We spoke with filmmaker JT Mollner as his groundbreaking new horror thriller Strange Darling was hitting the masses. It’s a wild ride from Miramax, with household name Giovanni Ribisi behind the lens this time as director of photography and producer. But fret not, as the performers in front of the camera are all first-rate, led by Willa Fitzgerald (Reacher) and Kyle Gallner (Smile). They play out a sort of nightmarish, blood-soaked first date gone wrong that keeps you guessing all the way through.
Mollner wrote Strange Darling in addition to directing and was tasked with penning the script for a highly anticipated Stephen King adaptation called The Long Walk. It’s a terrifying, dystopian premise about a brutal “walking” competition, with the film’s cast featuring big names like Mark Hamill and Judy Greer. “The Long Walk was a pleasure to write,” Mollner told MovieWeb. “I’m a massive Stephen King fan, so it was a dream job, and an equally massive fan of [director] Francis Lawrence. So to write, adapt a book like that, and be able to adapt it for a director like that, and to be able to be on set and watch that director work, a guy with that kind of body of work… I’ve been pinching myself… Amazing guy, yeah. He said this was an instant classic, I think, is what he said about our film.”
Strange Darling Features Nods to Duel, Halloween, and More
In addition to the utterly unique narrative, first-rate performances, and clever inclusion of bleak humor to balance things out occasionally, Strange Darling also benefits from paying homage to the horror classics and finding ways to top their notable qualities. “After the initial idea for the film came to me and the narrative came in a certain way, I saw opportunities to exploit certain tropes and subvert the expectations associated with those tropes,” Mollner explained. “There was always an opening crawl written into the movie, but later on, we decided to bring Jason Patrick in to do a narration, reminiscing of John Larroquette from Tobe Hooper’s film [The Texas Chain Saw Massacre].”
“So it became a lot of fun leaning into, especially in the opening act that we show the third chapter, just leaning into those tropes, like
Duel
and
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
… and
Halloween
, and showing the archetypes and the familiar things in horror films, and then spending the rest of the movie sort of peeling the layers away. That was exciting to me.”
And for all the budding cinematographers out there, watch out for the film’s exterior scenes in particular, with strikingly gorgeous color palettes among the nature. “It was just a great day in the forest,” said Mollner, reflecting on his favorite shots from Strange Darling. “The shots are beautiful, and it looks like a fairy tale… We captured such beautiful images… it was just a really good day. The weather was perfect. Everything was going the way it was supposed to go, which never happened on the movie. But then there were some shots with a high level of difficulty that, after they were over, I felt a great sense of achievement.” From Miramax, Strange Darling is now playing only in theaters.
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