GLORIOUS director Rebekah McKendry and star Ryan Kwanten on their Lovecraftian glory hole movie

Glorious interview  — director Rebekah McKendry and star Ryan Kwanten

Of all of the potentially terrifying things one might encounter at a rest stop, a Lovecraftian god speaking through a glory hole has to take the cake. That wild premise is at the heart of Glorious, a clever and twisted new horror feature from director/horror journalist/teacher Rebekah McKendry (All The Creatures Were Stirring, Colors of the Dark podcast).

Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) stars as Wes, a recently single man struggling from a recent breakup. When nature calls while Wes is on the road, he pulls into a remote rest stop where he soon finds himself locked in the grimy bathroom. Wes soon realizes he is not alone — a voice behind a locked bathroom stall (JK Simmons) begins speaking with him, pontificating about Wes’ place in the universe.

Wes’ only contact with the voice who claims to be an elder god is through the closed bathroom door, but there is one opening; a carved-out glory hole, that may prove to be humanity’s only chance of survival.

We caught up with Glorious director Rebekah McKendry and star Ryan Kwanten following the film’s premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival to discuss how this out-there film came about, the challenges of filming during COVID, the difficulties in bringing cosmic horror to the screen, and much more.

Glorious is now streaming on Shudder.

Bad Feeling Magazine: Rebecca, what are the origins of this film? Was this something that came together during COVID ?

Rebekah McKendry: Oh god, yeah [laughs]. This was a straight-up COVID project. So, we were maybe three weeks into the pandemic, it was the super scary time where I was scared to, you know, see my mailman, and we were sterilizing all of our groceries.

And it was during that time that my friend Jay Goldberg sent me the script. And he knew that I was looking for bonkers stuff. Like, that’s definitely my favorite type of cinema. I want something that doesn’t feel safe, I want something that doesn’t feel like anything you’ve seen before. And it’s just fucking out there and absurdist and funny all at the same time. And so I had told him a couple of months prior that if he saw anything like that, to definitely let me know.

So, top of the pandemic, he sends me the original script of this and it was a little different, but it was still the same guy trapped in a rest stop with someone that is claiming to be a god. And I immediately was like, there’s something really charming about this. So, I went to my husband [Glorious co-writer David Ian McKendry], who’s also a writer. And I was like, I feel like we can really put a lot of what we’ve been going through with the pandemic in this, like a lot of kind of our own existential crisis, because this was at the point of the what the fuck am I doing with my life? Like, what am I even doing at this point? I’m not making movies, I’m barely teaching anymore, what am I doing? I felt we could put a lot of that in.

And Dave is very much into history. He’s very into philosophy. He’s very into mythology. And so I kind of was like, okay, well, if we’re having a conversation with a god, it needs to be about god. It needs to be about philosophy, it needs to be about theories of hell, theories of confinement, theories of reflection on your life, what deserves punishment, your own morality, things like that. So we knew that we needed for it to be heady and philosophical, but at the same time, we wanted it to be funny. We knew from the get-go that we wanted it to have kind of the absurdist humor that is Dave and I, and a lot of that was in the original script. There was definitely humor in the original script that we wanted to preserve as well.

Ryan, what were your thoughts when you first got the script? Knowing you were going to be in a washroom for 85% of the film, I assume talking to someone who’s probably not on-set.

Ryan Kwanten: Pretty damn impressive, it definitely had a language, it was definitely sure of itself. So that’s one thing I kind of look for when you’re doing you know — obviously, I love my independent movies and particularly genre movies — so, you’re looking for that sure hand or the sure words on the page. And that was pretty instantaneous for me.

And the fact that look, Shudder and JK Simmons were already involved. We both know how well of a taste maker [Simmons] is. It will take a braver man than me to turn down the project. But it sort of came to me very fortuitously. And I feel, you know, very proud to be a part of it now. It was a chance for me to take a bit of a walk on the dark side too, to sort of play a character who had been ultimately sort of eclipsed by reason. The weakening of his will, and we sort of find him at a very fragile state where he, you know, ends up kind of running into a god in a truck stop restroom of all places. So yeah, what’s not to like about that?

What was the process like of incorporating JK Simmons’ voice into the film?

Rebecca: We had a ton of rehearsals going in. I come from a theatrical directing background. So for me, rehearsal is everything. Like, by the time I get to set, we basically know what to do, I kind of want it to run itself by that point because that’s our performance. So, for me, it’s always important to get a lot of rehearsal time before we ever even get to set. So that was one of the benefits of the pandemic was we had Zoom, and we had time.

We had three or four rehearsal sessions between Ryan and JK, just really nailing the tone, the tenor, the cadence of everything. So then, by the time we actually made it to set, Ryan knew how JK would sound in particular moments, and we had our producer, Morgan Brown reading it on set, but he was even emulating the way that JK had done it in all the different rehearsals. And then we went back and got JK’s voice and did our recording sessions with him, which were half and half, we did some via Zoom, and we had some of the recording sessions in person as well.

Ryan, what that rehearsal process was like?

Ryan: We had those Zoom [rehearsals] so that was incredibly helpful because we recorded those. And I was able to play that back over and over and get a sense as to where he was taking the character. And then also, we had the chance to sort of rehearse because you want to make sure you’re covering every cubic inch of that bathroom, since we’re there for a decent amount of time. So it was important for Rebecca and I that we really get a blocking system down.

That rehearsal period, for me in particular, it was clutch, it was definitely needed. Because we had a lot of bigger world discussions, as well as sort of the more micro character stuff beforehand, that didn’t slow us down on the day. So that really kept the momentum up on set, which is so key on these type of movies.

Rebecca: Yeah, we averaged eight to nine pages a day, if not more. So knowing that we were going into that, like it was rehearsals, but I did the same on the camera side as well. I ran my camera, my shot list like football plays with my AD and my DP for weeks before we got to set, before we actually started shooting. To the point where I had a dry erase board in the room where we were working and I literally would sketch out the set in x’s and it looked like football plays. For the majority of it, it ran like a rehearsed thing.

Cosmic horror has been notoriously difficult to bring to the screen; did you have any apprehension or were there discussions about what to show and when, and what things would look like? The idea with cosmic horror is that the horror can’t really be comprehended by us as mortals, which presents a challenge.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s always the thing. [Laughs] And I mean, that was always Lovecraft — with Lovecraft, it would be like, well, what does the monster look like? Oh, it’s indescribable. If you see it, it will make you go insane. And that was his thing. That’s what he did. So, it was always like, okay, well, where do I tease cosmos out of that?

And what I used as kind of my guide going forward that is that in Lovecraft and all Lovecraft, he views the cosmos and underwater as almost interchangeable, they function the same. If we look at the Cthulhu Mythos, he came from the stars, and he’s underwater now. But they’re used so interchangeably throughout all of Lovecraft. So I was kind of like, what if we blur the two together? And the $10 million [version] of this movie, every single one of those void scenes would have been fully underwater. Couldn’t afford to do that. So instead, it was like, well, how do I infuse water and cosmos into every single scene of this movie, so it’s built into the subtext, kind of the texture of everything, like it’s very subtle.

Our backdrop sound of this is water running. So like the toilet really never stops running throughout the entire movie. It’s very quiet, and it’s in the background. But some people did catch it at the screening last night where they were like, “There’s always dripping in the background.” And I was like, “Yeah, we wanted the water imagery.” At the same time, we’re putting cosmic sounds into the score constantly. Whale sounds, I even used this real-life thing, this real-life sound that was recorded underwater right off the coast of Brazil many, many years ago called the Bloop, which is this massive, giant monstrous sound, which they thought was maybe an earthquake. But of course, everybody online was like, “It’s a monster!”  We actually got the recording from NOAA, the North Atlantic Oceanic Institute, and put that under some of it, because it does have this massive, watery howling sound to it.

So, the Bloop is in there at various points. And so it was all about, if I can’t take us to space, and I can’t take us fully underwater, we’re in a bathroom, how do I bring space and underwater to us and make it one and the same. So that was kind of it. And then just using the tools that I do have as a director that are not free, but a lot less costly. I can control sound, I can put whatever sound effect I want in there. It can be a chicken clucking, or it can be crazy underwater monster and really kind of controlling it from there.

What were the challenges of presenting a main character that knows more than the audience does? We learn quite a bit about the character in the final moments, and I’m sure on a rewatch, audiences will be able to spot certain things that they might not the first time around. What sort of challenges are there in directing a character like that? And then portraying someone who has secrets that we don’t know about yet?

Ryan: Yeah, actually, someone brought that up last night, he sort of said, “I was liking your character, but I knew there was something missing.” I knew that that judgment could be played with and you want to be able to suck an audience in enough to want to go on this journey. But there’s also got to be a sense that we don’t quite understand his motives just yet. There’s a true sense that okay, we’re now locked in this bathroom with him. We’re not getting out. And we’re kind of seeing the world theoretically, through his eyes, and head. So it was important to kind of unleash little sort of tidbits along the way of, oh, wasn’t expecting him to do that.

Rebecca: Yeah, we built in little breadcrumbs throughout that tells you exactly who Ryan is and what he is, but I wanted to keep them subtle. I kept saying on set, “I want to wink at the audience, but not elbow them.” And so that was kind of the biggest thing was I never viewed it as the big twist in the movie. I didn’t want to treat it as such, because then I’d have to really preserve it and treat it a lot differently. I kind of just wanted it to be, we are coming to terms with it, just as Ryan did. Like Ryan at the beginning is in denial for a lot of it. Like why would he be calling her? He feels like he can still connect with her. He’s in denial of what has happened to a certain degree. And so we knew that I didn’t want it to begin with him like in full rage mode or anything like that.

There were definitely versions that were discussed, where, you know, we know from the beginning what his transgressions are, and I was like, I think that there’s something important about that part of the journey is that he has to come to terms with it. He has to make this sacrifice and he has to reach the point where he says, “This is what I have done.” And this is how I atone for it. And so when you rewatch literally, we were at the bar at like, 2 AM after the screening last night, and somebody comes up to me and goes, “Oh, shit, the blonde girl from the party. He totally was talking to her.” So there’s a lot that’s built in that people can catch on rewatches. It becomes clearer, his entire MO, but we really wanted to keep it subtle.

Glorious is now streaming on Shudder.