How ‘Strange Darling’ Became the Demented Little Thriller That Could

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

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How do you promote a low-budget thriller? If you’re the cast and filmmaker behind Strange Darling , you carpet-bomb social media with unbridled enthusiasm — so much so that you might even scare a few fans. Not long after the sexy, deranged horror movie started hitting screens on Aug. 23, a cheeky X user posted : “The Strange Darling marketing is insane if you don’t see it in theatres the cast will have you assassinated.”

Fact is, everyone involved in this film cares — a lot . It’s evident in every shot and in their every tweet. The cast and crew of Strange Darling want people to see their movie so that they can pay their rent, sure, but they also truly love what they’ve made.

“We all just sort of banded together and locked arms and said, ‘We’re gonna fucking do this.’ And it was for the love,” writer-director JT Mollner tells Rolling Stone . “Nobody was getting paid big money. It was all about the fact that we believed in what we were doing.”

Told out of sequence in six chapters, Strange Darling follows characters we know only as the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) and the Demon (Kyle Gallner), as they meet in a seedy motel for a one-night stand that devolves into a game of cat and mouse between serial killer and prey. With lush cinematography by the actor Giovanni Ribisi, who shot on 35mm film, it’s a blood-washed, white-knuckle ride that will leave viewers panting.

During a summer that’s already been great for horror — see: the box-office success of Longlegs starring Nicolas Cage, which in July became the highest-grossing indie horror of the last decade, and the critical praise for writer-director Ti West’s MaXXXine — Strange Darling is joining the club as the little thriller that could. And much of its word-of-mouth buzz can be traced back to the people who made it.

Gallner, for one, has been posting nonstop about the flick for months. “I come from such an indie background,” says the actor, a horror regular who you may have seen die in the likes of 2022’s Scream and 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . “I come from making very tiny movies. I come from street-team type of shit, where you’ve got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and shake people to try to get anybody to watch it.”

Mollner has also been hitting socials hard, which he admits isn’t typical for him. “I’m not really not a social-media person, until right now,” he says. “When I see somebody talking about our film, even if it’s not in the most positive light, I just want to say, ‘Hey, thank you for taking the time.'”

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The gratitude makes sense when you consider that Strange Darling was in the works for six long years, ever since Mollner met Ribisi at the American Society of Cinematographers in 2018 and they bonded over their love of super-saturated, primary-color-drenched films, like David Lynch’s 1986 cult classic Blue Velvet and David Cronenberg’s 1988 thriller, Dead Ringers . After penning the script for Strange Darling — which was inspired by a vision of the proverbial “final girl” running toward the camera — Mollner hit up Ribisi, who had done cinematography for a few music videos at that point, but never a feature-length film. “I sent him the script and said, ‘Let’s do that thing. Let’s do the primary-color thing,’” Mollner says.

Mollner was used to tiny budgets, so he was stunned and delighted when Miramax gave him $4 million to make the film. And luckily, the script was an instant draw for collaborators. “I remember finishing it and feeling that it was both the best script I’d read maybe ever and also that it was asking so much of a performer in that role that I was terrified,” Fitzgerald says. “And I absolutely had to figure out how I could get this job.”

Although Mollner had more money to work with here than on past projects, like his 2016 Western Outlaws and Angels , the process wasn’t without its challenges. “We all felt the whole time like we were holding everything together with duct tape,” Fitzgerald says. “There were wildfires in Oregon [where we were shooting] and if the air quality is above a certain level, you can’t work outside.”

Mollner agrees, adding that the crew had to build the entire motel-room set in 14 hours. “A lot of people wanted to finance the script, which was a very new experience for me,” Mollner says. “But once we went into production, I don’t think the executives in charge of the movie had any idea what I was doing, and I don’t think they liked it at all.” For example: The first scene the brass saw wasn’t some bloody affair, but comic relief: a couple of old hippies played by Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr. consuming an obscenely large breakfast. Their home later becomes a hiding place for the Lady after she flees the Demon, but executives were puzzled by the lighthearted clip. “In the future, I would shoot the car chase first,” Mollner quips.

Despite the pressure, the cast and crew were locked in on the tense plot, which allows for silent stretches as the Lady flees the rifle-toting Demon through fields and in a pilfered Ford Pinto. The lead actors really had to make viewers care about them as people rather than archetypes, especially when the movie flips our assumptions about who is the killer and who is the prey. “It really was a narrative exercise,” Mollner says. “Part of what Willa and I talked about when we first met is that she would be playing this complex, damaged, sympathetic character. She’s aggressive and” — spoiler alert — “she kills, but she’s not a sociopath. She has remorse, feels compelled to do this, but she is self-aware.”

The Demon subverts expectations too. A bitter cop with a lot of internal rage, he’s no textbook victim — yet he’s also charming, even goofy. “He’s a flawed guy put into an extreme situation,” Gallner says.

In the end, Mollner allows that despite having a serial killer as a major character, Strange Darling is not really a serial killer movie. “It’s about the relationship between these two characters, and it’s about a betrayal,” he says. “So we just always wanted to really focus on, for lack of a better term, the love story, or the story of human connection, and the tragedy of the human connection in the movie more than anything else.”

No wonder their oh-so-human marketing campaign has been so effective.

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