Fantastic Fest 2025: The Cast & Crew of Theater Is Dead on Backstage Bloodshed, Female Rage, and Why Horror Loves Theater Kids
- Travis Brown
- 24 hours ago
- 3 min read
There’s messy drama, there’s theater drama, and then there’s theater-kid drama weaponized into a horror-comedy. At Fantastic Fest, we sat down with the team behind Theater Is Dead — director/co-writer Katherine Dudas; cast members Shane West (Matthew), Madison Lawlor (Taylor), Olivia Blue (Shannon), Decker Sadowski (Willow), and Jacob Nichols (Ben) — to talk tone, knives, and the cursed charisma of directors who think they’re gods.
“Never be boring”: building a horror-comedy that actually kills
Katherine came from comedy, but she locked into horror’s rhythm fast.
Her rule: “Never be boring.”
Comedy and horror both live on build-up and release, so the team leaned into surprise as the glue — a laugh, a gasp, a shriek — keeping the audience “on the edge of their seats, or off them.”
Writing was a late-night relay: push the idea, then push it further. The result is a movie that treats backstage chaos like a summoning circle and theater culture like a cult (affectionately… mostly).
Matthew: the director who isn’t the Devil… but auditions for the role
As Matthew, Shane plays a charismatic tyrant with a smile sharp enough to cut cable ties.
He blended understated menace with occasional grand flourishes — think Dead Poets Society energy dipped in Devil’s Advocate aftershave — and savored the slow reveal.
“He’s not the Devil,” Shane said, “but he might want to be.”
Taylor: nepotism baby, avatar of
female rage
Madison didn’t play Taylor as a joke; she played her as a reckoning.
Taylor knows what’s happening behind closed doors. She’s been complicit. Her arc is about stopping the silence and wearing the anger she’s swallowed.
“She’s rage in human form — and once a ‘solution’ shows up, she’s finally happy to use it.”
Shannon: smile with knives behind it
Olivia’s Shannon is the musical-theater frenemy you clock in five seconds — grinning while she measures your throat. Rivalry, proximity, and perfectly pleasant cruelty turn every rehearsal into a duel.
“I love torturing Decker,” Olivia laughed. “Keeping enemies close is part of the craft.”
Willow & Ben: ambition vs. responsibility (and the price of the dream)
Decker (Willow) walks a high-wire: bright-eyed, not naïve. The writers refused to make her “dumb enough to deserve it.” She’s smart, eager, and ripe for manipulation — which is the point.
Jacob (Ben) grounds the chaos: scholarship kid, real stakes, a deadline you can hear ticking.
“If this doesn’t work, I’m in trouble,” he said. “So when Willow slips into the theater undertow, the pressure spikes.”
Process: phones for storyboards, blood for ink
Indie time and money meant invention. Katherine and her DP pre-blocked scenes on phones, Katherine literally acting every role to nail staging. One favorite sequence hinges on what the camera refuses to show — proof you can get big with restraint.
Casting doubled the meta: the film’s “play” cast were chosen to be stars within the story, with Dylan Adler (Jaden) riffing improv and Colin McCalla (Zach) volleying right back.
They also shouted out Stephanie Suganami: her dance-background power in the opener hit so hard they rewrote later beats to thread it through.
Themes: impostor syndrome, shadow-living, and choosing what you keep
The film keeps circling nepotism and impostor syndrome: living in someone else’s halo until it burns. Madison drew on real-world parallels; Decker framed Willow’s journey as empowerment by curation — taking what you learned from bad mentors, ditching the rot, keeping the craft.
Why horror fits theater like a bloodied glove
Because theater is already ritual. Because backstage is already haunted. Because horror is the grandfather on the porch, “waiting for every other genre to mess up.”
Here, the genres meet in the wings and take their bows with claws out.
Theater Is Dead made the Fantastic Fest crowd roar, then wince, then roar again. It asks the oldest showbiz question in the ugliest light: what are we willing to give the stage — and who gets to take it?