By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
I come from a commercial background. I’m mostly directing pieces where everyone looks perfect…. I did not want Booger to feel like that at all. It’s raw and disgusting and grimy.”
At its most placid, depictions of grief on-screen veer away from excessive physical displays. Gentle weeping is acceptable, while gushy, snot-laden heaving sobs are generally avoided. Grief is broadly intellectualized as an experience that can be verbally described through a mapping of easily articulated emotion; a character might lose weight or delicately stagger, but such depictions are commonly dominated by what can be said or explained.
And then there’s Booger. The debut feature of American indie filmmaker Mary Dauterman, she has effectively described it as “a disgusting comedy about grief. Or a body horror that’s funny and sad. Or a tragedy that makes you laugh and squirm.” Apart from the fact that she so gleefully rejects the more composed ideals of how grief should manifest on screen, most striking here is the fact that for Dauterman, grief is not just one thing and one thing alone. It can be a lot of things, things that sometimes seem contradictory or inappropriate.
The film tells the story of Anna (Grace Glowicki), a young New Yorker faced with the sudden shocking reality that her roommate and best friend Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin) is no longer around, having died unexpectedly. With her grip on work, personal hygiene and interpersonal relationships starting to slip, when Izzy’s cherished pet cat Booger goes missing, Anna is forced to confront the reality of her new Izzy-less world and what shape her own identity might take in such a scenario as she desperately searches for the absent cat.
Pivoting around an extraordinary performance from Glowicki and further strengthened by an impressive supporting cast including Dobrushin, Garrick Bernard, Marcia Debonis and cult icon Heather Matarazzo, with Booger Dauterman presents a genuinely refreshing and original take on grief that – despite the fact that Anna slides deeper and deeper into a world both strange and fantastic – speaks to a fundamental truth about loss that film and television as a whole tend to avoid. In Booger, grief is visceral and tangible and has a very concrete impact on who we are, who we think we used to be, and who we might become in the future.
Booger recently had its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival, and Mary kindly took the time to chat to us about her feature debut.
What was the path that led you to Booger as your debut feature?
I feel like Booger is the feature that all of my previous work was leading to. I have made quite a few genre-bending short films that fell somewhere along the lines of comedy, cringe, and supernatural, and had been experimenting with set design and prosthetics in quite a few of them. I knew I wanted my first feature to be a comedy that skewed strange and surreal, and the emotional story I was most equipped to tell was one about the complicated nuances in female friendship. Writing and developing this during the pandemic definitely infused the story with a feeling of loneliness and isolation.
Booger is such a perfect encapsulation of grief in that it refuses to not be messy. In screen culture, I find grief is usually very linear and straight forward, but it so rarely is like that in real life.
No, it’s not straightforward at all! And honestly it’s counterintuitive to put a “clock” (or a traditional three act structure, for that matter) to someone’s processing of grief, because it doesn’t follow rules. On the one hand, I always had to keep this 30,000 ft view of the script overall, but then the truth of Anna’s journey is that she’s completely unmoored. She doesn’t know up from down. She doesn’t know what day it is or why she feels the way she feels, or if she can feel anything at all anymore, anyways. Because in many ways she is rejecting reality – because reality is a place where her best friend no longer exists.
There is such a profound cultural blind spot when it comes to the death of close friends when compared to other relationships.
When I showed an early draft of Booger to an industry person I was talking to, I remember being extremely taken aback when they asked “why is this loss significant? A child or a family member, I’d understand, but Izzy is just Anna’s friend.” That made me feel that the story of friend loss was something I desperately needed to make, because that’s the kind of film I want to exist.
The heaviness of the grief story was something I was avoiding a little bit — I really do think of myself as a “comedy person” — until it just… sort of forced itself into being a part of this film.”
That Anna’s journey is one experienced so directly through changes to her physical body is really at the heart of the film, why did you choose the combination of body horror and comedy?
The heaviness of the grief story was something I was avoiding a little bit — I really do think of myself as a “comedy person” — until it just… sort of forced itself into being a part of this film. Anna’s inner turmoil always needed to be driving the transformation and the horror. But at the same time, the horror is so disgusting it becomes funny. So it’s all very symbiotic in the end.
David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) was definitely a touchpoint in terms of tone. The core story of Seth (aka Brundlefly) and Veronica being torn apart by his loss of humanity is so, so tragic. But then Jeff Goldblum’s face shooting off in an explosion of goo is so screamingly disgusting it’s hilarious. Hopefully I was able to achieve something sort of like that here.
What was your process for working with Grace Glowicki, particularly in some of the more intimate, physically demanding scenes where so much of the film’s body horror energy stems from?
Grace was in my lookbooks and treatments for the film early, early on. I finally approached her with a corny email begging her to consider my movie. It was so exciting how down she was for this film. Grace really entered the world of Booger full force. We zoomed constantly from the moment she said “yes” to the film, but it was when we were together, away from more of the heady emotionality of the script and in the physical world, that Anna really started to come to life.
Grace is an extremely physical performer and very aware of what she can do with her body emotionally (I mean, have you seen Tito?). I’m so lucky Grace and I were able to work together in person during prep. She basically relocated to New York and became my neighbor. We spent a lot of time at the filming locations together, she spent a lot of time interacting with my cats, but mostly we were cracking each other up and grossing each other out. A lot of crazy ideas from that time together made their way into the film.
We were both looking for the strange and the surprising, and really were of one mind when it came to how far was just far enough. She is such a pro and down to try anything, whether puking up hairballs or rubbing her face all over a tree, even taking direction like “I need you to be 30% more feral” and knowing exactly what that looks like.
So much of this film is about ugliness as a broader concept in Booger – about letting yourself be ugly, and sitting with ugly feelings. I’m particularly interested in how there’s a kind of gendered dimension to letting go that results in what is often perceived as a kind of ugliness, and I think the pressures built around that are enormous.
So, I come from a commercial background. I’m mostly directing pieces where everyone looks perfect. No hair is out of place. Wardrobe people flying in to straighten out wrinkles. Even the bag of chips looks perfect. Etc etc.
I did not want Booger to feel like that at all. It’s raw and disgusting and grimy. Even my composer was describing the level of distortion I wanted on the score as “extremely dirty”. It all ties back to Anna’s emotion, that ugly part of herself she’s trying to keep hidden but literally keeps vomiting back out.
So working with actors who really understood that point of view was so important. I would go so far as to say there was zero vanity from any of my cast. Everyone was there to be in the muck and tell this story. They really gave so much of themselves and I think in the end the performances are amazingly honest. There’s a specific Heather Matrazzo moment to look out for on this note – I won’t spoil it but when you see it you’ll know!
Finally, an obvious question but one I have to ask: “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” is so much a part of the film’s story and I note that Rupert Holmes even got a thank you. Why that song?!
The script for Booger always included a karaoke song that would be Anna and Izzy’s “song” — I wanted it to be perfect for the two of them, and also a “just weird enough” choice that shows what kind of people they are. Bonus points if it was a song that could become a trigger for Anna — both cringey to hear over and over and haunting in a darkly funny way.
In a bizarre chain of events, my producer Lexi was connected to Rupert Holmes, and we were able to use “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” in our film. It honestly checked all of my boxes and more. Lyrically it’s a story about people losing each other and finding their way back. It’s so silly (and catchy!) but at the core it’s touching and bittersweet.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: the Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.