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Glorious is the latest movie by director Rebekah McKendry. In addition to her film career, she worked for over a decade at Fangoria, lending her voice to several popular podcasts such as Killer POV and Shock Waves. Joshua Hull, David Ian McKendry, and Todd Rigney co-wrote the film. Alliance Media Partners and Fallback Plan Productions co-produced it in association with Eyebox Entertainment and Citizen Skull Productions.
“This project came to me the second week of the pandemic. It was a really weird time to be working in Hollywood. No one really knew what we were gonna do; we were just locked down and sanitizing everything. My friend Jay Goldberg sent this over to me and immediately I saw a lot of potential in it. The version of the script that we got was a little different, but it was still a guy in a bathroom with a possible Lovecraftian god,” said McKendry.
The film follows Wes (Ryan Kwanten), who finds himself in a public restroom as he waits out a hangover. He ends up encountering a mysterious entity (J.K. Simmons) behind a glory hole. From there, the story takes Wes deep into his psyche as he wrestles with fate and Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
“My husband and I had just watched Repo Man for the billionth time; we love that movie. And we had been talking about the idea of having philosophy in the least likely places. Immediately after I finished reading the script I said, ‘what if I told you I’ve got Waiting for Godot in a bathroom?’ and he said, ‘That’s a hell of a pitch.’ I felt like we could really turn it into something that’s heavy philosophically, but still a sort of guttural combination between absurdity and straight-up gory horror.”
During a discussion with Variety, McKendry discussed the balance between subtly laying breadcrumbs that hint at what might be ahead. While that might have been built into the script as subtle, McKendry always makes sure to leave herself options while shooting. That’s what she considers to be her job on set, to give herself options.
“I don’t have to make the big decisions yet, or at least not quite to the degree that I will have to when we’re in editing. And I want to wink at the audience, but not elbow them. There are versions of this footage where everything that is happening is incredibly overt, where it’s very obvious to everybody. But the edit that we intended to use from the beginning was one where we were just hinting at things, and that’s what we ended up using.”
The Horror of a Bathroom Stall
Since Glorious was a Lovecraftian cosmic horror story, McKendry approached it differently than she would a more traditional horror film. For Glorious, she knew that she could go all out, to really push where she wanted some of their nightmare imagery to go. For the scenes where Wes is having these nightmare trips, which are the most symbolic scenes, McKendry really wanted those to be crazy.
“If you ask me what the movie is about, I’m gonna point to two of those big, nightmare trip scenes, and on those I got to get really weird. You don’t always get that option. I just finished another movie that is a more traditional ghost story: I didn’t get to put an eight-foot-tall teddy bear with a giant vagina in its chest in that movie.”
When going over the entity’s voice, McKendry said that even in the early stages, the biggest thing for her was that it couldn’t sound scary from the start. It needed to sound cordial, friendly, and like a guy who would be in a bathroom stall next to you. After all, there needed to be a reason why Wes would keep talking to this person.
“And so J. K.’s voice is perfect because he’s just so multifaceted. The beautiful thing is he and Ryan got to work together a lot. We had several rehearsal sessions before we got into doing the recordings or onto set. So they had already worked through the script, processed it, talked about it. We had big discussions about philosophy, motivations. So by the time that we were actually recording, it just happened.”
Glorious was acquired by AMC’s Shudder earlier this year and will premiere on the streaming platform following Fantasia on August 18th. You can catch a teaser for the film here:
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