The ‘Your Monster’ Cast and Crew on Movies That Terrified Them [Sundance 2024]
Chad Collins
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Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of attending the press line for the Sundance premiere of Caroline Lindy’s Your Monster. The movie itself is fantastic, a horror, rom-com, musical hybrid that will make your heart sing. I expect it’ll have distribution news soon. The press line, my first ever, was an interesting experience. We were funneled into a room and placed in front of paper markers on the ground designating our outlet affiliation. Then we waited (a long time) until the cast a crew arrived to chat with us about the movie, other projects, and—in my case—the movies that scarred them for life, pulling inspiration from our own Mary Beth McAndrews. Your Monster is effervescent horror, but the one question I had on my mind for those involved was simple—growing up, what movies scared you the most?
Edmund Donovan (Jacob) remarked, “There were a lot of movies that scared me so much, I just never saw them.” While he wasn’t into horror as a kid, he recalls the trailers and posters for both Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project and Tommy Lee Wallace’s It as defining scares. So scary, in fact, he still hasn’t seen them.
Director of Photography Will Stone, while also not the biggest horror fan growing up, recalls being scarred for life on account of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, particularly the scene where Julian Glover drinks from a fraudulent Holy Grail, turning into a skeleton in real time as the chalice ages him. “It freaked me out a lot.”
Kayla Foster (Mazie, also a producer) feels similarly to Donovan. Growing up, she saw the trailer for Gore Verbinski’s The Ring and was resultantly “way too afraid to see it.” “That is my biggest scarring memory,” she says, adding, “You know what else scarred me, actually? Paranormal Activity. Fully. It was just simply too real.”
Then, of course, star and modern genre icon Melissa Barrera recalled some enduring scares of her own. Without hesitation, she managed to rapid-fire list “Thirteen Ghosts, The Haunting (the 1999 version)” and, of course, “Saw.” In fact, Saw was so scarring, that it actually turned Barrera off horror for a while. She noted, “I had to take a break after seeing that movie.”
Luckily, Barrera is back, and alongside the rest of the cast and crew, helps elevate Your Monster to a can’t-miss gem. Stay tuned to Dread Central for updates on Your Monster’s release!
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