Is there anything more terrifying — and ripe for comedy — than a weekend away with you and your partner’s parents? Only one thing that could make that pressure cooker more intense: A demon, of course. Or so Kent Sublette, writer of HBO’s new queer horror comedy The Parenting believes.
The film, which is now streaming on HBO Max, follows gay couple Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh (Brandon Flynn) as they face this watershed moment in their relationship. The couple gathers their respective families up for a weekend in an idyllic cabin in the country where, unbeknownst to Josh, Rohan is also planning to pop the question. Not intense enough? It just so happens that the house is already occupied, by a 400-year-old demon and the ghosts of its previous victims.
Courtesy of HBO Max
Brian Cox, Nik Dodani, Brandon Flynn, Edie Falco, Dean Norris, Lisa Kudrow
The origin of this story actually came from Sublette’s own personal experience. “It’s loosely based on a trip that my husband and I took with our parents when we first started dating,” he tells PRIDE. “It was wonderful. They got along, but a friend of ours let us use his house in Connecticut for three days. Three days is too long for that. So it was stressful. We would joke that the only thing that would make this more intense is if this house was haunted.”
He wasn’t the only one to channel real-life experiences into this project. Dodani connected with the anxiety his character Rohan felt in bringing his Type A mother (Edie Falco) and silently imperious father (Brian Cox) into a house with Josh’s more relaxed and classically Midwestern parents (Lisa Kudrow and Dean Norris). “Meeting your partner’s parents is truly one of the most terrifying things in the world, no matter who you are, whether you’re gay or straight or anything in between,” he tells PRIDE. “This movie is about...the way we turn into teenage versions of ourselves around our parents, or the desperate need for everything to go perfectly, or, like, the fear of the people we love maybe not loving the people we’re bringing into the family.”
Courtesy of HBO Max
Nik Dodani, Dean Norris, Lisa Kudrow
It’s a fairly universal experience, so the choice to center this story around a gay couple feels significant, and not lost on Dodani. “Having a couple like Josh and Rohan at the center of it is really exciting, but at the end of the day it really is just like a relatable human story with a demon,” explains.
For his part, Flynn also pulled from personal experience in his role as the more laid back — but prone to putting his foot in his mouth — Josh. “I’m just a crass kid from Miami who says whatever, and has no filter,” he shares with PRIDE. So, there were a couple of moments that I was just like, ‘Oh, I’ve been here before!’”
While The Parenting features lots of cheeky humor — dick jokes fly freely throughout — there’s actually something very wholesome about the whole endeavor. At its core, the film is about acceptance and family, both of the by birth and found variety. These are exemplified by Norris’s character, Cliff, who is Josh’s father and Sara, played by Vivian Bang, the couple’s chosen family who finds a way to insert herself into the weekend, where she belongs.
Courtesy of HBO Max
Nik Dodani, Vivian Bang, Lisa Kudrow
“Your chosen family are just as pivotal and essential, as your family,” Bang shares with PRIDE, on the importance of her character’s inclusion in the story. “My friends are so meaningful to me. I have such good friends, and so Sara is literally the friend that everyone needs.” Despite not receiving an invite to the weekend, Sara finds a reason to insert herself into it. “I just understand Sara viscerally, just feeling so slighted for not being part of the family, when she knows that she belongs and she’s gonna make a space for herself at the table. Or in this case, a house that’s haunted by a 400-year-old demon,” she says with a laugh. She acts as both a support system for the couple and often as a mirror when they don’t want to face uncomfortable truths, whether that’s being avoidant about things with their parents or accepting that there’s an actual literal demon in the house.
Driving home the theme of family and acceptance is Cliff who, in one of the quieter moments of the film, tells his son just how much he cares about him — but also how much he admires him. It’s incredibly sweet and moving and a moment that Norris hopes resonates with parents of queer kids. “He’s very ham-handed, he doesn’t have a filter, he talks a little too much, but the most important thing for me, for that character, was that he [does] love his son [and is] unconditionally and completely accepting of him,” Norris tells PRIDE. “That kind of drives him through the movie, because he’s like, we’re going to make this weekend work.”
Courtesy of HBO Max
Lisa Kudrow, Dean Norris
This juxtaposition of raunchy humor and heart was a big part of what made director Craig Johnson (The Skeleton Twins, Special) excited to come on board the project. “This one reminded me of the movies I grew up with as a kid in the ‘80s. I’ve always wanted to do something that was a little freaky and spooky. I grew up with Poltergeist and Creepshow and Beetlejuice and Gremlins and all of these kinds of freaky, subversive, funny, scary movies, and you don’t see them as much these days,” he tells PRIDE. “When I read The Parenting, I instantly wanted to do it. I thought this was the perfect version of this kind of movie for me.”
There’s also a real sense of joy that radiates from the film, which Norris reveals started with true camaraderie on set. “It was so much fun. We literally bonded the day we all landed there. I shared a house with Lisa Kudrow, and Parker Posey and Edie Falco were right around the corner. We just all hung out, cookouts, movie nights, game nights, just fun stuff. We would do all kinds of improv riffs,” he recalls, adding, “then get Brian Cox in there, and it was just, like no weird ego stuff at all. Everyone just appreciated and respected everybody, like, immediately. It was amazing, probably one of the most amazing off-set cast experiences that I’ve ever had.”
Courtesy of HBO Max
Nik Dodani, Brandon Flynn
But it wasn’t just laughs for the cast of the horror comedy — there were some scares as well. Flynn revealed that during filming they stayed in a supposedly haunted hotel, and one night they decided to see if they could make contact with its ghostly inhabitants. “We did have a seance,” Flynn reveals. “We were living at this hotel called the Colonial Inn, in Concord, Massachusetts, and it’s haunted. Nik was staying in the bride’s suite, so we had the seance in Nik’s suite because the front desk person was a clairvoyant and brought along a witch with him. We tried conjuring her, but she didn’t come.”
Courtesy of HBO Max
Parker Posey
However, according to Bang, her costars did a better job communicating with the dead than they thought. “I think we conjured some spirits, because I did have some experience with it, and now I’m a total believer, without a doubt that there are some energies,” she says. “The attendant at the inn that we were in told me my wing was not haunted. And then he said, ‘I think you guys conjured something because now it is.’” But that’s not all: Bang says that after they attempted the seance, she began seeing signs of the supernatural in her room including fog and a mysterious ring of purple lights.
Spooky? Funny? Yeah, that sounds about right for this charming horror comedy throwback.
The Parenting is now streaming on HBO Max. Watch the trailer below.
