How ‘The Restoration at Grayson Manor’ Mashes Up Soap Operas, Body Horror and Dark Humor Into a Queer Fantasia — Fantastic Fest

Glenn McQuaid, the director and co-writer of the horror-comedy “The Restoration at Grayson Manor,” built the film around his favorite things — even if the genres seem far-flung. But as a gay man growing up in Ireland in the ’70s and ’80s, there were certain pop culture touchstones that helped him through his tough youth.

“I found a lot of relief in the escapism of horror, but also in the escapism of soap opera,” McQuaid says. “I got sucked into ‘Falcon Crest,’ ‘Dallas,’ ‘Dynasty,’ ‘Knots Landing.’ It’s self-medicating. I know there are a lot of diverse aspects to the movie, but they all come from the same spot. They come from a very personal place.”

The result is a wickedly funny, bloody and unapologetically queer film set to have its world premiere tonight at Fantastic Fest in Austin. Chris Colfer plays Boyd Grayson, a snarky musician who is involved in an outrageous accident in which he loses his hands. Luckily, his best frenemy mother Jacqueline (Alice Krige) invests in an experimental hand surgery, and things only get more out of control from there.

McQuaid, who wrote the film with Clay McLeod Chapman, found inspiration for the central twist from real-life tech.

“I saw a YouTube clip of an amputee using a remote-controlled robotic hand with his conscious mind,” he says. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, what if it was the subconscious? And what if the subconscious was sullied?’ From there, I started to play around with the idea of tapping into the killer hands subgenre.”

Central to the film is the antagonistic relationship between Jacqueline and Boyd, which had to strike just the right tone to make the story work.

“We were really inspired by melodrama,” McQuaid says. “I joked with Clay from the beginning that I wanted to make ‘The Lion in Winter’ of killer hand movies. So we kind of just ran with it. It was a fine line with the relationship between the two. It could have easily become unlikable and insufferable to watch, so I needed an in for the audience to be able to participate and enjoy the barbed nature of their relationship. A lot of that came through having fun with the writing and dialogue.”

Another critical part of the film was normalizing Boyd’s sexuality, which starts with an early scene involving a one-night stand that includes poppers and male nudity — elements not often seen in horror.

“At the end of the day, I just really didn’t want to censor myself,” McQuaid says. “I read a lot of scripts, I watch a lot of movies and I just wanted to make something I wasn’t really seeing out there. It just all came naturally. It never was like, ‘Oh, this is slightly risqué,’ or whatever. I just think poppers are funny, and I thought the bottle of poppers being a plot device was funny. And I’m a sexually active gay man, and we did want to explore that unabashedly as well.”

McQuaid is set to continue his exploration of the intersection of queerness and genre with his next film.

“I love horror,” McQuaid says. “I feel like it’s a great way to talk about the topics that affect me. The next piece is tackling homophobia dead on, but through the lens of a haunted house in Ireland. For some reason, horror just spoke to me early on. It was my escape, and I suppose that’s continued to this day. I don’t know if I could sit down and write a drama about homophobia, but I can enjoy myself and write a very creepy haunted house piece that tackles homophobia in a way that’s effortless for me. Every idea I come up with is within the genre — I can’t help it.”