Most horror movies spend years crawling out of development hell. Playhouse got about one. Co-writers Nicolas Curcio and Kirby Gladstein pitched the film and won. Then they walked straight into a deadline that would make most productions lie down in the road. By Nicolas’s count the whole thing came together in roughly 355 days on very little money.
I sat down with the filmmakers and part of the cast expecting war stories about the schedule. I got a few. The detail that stayed with me was quieter than that. Early screenings nudged Playhouse toward more horror. The people who made it decided the relationship at its center mattered more. Having seen the film I’m very glad they held the line.
A Year on the Clock and a Lot of Help
Nicolas doesn’t sugarcoat the math. “Making a movie at that speed with very little money, kind of impossible,” he told me. What made it possible was us. Well, the horror community at large.
“We had a production meeting the morning after we won,” he said. Executive producers who weren’t yet attached to the film showed up anyway. “They were like, ‘You know what, I’m gonna make a call for you. Here’s the things you should focus on first. I’m gonna talk to this composer and talk to this DP.’ The horror community is so kind, and that is the only reason why we were able to make this movie.”
The deadline even worked in their favor. A fixed release date told casting directors this wasn’t a tiny indie that might never surface. “This is a real movie that has to come out next September,” Nicolas said.
Get Back to the Horror
Anyone who has sat through a test screening knows the note. Nicolas can recite it. “More horror. Get back to the horror. I’m bored with these people, get back to the horror.”
He sees that pressure all over modern horror. “There’s not that much character. They’re going for, every 10 minutes there has to be this horror beat. And this movie just isn’t that.”
The feedback rattled him at first. It took long talks with Kirby to remember what they had pitched. “The pitch is about a relationship. The movie’s about a relationship,” he said. As they refined the cut the thing audiences had pushed back on became what they praised. “I think now that’s becoming the strength of the movie. I think without that, it would be just kind of, we’ve seen this before, you know?”
Two Writers Who Already Knew How to Fight Fair
It helps that the writing team is also a couple. “I think the beauty of us being in a relationship is that we have spent years practicing the art of compromise,” Kirby said. They know which hill is worth dying on. The schedule settled the rest. There was barely time to revisit the script after the win. As the pair put it, they had to shoot what they wrote.
Red Flags and Real Motives
That commitment to character runs through the cast too. One actor plays a man who buys a house to win someone back. He chose to play the grand gesture straight. “Despite being a red flag, it’s probably a red flag that I’d run towards,” he said.
James stayed careful about spoilers. He did point to the real inspiration behind the film: houses the Highway Commission bought up to make way for a highway. His character’s sense of moral purpose “metastasizes into something much more grotesque and harmful.” That is exactly how he wanted to play it. “You’re not just playing a bad guy who’s trying to scare people.”
He also got to act opposite puppets, which delighted him. “I was mad about puppets, and I owned a lot of puppets,” he said. Jordan described his character as someone with “his true love of all things found footage, and just odd.” His loyalty to his best friend keeps him in the house long after a smarter person would have bailed.
More from Fantastic Fest 2026: our full lineup preview, our review of Resident Evil, and our interview with the team behind What Happened to Doris.
