Interviews
‘Shell’ – Max Minghella Reveals Surprising Cinematic Influences in His “Nostalgic Homage” [Interview]
Director Max Minghella (Spiral: From the Book of Saw, Horns) wears his cinematic influences on his sleeves with sophomore feature effort Shell, a body horror dark comedy written by Jack Stanley (The Passenger).
Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man) finds herself embarking on a scary new beauty treatment as aging actor Samantha Lake. She quickly befriends Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson), CEO of health & wellness company Shell. When their patients start to go missing, including starlet Chloe Benson (Kaia Gerber), Samantha realizes Shell may be protecting a monstrous secret.
The escapist love letter to ’90s cinema leans into dark comedy, but embraces everything from Paul Verhoeven to Soapdish, Species, and Sliver, if that’s any indicator of genre range here. Bloody Disgusting spoke with Minghella, who made his feature directorial debut with 2018’s Teen Spirit, about the genre-bender out of TIFF, where the film had its World Premiere.
The filmmaker revealed more about his influences, but mores o his salute to the quickly disappearing middle ground in film.
Between the body horror turned full-blown horror, Hudson’s femme fatale, and the ’90s style humor, Shell exists at a distinct intersection of genres that don’t typically mix. Minghella uses the perils of aging plot as a vehicle to pay tribute to the films that shaped him as a filmmaker.
“Jack’s script was really inspiring to my imagination, and yet I think the film that we’ve made probably bears quite little resemblance to that original draft,” Minghella says when asked how much of the eclectic genre mix and tone was in the script. “But all of those things you’re speaking to, I think were triggered in my brain as I started to read it. I thought a lot about a moment in film history that I feel like is lost a little bit. I think nowadays we tend to make movies either on a giant tent pole scale to sell toys or we make these much smaller movies for prestige audiences. And the middle ground, it has almost completely disappeared.
“So, while you just mentioned quite a wide variety of genres in Soapdish and Species and Sliver, they all stem from a period of time when there were these movie star-driven genre movies, which were really also designed as popcorn entertainment. Yet if you look at the credits on those films, they were shot by some of the greatest cinematographers in the world and greatest craftsmen in the world. Our ambition with Shell was to deliver something that is completely unpretentious but made by, I’m completely excluding myself from this, but made by some people who know what they’re doing and have put some thought and care into it.”
Shell cycles through genres with ease, largely due to the heavy emphasis on comedy as a grounding force.
Max Minghella and Elisabeth Moss on the set of ‘Shell’ Courtesy of Range, Blank Tape, Love & Squalor and Dark Castle Entertainment
Minghella explains how he found the balance between horror and comedy. “Honestly, with hopefully a sense of fun and playfulness. Drew Daniels, my cinematographer, and I really were determined to make the movie as practically as possible, to limit ourselves to the resources we would’ve had 30 or 40 years ago and not go beyond them. That just required a lot of inventiveness and almost Roger Corman-like approach to certain things. We just had a lot of fun.
He continues, “We really did want the film to feel mischievous. And the balance of comedy and horror was innate actually just to the agenda of the film and how we all saw it. I had to do remarkably little explaining to people of what the film might look like or what the tone of the film was. It seemed that people understood quite quickly what we were going for just from reading the script. I always felt like we were all making the same movie, which is not to do with me, that’s just to do with I think how maybe loud some of the intentionality is on the page.”
Also contributing to the infectious sense of fun is a vampy performance by Kate Hudson, channeling Death Becomes Her‘s Isabella Rossellini and Basic Instinct‘s Sharon Stone for her villainous role. Hudson understood what Minghella was going for here, and the director credits her for pulling off a Herculean task.
“It’s so important to me in all movies that the villain, it speaks truths because it’s so much more interesting and compelling to me if there’s real conflict for the protagonist of the story,” he reflects. “I agree that Zoe is incredibly cynical, and much more cynical than I am, but there is painful truth sometimes in what she says. The reality is that Zoe Shannon is a task for an actor, it’s a massive part, and it requires a level of magnetism and charisma and most of all I think self-confidence that I’m not really convinced you can teach somebody. I think you have to innately have those qualities. Kate’s the only person I’ve met actually who has that level of self-possession and ease in her own body.
“I couldn’t really think of anybody else that would seem quite as fun. I’m so relieved that she said yes. I don’t think the movie would work without her. I think no matter how hard we all tried. That performance is so central to the story making sense. She delivers something quite extraordinary. And Zoe also speaks in her own melody and cadence. There’s almost a musicality to how she speaks. Kate understood that inherently, it was never something we actually talked about. She just really knew how to say it all. It’s a thrill to watch her play this part.”
With Verhoeven’s output at the forefront of Minghella’s influences, among a few aforementioned ’90s titles, were there any deeper cuts or less obvious film references for Minghella? The filmmaker’s answer was surprising.
“No, there isn’t, although I will mention a very surreal thing that happened,” Minghella tells us, “which is that about three or four years into working on this project, I discovered a Michael Crichton film called Looker. I’d never seen Looker before. But there are quite a lot of parallels between these two films, especially in the aesthetics of these two movies. So, that was quite a surreal discovery for me. In fact, the opening sequence of our movie is almost identical to a sequence that happens in Looker. Yet, I was not conscious of the other movie when I wrote it. So that is one of those beautiful discoveries, and a rather fun one.”
He continues, “Then there’s a movie called Look Who’s Talking, which was a pivotal movie to me when I was growing up. It’s not a horror film, but the Este Haim character in Shell is almost directly lifted from Look Who’s Talking. Actually, quite a lot of the framing in especially the first act of Shell is pulled directly from the Amy Heckerling movie. So there’s probably 50 to 60 things that I looked at, and it really is, I mean, I know people hate this sometimes, but it is a shamelessly nostalgic homage film.”
Interviews
The Work ‘Grind’ Is Hell, So Brea Grant & Ed Dougherty Made a Horror Anthology About It [CFF 2026 Interview]
Genre fans rejoice! Chattanooga Film Festival is back for its 13th year in 2026 with a killer lineup and once again offering audiences both in-person and virtual options. After having its World Premiere at SXSW this spring, the horror comedy anthology Grind is playing CFF 2026 opening weekend.
From a screenplay by Brea Grant (Torn Hearts, 12 Hour Shift) and Ed Dougherty (MLM) and segments directed by Grant, Dougherty, and Chelsea Stardust (Satanic Panic), Grind features four interwoven stories that parody the gig economy, hustle culture, and the evils of late-stage capitalism.
The anthology follows weary everyday people juggling side hustles just to survive, while going up against greedy oligarchs, and cleverly uses dark humor and bloody practical effects to portray a world much like our current economic nightmare.
Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of chatting with Brea Grant and Ed Dougherty about the socioeconomic commentary in Grind, casting Barbara Crampton as a villain, and DIY filmmaking.
Bloody Disgusting: Every segment in this anthology feels relatable because people are actually struggling to survive in the gig economy right now. How did the two of you come up with the idea of creating Grind?
Brea Grant: Like you said, we were trying to come up with a cool idea that seemed relevant right now. The thing that everyone we know is talking about is the economy, the lack of work, and the nightmare hellscape that is late-stage capitalism. It felt like the right time to write something that really featured that as the main horror. As the main thing that people were scared of, this world sort of came to us over the course of a couple of years.
Ed Dougherty: We wanted to make a hit film, and we said, “Let’s make a horror anthology, that’s the most marketable thing there is.” [laughs]
BG: [laughs] Definitely not!
BD: I love anthologies!
ED: We do, too. We feel like it’s kind of an undervalued form of horror film, but it’s a hard sell.
BG: People told us not to make it. They said, “Don’t make an anthology. It’s too hard to sell.” But we did it anyway.
BD: I guess I’m just one of those weirdos who likes anthologies and watches them all.
ED: We believe that there are a lot of weirdos like you out there. It seems like every good horror anthology has a long life, but it’s just getting over the initial hump that’s difficult.
BD: Chelsea Stardust directed some of the segments with the two of you and serves as a producer. How did she first get involved with this project?
BG: The project has a long history. We shot the first segment, which is about multi-level marketing, a couple of years ago. We had decided we wanted to make a full anthology, but it took us about a year after shooting that initial segment to shoot the rest of the movie. When we did that, we knew we needed to bring on a producer aside from Ed and me, since we were directing the bulk of the movie, so that was how she came on board. I’ve been friends with her for a long time, and the one thing I know about her as a friend is that she is very organized, so it felt like a good fit. I just called her one day and said, “Would you want to produce these three segments that we have left to shoot of Grind?” and she came on board.
BD: There are some fun cameos in Grind, but we have to talk about Barbara Crampton. She’s so good as a villainess. Why did you want her for this role, and what was it like working with her on this film?
BG: She’s in her villain era, which is so fun. [laughs] Obviously, we’re huge Barbara Crampton fans, and when we were making MLM, it was a smaller part of the movie that we knew we needed to call on people who could do a good job but were also friendly to us [laughs]. I’m friends with Barbara Crampton, and we’ve done three movies together before this. So, it felt like someone within our reach, but could also really draw a horror crowd. She has a huge fanbase, and she’s also super supportive of all the projects that she’s been in, so that was also really exciting. She’s a great actress, and she’s super funny. I think a lot of these horror actresses, especially those who came up in the eighties and nineties, weren’t given an opportunity to be funny. I think she was ready to jump on an opportunity that was different than what she was used to; it’s not running around and screaming. She is a cult leader, and she is quite funny in it. She just takes the comedy so well and seriously, and she does such an amazing job with it. She has a scene across from Rob Huebel, who is obviously a comedy master, and I feel like the two of them together were hilarious. It’s been fun to watch Barbara go from these iconic roles to a different kind of role at this point in her career. We’re super happy to be a part of that.
ED: And she loves the movie and has been so supportive. Every time she posts about it, I’m like, “I can’t believe this. This is amazing.”
BD: This is an accurate parody of the current socioeconomic situation in this country, as well as our obsession with online culture. It repeatedly asks the question, “What are you willing to do to make money,” in a world with wealth inequality and evil oligarchs. It’s fun, and it’s a horror movie, but it’s thought-provoking. What do you hope audiences take away from Grind, besides having a good time?
ED: I read every review and every Letterboxd review; Brea does not. So, I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen some reviews that say, “Good movie but doesn’t propose a solution.” I think we do propose a solution, which is that the power of unions and organizing is the only way that we will be able to fight back against oligarchs. I do think that is the message of the film. Organizing is the only way to defeat these villains. I do think we have a lot to say in the film. I’d want someone to say, “Man, I’ve never seen a horror anthology that had a political message before.” [laughs]
BG: I think the other thing is that what is currently happening is that we live in a world in which people kind of feel alone in this. They’re like, “Well, I’m doing bad, “or “I’m having trouble paying my rent.” We wanted to hang a lantern on the fact that this is happening to everyone, that wealth disparity is at an all-time high. We’re pointing out to people that you aren’t in this alone; you’re not the only person doing side hustles. Every filmmaker friend I have is working a side job of some sort at this point, and that is just in Los Angeles. Outside of this city, I think things are more dire. I think it was about infusing some politics into something that could make people realize that they aren’t alone and that there are ways of fighting back and fighting the system that has been set up against them.
ED: I think the tone of the movie, which is darkly comedic, also really matches the tone of life right now. Everything seems almost at a parody level as far as the disconnect between oligarchs and trying to make a living and reality. The absurdist nature of the film kind of captures the real tone of life.
BD: There are some cool creature effects and makeup effects in this movie. Can you talk a little bit about the practical effects and makeup?
ED: I think especially because of the message of the film, which is pushing back against the current hellscape we’re in, we wanted to use as many practical effects as possible. We used matte paintings, miniatures, and practical creature effects. I’m always afraid of the matte painting because we used the old school matte painter, but they do look a little AI. I heard someone make a noise behind me during one of the shots, and I was like, “I hope that noise wasn’t them using AI because that’s a matte painting.” [laughs] There’s also the fact that it’s pretty DIY. It’s a film that we financed ourselves and shot in our houses as much as possible. We wanted the whole thing to feel handmade and very tactile.
BG: We’re old school horror fans, so we love seeing practical effects. The practical stuff is really fun for us. It’s the stuff that we think is actually cool. [laughs] So, practical stuff made the most sense for us. We both grew up in the punk scene in the nineties, and I think it just kind of comes naturally to us to try to do things ourselves. And we both work on projects for big companies, with smaller companies, but always for other people, so trying to do something ourselves to see what that felt like was also part of the experiment of Grind.
ED: This was our chance to do everything we wanted our way.
Grind screens at the Chattanooga Film Festival on June 20.
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