By George & Josh Bate
There are few things more unsettling than realizing you are a stranger inside someone else’s home. Maybe it’s the family photographs still hanging on the walls, the remnants of someone else’s life tucked into drawers, or the nagging feeling that you’re trespassing somewhere you technically paid to stay. In Godmother, that uncomfortable sensation becomes the foundation for something far more sinister.
Making its world premiere at this year’s Fantastic Fest, Godmother follows Theo (Paige Evans) and Colby (Cameron Cuffe), a couple who embark on a romantic weekend at a beautiful home in the New Mexico desert. Colby’s carefully planned getaway and his hopes of proposing to Theo are disrupted when Theo’s outspoken sister Katie (Riley Dandy) unexpectedly crashes the trip. As tensions rise between Colby and Katie, Theo also begins experiencing increasingly unsettling behavior from the Martinsons (Dee Wallace and Bruce Davison), the older couple who own the rental home.
The HoloFiles spoke exclusively with Godmother writer-director John Vernon and stars Riley Dandy and Cameron Cuffe about the origins of the film, its evolution into a story about female autonomy, the complicated family dynamics at play, and why sometimes the scariest thing in a vacation rental may be the person you brought with you.
For Vernon, the seeds of Godmother were planted nearly a decade ago. The filmmaker originally wrote the screenplay in 2016 under the title Crashpad, with the story initially centered around the strange experience of staying in someone else’s home.
“I kind of just wanted to talk about how it’s weird to fuck in an Airbnb,” Vernon revealed. “Because back when I first wrote it, it was 2016, it was originally called Crashpad, and it had this really clunky page of exposition about how a vacation turned to work. So I had to invent a fictional company called Crashpad.com, et cetera, et cetera.”
By the time the film finally came together, however, the world had changed enough that the exposition was no longer necessary. “But it took so long to make the movie that I didn’t have to explain that anymore,” Vernon said. “And the page was not good, and Crashpad‘s a bad title. So all of that went out, and now it’s called Godmother.”
The original concept nevertheless remained at the heart of the movie: the inherently strange experience of occupying someone else’s personal space.
“Back then, now they’re all run by rental companies, but back then, these were people’s houses,” Vernon said. “You’d be doing shots with your friends in your 20s or whatever, and you’d look over, and there’s like a kid’s soccer picture right there. And it did feel like you were haunting someone’s house. And so I kind of wanted to talk about that.”
What Vernon discovered as he revisited his own screenplay, however, was that Godmother had evolved into something beyond its initial premise. “I’m a really, really big believer in the idea that the movie tells you what it wants to be about when you read back what you’ve written,” Vernon said. “And you have to be open to that. And when I read back what I’d written, I realized that I was talking about issues of women’s bodily autonomy and agency and all this sort of stuff.”
That thematic evolution was something Dandy appreciated about the project, particularly because her character Katie is someone who refuses to simply accept the world as it is presented to her.
“I was thankful that [Vernon] was open to hearing women out, because there’s a lot of male filmmakers that don’t care,” Dandy said.
For Dandy, Katie’s outspoken nature and fiercely protective personality provided an immediate connection to the character. Katie may enter the story as an unwanted guest who throws Colby’s meticulously planned romantic weekend into chaos, but her resistance to being pushed aside becomes increasingly important as the story unfolds.
“I feel like Katie grew up in a world where she was constantly told no, and I think that really fuels their relationship,” Dandy explained.
The actor also drew from the women in her own life when approaching the role. “I have so many sisters and nieces, and so I am naturally very protective of women in my life specifically,” Dandy said. “So I love that Katie was a female-forward woman who I think fights for women because I think she’s been hard done by a lot of men in her life. And unfortunately, a lot of women can relate to that.”
“I think that really drew me in,” Dandy continued. “I think she’s very honest and reactive. Life has never given her a fair shot, and I think we see that in this movie, that that just continues to happen. So that’s why I fell in love with her. They’re both two different versions of they kind of never had a chance.”
That complicated dynamic between Katie and Colby is crucial to Godmother, particularly because Vernon allows the relationship to dominate the film and its tension before the horror elements fully emerge in the second half.
For Cuffe, this structure meant approaching the movie almost like he was making an entirely different film at first. “It’s the beginning of another movie, and then a horror movie happens,” Cuffe said. “And it was thrilling, because we talked a lot about backstory, me and myself and Paige talked about that, and you talked with Paige about your big sisters, but [Riley and I] didn’t talk at all. And the first scene that we filmed was her coming in. So we’re really discovering it fresh, and these characters are so diametrically opposed.”
The tense back-and-forth between Dandy’s Katie and Cuffe’s Colby makes the first half of the film as compelling as it is. Colby is not necessarily a traditional horror villain when the film begins. Instead, he is the sort of person whose flaws become increasingly apparent the longer he is forced outside of his carefully constructed comfort zone.
Cuffe describes him bluntly. “He’s not a dick, he’s just a knob,” the actor said. “He’s awful, not necessarily always willfully. And I think that’s the kind of thing, it’s about the thing with him and the thing with guys like him, he’s not thinking about what he wants to be, he’s thinking about what he wants to be seen to be.”
Cuffe embraced that distinction when constructing the character, particularly as Colby attempts to project an image of himself that doesn’t necessarily align with who he actually is.
“Playing that in every sort of opportunity I could, because it worked really, really well for the character, who’s dealing with a very real problem,” Cuffe said.
Yet there is something almost tragic underneath Colby’s shortcomings. Cuffe doesn’t view him as inherently irredeemable, but rather as someone who has gone through life without developing the tools to understand himself or the people around him.
“I like the idea that if Colby had seen a very good therapist as a young man, he might have been okay, but he’s just not,” Cuffe said.
That sense of two damaged people colliding is also what Dandy sees at the heart of Katie and Colby’s relationship. They are fundamentally different, but both have been shaped by circumstances that left them feeling as though they were never quite given a fair opportunity.
And while Katie’s clashes with Colby provide much of the movie’s initial tension, her relationship with Theo is equally important. Dandy found it remarkably easy to establish the protective sibling dynamic with Evans, whose performance as Theo required her to remain emotionally open as the increasingly bizarre events unfolded.
“It was also so easy to feel protective of Paige because she is the world’s… She’s the purest heart,” Dandy said. “She’s the world’s most open-hearted, tender, talented, gifted actress. And you see her opening her heart. And so I think all of us did want to protect her. So that sibling dynamic was so, so, so easy.”
While the interpersonal drama gives Godmother its foundation, Vernon was determined to make sure the supernatural horror wasn’t simply another variation on familiar demonic possession stories. Without delving into spoilers too much, the film inevitably invites comparisons to The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby, but Vernon deliberately wanted to move away from their specifically Christian mythology.
“That’s why I keep insisting that it’s a god,” Vernon said. “It’s not Demon Mother. It’s Godmother. One of the things that I wanted to do was kind of lean a little bit more cosmic, a little bit more Lovecraft with a lot of it, because [The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby] are very rooted in specifically Catholicism. Or like Christian iconography. And every time you see some sort of supernatural entity tormenting someone in a horror movie, you hear that it’s a demon. And I always kind of have the instinct to go where other people aren’t playing.”
For audiences wondering what kind of movie Godmother might be if they find themselves drawn to its particular brand of horror, the cast had some suggestions.
“House of the Devil,” Vernon said. “That’s a great film.”
“Paper Dolls,” Cuffe added. “It’s a good one.”
Dandy, however, offered perhaps the simplest recommendation of all.
“If you like women, you’ll like Godmother,” she said.
There may be no better place for a movie like Godmother to make its debut than Fantastic Fest. The Austin genre festival has long embraced filmmakers willing to take genre conventions in unexpected directions, and both Cuffe and Dandy saw the festival as an ideal home for Vernon’s feature debut.
“This is an incredibly creative city, and I think people did celebrate that,” Cuffe said. “I’ve said before that this is one of the most supportive places you could ever possibly premiere a film in. Because people understand it.”
Dandy sees that sense of community as an essential part of what makes Fantastic Fest special. “I think this festival in particular welcomes big swings,” she said. “And I think all of the people that make genre movies at one point in our lives were weirdos that felt a little bit outcast by society. So I think it’s a really beautiful way and full circle moment for all of the weirdos to come together and celebrate making really fucking cool movies. And find community in that.”
For a film that began with the simple, uncomfortable idea of sleeping in a stranger’s house, Godmother has ultimately grown into something considerably larger. It is a story about family, control, female autonomy, toxic masculinity, and the ways people can impose themselves upon one another. If Vernon’s first feature is any indication, the filmmaker has found a particularly promising place to make his mark.
Watch our full interview with Godmother writer-director John Vernon and stars Riley Dandy and Cameron Cuffe below….
