Silas Howard on friendship, death, and Darby and the Dead

In the age of streaming, you have to act fast before the good stuff disappears without a trace. But in some cases, if the good stuff is really good, it will find its own cult following.

Such has been the fate of trans director Silas Howard’s playful 2022 entry into the paranormal teen genre, Darby and the Dead. A perfect compliment to recent neon goth offerings like Lisa Frankenstein and Wednesday, the film tells the story of Darby, a girl who survived a near-death experience only to be gifted with the inconvenient ability to speak to the dead. Darby—which sports a fantastic, diverse cast featuring Auli’i Cravalho, Nicole Maines, and Riele Downs—is getting the big screen treatment later this month at Eagle Rock’s cinephile mainstay Vidiots as part of UCLA’s screening series Queer Rhapsody. Ahead of the screening, INTO spoke to Silas Howard about queer content in the age of streaming, friendship, and making movies about death.

SILAS HOWARD: I just got out of New Orleans, where I’m directing a new show for Netflix, based on a memoir called Pink Marine about a gay man who joins the Marines in the early 90s. Greg Cope White is the writer and and Andy Parker is the showrunner, who I worked with on Tales of the City. It’s really interesting. I remember that era. Under Clinton, the big improvement was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which,…the name alone just says everything.

INTO: Yeah they were like “aren’t you glad we threw you a pathetic bone?”

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Yeah. It’s a great cast. I learned a lot about the Marines, because we have all these consultants, and they’re pretty tender dudes, which was surprising.

That sounds great. I’m glad to hear that Netflix is still investing in queer stuff. Obviously, it’s a very weird time in terms of queer content and streaming in general.

It really is. I felt the same way. Any queer stories right now are not to be taken for granted.

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Speaking of which, I loved Darby and the Dead. It was right up my alley. I was wondering why it’s not on Disney Plus or on streaming currently?

Well, it’s, it’s the blessing and the curse of streaming. It’s the first studio movie I got paid to do because even [2018’s] A Kid Like Jake was done on such a small budget that we all did it as a labor of love. Darby had a very generous budget, and we were on a clock. They needed it to be released before 2023, so it had to come out in December of 2022. The benefit is that I didn’t have to sweat over the theatrical numbers, but this is what happens with movies that are streaming. There’s movies by even bigger directors—things just get buried.

Because, to their credit, my executive at Hulu was amazing, and so was the executive at 20th Century Fox. And they’re both pretty major players. They were very passionate about the movie, and they also listened when I pushed back on certain things around casting. They were really excited to add Nicole [Maine’s] character, who’s the trans queer friend.

They put Darby on the homepage of Hulu, and for awhile we got a fair amount of press. It was nice that everybody got paid, and there was respect in terms of the vision. But yeah, getting lost in the streaming algorithms is a thing. We were at least up for a year before the movie got pulled. And then it went pretty quickly back online in terms of Amazon and [VOD.] But now it’s being screened at Vidiots through Queer Rhapsody. Amanda Salazar, who programs for Sundance, but also is programming at Vidiots, has been so passionate about it, and also wanted to talk about what happens with movies get pulled. I mean, Disney pulled so many movies, and during Pride they pulled a lot of queer content. But one of the things that that Hulu and 20th Century were really proud of is that that this movie hit a younger demographic and a more diverse audience. Particularly all through the South, the film found a young Black audience they hadn’t really reached before.

That’s the that’s the frustrating thing. It’s got such a great conceit and a great cast. I loved Nicole Maines in it so much. I love it anytime there’s like a trans character who’s just a normal teenager, but like, it’s rare that they’re made explicitly trans. So I loved that moment about the tampon.

That was a moment we found together. Because that was another thing the studio really gave me full freedom to do. Nicole, when she first got cast, she didn’t know I was trans, and then she was like, Oh, it was like a little bonus. So when we got to do that scene, I was like, “hey, your character’s queer. That part is very important to me, but whether she’s out as trans or not, let’s talk about it.” And and then Nicole was like, “Well, we are doing a scene in the women’s locker room, and it’s kind of, you know, we can’t resist.” And so she improved a bunch of things. And then when we told Kylie [Liya Page], who plays, plays the head Mean Girl. We told her the line, and she was like “Oh, is that offensive that I forget she’s trans?” And Nicole goes, “Oh no. Girl, that means I’m hella fish.”

That’s a benefit of [having] authentic people behind the scenes. Because I knew the community would probably appreciate it. But even some of the older, cis white dudes that were in post were so grateful for that line. They were like, I really love that moment. So the ways things are going aside from the terrible policies is actually really exciting, the just visibility and the younger generation completely embracing that is no small thing.

Totally. I really love this moment where there’s stuff like Wednesday and Lisa Frankenstein and the upcoming Beetlejuice sequel, because I do feel like it’s important to have like fun movies and shows for teens and kids that are about death.

I agree, yeah. Thank you for saying that. I love comedy about death, and I liked that the movie centered around this magical power she got from trauma. Because if you think about it, people that go through trauma, it’s not just that we live in that trauma and it’s so sad. That trauma actually gives us superpowers. So I liked that as sort of a subterranean theme. I liked having a movie where I had to get a chuckle at the funeral scene and a laugh at the electrocution scene. That was a fun challenge.

Yes! There was one line where Darby explaining what she does, and she’s just like, “what I do for the dead is like they get to leave this world where they’re invisible.” And I was like…wow. Relatable.

I’m so glad, because I, I felt really proud of it, and there are those little heart tug moments at the end. And it did feel like young people responded to it. There were a batch of fun TikTok videos, especially around Darby’s glow up, and how her hair goes from straight to natural, that Darby is a darker-complexioned Black woman in a film of this genre who’s wearing Converse and just being a weirdo.

@thefreshnostalgia

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♬ original sound – Fresh Nostalgia

And I with kids, especially post-COVID, they deal with death, and we just don’t talk about it. And that makes it this big, isolating thing, right?

One of my favorite things also about the movie was that, in the end, it was really about female friendship, and the transformative power of friendship has been a theme since my first movie, By Hook or By Crook. Which was about like, we can want to do these grand gestures, but if we can actually just be a hero to the person closest to us, that’s kind of epic. ♦