When I was five, my brother sat me down in front of the tv to watch one of his favorite movies - Night of the Living Dead. He hates when I this story but it ended up being quite a defining moment for me so he can just deal. I was terrified and by the time poor Johnny gets his head bashed in by rock in the graveyard by a zombie, I was scarred for life. 

        My siblings being much older than me, I ended up watching a lot of movies I was probably too young to see like Jaws, Scream, The Ring (Thanks Dad), and many more on-screen nightmares. What resulted was a years-long crisis of being unable to fall asleep in the dark, in the quiet, alone with the images of those movies haunting me - that is until, through some form of Stockholm Syndrome, I started falling in love with the idea of watching something that terrified me. I started to dare myself to watch a scary movie playing on TV to see how long I could last - a panicked phone call to my friend Lindsay as I walked her through what was happening at the end of I know What you Did Last Summer, or leaving a spiraling voicemail to my friend Phil while I watched the beginning of Shaun of the Dead, or accidentally punching my friend Sam in the face when she scared my while we watched Amityville Horror. It started to become fun and what was once a casual thrill from time to time became a passionate love affair. I consumed horror movies, adoring originals, admonishing remakes, and idolizing those that dared to be different or new. 

       The Script for Lost Boys Pizza had me hooked on page one. Tati did such an amazing job crafting the world, that all I could think while reading it was "I want to direct this" and in our first notes session together (we were in the same writing class our first year of grad school), I told her exactly that. Two years later when I was embarking on my thesis film, I reached out again and said "hey, remember how I said I wanted to direct Lost Boys Pizza? Here's a sizzle reel and a look book, please let me direct this" and I think that caught her a bit off guard, how much her script stuck with me. But of course, in a genre that's been dominated by straight men with very little studio acknowledgement of the existence of women or queer people as avid horror fans, I had never had the pleasure of watching used tampons repurposed as a weapon against vampires and WHY THE HELL NOT?! Her script was littered with opportunities to showcase camp on screen and I was lucky that Tati let me take this wacky wild story and run with it - all the while trying not to slip on any tampons in my way.