Restoration at Grayson Manor (2026)

Hold your ears, folks. It's showtime. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Turn it off. Turn it off! Well, come on. I won't bite. This is your place.

My mother's. You live with your mother? She's dead. Okay, I'm going to get out of here. Get up.

Hello, mother. I look dead. Don't answer that. Things got a little grueling. Don't forget to pack your friend up with the rest of your toys.

Any fairies in this family will be consigned to the closet. Cue this symphony. This is how the family name dies. So get out of my house. Your mother has seen to it that you have your very own medical staff.

I'm gifting you a new set. Remember what it feels like to play. You're the first amputee in history to control bionics. Nothing more than your subconscious mind. And what if I have a dirty mind?

Then I'll guess you'll do dirty things. You will notice. Give me an F. It is the last thing you do. You're insane.

You do know that. We are. The cradle of humanity. The architects of a legacy. Without us, it all goes away.

So there's never really a choice, is there? There's a duty. You're a lunatic. All this anger is going to affect the. Baby.

This will get you stretched up. That's a good boy. I don't want to spoil the surprise. Surprise? You've got some work to.

Do. Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with Glenn McQuaid. He is the director and co-writer of the new film, The Restoration at Grayson Manor.

The film stars Chris Colfer and Alice Krieg. And it is a wonderfully bitchy gothic tale. I had a lot of fun with this, and I hope you have a lot of fun listening to this interview. Enjoy. Great.

Well, can you talk a little bit about how you got interested in making movies? I grew up very working class in the 70s and 80s in Ireland, and I just found so much escapism through movies, in particular horror movies. At the time, they might as well have been made in a different universe to the one that I was in. I didn't know how these things got made, but I caught the film bug very early. And I found such great escapism through horror.

And I suppose I've never let go of that. There was a period of time I was working in advertising in New York and some other bits and pieces. But I always wanted to get back to horror. So then really in my mid-30s, I was like, damn it, I have to do this. And I started picking up Fangoria again, and I just found my soul again.

And it was all through a love of genre. And I do it because I love it. I think just to add a bonus of perhaps hoping my work reaches somebody else who might need some escapism too. So yeah, really just feeling... so invigorated and enamored, thrilled by genre since I was five. It's remarkable to me to see just how many things that you've done on different pictures, between editing, visual effects, acting.

I mean, you're all over the place, which is great. Yeah, but don't ever put me in front of a camera again. I have such tremendous respect for anybody that... can do that i i'm i'm not one of those people however i really love i love the process of acting and i i love rolling up my sleeves and and help getting the best out of performers but yeah i think also some of that sort of jack of all trades comes from the glass eye pics school of filmmaking true larry fessenden uh from early days my work with glass eye pics started out as visual effects Then moved on to second unit directing and directing and so on. But Fessenden is just some man for reminding you of all the many different hats you may have to wear while filmmaking.

Like people like Jen Wexler and Chris Scotch-Dupont, Ty West. We all came out of the glass I pick school of filmmaking. I've seen at least one of your films before. I really enjoyed I Sell the Debt. Okay, thank you.

Yeah. I love Ron Perlman, so any chance I can see him, I will definitely jump at it. Ron is the best. I just had dinner with him in Dublin, actually, the other night. He's such a sweet, talented man.

I met Ron on the set of Fessenden's movie, The Last Winter, which we shot up in Iceland, and I was second unit on that. And then we had him for I Sell the Dead, kind of twisted his arm on that one but we had a great time working with it and he's since been back for a couple of episodes Tales from Beyond the Pale which is an audio drama show I co-run with Larry the most recent one with Ron as well so delighted to find these hearty people in the industry and hang on to them like a Jack Russell you know I'm not letting go exactly. Can you tell me, where did the idea for the restoration of Grayson Manor come from? Well, initially I saw a YouTube video of an amputee sitting at a table, and he's got a mess of wires between him and a pretty crude-looking prosthetic.

And over the course of the video, he managed to move the digits on it with his conscious mind. So I thought, well, what would it be like if it was the subconscious mind, if that was the goal, to have the subconscious mind to control these things? prosthetics without thinking about it because I think something like 90% of body movement is unconscious. So I wanted to kind of tap into that and have fun with the idea that the protagonist slash antagonist in the movie might have a really shitty subconscious mind and suddenly have these potentially dangerous weapons in his arsenal. I mean, it's a really nice twist on the hands of Orlac. Yeah, I love The Hands of Orlok, and as I was saying earlier, horror hit me at an early age, and one of those movies was The Beast with Five Fingers with P.P.

Dengari, and I watched that with my dad, and we had a lot of fun, probably for most of my childhood, of a creepy hand running after me, you know? So, in a way, I wanted to homage that peculiar sub-genre of horror, but also sort of a nod to my dad and, again, to some of the escapist fun that we would have through horror. But certainly Hands of Orlok is fabulous. It's probably closest to what I ended up making. Can you tell me a little bit about your co-writer on this?

Yeah. Clay McLeod Chapman is an amazing, amazing writer. He's an amazing human being as well. You never really know from what he writes, but he's just one of the sweetest, kindest guys in the world. And I met him through Fessenden again, Tales from Beyond the Pale.

We invited him in to do a couple of shows. And I had a bunch of ideas for a new tale that I wanted to collaborate with Clay on. And one of them was, at the time, something called Transplant, which became the restoration at Grayson Manor. I loved the idea of tapping into, again, the killer hand sub-genre. I wanted to make it queer and I wanted to make it about body autonomy and identity autonomy and what it's like as a queer person to grow up in a heteronormative society and have the paranoias of a queer person surrounded by heterosexuals.

So I was... wrestling with all of these ideas and I knew I wasn't giving them or doing them much justice. So I turned to clay and clay, I was tickled pink by the idea of it and went off and quite quickly wrote first draft of the script that pretty similar to where we ended up. So all of the barb nature between Boyd and, and Jacqueline, Chris Cofer and Alois Krieger, really came from that draft and came from story conversations with Clay and I about movies with that kind of barbed relationship and how important it was for us not to kind of repel the audience because I think it's a fine line to enjoy two people going at it and to know how to hurt each other as it is for it to be kind of suffocating for the audience so you know we talked a lot about you know Tennessee Williams and movies like The Lion in Winter which is was such a touchstone for the nasty cattiness of the dialogue between the family.

Other movies were Harold and Maude and just having fun with how far we could stretch this crazy idea. But that was particularly a topic we took quite seriously, is how do we make this enjoyable if mom and son are just so at each other's throats. For me, the answer was kind of deadpan. Just play it deadpan. Say the nastiest of things and give it some air.

Well, yeah, Colford and Krieger are just amazing. Can you tell me about the casting process and working with those two? Chris came on pretty early, pre-COVID. And I was delighted to learn that he was really a horror guy. He loves and knows his horror very well.

I didn't know that about him. So we kind of pretty quickly got on like a house on fire. And then the casting continued. And then COVID hit. And the project kind of died for a little bit.

And then we managed to get it back. And I always loved Alice Krieger. Huge Star Trek fan. And there's obviously the Borg Queen. But I also...

She has such veritas in movies like... Ghost Story and Sleepwalkers and so on and it became pretty thrilling quite quickly to imagine Chris and Alice together and Chris was over the moon when we announced who he'd be playing against and from there I managed to get a little bit of rehearsal time in with them and that was essential just that they get to know each other a little bit and get to have fun And the early rehearsals were almost a Meisner-style workshop, which I really enjoyed. And they seemed to really enjoy just trying everything out and finding some realism and some grounded nature to the characters, which was... which could have potentially been tricky given the nature of some of the broader horror tropes that we're playing.

Yeah, I was wondering if you had rehearsed with them because they just feel so natural together. And I'm sure that even if it was limited, that rehearsal time must pay off in dividends. It was. I also think it was such a long process to try and get the movie made that once we got on set, I was determined to have a light atmosphere. So much of my job was encouraging actors to try things to go bolder to to let them know that i was their safety net and that it was it was all good we were going to have a good time and and set was a lot of fun thank god but afterwards alice thanked me and she said nobody had ever asked her to do comedy before so she mentioned being during the process quite nervous of of it all you know it was just joyful.

In fact, there were tears on the last day, certainly for me, to go from fighting for my life with 15 minutes to go before a wrap and there's like a scene needs to be shot to suddenly, okay, cut, okay, Glenn addressed the crowd and I just went, wah! It was a lovely moment. It was a lovely, on set was absolutely fantastic. How much of the rehearsal or some of the other actors, how much did they change the story, or did you stick pretty close to that original script? I would say we were pretty close, but I did allow a lot of room for encouraging improv.

I didn't necessarily end up using a lot of it, but last takes I would kind of have a bit of fun. I think with performers like Gabriela Garcia-Vergás and Declan Reynolds, we definitely pushed through and found the characters. I think particularly with Declan as well, towards the end of the project, I was pretty dogged with him that we would go deeper and get deeper. And yeah, thankfully he didn't give me a black eye, but we just went pretty, pretty in depth and had a bit of fun with that character right up until my last one was with Declan. And it was nice finding that twist in the character of Lee.

Similarly with Gabriela Garcia-Vargas, we had quite an intense, loving, but tense collaboration at times on set. There's a moment where she tries a drug and goes through an ego death and so on, and it was not life work. Oh, I don't imagine it was. Can you tell me a little bit more about the manner itself? Where did you shoot?

We got very lucky. We were. Racing all around Ireland, trying to find a right location. And Wednesday, the television show Wednesday, we're also scouting as well. And I think we lost a couple of mansions to them because we couldn't compete.

I think with six weeks to go, we found Stradbally Hall in County Leash, which is right in the center of Ireland. And it's famous in Ireland because it's where a big concert outdoor concert happens every year called electric picnic and you've got people anywhere from like the horrors playing next to kylie minogue and you know so we found a hall we had six weeks to shoot before electric picnic happened so we're definitely towards the end of the shoot you know we're maybe inch the camera to the left slightly you know otherwise you see the tent outside being built you know But we got very lucky and that was really down to John McDonough, one of my producers at Fantastic Films. He used to be a locations guy years ago, I think on Braveheart and stuff like that.

So he took me to see the place. I ran inside, looked at the staircase and said, perfect, let's do it. That was the one important location for me for various reasons, for safety, for effectiveness and with some effects and making sure the actors had enough space as well to perform. Yeah. Well, speaking of music, music is such an important part of this with a musician character.

Can you tell me about the music in the film? I suppose it harkens back to like Hands of Orlok or Beast with Five Fingers and wanting to talk about a musician whose gift was taken away from him. I also wanted to talk about sort of somebody in recovery and what that's like, um, But I suppose on top of filmmaking, music is my other big love. I collect it. I've been collecting it since the 80s.

And I've been making it for about 10, 15 years now. I have a goth, an electronic goth outfit called Witchboard. And I have a couple of pieces of vinyl out there. And so I always had in mind, maybe I could do the score myself. But as we were casting for the person to play the hands in the movie, I met a young local guy in Leash called Ruben Harvey.

And Ruben came on, and after seeing so many hands that were like hairy shovels that weren't going to work, he had the most dexterous fingers and elegant hands. And I hired him, and as we were working on set, I said, gosh, you've got the hands of a pianist. And he's like, oh, I am. I'm a composer. So I was like, no way, send me your work.

So he sent me his work and I hired him then on the spot once I heard it to co-compose with me, which was a blessing because I couldn't have done it on my own. I slightly regretted deciding to score my own movie as well. There was so many things happening in post and then suddenly on top of it, I was managing the sounds and like trying to figure out the headspace of a composer. between all of that. So it was very beneficial to have Ruben on board. So it was a nice mix of Ruben's classical training and my own dicking around with and fascination with like goth music and electronic music.

I think it comes together really well. I mean, the very opening with that song and everything is very, very striking. Thank you. Yeah. The other thing that's very striking to me is the use of color.

Can you talk about your DP and working with them? Yeah. Narayan van Mala, I saw a movie that he made years ago called You Are Not My Mother by Kate Dolan. And it was also produced by Fantastic Films. And when there was conversations about, you know, building the team, I was like, why don't we just get everyone from that movie?

Because I love it. And so I met Narayan and we had a lot of conversations and he's just a very, very charming, very talented director of photography. We watched a lot of movies together. I introduced him to a lot of old Hammer movies, Brides of Fisherman. I'm a fisherman, so Terrence Fisher's Brides of Dracula's.

Dracula's nowhere near the movie, but I love the color tone of that. We didn't quite go that lavish, but I wanted to, and I suppose Daughters of Darkness was another movie that I referenced quite a lot. I think that comes true more in the costumes and so on with Jacqueline Grayson's outfits. We had a lot of fun with that. But yeah, with Narion, what was interesting is I came very well prepared, storyboards, animatics, and so on.

But every day we decided let's rehearse with the actors and see what works for them. And we allowed them to sort of instigate the dance between actor and camera. One of the most thrilling days for me was there's a scene in the movie where Jacqueline's playing with a doll that she's going to give her grandkid. And Dr. Tananek walks in the room and he's covered in wrap bandages.

But it's just a long developing shot. It wasn't written or intended to be as such. But that day was a mix of running out of time and me wanting to just really have some fun. And so we just got down to the blocking of it, you know, and we spent most of the time that we had on it blocking it and seeing if it could work. And we go in that shot from, you know, a wide two shot over the shoulders, close ups and so on.

And that to me was probably the most invigorating day as a filmmaker, watching that magic come together and everything, everyone come together, my directing team, my AD and Drew Maitland and Narion and his team, but the actors as well, Alice and Daniel Adeboyega. So we had a lot of fun sort of tearing up our own rulebook and I would absolutely want to. Work like that again. That's wonderful. You said that you were delayed by COVID.

When did you actually shoot this? Oh God. It was about two years ago. I can't remember exactly. It's been a long journey.

The movie was shot two years ago, and a very extended post-production process delayed things slightly. But finally, it's so cool to, as I say, it's time I let it go. You know? When did you first get to see this with an audience? I saw it at Fantastic Fest last year, actually.

And that was cool. We had a couple of showings. I think my favorite of them all was the midnight screening. I'm not sure if it was because everyone had had a few drinks at that stage. It was a full theater and the language of the movie seemed to go over very well.

I was very happy that there's a, there's a, there's a lot of, I don't know, references, but there's a certain tone and to a lot of the jobs, and they were landing very well. So it's been a thrill. I mean, we've shown at about 15 festivals, so it's always interesting to see how an audience from a different culture will take it. For instance, we showed it in Korea recently, but I wasn't there, so I have no idea how it went over. Yeah, I'm trying to imagine, because the language is so specific, to see it subtitled must be interesting.

Yeah, and I don't have any say in what those subtitles are, so who knows? So what's going on with the film now, and what's going on with you? Well, the film is being released in the States October 7th, and it's being released... Sorry, that's October 9th in the States, and in Ireland and UK, November 7th. So...

Just gearing up to be ready for that. I'll be in New York and LA, it looks like, with some of the actors and some Q & As and so on. And really, we'll see what happens. It's nice to be at the end of the festival journey and to be getting it out. And then we will end up on Shudder.

I forget the actual dates, but this is all happening before the end of the year. Myself, I've been writing. I'm in development with a television show here in Ireland that's very much genre-based. That's taken up quite a bit of my time, but I'm in love with the project. And I've also been working with Declan Reynolds, who's an actor who plays Lee in the movie, but we've been working together on a couple of scripts.

It's been fun with Tales from Beyond the Pale to be getting back into that because I'm definitely using it as a platform for some of these ideas. Most recently, Ron Perlman and Declan Reynolds and Ashley Bell had a piece called Three Raps on the Buoy. And that's the most recent tale from Beyond the Pale. And that's definitely something where I iron up for a low-budget feature. But there's also the big one is definitely dealing with what I'm considering as concerning run homophobia, but through the, through the, uh, gaze of a haunted house movie.

So pretty fantastic that you almost have your own seed bed for films by having your podcast. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fun that it's actually become that because back when we started doing it in 2012, that was always the idea, you know, cause we were sitting on so many idea projects that were gathering dust, but truthfully, uh, I think we have like 55 or 56 episodes now. Fessenden's Blackout is the only one that's come from, that went on to be a movie.

But as I'm busier now, I love the idea of it. And it's a great way to give a project some legs. That's wonderful. Where's the best place for people to keep up with you and your work? Gosh, well, I'm not really, I'm on Instagram.

I'm on Glenn McQuaid on Instagram. You know, other than that, yeah, it's just hopefully true a bit of press here and there. Hallelujah, hallelujah I am the truth. I am the way. I am the life.

I am the truth, I am the way, I am the life, I've Got Bye.