Free to Read Through August 22

Travis Stevens is the prolific producer behind fan favorite indie horror movies like Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way to Die, E.L. Katz’s brilliant Cheap Thrills and Ted Geoghegan’s eerie We Are Still Here. In 2019, Stevens made his long-awaited directorial debut with Girl on the Third Floor, a gruesome haunted house flick complete with oozing walls and a former WWE star in the lead role (Phil Brooks aka C.M. Punk, not Dave Bautista or John Cena — it wasn’t that crazy of a movie). 

With Stevens’ sophomore feature Jakob’s Wife, he has truly come into his own as a filmmaker, crafting a radically feminist vampire story with a central performance from horror icon Barbara Crampton that, if there were any justice in the world, would be in awards contention. Working alongside her is fellow beloved genre stalwart Larry Fessenden, virtually unrecognizable as a clean-cut fundamentalist type who does not realize his wife’s power until it’s much too late. 

I caught up with Stevens to discuss the delicate but necessary process of inserting vampire movie references into Jakob’s Wife, casting Fessenden against type, and the undeniable power of a female antiheroine. 

More by Joey Keogh: Review: Travis Stevens’ ‘Jakob’s Wife’

Joey Keogh: How did you initially get involved with this project?

Travis Stevens: It was a script written by Mark Steensland that had been sent to Barbara Crampton and she’d spent some time developing it — she worked with Kathy Charles, and then it was sent to me, and I started my work on it. The idea of a character in the second half of her life re-examining the choices she’s made earlier and the things that she’s prioritized over her own wants and desires, that idea was something Barbara Crampton was looking at in her own life because she’d stepped away from her acting career to focus on her family, so that was something we definitely wanted to explore in this movie, using vampirism as an allegory to talk about how relationships change and need to adjust in order to remain happy and healthy for both partners. 

JK: Did you have to do a lot of work on the script, or was it pretty much good to go?

TS: I did the standard amount of work on it that a writer-director typically does when they come onboard a project, but the core movie was there. I just wanted to calibrate certain aspects of it and really make sure there was room for this character transformation to happen, and also to have some fun with some new vampire ideas.

JK: Vampires have kind of been done to death at this stage, no pun intended. What was it that appealed to you about tackling them?

TS: I think, at least so far… whatever the horror sub-genre is, I like using that plot element as a way to talk about other themes, other ideas. I had done a haunted house movie that sort of used that structure to look at the rot in a person and what can be done about that, so doing a vampire movie and telling a story about rediscovering your lust for life ticked the same boxes for me. When you’re working in such a defined genre, you’re trying to find new things you can do with it, and that’s always a fun creative challenge, compared to if you were creating a completely new mythos or completely new subgenre. When you’re working with something like vampires, there have been so many of them that you can reference little ideas or images from other movies and that becomes kind of fun as well, to spread in the DNA from movies that may have done something similar thematically or with a particular moment. That was appealing to me, too. 

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JK: There are a lot of references to classic vampire movies in there. Did you get a lot of your favorites in there? 

TS: I did! Part of the process is identifying your favorites, and a lot of mine leaned heavily on the alt-vampire movies, where the vampires themselves are more metaphorical — looking at those films, like The Addiction, Ganja and Hess… stuff like that but also trying to get in references to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot, Daughters of Darkness too. This isn’t going to sound very articulate, but essentially it’s a lot of fun trying to put in little Easter eggs to the movies that inspired you! It’s a real pleasure. Depending on my mood, there are so many movies that do different things with vampires. My top three would be The Addiction, The Hunger and Let the Right One In, and all three are doing slightly different things with the vampire character. 

JK: The look of The Master is very Nosferatu-esque, for sure. 

TS: Absolutely, and part of the reason for that is simply that we haven’t really seen it a lot, particularly in the more modestly budgeted vampire films. I just wanted to… because the movie itself changes tone as the character of Anne changes, I wanted the vampire to really match the tone that the movie ends up in, and that felt like a classic vampire movie vampire, which also felt more fun. 

JK: You’re not afraid to make it kind of ugly, in other words? 

TS: Right. For what the movie’s saying about what your life can be — to have a beautiful older woman vampire saying “Hey, you can be beautiful forever!” — that wasn’t the message we wanted for the movie. The movie is about enjoying your life as it is now and living it to the max, not “You can be beautiful forever!” So, removing that aspect from the character of The Master felt like a good way to ensure the focus was on what the character was really saying overall. 

More by Joey Keogh: Interview with ‘Jakob’s Wife’ Actress Bonnie Aarons

JK: What’s interesting, too, is that these flashes you get throughout the movie of The Master don’t necessarily read as female — though, obviously, the character is being played by the great Bonnie Aarons — but the whispering voice is very female. We don’t typically see that character presenting as female. 

TS: There’s an audience assumption because it’s so often the gender for these types of characters and the look seems to chime with that idea of it too, but the hope is that as the movie’s transforming the audience’s understanding starts to transform as well, where they realize they’ve made the wrong assumption, which is part of what the characters in the movie are doing as well. Jakob’s certainly made some wrong assumptions about his wife and looking at The Master as a threat to him instead of focusing on what’s really going on, which is that this isn’t a satisfying relationship anymore — we need to make some adjustments here. Whether or not the audience will pick up on all those more subtle ideas, it’s certainly fun as a filmmaker to have them in there.

JK: The movie is being heralded as a feminist story. Would you consider it feminist? The central message, in particular?

TS: Absolutely. It’s a feminism that’s not at the expense of somebody else either. This is a movie about somebody embracing her voice again, recognizing that she, herself and the relationship she was in was stifling her voice. It’s not necessarily about, you know, “You’re a man, and you’re bad.” It’s truly about empowering yourself by saying “Hey, I’m going to start voicing my needs, wants and desires.” It might be a little more subtle, but it feels important to have movies, especially in this genre, that have more nuance to what they’re saying about life. For me personally, not only is the story a feminist story but the fact that this is a Barbara Crampton movie that she found, decided she wanted to do, nurtured and never gave up on, the movie itself, the very creation of it, is another empowering story. So, 100 percent, yes! 

JK: Sorry, I realize that’s kind of a loaded question! 

TS: No, not at all, not at all. I’m proud. I’m excited. It’s been really nice to see people who appreciate that about the movie. It’s authentic and the intention is sincere, so I’m proud of it. 

More by Joey Keogh: Review: Steven Kostanski’s ‘Psycho Goreman’

JK: We’ve talked a lot about Barbara Crampton, obviously, but there’s another horror icon in this movie in the form of Larry Fessenden, who’s really playing against type here as a priest. How did he get involved? Did you guys always have him in mind? Did Crampton pick him out? What’s the story there?

TS: He was my first choice. As I was reading the script and trying to wrap my head around what the movie could be, Larry popped into my head. We had such a good experience on We Are Still Here and what I knew was… one of the things I wanted to do with this movie was give Barbara space as a performer to really demonstrate different acting muscles. I wanted her to be able to go big and go small, do a wide variety of stuff, and because that was important as I was reading the script, I was thinking about how Larry is such a good dance partner — not just as a performer, but because he’s a director too — and there’s such a comfort level there because we’ve all worked together before. When you’re making a movie, you often don’t have the time to get to know your collaborators. You get to know ‘em better by the end of it, and you know ‘em certainly better after the festival run, but we already had those relationships in place. There was already a familiarity there, a sense of comfort. He was my first thought, and then when I mentioned it, Barbara and the other producer Bob Portal told me they were thinking of him too. We reached out to him, and he’s just another actor that has so much spark and fire in him, and to get a chance to have him as a lead where audiences can really see him — from the beginning of the movie all the way to the end — really go through his own character arc, it was an honor for me to give him that opportunity. I respect him so much as a filmmaker and what he does in supporting and lifting up other filmmakers. For me to have someone like him in my corner and to be able to work with him was just a huge win, and I feel so grateful for it. To see the reviews come in, it’s been really nice to see how much people appreciate finally getting to see these two actors together and in such big roles. 

JK: It’s such a thrill, as a horror fan. And it’s such a different role for him too, he looks completely unrecognizable. 

TS: Transformative. We wanted it to be a transformative movie for Anne, Jakob, Barbara and Larry!

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs.