The art of cultivating fear has been a lifelong labor of love for JT Mollner. The Vegas-born filmmaker inherited it early, from his days of running his family-owned Halloween haunt, Freakling Bros. Horror Shows. In recent years, he’s been granted the privilege of transferring that terror to the silver screen.
Mollner’s 2024 thriller, Strange Darling, has quickly become the breakout film of the summer. The story follows two lovers, plainly named The Lady (played by Willa Fitzgerald) and The Demon (Kyle Gallner), as they navigate a twist-fueled one night stand that goes terribly wrong. Stephen King has called it “too clever to spoil.” Critics have compared it to a modern-day Tarantino flick. Yet despite all the fanfare—and in the midst of his busy Hollywood schedule—Mollner still finds the time to come back each year to his family’s Freakling Bros. haunt in Las Vegas, where it all began.
“Everybody always said, ‘As your film career grows, as you start to make features … are you going to be able to still do this?’ I said, I better,” Mollner says. “I really don’t care how much things take off and how busy I get, because it’s so important to me.”
Freakling Bros.’ unholy trinity of haunts—Castle Vampyre, Coven of 13 and Gates of Hell, Nevada’s first and only R-rated horror experience—have become synonymous with Halloween in Vegas, a true tradition of terror ongoing for the past 31 years—well, mostly. In 2023, Freakling Bros. made the difficult decision to cancel its season after its original site fell through. But when it returns on October 4 at its new Desert Breeze Park location, Mollner’s “family of freaks” will roam the Earth again.
I’m really excited to see Freakling Bros. return. I know it was disappointing having to cancel last year.
We’re really happy, too. It was the first time in 30 years, except for COVID and since my dad started the company, that it hasn’t opened. We were at IKEA, which was our best location … and they started building an Ashley Furniture on that plot of land, so they told us we had to leave. We did find other spots, but we didn’t find anything in time to get permitted. Being at Desert Breeze Park is really going to be great. We like the new location a lot. We think it’s going to be a great season. It’s been a little tough for the company because we were closed and there was no revenue. So we’re deeply in debt, but we got some investors and we’re able to get back open, and hopefully one good season will get us back on track.
It’s commendable you’re still staying true to your family’s tradition. Why is the thrill of the haunt still so exciting to you?
I haven’t lived in Las Vegas full-time for a long time, but I’ve come back here every year for at least three months. It’s become so much more than a business or a job. My dad started scaring people at our home before I was born, back in 1976. I trick or treated twice, the rest of my childhood was always watching my dad scare people. When I was old enough, I would be part of it. He was the hunchback, I was the mini-hunchback. When he was Frankenstein, I was Igor. It’s so magical to me. It’s like people who grow up at Disneyland or people have memories of Christmas during the holidays. For me, it was green lights and fog machines and makeup. That’s how we celebrated Halloween—hearing people scream.
When I had to shoot Strange Darling in 2022, I trained somebody to take over the managerial operations of the [Freakling Bros.] show for me. But I still showed up for training the cast. I still showed up halfway through the season. I really wanted to get back [to Vegas] because I knew this was a crucial season. If we can’t open, then the company might die, because two years being closed would be dangerous financially for us. I told everybody in LA, listen, I’m gonna come back a few times to do interviews and to do meetings with studios … but I need to go out to Vegas and make sure we get back open.
I haven’t seen a movie like Strange Darling in a long time. It was refreshing to feel like a participant in the plot, as out of loop as the characters. Was that intentional?
That was always the goal with this: for it to be sort of a ride, for you to be in it with them, and discovering things with them the entire time, and to feel like you’re in there. From the moment I was writing the script to then conceiving all the shots and everything with my [director of photography] … there was a very clear idea of the stress level, the passion and the emotions that were going to be felt by these characters during the movie.
There’s nothing I love more than filmmaking than my family. It’s emotional for me. When you’re making a movie, it’s life or death. Everybody was committed to this—the cinematographer, the actors, the production designer. We wanted to go as hard as we could on every level. So it’s a very maximalist film, obviously. There’s, hopefully, subtlety in the way the characters are presented in the dialogue and stuff like that, but we weren’t holding back as far as we wanted the movie to be bombastic, emotional and all about feeling. More importantly than the movie being understood or followed, it was about immersing the audience in a feeling, and that had to do with colors, music and the camera work.
Do you feel like your horror upbringing has helped inform how you make films and write thrillers?
Absolutely. I think it was actually my training ground for being a film director. Every character in our haunted houses are Freakling Bros. originals, and I write dialogue for all of them. There’s creating these characters with my dad, then … we cast those roles and then we direct people in those roles. It’s different from a movie, obviously, on many levels, but that part of the process is very similar. It was probably as valuable as the short films I made. I’ve been writing horror stories since I could spell, since I was really little, and I think being around it definitely inspired all that. I don’t know if I’d be a filmmaker if I hadn’t been exposed to—I wouldn’t be— if I hadn’t been exposed to the things my parents exposed me to.
At haunted houses, the most important thing to me is making people feel fear. We can’t compete with the budgets at Halloween Horror Nights or anything like that, so we do our best with sets. It’s more important for us to immerse our audience in a terrifying situation, whether it be an enclosure and they’re claustrophobic or in the darkness. The art of fear is the sole focus for us at Freakling Bros. I have that outlet when I’m working with Freakling Bros. and with my dad. But when I make a movie, as you could probably tell, what attracts me there is a different outlet. I think I could very much make a straight-up terrifying horror film, and maybe I’ll feel like doing that one day. But with this movie, I was more interested in blending genres and … dare I say, some romance and maybe real connection with these characters.
As a filmmaker, I’m really interested in finding ways to do things that don’t feel straightforward, that have emotion and character, and with Strange Darling, it was much more important to pressurize the characters and the viewer and to put you through stress and emotions than to make you feel just straightforward fear. I know it’s being called a horror film by a lot of people because it has a serial killer in it. But for me, it’s a little different than that.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of Willa Fitzgerald. Was it apparent when you first met that she was The Lady you were searching for in your story?
When we met, she was the only person that felt as deep of a love and compassion for this character as I did. She was like, I love this character. I relate to this character. I will die for this character. I’ll protect her. She was passionately engaged. And audiences don’t have to like The Demon or The Lady. As long as the story works, they can feel any way they want about a character, but the actor needs to connect and make excuses for their character’s deficiencies, in my opinion. That’s when the best work is done, when an actor is really connecting. Kyle and Willa both felt that about their characters. Willa, it was one of the great joys of my life to work with her, because she cares so much, and she takes direction so well, and she’s willing to go to such hard places, and she trusts.
I felt the chemistry between them, even in the most violent moments, which was weirdly amazing.
That’s so great you felt that. [Gallner’s] just a pro. He’s so talented, and his performance is definitely the most understated. Hers is a very flashy performance, so it’s easier to notice on first watch. But the sort of stuff he’s doing is so nuanced, it’s so difficult to do as an actor. The two of them had such a connection. I was really relieved, because we talked a lot about how we wanted them to play this as an earnest connection. When they meet in that movie, we want you to know they are actually feeling something for each other. It just goes south (laughs). But there are emotions there, and they care about each other in these crazy ways, which is why they get so emotional in such a hyperbolic way in the movie.
That connection makes me think of when Willa’s in the freezer and starts singing “Love Hurts” and how it plays in the opening sequence. How did that song sneak its way in there?
When I’m writing, I’m always thinking of music. When I made my first movie, I was on this Erik Satie kick, and it really informed the feeling that I was trying to pass along in Outlaws and Angels. On this one, I was listening to a lot of [Frédéric] Chopin, I was listening to nocturnes, and I felt like I found some of that music I knew had to be used in certain places.
I remember walking at some point and just listening to that song. I was actually listening to the Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons version. I thought it was beautiful. When I sat down and I began really conceptualizing that image, that opening scene, that image that had come to me, it was married to that song.
Z Berg, who ended up doing the original soundtrack for the movie, I knew that I wanted to license one of her songs for one of the scenes. And I thought, what if Z Berg covered this? So I wrote that into the first draft of the script. It says, “Woman running in slow motion, cover of ‘Love Hurts,’ dreamy, covered by Z Berg.” Later, after we’d gotten the rights to it and we recorded it … I talked to her and found out that she hated that song. It was one of her least favorite songs, but she was afraid to tell me! She did it anyway, and now she loves the song. It was always kind of in the fabric. It was the first draft of the script. It was written into that opening scene, and it was also written into her [Fitzgerald’s] dialogue. We knew how it was gonna be incorporated, and I was praying that Miramax would pay for the licensing of it.
Everybody loves the film, including Stephen King, who gave it his blessing. What did that mean to you? As a Stephen King fan, I think I would have died.
You know what? I almost did. It was really stunning. It was the feeling of getting into Sundance with my first movie. It was the feeling of getting this movie financed. You have these moments in your career when you work so hard as an artist, and you want it to become a profession too, but you’ll do it either way, because you love it. And you have these moments where the profession part becomes more real, and the hard work actually translates to something and it just is so rewarding.
Hearing about Stephen King was more impactful than any critic or studio. When you have people who are your heroes enjoying what you do, there’s nothing that feels better. I just respect him so much and he’s informed so much of my storytelling. He’s influenced me to such a level. The first book I ever read was Carrie when I was a little kid, and it took me forever to get through it. I was reading it in second grade, and it was sent to the principal’s office at William E. Ferron Elementary School here in Las Vegas, and my mom defended me and said, “I’m not going to tell him not to read.” That’s my history with Stephen King, and I’ve read everything by him over the years.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I just want people to come out and see the haunted house this year, because it’s a labor of love. It’s my family business. I’m back here, because I love doing this with my family. The movie’s doing really well, and I want people to see the film, but on some level, I’m much more excited right now about people coming out and helping us get Freakling Bros. back to life, because it’s an extension of my family.
FREAKLING BROS. HORROR SHOWS October 4-31, 7 p.m., $50+. 8450 Spring Mountain Road, freaklingbros.com.
