Montclair Film Festival 2024: RAT! | Interview with Neal Suresh Mulani

Have you heard the latest catchy pop single ‘Get Out of My Head’ by Wally Max? That’s because the pop song can only be heard in Neal Suresh Mulani’s horror-comedy short film, RAT! Mulani’s recent short has played at various film festivals including the Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival, Nashville Film Festival, Nightmares Film Festival, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, and is expected to play at more film festivals this fall including AFI. However, RAT! was selected for the 2024 Montclair Film Festival as part of the Midnight Shorts program. Mulani’s previous short was selected for the festival back in 2022 and he returns to Montclair Film Festival with a short that cannot be missed. It’s a bigger, bolder horror-comedy with superb talent. In the home invasion short film, Mulani stars as a journalist who is fed up with a global pop star, Wally Max who accuses him for queerbaiting. The musicians most dedicated and loyal fans seek out his cabin for vengeance. We had the chance to connect with Mulani who is also a Swiftie (like myself) to discuss working on the short film, what excites him the most about horror and potential plans to turn the short into a feature length film.

Kristin Ciliberto: Why did you want to tell this story?

Neal Suresh Mulani: RAT! started in the depths of COVID and I wrote the first draft in 2020. I’m a big Taylor Swift fan and when she put out Folklore (2020) during the pandemic, there was quite a strong response to critics who maybe didn’t speak about that album so favorably, which it is a great album. There’s only one critic who was doxed and I’m just very chronically online. I have a Twitter (now known as X) and I have a Twitter account, but it’s a private account. I don’t participate in all of that, but I just have it to be a citizen of the world, be with it and know what’s going on. I noticed, just like that ecosystem of stay on Twitter, it is such a fraught and also hilarious, but kind of at the same time a terrifying situation. I think my films, what I love to hone in on, is taking either something I’ve been through or something that’s very real in the world that we inhabit and take it one step further. Like what if somebody was irked enough to search for you on yellow pages if you piss them off online and how that could dovetail into the home invasion subgenre.

KC: I love that aspect to it. So the film looks at this person, Wally Max. Did you come up with this character, or is this a real artist that I have never heard of?

NSM: That question makes me so happy to hear because I think a lot of the response we’ve gotten after screenings, which is what we hoped for, was like is this someone who I should be looking up on a streaming platform, whose discography I’m just unfamiliar with. He’s not real. He is a character I came up with. He’s an amalgamation of so many different artists.

KC: I could probably tell who you were alluding to.

NSM: I mean, that’s the thing that many different artists have influenced, different aspects of him, and we wanted not to create a generalized portrait of a pop star and one that felt honest to the world that we live in today, and specifically Gen Z. Wally Max is played by Jacob Berger who is the lead singer of a band called Moontower. I went to college with all of them, and I’ve been friends with them. There were many different permutations of the gender identity of the pop star as I moved through drafts. There was a certain point where I kind of honed in on the queerbaiting, and it’s sort of being a gay male journalist and a male artist who he was going to accuse of queerbaiting, and how the film is about fandom and the online world. It also is kind of specifically for me, at least about how territorial and mean gay men can be sometimes be online and on pop culture. Jacob was so great. He understood the assignment, and I wrote the song that’s in the film with them, which they were so great about. It’s such an earworm in my opinion (referring to ‘Get Out of My Head’).

KC: You have to release the song!

NSM: We will be releasing the song at some point. You put the film out online more widely so everyone could hear it at the same time, but we were very happy with how it turned out.

KC: You have to put the short online at some point because it stars one of my favorite internet comedians, Caitlin Reilly. I have to talk about the casting for the short. How did you get Caitlin Reilly to star in your short and all the other comedic talent?

NSM: I’ll start because the Reilly story actually begins with Tyler Joseph Ellis, who plays the credited role in the film as the twink, who sort of invades the house, and we have a little brawl exchange. He was in my last film and we went to the University of Southern California together. He has a really solid following on TikTok because he is incredibly hilarious. His niche is kind of like theater humor, but his range bar exceeds just that. Obviously, he played like a villain in this. Personally, I find him so scary, but he is also funny. He knows how to dial into that sort of head tilt and sit in silence and let that do a lot for him. He’s also so funny on set for scenes, that he wasn’t even in just riffing on different joke alts or things that we could do. He has a lot of friends in the TikTok community, one of them being Reilly who is my favorite. She’s the first person truly in COVID when I really started going on TikTok who I ever followed. I was like oh my gosh, this woman’s impressions are so uncanny and so specifically funny! Ellis put me in touch with her and she read the script and said yes, she was hilarious. We had barely any time to do many takes. She was actually FaceTiming in, but we were trying so hard during her coverage just not to laugh. In a completely unexpected way she would do little riffs, or like, switch up lines in a way that we were all on the cusp of tears. She was phenomenal!

KC: So this is a horror story. What excites you the most about horror?

NSM: I’m a huge horror fan like yourself. I think there’s so much interplay with the genre and other genres. I think, first and foremost, it’s a communal experience. I’m definitely somebody who cherishes the experience of going to a theater and seeing something with a crowd. The experience we’ve had with this film so far has been nothing short of that, like hearing people laugh and scream and like maybe at the same time, it’s so communal, it’s so reaction based. I think that horror also gives you a ton of latitude and range to play with audience expectations, and especially for this to sort of dive into some aspect of social commentary surrounding identity in the digital, digital age, and our digital footprint. Also, how scary that is as the first generation to grow up, sort of like memorializing our lives in status updates and tweets, and over-saturated Instagram posts from like seven years ago that we don’t want anyone to see. I don’t know exactly how I feel about it, and it really haunts me at night. The horror genre is sort of the perfect vehicle to unpack that.

KC: What you’re saying feels so relatable especially for right now. Do you have plans to develop this into a feature film because I do see the potential for it.

NSM: I can’t say that it was originally always conceived of as a proof of concept, but my producing partner, Lottie Abrahams and I worked closely on developing the short and now I’m in the middle of writing the feature. It’s quickly into us working on this around like 2021 and this lends itself to a bigger expansion. It’s been really nice to have the time to think about what exactly that is. We’ve kind of arrived at a take that we feel really honors both the horror aspects, but also the world building and the lore of the pop star that we’ve created and the humor and satire of that. We were at the American Cinematheques Proof Film Festival, a festival dedicated to proof of concepts, We were recognized with a special invention by the jury and met with a lot of different people who I think affirmed the appetite to like, maybe see it expanded as a feature. I don’t want to like or say too much about it just because I’m kind of in the middle of writing it. It’s constantly evolving and changing, but it takes the project in a bigger direction sort of set against the backdrop of the music industry in LA, and becomes this journalistic horror Neo-noir, who done it with some of the same characters. It’s a lot of fun and still carries that tonal balance of comedy and horror.

KC: My last question is, how does it feel being at AFI and the Montclair Film Festival? How exciting is that?

NSM: I was there with my last short film two years ago, and I could go in person, which was so lovely. The short was called Tell Me Something I Don’t Know (2022). That’s sort of like a similar tonal balance where I play someone who is a narcissist and invites his friends to the desert for his 25th birthday and asks them to tell him everything that they hate about him. It does not go well, but I loved it. I was in Montclair for the day. It’s such a picturesque, gorgeous town. I think the festival does such a great job cultivating audiences who are hungry to see the best that independent cinema has to offer from just Montclair and the surrounding area. They took great care of us, and the screening was well-attended. I think it’s such a great opportunity for any filmmaker to share their work. AFI is crazy. I’ve gone to the AFI festival every year since I’ve lived in Los Angeles and moved here. When I found out that we were screening in the short film competition there, I was gobsmacked.

We are delighted to be reporting live from the 2024 Montclair Film Festival, running on October 18-27, 2024.