“What would you like to do with your hands? Besides matricide?” Boyd’s mother Jacqueline (Alice Krige) asks her son (Chris Colfer) in “The Restoration at Grayson Manor” where the thought of strangling her is never far from his mind. The two have remained hopelessly intertwined since Boyd left the womb when the son has lacked the financial wherewithal to leave the palatial estate that has been in his family for generations (and has seen far better days), with Jacqueline tightly controlling the purse strings, but can impress the random guys he meets at the club by bringing them back to the mansion, much to her chagrin. While she could likely care less about Boyd’s sexuality ideologically or practically with the sounds she’ll hear coming from downstairs, her homophobia is rooted in biological concerns when she is desperate for an heir that will fulfill her promise to her grandfather to see that the family’s legacy is carried out of a belief that the bloodline is the measure of immortality.
It’s an undeniably juicy premise that director Glenn McQuaid squeezes the most out of in his glorious return to the big screen, having made a splash with his 2008 debut “I Sell the Dead”before taking his talents to the podcast world with the audio drama series “Tales from Beyond the Pale,” occasionally popping his head into anthology films. His proper feature return makes up for lost time as Krige and Colfer square off as a mother and son with truly warped relationship that only gets worse when Jacqueline invites Dr. Jeffrey Tannock (Daniel Adegboyega), an expert in “subconscious mind prosthetic connectivity” over to the house along with his assistants Claudia (Gabriela Garcia Vargas) and Lee (Declan Reynolds), to help reattach Boyd’s hands that are sliced off by the shards of a mirror in a freak accident and Jacqueline comes to see it as an opportunity to gain control over her son’s medical care, planning to take full advantage of the fact he’s bedbound.
Who has the upper hand becomes a literal issue in “The Restoration at Grayson Manor” when Dr. Tannock’s experimental treatment leads to Boyd’s prosthetics having a mind of their own and McQuaid and co-writer Clay McLeod Chapman let their own imaginations run wild as Boyd’s new digits do around the house where no one can be trusted. Although McQuaid has made no secret of the film’s genesis as a love child of horror and soap operas, it has an undeniably genuine and tender core when it comes to notions of inheritance, both genetically and what can be divvied up in a will. While there’s no love lost amongst the rogues’ gallery of characters, McQuaid and McLeod Chapman clearly adore them all and have an ensemble on hand to really make their tart dialogue delicious. With the film making its premiere at Fantastic Fest, McQuaid generously took the time to talk about getting all hands on deck for his long-awaited second feature and the personal connections to the material that only add to the fun.
How did this come about?
The origins of “The Restoration at Grayson Manor” came from myself and Clay McLeod Chapman scheming up ideas originally for an audio drama. I have an audio drama show called “Tales from Beyond the Pale,” and I thought this might be a nice half hour nod to the killer hand subgenre. But as Clay and I really began to roll up our sleeves with it, we realized that, “Nah, this is a movie,” so I wrote a treatment. I got that to Clay and I could tell in his writing, he was having an awful lot of fun with it. One of the biggest concerns of mine initially was the barbed nature of Boyd and Jacqueline and wanting to make that enjoyable for the audience as opposed to being suffocating and insufferable. I don’t love watching movies of people just going at each other’s throats if it’s not done in an inclusive way for the audience, so I knew pretty quickly that Clay was the right collaborator for this piece because we just had such a good time chuckling away at what we were scheming and planning.
You have a great list of influences for the film on your Instagram, including one full of soap operas, which might not be obvious for a horror film, but you totally make it work. What led you to look at them in the first place?
The story came from a very personal place, actually. I think “Grayson Manor” represents the weight of heteronormative expectations on queer and defiant and rebellious shoulders. And that comes from experience. What got me through some of that weight was horror, soap opera, melodrama and comedy. When I was quite young, I got to see a lot of really cool — and what I didn’t know at the time queer-made — horror of James Whale. “The Old Dark House” is such a big influence. I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I watch the movie now, I’m like, “Gosh, this is like a contemporary take on a James Whale piece.” Of course, we are much more out of the closet with it, so it never felt like something I had to juggle. It all felt like it was coming from the right place and I felt like I had the right vocabulary to be inviting other collaborators in and then to be their safety net, because it came from such a personal place.
One of the other great balances you strike is between classical and contemporary – I was struck by the production design where there are often vibrant colors amidst this dilapidated mansion, but then also in the score, which you’re credited on as a co-composer, where you were using some classic instrumentation but modern arrangements and vice versa at times. What was it like to put together?
I make music, which would be more goth or electronic, so I knew I needed a collaborator and I partnered up with Ruben Harvey, a pianist and a classically trained composer, who, however, randomly I hired as the hand actor in the movie. It wasn’t until days into it, I was like, “God, you’ve got the hands of a pianist,” and he’s just like, “Well, let me tell you…” And he started sharing work. So it was just one of those lovely coincidences in life that we then became partners in the score. But there’s a couple of things at play in the movie – this gothic crumbling grandeur juxtaposed with something very modern and high tech, so I wanted the score to reflect that with my own push for an electronic score that was almost crumbling and falling apart and giving way to classical, so there was a tug of war there between the pieces. We just had fun reflecting on the concept in the script and then also what the mansion had to offer because the mansion almost came in at the 11th hour. We were searching up and down Ireland to find the right place and then that spoke to us as well, so there was a lot of fodder for us to lean into.
What was it like to have that mansion as a base? It looked like you used it both for the interiors and exteriors.
It was amazing. As a filmmaker, I absolutely loved the constraints of working within a structure and just feeding off of whatever it’s giving us. I don’t love the idea of the walls behind me instantly moved away just to get to it. We wanted to have a very tactile sense of the space and the space spoke to us in ways that I didn’t realize. There’s a lot of that house in this movie. A lot of the ancestry, the portraits are from the house. A lot of the taxidermy are from the house as well, so we were just using what we had and allowed it to speak to us. And again for me, the house began to represent this expectation of procreation and this heteronormative idea that we can only exist through procreation, which is something I wanted to poke a little fun at as well.
You’ve got the whole cast of great actors who can handle the serious demands of the tone as well as the comedy. In particular, what sold you on your two leads?
I mean, I’m a geek, you know? So my first conversation with Alice [Krige], I was trying to be cool and we were getting on and then by the end of it, I just let it all come out. I was like, “I don’t know how much they told you, but I really want to work with you. I love you.” And she chuckled away. Likewise with Chris, I [knew he was] fun and terrific, but I had no idea he was a horror guy. He loves horror. Chris actually came on quite early and stood by us through all the ups and downs as we were trying to get it made. We spoke pre-pandemic and Chris loved the script. We got on very well and we wanted to work together, so my time on the set was great.
I was almost a third character. At times, I would whisper in Jacqueline’s ear, “Hey, remember what he did to you on your 40th birthday?” And [she would say as] Jacqueline, “What did he do? He was born!” And then I would go whisper something in Boyd’s ear as well, be his worst best friend and have fun with contrary expectations within scenes. I pulled the rug from under the characters quite a bit, but it was always their safety net because I knew the world and what I was going for, so I was not quiet on set. I had a lot of fun with them all.
Post-production on this must’ve been interesting, editing out not only your own presence on the set, but also the bodies of the actors whose hands run amok. What was it like to cut this together?
Yes, it’s fun in a way with the hands running around, it’s kind of a multimedia project. We have a lot of different solutions for the hands. At times there are props, at times it’s a hand actor and at times it’s CGI, so it’s this amalgamation. I have some effects background, but my heart really is with the actors, so at times it was just chaotic and you’re relying on your VFX coordinator and script supervisor and [for] the more action-heavy stuff, it definitely got a little bit tricky, but [we just] stayed with the characters and the characters’ emotions. I really pushed for a deadpan style of performance so that we were never laughing at ourselves particularly. If we were enjoying it, we were enjoying it in a way that wasn’t camp. It was more just leaning into the melodrama of it.
What went into actually designing the hand? The first time I saw them, I was getting a bit of a “Hellraiser” vibe.
Yes, it was really the idea of acupuncture, I was just getting acupuncture done at the time and I wanted the hands to appear unusual and to gradually be formed into something, so I agree, it does have a kind of Cenobite attitude, but that really just came out of wanting it to have its own journey. I wanted the first time that we saw the hands for them to be striking in a way that you weren’t expecting.
What’s it like getting to this moment of the premiere? You’re making this triumphant return to the big screen.
It’s emotional. This movie has been a journey, a long prep and a long post-production. Production and working with the actors was the time of my life, so I’m excited to get it out now. And I just hope that people enjoy and appreciate it. This has been my baby for quite a while and it’s been a wild ride, so it’s a roller coaster of emotions as we gear up to the premiere.
“The Restoration at Grayson Manor” will screen again at Fantastic Fest at the Alamo South Lamar in Austin on September 23rd at 11:10 pm.