Love hurts in the dizzyingly unpredictable Strange Darling – a thriller that upends expectations at every turn, courtesy of our guest this week, Las Vegan-born writer-director JT Mollner. JT grew up surrounded by immersive storytelling – his father ran a haunted house in Vegas that he helped conceptualise every Halloween as a child. That adolescence came in handy when crafting this tale of a serial killer on the final days of a bloody rampage through rural America: Strange Darling, though not a horror, feels decidedly like a sprint through a madhouse in all its gruesome shocks and Tarantino-esque play with chronology.
On this spoiler-filled episode of Script Apart, the filmmaker breaks down the film and its corkscrewing structure. We get into how the film uses chronology as a storytelling weapon, what JT is willing (and unwilling) to reveal about the visions inspiring the killer's rampage, and the idea of the movie as a romantic drama – one that just so happens to be full of murder.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.
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