One of the buzziest titles at the 20th installment of Austin’s Fantastic Fest, The Restoration at Grayson Manor is a sci-fi-horror film with a melodramatic bite, the story of rich people being savage to one another that also explores queer identity, family obligation, and the limits of science. 

It’s a lot to pack into one movie, but thanks to command performances from Alice Krige and Chris Colfer as Jacqueline and Boyd Grayson, a constantly bickering mother and son, director and co-writer Glenn McQuaid was able to hold it all together, and deliver an experience unlike anything else at the fest this year. Ahead of the film’s September 21 premiere, Dread Central sat down with McQuaid and Krige to discuss how The Restoration at Grayson Manor took shape, what inspired the film, and how they managed to pull it off its delicate, darkly funny tone.

Dread Central: Glenn, where did this project start for you?

Glenn McQuaid: Well, initially, myself and Clay McLeod Chapman, my co-writer, we’re drumming up ideas for, I have an audio drama show called Tales From Beyond the Pale, which I run with Larry Fessenden at Glass Eye Pix. We’re initially thinking about just drumming up ideas for what might make a half-hour audio drama. And I spit this idea out at Clay, and we felt pretty quickly, if we’re going to make a riff on the killer hand genre, you want to see them. It was just a fascination that I have with these sub-genres. I made a movie many years ago about grave robbing because I loved the little side avenue of grave robbers and horror movies.

For the longest time, I always wanted to make a killer hand movie. One of the earliest formative movie-viewing experiences was with my dad watching The Beast with Five Fingers. And I joked with Clay, “Why don’t we try and make The Beast With Five Fingers meets The Lion in Winter, just elevate it with a lot of melodrama?” So, yeah, that’s the beginning.

DC: Alice, when did you get involved with The Restoration at Grayson Manor?

Alice Krige: I was sent the script and I thought, “This is absolutely wild.” Just wild because you just don’t know what’s going to happen next all the way through, and it goes from being heartbreaking to horrifying to hilarious, and all the way back again. I was just fascinated by it, but also by the challenge of it. So, yes, I was sent the script. Did we talk to each other, Glenn? Or did I just say yes? I can’t remember.

GM: We had a conversation on Zoom, and I was trying to play it pretty cool for quite a while, and at the end, I just spilled the beans. I was just like, “Alice, I don’t know if they told you, but I really want to work with you.”

DC: Glenn, you mentioned Clay McLeod Chapman’s contributions to this as it evolved from a possible audio drama to a feature film. What did Clay bring to the script?

GM: I think I wrote a pretty rough treatment, and I just thought, “I need help here. I’m not going to do it justice.” So, basically, I would say what Clay did to it is he really leaned into the barbed nature of Jacqueline and Boyd, that kind of a bitchy, almost Tennessee Williams sardonic wit. And it was remarkable because I was always quite concerned about showcasing this relationship on film. It can get almost suffocating for the audience to just watch two people go at each other’s throats if there’s no end to it.

So, all those concerns went out the window when I read Clay’s first draft of The Restoration at Grayson Manor. I was just thrilled and delighted. The really vicious, hilarious, and codependent nature of Boyd and Jacqueline really comes from Clay. So, it was a wonderful experience to feel like I was in good hands, and we just kept rolling.

DC: Getting the dynamic between those two characters right was so important. Alice, what was it like working with Chris to get that right?

AK: Well, really nerve-racking because like Glenn says, that [Jacqueline] is so appalling. To trust that there’d be something that an audience could connect with on some level, I find it very frightening. I felt as if I was walking on a knife-edge all the time.

I was also so mindful of the fact that it was very funny on the page, and I wasn’t sure whether I was actually accomplishing that or not. We were listening to each other, actually, Chris and I, and to Glenn. We didn’t really have rehearsal time, did we? Chris arrived pretty much after we’d begun. So, it was just being there in the moment and playing off of each other. And of course, Glenn, who was really so intimately connected to that process.

GM: I think that on set, I was almost playing Jacqueline’s best friend, best worst friend, whispering in her ear. “Don’t forget what this little shit did to you on your 40th birthday. What did he do? He was born!” And doing the same thing with Chris and having fun in that style of just being in the trenches with you guys and just being your safety net. So, yeah, I feel like it was a knife-edge to make the dynamic between the two enjoyable for the audience. So, that was very much on my mind.

AK: That’s the word, enjoyable, that, as you say, it didn’t just become a sense of revulsion at how savage they were with each other.

DC: I want to make sure to ask about the house, because it is in the title, and it does become its own character in the way that Jacqueline views it versus the way that Boyd views it. Where did you shoot this, and what did the environment bring to the film?

GM: Well, right off the bat, for me, I think the house was always going to represent the weight of heteronormative expectations on defiant and rebellious queer shoulders. So, we—myself and my producer, John McDonnell—traveled all over Ireland, basically looking for the right home. We viewed castles and other state manors and so on, and every time I thought I had the right place, there was something not quite right about it. The staircase was obviously very important because there’s an action set-up there.

Then, when we found Stradbally Hall in County Laois in Ireland, it ticked off many boxes. It was a little shabbier than I was imagining, maybe a little bit more Grey Gardens than I was imagining it. So, we just went with that, and the house offered an awful lot. Just the rooms themselves were fabulous. On top of the rooms, there was all this great taxidermy and so on.

We had a lot of fun working with everybody, just using what was there and embellishing it somewhat. There was this great, stately library that we put the laboratory in. We put this pop-up laboratory in the middle of this library. So, just a lot of fun collaborating with everyone making that work.

DC: As we’ve already discussed, the tone is so important in this. You mentioned The Lion in Winter already. What were some of the other touchstones you both looked to as inspiration?

GM: I’m a big fan of, as I say, melodrama. I’m also a big fan of Dan Curtis. I love Night of Dark Shadows, House of Dark Shadows. There’s just something really dry about his work that I really enjoy. So, just reminding myself that there is a space for a drier tone in the genre these days. Just a lot of glancing around rooms, letting time slow down a little bit. In fact, the title of The Restoration at Grayson Manor comes from [Dark Shadows star] Grayson Hall. It’s an homage in a way to the original [Dark Shadows].

AK: Well, Glenn suggested I look at Lion in Winter and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and obviously, they were all immensely helpful. But in the end, what you’ve got is the script and yourself and everyone you’re working with. There are so many elements that always feed into allowing the character to find their own life. And I personally start a search. I have absolutely no idea whether the character is suddenly going to take on their own life or not. And that’s what you pray for because otherwise, you are working as opposed to just channeling, so to speak.

A wonderfully surprising element, a key part of her was the costume process. The costume process was fantastic because we started with a rail of things, and looking at them, I thought, “Oh, none of this really rings a bell.” But just one piece led to another piece led to another, and suddenly, there was this mad woman wearing the most outrageous clothes! There’s one scene where she shows up in the middle of the night in a gold lamé dress with a fur on! Where has she been? What has she been doing? Well, she’s in this house. She’s living in this fantasy. So, it was astonishingly helpful to me, the whole costume process.

And Glenn came up with that red fan-sleeve dress. Glenn, what’s the reference? It’s a German film, isn’t it?

GM: Well, I’m very much in love with Daughters of Darkness. It’s in quite a few of the costumes. There’s also the silver dress towards the end, as well. But we had ever such a good time with the costume. Alice would just arrive on set in something new, we would look at each other and just burst into laughter with joy because it was just all coming to life.

AK: It created for me a powerful sense of someone who was genuinely bonkers, really utterly in a world that was all about her and not about anyone else, and in this fantasy space of her own. And Glenn was saying that Stradbally Hall might not have been as sumptuous as he had originally looked for, but that quality of frayed grandeur was very helpful to me because it was like it was all unraveling around her, and she was holding on as tight as she could. The whole mise-en-scène of the world that we walked into was another element in helping to up the ante of her particular madness, really. And Glenn features in the film, the portraits of the ancestors looking down. And I think she spends her morning communing with the ancestors, but for real, for real.

GM: Yes. She’s physically mimicking quite a few of those portraits, as well. Her stance is reflected in the portraits. So, we had fun with just the weight of the ancestry, really having such a powerful impression on Jacqueline.

AK: A wonderful starting point was Katharine Hepburn in Lion in Winter, that exquisitely manipulative behavior. She’s sinuous; she wraps herself around you, and you don’t even know that you’re about to be bitten by a venomous snake because she is so mesmerizing. So, that was a wonderful leaping-off point for me. But what I’m trying to say is, in the process, you are gifted by all of these things. Like suddenly, the costume having started from a simple rail, stuff was being pulled out of the air from all over the place, and it built on itself. And then the house created a whole other aspect of her personality. And that’s not just to mention the interaction that happened between all of us.

The Restoration at Grayson Manor celebrated its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 21, 2025. 

Categorized: Interviews