The Parenting Cast Talk Balancing Comedy vs Horror and the Nightmare of Meeting Family
Meet The Parents goes ghost when a couple plans a weekend away to introduce their parents to each other, only to discover the vacation home is haunted by a 400-year-old poltergeist. Kristen Maldonado spoke with the cast and team behind The Parenting for Pop Culture Planet.
Writer Kent Sublette was inspired by his own meeting of the parents when he and his husband first started dating. “When we first started dating, they'd never met, and we said, ‘Oh, let's bring them to this house in the middle of Connecticut for three days.’ We all got snowed in and it was an amazing time, but also it's a very stressful first thing to happen,” he shared. “We joked the only thing that would make this more stressful is if this house was haunted, so that's where that idea came from. Everybody survived and they all love each other now.”
Meanwhile, one of the reasons director Craig Johnson was drawn to the material was because of the same-sex couple that was the focus of this horror story. “They were just part of the fabric of this family. It's not that we ignore the fact that they're a same-sex couple. It factors into the plot, it factors into the haunting. It does play on our prejudices thematically, but it's never heavy-handed and that's why I liked it,” he explained. “You get what the story is trying to say, but you're also getting splattered with projectile vomit. You're jumping out of your chair and you're hopefully laughing a little bit too.”
The cast bonded immediately and were able to bring their off-camera chemistry to the screen. “We had such an amazing cast. Lisa Kudrow, myself, and Parker [Posey] all lived in the same house. We hung out non-stop and the boys would come over. Edie [Falco] lived next to us and we would go out to eat together,” said Dean Norris. “We would have movie nights together. We would have game nights and cookouts. All that off-camera chemistry helped to bring the story to life […] and I think it made it for a more genuine, natural thing on-camera.”
There is a fine line between comedy and horror that lies in the balance of The Parenting. “This movie does such a good job of mixing the two genres in such a specific tone that’s I think really hard to do,” said Vivian Bang. “Is it horror or is it comedy? Where are you invested? Where are you taken for a ride where you're literally about to poop in your pants, and then where are you laughing the next second because something said is so human?”
“The demon possession is such a great metaphor for the family conflict and there's nothing more terrifying than meeting your partner's parents. To add a possessed Brian Cox was just brilliant and was such a fun thing to do,” continued Nik Dodani, with Bang confirming: “You've never seen Brian Cox until this movie. […] It's a lot of Cox.”
The build up was key in getting that aspect of the film right. “Part of constructing a horror movie or suspense film is the buildup. I loved how Kent’s script started with all the typical things. Little bumps in the night and doors closing, but then he'd have this hilarious twist on it,” shared Johnson. “The bumps that you hear are not automatically instantly scary.”
Meanwhile Bang loved how the poltergeist of the film tapped into the realities of our daily lives. “Being human is so horrifying and humiliating. Wanting to be loved or connected or trying to create family is horrifying. People are not in your control. Everyone thinks differently,” she explained. “[It’s] very much like our reality. Art has such a fun way of mirroring this horror that we have in our daily lives. That internal horror is something that you can easily access. I face hate all the time in my life. Then to have this actual physical embodiment of hate or generational trauma or this dark demon that's old and just omnipresence in this house, it's such a fun social satire.”
The most difficult scene to bring to life was the huge finale that finds the family coming together to take down the poltergeist. “Everyone's outside. There's all these grand reveals. There's visual effects. There's fire special effect and every actor in the whole movie is there. When we shot it, it was freezing cold. It was very early in our shoot schedule, it was all overnights, so I was stressed out. I'd never done a scene that big before in my career, so I really was feeling the pressure there,” shared Johnson. “Everyone was fantastic and the cast was great. We pulled it off and the rest of the movie… I wouldn't say it was easy, but I could breathe easier having done the finale.”
See the horrors of meeting the parents come to life with The Parenting now streaming on Max.
