‘The Only Ones’ Director Jordan Miller on Choosing the Crazy Twist Every Time
Jordan Miller wears many hats—musician, podcaster, serial collaborator on other people’s films, and, of course, film director. His feature debut, The Only Ones, is both a callback to slashers of the past and a movie that delivers constant twists that will have you questioning exactly where the movie is going. It’s a fun ride, with a lot of humor and some genuinely emotional character-driven moments.
In the film: “A group of friends’ plans unravel when a string of misfortunes spirals into bloodshed. Trust crumbles as the survivors are forced to confront the harrowing truth that sometimes, the deadliest threats come from within.“
After having seen an early version of the film in 2024 at Creature Feature Weekend in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I was excited to talk about the finished project with Miller.
Dread Central: You run your own production company, you’re constantly working on other people’s films, making music, music videos, and podcasts. How the heck did you find time to work on your own feature film?
Jordan Miller: I mean, doing my own stuff was the reason I started any of this stuff in the first place. I started with music first, and then I moved over to film later in life. And, I think the best calling card that you can have if you have a production company and you also work on other people’s stuff, as I do, is to produce your own work and showcase what you can do. But, also, it’s a passion, it’s something that I really don’t know how to not do. So I make time. Because that’s my treat at the end of the day. If I’m working on other people’s stuff, and I spend a long day working, and then I can work on my own script, or I can do something like that, that’s fun for me, you know?
DC: So even though it subverts expectations in a lot of ways, The Only Ones is definitely a slasher. Did you go back and look at some of your favorite slashers before you wrote the script?
JM: Definitely! Well, as you said, I do a podcast, so we analyze a lot of movies. And we’ve done a lot of slashers. So I went back and I re-watched some of the tentpoles, but some of them I’ve seen so many times that they’re just ingrained. But I wanted to hit as many marks as slasher movies sort of require, and take all of those things that [audiences] expect to see and then use them to subvert where you think it’s going to go.
Joe Bob Briggs has started throwing the term “meta slasher” around recently, and I guess that’s pretty apt. So I guess he’s thrown movies like In a Violent Nature, and a bunch of other movies that subvert expectations. Or Cabin in the Woods, maybe, would be a meta slasher. I don’t really fully understand what that word means, but I think that maybe it applies to us.
DC: What are some of your favorite slashers?
JM: I love the original Maniac. It’s one of the grimiest ever made. But, I mean, John Carpenter is just huge for me. If we’re strictly talking about slashers, the original Halloween is obviously one of the greatest. Do you consider Texas Chain Saw Massacre a slasher?
DC: Oh yeah. There’s a lot of slashing going on!
JM: There is, yeah. Chain Saw is a weird movie because it’s kind of a lot of things. But I think Chain Saw, the original ‘74 Chain Saw, is arguably my favorite movie ever made.
DC: Yeah, I think, me too. Either that or Rocky!
JM: Hell yeah, that’s a great film, too. The 70s were just a magical time for raw cinema and groundbreaking stuff. Chain Saw broke so much ground and it was a beautifully shot movie. Their cinematographer, Daniel Pearl, still has one of the best-looking movies, with what he shot. It’s so sun-soaked and orange, and not what you expect out of horror movies. And there is a level of that that we were going for in The Only Ones. I love orange, sun-soaked scenes like that, which we have a couple of.
Our opening sequence in The Only Ones is a bit of a fakeout and also an homage to all slashers, but specifically, there’s an opening narration that calls back to Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I was able to get Brett Wagner, who played Leatherface in the 2003 remake, to do that narration and complete the homage.
DC: So tell us about the origins of The Only Ones. How did that start to formulate in your noggin?
JM: So our producer and one of our actors, Matt Burns, is a close friend of mine. We’ve known each other a long time. He came to me with this idea of doing a really non-traditional slasher film. Something that didn’t rely on all of these things that most slashers rely on, while also playing into them. He had some different ideas, but we started joking around about what that would even look like. Could that even be a movie?
Ultimately, I started playing around with it, and I found a way in that I really liked. It’s a really character-driven thing. Because it has to be, for what this kind of movie is. And I ended up turning it into something that we both really liked, and we hadn’t seen anything like this, so that was really the beginning of the idea. So I just wrote the script from there.
DC: The Only Ones is definitely not a comedy, but it is quite funny in places. How’d you find the right blend of humor and horror?
JM: That was one of the toughest aspects of the whole movie. Probably the single thing that we had the most meetings about. We’re trying to shoot for this character-driven drama thing that also wears the hat of a horror movie with comedic moments. But you don’t want it to be slapstick-y necessarily, to the point where it becomes overly silly. Because you want the drama to land. So I’m trying to go for a Burn After Reading, really dry comedy, and when the violence hits, it can be really shocking.
We had a lot of meetings on how not to overplay the comedy. And I’m a firm believer that even if you’re doing comedy, you don’t play it for comedy. You play it seriously, and the situation is the comedy. And if you play that like it’s a joke, it’s not going to be as weighty. But if they play it like a tragedy, but the scenario, at a large scale, is kind of funny, the comedy will find its way in.
DC: Have you had instances during a screening where people laughed when you didn’t think they were going to laugh or didn’t laugh when you thought they should?
JM: Sometimes! Mostly, in the screenings, I’ve been happy that the emotions landed where I hoped they would. If anything, there are lines that I find hilarious that no one else does. Like, people laugh at the parts they’re supposed to laugh at, but then there are parts that I hope they laugh at that I low-key think are funny even though maybe they’re not a joke. And sometimes they get laughs. Sometimes they don’t. It’s little things.
I mean, I’ve stared at these performances for hundreds of hours editing this movie, and there are little things in there that just crack me up, every single time that some of these actors do. I’m a big fan of every actor in this movie. That’s why I cast them. I’m just a fan of what they do.
DC: I don’t know if this sets the record, but there certainly are a ton of twists.
JM: In a short amount of time, too!
DC: Might set the record. Was the idea from the beginning to have so many twists, or did it evolve while you were writing?
JM: Honestly, it evolved while I was writing, because I kept finding scenarios. Basically, the game I played with myself was to write myself into scenarios that are somewhat traditional, and find avenues that are really wacky to go from there. And so these scenarios just started presenting themselves in the scriptwriting process. So I was like, “Oh my goodness, yes, choose the crazy twist every time.” Also, because we knew that this wasn’t a traditional slasher, there’s kind of a gag to what this whole movie is doing. If you play it out too long, and without those twists and turns, I think it shows its hand. So I want this movie not to show its hand.
DC: The cast was great. They seemed very comfortable around each other. Was this because they’re from the same local acting scene?
JM: Some of them are, some of them aren’t. Cayla Berejikian, who’s just done the last two Hell House LLC movies, is from New York, so we brought her down. We actually shot with her right before her previous Hell House movie had come out. So we brought her in, and Jeb [Aufiero], who plays Jude, we brought in from Virginia. Everyone else was from our local D.C., Maryland, Virginia area, somewhat locally. But I’ve worked with almost all of those people before, on numerous projects.
Paul Cottman, who played Nicky, we’ve done at least half a dozen films together. He’s been in almost everything that I’ve directed. Emily [Classen], we’ve also done at least three films together. She brought in Tatiana [Nya Ford] because there was kind of a delicate balance and an intimacy that I wanted to hit between her and her partner. So I went to Emily and I asked if she had someone she had preexisting chemistry with. She immediately was like, “You have to audition Tatiana.”
We auditioned her, and she auditioned with her heavy monologue from the movie and absolutely nailed it. And we knew immediately we had found her. She and Emily already knew each other, so there was a lot of comfort there. We had some rehearsals so everyone could get to know each other. Zach [Ruchkin] also had done three films together, two of them were also with Emily, so very, very comfortable.
But I also wanted to try something with this movie where we shot backwards with certain scenes. So the first scenes where they’re all talking and you’re meeting them all for the first time, that was the very last thing that we shot as a group, because I wanted to give the most time to get comfortable with each other as actors, so that when we meet them for the first time, they’re the most comfortable.
DC: That makes sense. So you didn’t do a whole lot of auditions, then?
JM: For certain roles. Certain people I was writing for, because there are people I love to work with, and I know what I can get out of them and what they can give. I knew they’d be perfect for it, so Emily, Zach, Paul, they were pretty much already cast in my mind. Tatiana nailed her audition so hard that we didn’t need to audition anybody else.
But there were a lot of people auditioning for the Casey role, and Cayla was, strangely enough, the first person to submit. But you never think it’s going to be the first person, so you watch like 100 more and then realize, “No, it was her.” And Jeb, also. Quite a few people auditioned for that role. Jeb took that.
Then there’s Christopher Inlow, whom I had never worked with before, but he’s well known in our area as a hardworking actor. So he was cast, pretty much right out, for his role. And Nancy Anne Ridder, we kind of lucked into her, because she’s a very talented actress. She was in the original Scream. And she was trained, she went to school for this sort of thing. Had been out of the game for a long, long time, but recently moved back to the area, and was looking to get back into it. So this is one of the first productions that Nancy Ann was able to dive right into. And we had a great time working with her.
DC: So, in addition to the cast, the makeup effects were top-notch. Tell us about working with your makeup peopl,e and especially how you got some of those nice juicy gore effects.
JM: Thanks, yeah. Well, we had two separate teams for our fakeout beginning scene that had a bunch of kills, and had a couple of makeup artists. Kayla Sesko and our own team, Raven [Jackson], and I did a lot of effects there.
But the bulk of the movie was done by Joan Jones, who’s been my go-to effects artist for a long time. And yes, she has the best name in the business. But she’s amazing, and she lives for this kind of stuff. She and I have worked on a lot of films, a lot of corporate, really clean stuff, too. But we really get excited by the horror stuff.
So when it finally came time to do my feature, I wanted to bring Joan in. I’d been able to work with her on music videos and all kinds of stuff. But I was able to draw out all my plans for these gags and how I think, as effects artists, they might work. And then I would present them to her, and she would tell me why this wouldn’t work or how this could work. And we’d go back and forth and make these gags happen. She has a bunch of 3-D printers, and she’s an amazing hand painter, as well. So anything we needed to make duplicates or triplicates or a fake movie version of, say, the camera, a knife, or something like that, she was able to produce all this stuff for us. So we were able to keep things safe, but realistic.
DC: Nice! That was one of the highlights for me—the practical stuff.
JM: Oh, yeah, you can always tell. Joan will have a plan, and then Joan will always throw in some gruesome other element. You can tell when she’s tee-heeing and laughing on set that she’s having a good time, that she’s got some sort of gruesome, wonderful idea that will add to the scene, and it’s always great.
DC: So there are so many creative kills in this. Without spoiling it, if possible, do you have a favorite one?
JM: I do. I have a definite favorite. But it’s hard to describe without giving the scene away because the best part is that it kind of comes at you out of nowhere. I’ll tell you, it’s eye-full. That’s for sure.
The Only Ones is available now on VOD.
Categorized: Interviews
