Written and directed by Parker Brennon’s horror anthology, Hauntology follows Jazmin as she takes her fearless runaway younger sibling Venus on a road trip and shares the most chilling tales surrounding their Ohio hometown. Each place they visit has its own ghost story and queer perspective: trans woman Julian casts a spell to become her ideal self but the dark spirit unleashed tries to invade her life; a troubled married couple finds a love beyond the grave; an up-and-coming art gallery is forging paintings of a deceased artist with very bloody consequences; and a journalist secures an interview with the eccentric owner of a haunted Victorian mansion…
We sat down with Brennon to find out more…
When did you first get the idea for Hauntology?
Oh my gosh. I think the simplest answer is I just wanted to make something that I thought would be easy to do on a low budget, which is crazy when you see the final thing because it ended up being a lot bigger than I originally imagined!
The initial concept was ‘let’s do something I can shoot, a weekend here, a weekend there, and just take my time with it’. Then I ended up meeting a team of producers who added a lot bigger budget to the pot, and we were able to get some stars from the horror community. And it just really evolved. It went from the $30,000 idea to what it is now!
Was having the movie as an anthology easier or harder to handle than a straightforward feature?
It started out simple because nothing was connected at first. It actually was just a story where Jazmin and Venus go and you get these different stories, and then they have their own story at the end that has nothing to do with the vignettes before.
So it was simple. Then as I kept rewriting and rewriting, it really hit me that if I made everything connected, it would be so much more rewarding.
There’s a great movie called Trick ‘R Treat, that connects the segments of the anthology so beautifully – that was a big inspiration for me.

What were your horror influences for Hauntology?
Definitely Trick R Treat. I also thought a lot about Creep Show, the classic of classics as far as horror anthologies go. The segment called ‘The day Mabel came out of the grave’, was actually inspired a bit by the Father’s Day segment in Creep Show. In the original version, Mabel comes out of the dirt like in Father’s Day. But one of my favorite films is, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death from 1971 and I just thought, how amazing would it be if Mabel came out of the lake? So that was a big script change there. My first assistant director wasn’t happy. She was pretty nervous that that that would be unsafe, but my dad and I built an underwater ramp for the actor to walk up out of the lake. We did a lot of preparation to make sure, and we had a stunt coordinator there who was very experienced. He made sure it was as safe as possible.
What is it about horror that attracts you as a filmmaker?
Two big things. The first is the outsider genre, and as a queer person, it’s very relatable to want to step into the kind of goth and outsider side of life.
The other thing is horror movies tend to star women characters, and I connect a lot more with women than men in my life. I don’t know exactly why that is, but I like the figure of the final girl. There’s a huge sub-genre of women losing their minds in horror, like Keir-La Janiss’ book House of Psychotic Women. I think that’s all that drew me in.

Was the central relationship in the movie always going to be sisters?
It was always in the cards. I actually wrote the character of Jazmin with Lindsey McDowell (who plays Madeline in ‘The Old Dark Cashel House’ segment of Hauntology) in mind. So it all came from me wanting to feature Lindsey in a movie. Then later down the road, when we were doing auditions, I asked Lindsey to do an audition for Madeline and Jazmin, and we realised that Lindsey was the best Madeline that we had. And Samantha Russell, who plays Jazmin, just knocked my socks off. So I knew, that was Jazmin.

Do you have a favourite story? Ours has to be The Old Dark Cashel House…
That’s my favorite too because that week was just one of those times in my life when everything went right – on a movie set usually everything goes wrong!
We had Nancy Loomis from Halloween coming in, and she was just like the sweetest, most relaxed person. We had Lindsey there, who is my friend. And the homeowners of the Cashel House are the loveliest couple, Matt and Aaron, and they made us feel so at home. They were the most accommodating location owners I’ve ever met in my life. So that segment was just really special. And when I watched the movie, I felt like what a good time I had.
Horror icon Nancy Loomis/Keys hasn’t been in a movie since 1982. How did you get her on board for Hauntology?
I didn’t even have her on my radar because she had ostensibly retired from acting. Naomi Grossman, who’s in the movie, her manager knows Nancy, and Nancy has a trans son and he suggested ‘why don’t we just send the script to Nancy and see if she likes it?’ And our producers were all kind of like, ‘wait, what? She might come out of retirement for us?’.
It was kind of hard to believe, but she read the script, and her manager told her it would be worth doing, and she trusted him. So we got Nancy! I mean, it’s just a miracle.
Hauntology comprises of all queer stories. Was that an important element for you to maintain in Hauntology?
I grew up watching movies where the queer characters, or maybe it’s a best friend character, or maybe it’s just someone really inconsequential who’s kind of there to be comedy… I always dreamed of making a movie where all the characters are somewhere in the spectrum of queerness. So if you’re not, you’re the minority. That was the fun of it. I haven’t seen very many movies like that. I keep a list on Letterbox of every queer horror movie I’ve ever seen, and there are only a few where most of the characters are queer. It’s very rare.
The movie is being shown at the 2024 Frightfest festival. What are you most excited for audiences to see?
With the horror crowd, I want to hear how they react to our throat-slit scene in the opening of the Giallo segment and I want to see them when Mabel comes out of the lake, when the woodsman comes up and we see his creepy eyes over Zoe’s character. Oh, and when Nancy Loomis appears on screen. I want to see if anyone recognizes her… maybe we’ll get a cheer from the Halloween fans!
Hauntology has its international première at FrightFest 2024, 23 August