Tyler Treese spoke to Your Monster director Caroline Lindy about the horror romantic comedy movie starring Melissa Barrera. Distributed by Vertical, the film is now playing in theaters.
“Your Monster tells the story of the soft-spoken actor Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera), who is dumped by her longtime boyfriend (Edmund Donovan) while recovering from surgery and retreats to her childhood home to recover. With her future looking bleak, insult is added to injury when Laura discovers her ex is staging a musical that she helped him develop. But out of these gut-wrenching life changes emerges a monster (Tommy Dewey) with whom she finds a connection, encouraging Laura to follow her dreams, open her heart, and fall in love with her inner rage,” says the synopsis for Caroline Lindy’s directorial debut.
Tyler Treese: I wanted to ask you about the musical within a movie aspect. I thought that was just so cool, and I also heard there were more musical numbers that were filmed that I’m just dying to see the full versions of, but how was it incorporating that?
Caroline Lindy: It was a challenge for sure, but it felt appropriate to the journey of our protagonist, Laura Franco. This is a story about a woman finding her voice. To have a character who’s trying to be a musical theater actress ultimately finding her voice on the stage in front of a lot of people, being loud and proud and unapologetic about how she’s feeling felt just right. I followed my gut, and even though it’s a weird mashup, I’ve seen it before with Phantom of the Opera. It’s kind of spooky love stories and opera, so I thought it could be done.
The whole last act is gonna really impress a lot of people, and Melissa’s just fantastic throughout, but she really takes it to that next level during those final scenes. Can you speak to her as your casting choice? When you describe those elements of the protagonist, you basically describe Melissa.
She is amazing and just so brilliant and such a phenomenal performer. We were looking for someone who understood horror, which she has gained this big profile being in horror movies. Then, someone who is a musical theater actress. She’s in In the Heights. She grew up singing. She’s a dancer. But then the one thing that I hadn’t seen her do is that many romantic comedies, and to incentivize someone at her of her status to do a smaller indie film, I was like, “I wonder if she’d be excited by the challenge of doing a role she’s never really done before. I know she can do horror. I know she can do musical theater, but maybe she’ll be excited by the prospect of doing romantic comedy.”
When I sent her the script, that’s exactly what she said. She was like, “I wanna do a role like this. No one’s ever asked me to do something like this before.” I feel confident about certain genres of this film, but this is the one that I really wanna sink my teeth into. This is my first feature. So we were both taking a risk on each other, together, and it all came together well.
This is a long time coming. You did the short film, so you’ve been working on this for five-plus years. Then, earlier this year, we saw Lisa Frankenstein come out. The films diverge, and they go in very different directions, but I was curious about your reaction when you saw that logline because they have similar premises.
I was thrilled because it’s a very different movie, but I am like, “Okay, there is a market for horror rom-coms.” So I was delighted to see it come out. I really appreciate filmmakers who take a risk and try something new, different, and weird. I think it’s awesome. So it kind of set the stage for Your Monster, and I was very grateful for it.
The horror girlies are really having a good time here. For the monster design, how was it finding that balance between him looking like a monster and making him attractive? Melissa said he was pretty hot.
Yeah, so that was David LeRoy Anderson, who was the special effects makeup artist on this film and an extremely talented person. I made that very clear to him. I’m like, he is a monster, but we have to fall in love with him. This is a love story. So he can’t be too grotesque. He has to be appealing and as appealing as he is dark and mysterious. We worked very, very hard and Monster went through a lot of different iterations to find that perfect balance because the movie doesn’t work if we don’t ultimately fall in love with him. So, we couldn’t create him in a way that would throw people off too much. I think we landed on the perfect look.
Thanks to Caroline Lindy for talking about Your Monster.
