Interview With Filmmaker Mary Dauterman And Grace Glowicki For ‘Booger’

Gross, sticky, slimy, oozing body horror is my jam, so whenever a new horror film marketed as body horror comes out, I jump on it. I also have been drawn to stories about grief lately because I’ve been going through my own, and I am intrigued with how different each journey is for others. These were the biggest draws for me for the movie Booger. Written and directed by Mary Dauterman and starring Grace Glowicki, Booger does not shy away from being completely disgusting while showing the extreme side of someone grieving the loss of a loved one.

After the death of her best friend Izzy, Anna focuses all her attention on Booger, the stray cat which she and Izzy took in. When Booger bites her, she begins to undergo a strange transformation.

To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Mary and Grace about making the film together, what Grace was actually eating (it’s pretty gross), horror films, and more!

PopHorror: I really enjoyed Booger so I’m super excited to talk to you about it today.

Grace Glowicki: Cool!

PopHorror: What intrigued you about the script and the role of Anna, and made you want to say yes?

Grace Glowicki: Well, I was saying to Mary the other day, even just the title of the film, Booger, I was like, oh my god! What is this about? I really love body fluids in genre movies and stuff, so I was kind of already wanting to do the movie just by virtue of its title. And then I would, of course, go on to read it, it just kept getting better and better. I’ve become increasingly interested in genre films and especially ones made by women, and I love The Fly, so I thought this was just literally the most perfect opportunity that could have come to me at this time, so it was a hard yes.

PopHorror:  You mentioned just the name in general, a friend of mine posted that he was watching this for the Chattanooga Film Festival, and the name intrigued me and the poster. I was like, what in the hell is this? I was so intrigued.

Mary Dauterman: The cat vomit? Our festival poster with the cat vomit?

PopHorror: Yes!

Mary Dauterman: That’s a really good one.

PopHorror: Mary, what inspired the story and how did the project come about?

Mary Dauterman: The story was a couple of different ideas I had swimming around. I wanted to do a sort of An American Werewolf in London but with a bodega cat in modern day Brooklyn and a woman. It was kind of a short film idea and then when I was sitting down and really trying to craft a full narrative, I had these ideas about female friendship and loss because that felt like something I had a lot of personal experience with and a lot to say there. When I started overlapping the stages of grief with cat behavior, things started clicking in a really interesting way. So, yeah, it was a lot of ideas swimming around at once, and then once Grace said she was down, I just knew that this could really be a movie because she’s the only actor who can do everything I needed. We started working really closely together and just talking about the character and talking about the journey of the film, and I feel like that process really, really brought the whole thing to life.

PopHorror: I like how you said Grace was the only one who would do what you wanted. I have to say that when you were eating whatever you were actually eating to make this, it made me feel sick to my stomach. That takes a lot. I watch a lot of horror; I watch a lot of body horror. That’s my jam. So to make me feel disgusted, that’s… Good job!

Grace Glowicki: Actually, it was so gross. It was like real human hair that the make-up artist would keep in a little shot glass of mouthwash, and then she would take it out and douse it in caramel sauce, then she’d put it on a spoon and then she’d say, “Open up!”

PopHorror: That’s disgusting.

Mary Dauterman: The number of things you had to put in your mouth is a lot.

PopHorror: Mary, I’m glad you brought up this movie being about grief. I’ve been dealing with a lot of grief lately and I’m realizing that it’s a complicated process for everyone and everyone does it differently. This was a very unique view on a very extreme way of dealing with grief. How did you prepare for shooting something that can be very powerful and emotional?

Mary Dauterman: This was a situation where directing I felt like, oh this is evil. Like the level that Grace is going through is so intense but also I feel like we still were very playful in the way we made the film even though we know that something serious was coming up. We felt like we had each other’s backs and the support of all our team around us. Because this was a small film, we weren’t shooting chronologically so we would have one day that was really emotional and then one day that was just Grace being insane and eating cat food. We had conversations about the levels of cat behavior, which was going to be in line with the level of the emotion of the story too. But it was a lot of modulating and that’s just a testament to how incredible Grace is because she could bring all of these varied things on any day, where we were like, “And also, you’re going to be eating a rat later so get ready.”

Grace Glowicki: So many nice compliments this morning, Mary, thank you. The vulnerable stuff is harder for me than pretending to be a cat and eating the cat food stuff. That was the hardest part. But Mary walked me through it. We talked a lot about the subtext of the thing and the backstory. I can’t really remember but I think I remember just like really attaching to that the character was avoiding grief and doing everything she could to not feel the feelings. Like a cat batting away a toy. I was just trying to stay active in that until the moments when it would crack out, like in the bathroom scene with Marcia (DeBonis as Joyce), or at the end in the shower. And then yeah, sometimes I would use the tear stick, sometimes try to focus on empathy and stuff but yeah, that stuff’s what was so cool about the movie too. It’s not just a body horror movie, it has this emotional core that means something.

PopHorror: I like it when horror has heart, because a lot of people don’t realize that you can have a really grotesque and hardcore horror movie, and still have heart at the center of it. That’s what I like about movies like this. It proves that you can be really disgusting with part of it, but other parts you’re on the verge of crying because there’s so much emotion and realism in it outside of all the weird stuff. I appreciate that. 

Mary Dauterman: Emotion is also disgusting and nasty, so it all makes sense.

PopHorror: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great way to say it. Mary, was there anything you were adamant about leaving in the film, no matter what?

Mary Dauterman: That’s a good question. I feel like I have the problem that I can let everything go. Like I could have made this into a 20 minute film, which is all my favorite pieces. The act of writing and shooting and editing was a lot of tearing down and building back up for me. I was like, I’m not precious about anything but there were so many moments of performance and emotional story beats I knew we had to hit. My process and the piecing together is like, okay I’ve just got to make this story work first and then I can indulge myself.

PopHorror: I love that outlook! Grace, was there anything you were adamant about bringing to your character?

Grace Glowicki: Oh, good question. Nothing really comes to mind other than I remember really trying to figure out how to do the cat behavior and how literal versus expressionistic to do it. I remember workshopping it with Mary beforehand and just being like, “What about this? Does this look cool?” I think that was something that was pretty important to us. It sort of just emerged the way it did. I remember trying to find that line of how much were we literally mimicking versus how much we were performing just the spirit and dynamic of a cat. 

PopHorror: I have just one last question for both of you. What is your favorite scary movie?

Mary Dauterman: I’m like, so many! But I watched The Blair Witch Project for the first time this Halloween-

PopHorror: The first time?!

Mary Dauterman: I’ve been too scared. And it was scary but it’s such a cool, effective movie and as a person who goes camping, I got messed up.

PopHorror: I don’t go camping because of that movie so there’s that. Just like The Descent, you’ll never, ever find me spelunking. Nope.

Mary Dauterman: Don’t even do it!

Grace Glowicki: I don’t know which one’s the scariest but just a horror film that I watched the other day that I really loved was a film called Cemetery Man. That was a great movie. I’m trying to find out a score for a horror comedy film I just directed about a gravedigger that’s looking for love and somebody recommended this film. I just thought it was the coolest movie and Rupert Everett gives such a cool performance. I love the blend of romance-horror-comedy. It’s not scary but a good horror movie.

Thank you to Mary and Grace for taking the time to chat with us. Booger is now on VOD.