Godmother Interview | Fantastic Fest 2026
Godmother wants audiences to think they know where it’s going.
That assumption is part of the design.
During Fantastic Fest 2026, Horror Movies Uncut and The Final Cut sat down with filmmaker John Veron and stars Riley Dandy and Cameron Cuffe to discuss a horror film that deliberately plays with familiar genre expectations before expanding into something considerably more complicated.
Without giving away the movie’s turns, Godmother initially presents a situation that could easily lead audiences toward a familiar conclusion: seemingly harmless people enter the lives of its central characters, something doesn’t feel right and the question becomes what sinister intentions might be hiding underneath the surface.
For Veron, however, the mystery wasn’t simply whether something evil was happening.
“The question is not, ‘Are the Martinsons evil?’” Veron told HMU. “The question is, ‘What is the nature of their evil?’”
That distinction became fundamental to the movie’s structure. Veron described Godmother as essentially operating in two halves, with the first allowing a sense of unease to hang over the relationships before the second begins revealing what the film has actually been building toward.
The themes underneath that structure weren’t necessarily imposed on the screenplay from the beginning.
Veron said he believes strongly in allowing a movie to reveal itself during the writing process rather than forcing an initial thesis onto every subsequent draft. At a certain point, he explained, the writer has to recognize what the material itself is becoming.
“If you feel like you’re growing something or discovering something, it’s gonna be good,” Veron said. “If you feel like you’re assembling a car, it’s probably not gonna be good.”
One of the ideas that emerged from that process is the complicated question of what constitutes a successful life.
Godmother places competing versions of fulfillment alongside one another: professional ambition, independence, romantic partnership, family and motherhood. Rather than presenting one of those paths as inherently correct, the characters bring their own expectations into conflict.
Cuffe, who plays Colby, sees that uncertainty as essential.
“What the hell is success?” Cuffe said. “It’s individual for everyone.”
For Cuffe, art doesn’t necessarily need to resolve that question. Its value can instead come from presenting the conflict and allowing viewers to continue the conversation afterward.
Colby represents one particularly damaging interpretation of success. He is relentlessly focused on where life is supposed to be going, something Cuffe believes prevents the character from actually experiencing the life immediately in front of him.
That initially made Colby difficult for the actor to approach.
Cuffe admitted his first instinct was to reduce him to simply being a terrible boyfriend. That version, however, quickly became uninteresting.
“I hated him,” Cuffe said. “I just thought he was awful.”
Conversations with Veron pushed the performance toward something more complicated. Rather than playing Colby as someone who is simply cruel, Cuffe began seeing him as a man poisoned by expectations surrounding achievement, masculinity and what his future is supposed to look like.
His desire to be a provider and protector can become a facade for deeper insecurity.
Cuffe believes Colby genuinely loves his partner. The problem is that he doesn’t necessarily know how to love her well — and frequently prioritizes himself.
Dandy’s Katie occupies a very different position.
She described Katie and Colby as standing on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what they consider success, particularly during one of the movie’s central conflicts between them.
Yet Dandy doesn’t view either perspective as containing the entire answer.
“I actually think that there’s a lot to learn from both of them,” Dandy said. “Potentially they’re both after the same thing, just coming at it from completely different perspectives.”
Underneath those disagreements is something considerably simpler.
“We all just wanna be seen,” she added.
Maintaining those character dynamics was especially important because Godmother spends a significant portion of its opening stretch operating closer to relationship and domestic drama than full-throttle horror.
Veron said the challenge was sustaining tension long enough to maximize the eventual shift.
He referenced Alfred Hitchcock’s famous example involving a bomb underneath a table: an unexpected explosion creates surprise, but allowing the audience to see the bomb beforehand transforms an ordinary conversation into suspense.
For Godmother, the opening effectively shows viewers the bomb.
The next roughly 35 minutes are about reminding them that it’s still ticking.
Finding exactly how long that could continue required experimentation. Veron said an early cut had a strong foundation but lacked some of the personality and momentum the finished movie needed. Test screenings became an important part of determining where the tension held and where adjustments were necessary.
Rather than treating a completed edit as untouchable, Veron views audience response as another tool for understanding what the film still needs.
That openness extended to the production itself.
Despite joking that he ruled the set “with an iron fist,” Veron described Godmother as a deeply collaborative production where actors and department heads were encouraged to bring ideas forward.
Dandy recalled occasionally offering alternate dialogue. One small example came during an early margarita scene, when a line Veron had written using a more explicit description of sex became considerably funnier when Dandy substituted the word “doink.”
The change stayed.
For Veron, those contributions are part of directing rather than an intrusion upon it.
“It’s not my job to generate every idea,” he said.
Instead, he described part of the director’s role as functioning like a filter — listening to suggestions from performers, cinematographers and other collaborators and determining not simply whether an idea is good, but whether it is right for this particular movie.
Dandy described the production as a group discovering the film together.
Veron compared directing to hosting a party: bring the right elements into the same place and create the conditions for them to become more than the sum of their individual parts.
That philosophy becomes particularly important as Godmother moves toward an ending designed to alter the audience’s understanding of what preceded it.
Veron’s primary hope isn’t necessarily that viewers walk away having decoded a specific message. He wants them surprised by the distance the movie travels from its opening assumptions.
“I can’t believe we ended up there from where we started” is the kind of reaction he hopes to overhear after a screening.
A Roger Corman tattoo on Veron’s arm offers some indication of the filmmaking tradition behind that philosophy.
Working within genre and limited resources, he sees structure, escalation and unexpected turns as tools capable of giving audiences the kind of ride that enormous set pieces and blockbuster budgets aren’t required to provide.
At the same time, the movie’s ideas remain underneath the entertainment.
“We’re not making a sociology lecture,” Veron recalled telling the production. “We’re making a horror movie.”
His belief is that if those themes are embedded deeply enough within the characters and screenplay, audiences don’t need to have them explained. Give viewers the pieces, and let them reach their own conclusions.
Cuffe similarly hopes viewers first experience Godmother as a wild genre ride while still recognizing something real in its characters.
Dandy, however, identified two subjects she particularly hopes remain in the conversation once the ride is over: the fear surrounding pregnancy and the question of consent.
Those concerns ultimately connect back to the larger conflict running underneath Godmother: how much control people actually have over the lives they build, how much comes from expectations placed upon them and what happens when someone else believes they have the right to make that choice.
Godmother doesn’t appear particularly interested in handing audiences an easy answer.
It would rather give them something to argue about after the lights come up.
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