Scream Therapy sees a group of female friends head to the desert to shout their problems into the isolated wilds of Wonder Valley, California. But they end up falling foul of an incel cult that needs a sacrifice or two pretty soon. What follows is a madcap battle for survival and understanding. It goes to some interesting places along the way, including a very twisty-turny finale.
ComingSoon’s Neil Bolt spoke to Scream Therapy director Cassie Keet about her desert horror comedy and how the pandemic shaped its story.
Neil Bolt: Thank you for speaking with me, Cassie. I really enjoyed Scream Therapy. Horror comedy is a tricky balance to pull off. It doesn’t have to be even-handed, and there’s no one right way to do it. I think your film is a good example of that.
Even though there are some serious subjects in the story, you use comedy to offset some of the darkness in it. Was comedy always the first instinct with Scream Therapy?
Cassie Keet: Yes and no. When i first got the idea about it, i was in such a rageful place. It was during the pandemic, and I had so much extra time to go on Twitter and just read everything that was happening. It was very much born out of me saying, ‘’I need scream therapy!’’ But I was locked in my home in Los Angeles with four roommates for like two years. I was losing my mind, and things felt like they were getting progressively worse, and then you’re reading about everything that’s happening. Plus, you have the sociopolitical arena, Black Lives Matter, and women are starting to lose access to their own bodily autonomy. I was so angry, but I was a comedian. So, I started writing this script from a place of anger, knowing it was going to be funny.
And you know, the characters did evolve a lot. At first, I wanted to punish the incels. They were going to die horrible deaths, and I was really looking forward to that! But the more time I spent with Jerimiah, this character, the more i though, ‘’This poor bastard. He was raised to be this way’’. A lot of people, especially these young men who are getting raised by horrible influencers, people telling them women mean nothing. It’s like a generation of young men being raised by racists, misogynists, and homophobes. I think that we can still reach out to them and be like, ‘’No! Meet a Woman! They’re fun! Talk to someone who doesn’t look like you!’’
So, I had to find empathy for those characters. And When I did, the story made so much more sense. I feel like I’m talking a lot!
NB: No, that’s absolutely fine! I was actually going to bring up the fact you’re sure to include empathy for every major character in the story to some degree. It would have been understandable to paint the incels as straight-up villains, even the demon, but you don’t. So learning that’s where the journey of making the film took you sounds healthy.
CK: Yeah! Yeah, it was.
Especially when looking into those online spaces where things are so often divided into, ‘’You’re on this side or that side,’’ and there is no context beyond that. It shows that, given time, people can gain a wider perspective on things. You made a film that’s wholesome in a dark sort of way.
CK: Yeah! It’s wholesome! It’s very funny to find wholesomeness and women supporting women in a film where 12 people die, but we somehow managed to do it and walk very carefully across that line.
I was wondering if you’d had any experience with real-life scream therapy before the film?
CK: The line that Mary Beth says where she says, ‘’Oh yeah, I do it every time I drive,’’ that’s me. I get a lot of road rage, and I try to keep a lid on it, but anytime someone’s in a car with me, they’re like, ‘’You should calm down a little bit.’’
I think it’s healthy to express your big feelings. Bottling that stuff up just makes you feel sick. It makes you physically ill. So, taking a moment, I think that’s why people take up things like boxing and working out. It’s a release of that stuff. Scream therapy is just another way of letting these things out of our bodies and making room for more positive things.
The scream therapy brings the film to the desert, and I find It’s such a fascinating setting, given the isolation and pocket communities that exist within it. But what for you made it ideal as a setting?
CK: Well, it was ideal because it was available. I know the owner of the bar we filmed at, and it’s no exaggeration to say it’s the only bar for 30 miles. It is literally in the middle of the desert in Wonder Valley.
I’d gone and performed out there before as part of a comedy group I was in called Woah Man a couple of years before the pandemic, and he’d invited us out there, saying, ‘’ You can come out and stay here, I’ve got this extra house,’’ and we performed this show out there in the desert for desert folk, and a lot of them had never seen a variety show or a sketch show before. So, that was a culture shock. But while I was there, I was looking at this house and this bar and thinking, ‘’I could write something. I could used these two locations’’ and that’s how it came about.
Then, in the pandemic, if we were hanging out together, it was like 8 feet away from each other in outside spaces. I was so desperate to just get out of the apartment that I wrote and entire movie just to get out of that apartment and hang out with my friends again. That movie was Scream Therapy.
Also, the owner of the bar was in the movie.
Oh yeah?
CK: Yeah! He plays the staring man. The man with the crossbow. His name is Kevin Bone, and he is the light of my life. I love him so much. He and his wife Laura own the house and the bar that we filmed in. Also, Laura is in a band called The Sibleys, and they licensed us their music for half of the background music. If it’s not our score by Drew Griffiths, it’s by The Sibleys.
That’s great. I suppose that really added to the family feel of the shoot.
CK: Absolutely. The main theme song, The Wonder Valley Lover song, was from a band we watched the night before a location scout. So we we asked, ‘’Hey we’re making a movie, can we use your song in it?’’ And they were like, ‘’Yes’’. It was such a generous community out there in Wonder Valley.
Returning to that family feeling, you let your main cast shine together before unleashing the cult and the madness that it brings. That’s so important to the story, as well as caring about the outcome.
CK: I completely agree!
How difficult was it to find a group of actors that connected this well?
CK: Not hard at all! I’m so lucky, I feel like I have a cheat code because for seven and a half years, I worked at an acting studio, and I was the studio manager for a few years, so the women in the film I was either in the acting class with them or in the comedy group Woah Man with them. So when casting started, I sent it out to my acting class asking, ‘’Hey, do you wanna come hang out in the desert for two weeks and not get paid anything, but we’ll just drink, make a movie, and hang out?’’ And so many people auditioned. People were like, ‘’Hell yeah, get me out of here!’’
From that existing pool of talent, we were able to cast many people, and many of them were friends or had worked together before, so that camaraderie was already there.
That’s lovely. It did seem that at least some of the cast members had to have known each other well before filming.
CK: Oh yeah, and we’re all on a text thread called… I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to curse on these…
Oh sure, swear away!
CK: So our text thread is called the Motherfucking Mermaids, and we do text each other a lot.
Ah, so that’s where the group name comes from in the film!
CK: Yes!
Awesome. I really like the escalating twists and absurdity in the second half, but were you ever worried about it being seen as pushing it too far?
CK: Yes! Haha. I knew I was in the last 20 pages of the script, and I got right up until when The Sovereign showed up, but then it felt like I got writer’s block. I’d written myself into this corner and was like, ‘’Oh God, how do I wrap this up?’’
I had some crazy ideas, but I was like, ‘’What if it’s too much?’’ But I was on Twitter, and this writer is someone that I love and respect. I don’t know him yet, but we will be friends! His name is C. Robert Cargill.
Ah yeah.
CK: He’s not really on Twitter anymore; he’s on Bluesky now because, well… you know, Elon. But he used to just do random tweets where he be like, ‘’Hey I’m up drinking whisky, ask me a question and i’ll see if I can get back to you’’. And I happened to be on Twitter at that exact moment. I’d had some drinks, he’s had some drinks, so I was like, ‘’Hey, I’m in the last 20 pages of my film, I kinda know what I wanna do, but I’m worried people are going to think that it’s too much and they’re gonna think the ending is stupid or bad.’’
His advice, and he wrote back immediately, was essentially ‘’Go for broke, make it as big and insane as possible, and if you need to pull it back, pull it back. Don’t limit yourself to worrying about what other people will or won’t think; just do it’’ So I cracked my knuckles and wrote the last 20 pages in one sitting.
In the final script, you can read one of the stage directions it says, ‘’Fuck it, she’s an angel’’ because it came up in that session where I was like, ‘’How am I gonna get this character out of here? She’s just gonna fly away, and why not?’’
When I had my first table read with my producers, I was so nervous about the ending, but we got to the end, and they were like, ‘’That’s the funniest ending to a movie!’’ they were so on board with how insane it got. They encouraged me to make it crazier, so it got a bit crazier. It was so great to collaborate with them.
That’s awesome to hear. Great that you got to shoot your shot like that as well.
CK: Absolutely, yeah! Go far and rein it back in if you need to, and if not, well, you already did the thing.
Definitely! To wrap up, there’s a running gag about Nicholas Cage and his sadly fictional dining establishments. Do you feel that strongly about Cage in real life?
CK: I feel even stronger about Nicholas Cage in real life. I love Nicholas Cage so much. I have several Nicholas Cage T-shirts, and I have a Nicholas Cage pillow on my chair. I love Nicholas Cage. I grew up watching his movies, and there’s a movie for every mood, for every life situation. There’s a movie for falling in love, having your heart broken, and for fighting on a plane full of convicts if that ever happens.
I love how weird he is and how dedicated he is to doing this no-holds-barred kind of thing. Honestly, he inspires me. I don’t think that man is capable of feeling self-doubt. We should all be more like Nicholas Cage, right?
Yeah absolutely. I’m guessing that passionate speech about him in your movie was very much from the heart.
The depths of my heart, yeah. I could have written a 45-minute monologue about Nicholas Cage—it could have been longer than the rest of the movie. Thankfully, they reined me in just a little bit for that.
Scream Therapy will be out on digital platforms starting on June 18, 2024.
