The Projection Booth

Mike talks with Jake Allyn, writer-director of Clean Hands (2026), a true-crime drama about a celebrated Hagerstown, Maryland narcotics sergeant fighting the opioid pipeline he polices by day while his own daughter is consumed by it at home.

Allyn found the story on YouTube during COVID and became close enough with the real Kevin and Dana Simmers that he calls them second parents; they and the police officers who served with Kevin were on set throughout the 20-day Atlanta and Hagerstown shoot, alongside Brooke’s actual drug counselor, who appears in the film herself. Zach Braff, taking his first dramatic lead as a real person and a cop, reportedly came to need Kevin’s presence on set by the second week after initially asking for space; Esther McGregor carried the weight of standing in for every woman who’s passed through the recovery home the real story inspired. Allyn structured the film’s financing so that a third of its profits go directly to Brooke’s House, the real nonprofit recovery residence Kevin founded after his daughter’s story played out.

The film is Allyn’s second directing credit, made with his brother Conor, following their earlier border drama Ride; it opens Friday, October 16th, after premiering at this year’s Tribeca Festival.

Follow the film on Instagram, and visit Brooke’s House to support the recovery program.

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Mike talks with Danish writer-director Kasper Kalle about his sophomore feature No Rest for the Wicked (2026), a queer gothic romance shot on the Faroe Islands that slides from love story into vampire tale into body horror without the audience noticing the ground shifting under them.

Kalle built the film from an 1885 short story by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs — one of the earliest unapologetic accounts of gay love in print — and expanded its fifteen pages using the islands themselves: constant, unschedulable fog (created on set and in post), a 300-year-old stone village the crew stumbled on mid-scout, and composers from the Faroes so the score wouldn’t feel imported. Leads Egor Venned, a Faroese former model making his acting debut, and Danish star Pilou Asbæk (Game of Thrones) anchor the romance at the film’s center.

After premiering at Fantasia and playing its US premiere at Fantastic Fest, the film is headed to US theaters, with Kalle already writing his next two projects.

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Mike talks with writer-director Chris Merola about his debut feature Lemonade Blessing (2025), a coming-of-age dramedy about a Catholic-school transfer student who falls for a girl who dares him into escalating sacrilege, all in the name of love.

Merola wrote the script as a USC film student mining his own adolescence — a Catholic mother, a fake-named first crush, the general sense of being “unmoored” — and financed it himself, funneling 1,000% stock-market gains from a well-timed Tesla bet into New Jersey’s tax-credit system before approaching outside investors. He shot the film with a crew of first-timers (his editor, his production designer, his producers) in just 20 days, and credits his sound designer with the idea that reordered the final scene, flipping the film’s opening noise into closing silence. After a muted reception out of Tribeca and a near-miss with sales agents, the film found a second life through Letterboxd’s Video Store before landing distribution with Antenna Releasing, who are putting Merola on the road for a five-month, city-by-city roadshow.

Merola’s a philosophy-and-psych double major who treats directing less like genius and more like mediating a fight between departments — which, he argues, is most of what the job actually is.

Follow the film on Instagram for tour dates.

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Mike talks with French director Quarxx about The Ones Who Grieve (2026), in which a mysterious plague called the Black Veil and a father’s religious cruelty turn out to be the same disease.

Quarxx came to filmmaking through a decade as a painter before ever picking up a camera, and this is his first script written with a co-author, novelist Frédéric Soulié, after years of collaborations that never clicked. He reunites actors Thierry Frémont and Zélie Rixhon ten years after they played an unhealthily entangled pair in his debut All the Gods in the Sky — only now she’s grown into the role that reverses their dynamic. The film’s plague victims wear masks designed and sculpted from scratch for the production, a deliberate swerve away from standard zombie iconography toward something that isn’t dangerous, just hungry and discarded.

Made on what Quarxx calls the lowest budget of his career after French funders balked at the material, the film premiered this year at Fantastic Fest following festival stops across Europe.

.Follow Quarxx on Instagram for updates on his next film.

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Mike talks with author Marcus Heslop about Frantastic!: The Amazing Story of Fran Fullenwider, the Plus-sized Pioneer, the first biography of the actress whose single wordless scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) made her a cult fixture despite a stranger, richer career about which most fans never knew.

Heslop, a secondary-school drama teacher in northeast England who works on his books during school holidays, built the biography largely from letters, scrapbooks, and photographs a stranger rescued from an abandoned Texas mansion in the 1990s and donated to the Museum of South Texas History — the same archive that lets him trace Fullenwider from a wealthy, closely chronicled Texas childhood through a brief but real Italian film boom, a four-year run with Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror world, and a death scene in House of the Spirits that got cut for time, which Heslop confirmed really existed by tracking down director Bille August himself. The book features new interviews with O’Brien, director Jim Sharman, costume designer Sue Blane, and Jeremy Irons.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth