We’ve been celebrating horror all year as one of the few genres in Hollywood where original storytelling is, not only alive, but thriving significantly. This is honestly thanks to one of the biggest indie studios in the market: Neon. They have had several incredible horror hits in the past few months, from last year’s Longlegs to this week’s Together. To celebrate their strong slate of horror films, they took to the stages of Ballroom 20 at Comic-Con to discuss what’s coming next!
Original storytelling is becoming a rare luxury in Hollywood for a multitude of reasons. Movie ticket prices have gone up, audiences have become more fickle, and most of all, bigger studios will prioritize safer bets like franchise films over investing money in low-to-mid budget original releases. This is where studios like Neon are completely necessary, as they search for original voices and auteurs with unique visions to invest in, and give them a chance to shine. This is how the best filmmakers are found, and how masterpieces are made! It’s even inspired bigger studios to begin investing in smaller-budget original horror films like Companion and Weapons. This is all thanks to the works of studios like Neon.
This year, for the first time ever, the studio brought three of their films to showcase to all the hardcore horror fans in attendance: Together, Keeper, and Shelby Oaks. Representing Together were stars Alison Brie and Dave Fanco, as well as writer/director Michael Shanks. Keeper brought out Longlegs and The Monkey filmmaker Osgood Perkins and star Tatiana Maslany. And writer/director Chris Stuckman brought his film, Shelby Oaks. If you took these three titles, you’ll note that all three movies were directed and written by their respective filmmakers. In short, Neon always puts its money where its mouth is in terms of supporting auteur driven works, and the industry is way better for it.
“We’re here because we have our voices amplified,” Perkins stated kicking off the panel with a tribute to his home base. “We’re lucky as human beings and as artists to have that opportunity. Not everybody gets that. And that’s a large part due to Neon and the actual work they do.” His cheers for the company behind his last two hits resonated throughout the crowd as fans of the indie studio recognized their contributions to cinema to open things up.
However, Perkins did something incredibly unexpected, and decided to dedicate the panel to the voices of the underrepresented. Particularly in the LGBTQ+ community. Which is something The Nerds of Color is all about!
“I’m sure I’m not the first person to tell you that we live in a time where most voices that are really essential to our country are being silenced, yeah?” Perkins continued. “It’s a pretty grave situation. When I think about my father, who was a movie star 60 f**king years ago, he was a queer man who wasn’t allowed to be a queer man both in society and in his business. So his voice was not amplified. His real voice was not amplified. I’d love to be able to say today it’s better, but it’s not better. In today’s world we have leaders who run the show by discrimination and hate and destruction. And that’s what we’re facing. So what I would like to be able to do today is to take this opportunity with my fellow panel members to raise a voice that needs raising. I’d like to say something for the LGBTQ+ community to honor my father’s struggle and the continued struggle for those in those communities. So if you don’t want to join us, that’s fine, you can do nothing. You do you. But if you’d like to join us, what I’d like to be able to do is have you all join me in doing the knife sounds from Psycho all together.”
And all together, the room united, erupting in a chorus of the famous score from the shower scene in Hitchcock’s immortal masterpiece. It was a surprising and wonderfully warm way to start a panel (yes, even with knife sounds). It was a commendable moment for the filmmaker, showcasing what we’ve known about from his works throughout his career: he’s brave, outspoken, and intelligent. And the industry is incredibly lucky to have someone like him crafting terrific films.
As the panel progressed, the rest of the panelists dove deeper into their respective movies. Shanks was asked about what he was working through with his partner when writing Together, a horror fable about the threat of codependency in relationships. “When I told my partner that I was going to write the script, she said that it was upsetting to her,” joked Shanks. “But luckily she loved the movie. And she came up with the best scene in the movie… the script was written before the pandemic. But during the pandemic, things sort of amplified… so I think it resonates even more after the pandemic.”
One can see why there was an assumption that Together was written during the pandemic, even though it wasn’t. The prospect of codependency in relationships became even more terrifying when folks were trapped together in a single location for a year. However for all the pandemic did to amplify the horror of claustrophobia for some, it sparked creative juices for others, including critic turned director, Stuckman.
Stuckman was asked about the origins of his upcoming film Shelby Oaks, and how he put it together during the pandemic and the themes of isolation. “When I started writing it,” Stuckman began, “COVID wasn’t even like a thing. And Zoom meetings weren’t normal. And so when I started pitching the movie, I was like ‘Yeah let’s start shooting it in 2020.’ We’re talking Summer 2020. It sounded pretty good. But having to pitch and talk to people during those times, realizing that even in Ohio, where I live, I could get a movie off the ground. And strangely, it helped let the process go a little faster. We had to wait to shoot, but yeah. Everyone was affected differently. It definitely gave my wife and I just time to talk about the script way more than we ever did before.”
Sometimes when it comes to the process of creating original movies, casts and crew members have to push the boundaries physically to get the right shot and justify support for an original property. It’s not just the writers/directors making these original movies and concepts work. It’s also the actors. And such was the case with Brie and Franco, in regards to their work in Together.
“Pretty much every day there was a sequence… where we were contorting our bodies in very unnatural ways. Coming home sore in places I’ve never been sore before,” started Franco. “We got beat the f**k up. There’s one scene… where I shower, I’m fully nude, my character is unconscious, and I am leaning myself against porcelain walls. That hurts! Every single day it felt like we were getting away with something people had never seen before. So our general excitement superseded any pain we were in.”
This was something shared by fellow panelist Maslany, who also went through the wringer thanks to Perkins for their movie, Keeper. “I feel like a lot of it was mental buffering in a really great way,” Maslany stated.
“I find mental abuse to be much better,” joked Perkins.
“We’ve been talking about it today,” continued Maslany. “A lot of the fear and discomfort comes from [the questions of] ‘Where am I? Am I safe here? Do I know this person that I’m in love with?’ But we did do some fun, classic running and screaming.”
Perkins, who has been on a back to back streak of movies starting with Longlegs, continuing with The Monkey, and going into Keeper, was asked about how he managed to fit three movies together in a span of 18 months. He touched on the collaborative and creative challenges of this by saying, “I found really good partners. It’s not something that any of us does alone. We did Longlegs , then we were supposed to do The Monkey right away, but [the strikes happened]… We had to wait. And in that period I called my producer and said ‘We gotta make something. We can’t just sit here.’ And so we called our friend Nick Lepard, who is a screenwriter, and not a member of the Writers Guild. So he started writing. And I started meeting actors. We had no script. We had some pages, some compelling pages… And we did this impressionistic thing with no money, no time, no prep. Prep was during the creation of the thing… the joy of doing something where there’s no pressure and there’s no expectation… we had nothing, no reason to succeed or fail, and the freedom of that was sort of childish in a way. And we ended up with this beautiful thing, which Tatiana said is relationship horror… while [Together] is very physical in a beautiful way, ours is very mental/emotional… So we’re all trying to do the same thing, and say the same thing, which is that relationships are killer!”
Naturally something Franco and Brie can relate to, having survived Together as a couple. When asked about what it was like having Neon essentially do a movie about codependent relationships as a real-life couple, Brie added, “We love [Neon]… the people that work there are genuinely passionate about film and about art… Especially when there’s a true understanding between the filmmaker and the distributor, and they care about the projects in the same way, and understand what makes it exciting, that is really exciting. I think for us, the dream was always Neon. And at Sundance it was like a dream come true to have them be at the forefront of that.”
And yes while it could be very easy to write off nice statements about a distributor/studio off as publicity, there’s something about the passion in the room that validated the sincerity of each of the panelists when discussing Neon, and everything it does for art and creativity. As stated at the top, it’s a dying notion in the film and television industry. So when a studio comes along looking to challenge our preconceived notions of the beauty in things like relationships, by looking at the horror within them as well, or look deeper to find the comedy in death and fear, that in and of itself proves the studio to be fearless; both in its decisions about which films to support and release into the world, and the choice of fearless talent to bring unconventional stories to life. Saying this as a fan of superhero films, action films, and animated movies, its easy to look at big studio examples of each, and declare them to be a dime a dozen. This year alone we had four different superhero films — each with their own wonderful merits, yes — but how many films like Together, The Monkey, or Longlegs do we get for every mainstream blockbuster?
As such, if nothing else, Neon’s presence at Comic-Con (and in the market share) this year has proven without a shadow of a doubt that you can absolutely have both blockbusters and originality in Hollywood. There’s absolutely room for both. It’s evidence that the model Neon follows to keep creativity and originality alive can be adopted by major studios as well, and when done right, true art can persist, and the best and worst of humanity can be transmitted to our screens, immersing us in the magic of cinema and storytelling. Ugly sometimes? Yes. But no less breathtaking, and (in the case of Shelby Oaks, Keeper, and Together) completely haunting!