When I first moved to California, I started to notice this dissonance between an unabashedly loud queer acceptance across Los Angeles and a quieter homophobia lingering within the more affluent residential neighborhoods surrounding the city. Witnessing spaces that weren’t outwardly hostile towards queerness but quietly repressive taught me how politeness can be used as a weapon by those with power, and how I and so many others have learned to compartmentalize our identities to survive. This film feels important to me because it confronts a kind of trauma that thrives on being ignored.

I first began writing Dana Never Had A Brother (DNHAB) in the fall of 2023 to help unearth some of my own repressed feelings surrounding suburban dysphoria, the social line between middle and upper class, and growing up queer in spaces systematically built to suppress queerness. That first draft poured out of me in a way that no script has before - it helped me confront parts of myself and the city I live in that I don't think I would have otherwise.

The films’ themes - queer erasure, generational trauma, conditional acceptance, and the quiet violence of conformity - have only become more timely the longer the script has existed. We live in a period where visibility is rapidly increasing, but so is pushback.

In particular, Dana Never Had a Brother explores how trauma and queerness intersect with class and silence - Who gets to be seen? Who gets to forget? And who carries the cost of everyone else’s denial?

I want to invite a wider audience to examine the horror not just around us and on our phones, but within the spaces we call home. As we wrestle with our own understandings of belonging, safety, and identity, this story feels more urgent than ever.

Dana Never Had a Brother opens on a childhood flashback to a terrifying supernatural incident taking place at a child’s sleepover.

Its narrative goal from there on was to mirror the cycle of unacknowledged trauma through our leading couple, Olive and Dana. The story begins buried under what first appears to be a grounded queer romantic dramedy surrounding their firt time visit to Dana’s idyllic California hometown. As they descend deeper into the night, Olive meets Taylor, an old acquaintance of Dana’s who casually asks about Dana’s brother Austin, someone she has never heard of.

Olive’s tense interactions with the environment and omitted parts of Dana’s past begin to warp the story’s tone towards something darker. Confrontation between the two changes from romantic tension to emotional horror, as intimacy is repeatedly barred by secrecy.

As Dana’s suppressed past inevitably leaks into her and Olive’s present, Olive, now treading between what she knows and what she's too afraid to ask, finds herself trapped in the childhood home of an increasingly unfamiliar partner and the crumbling foundations of her belief that Dana never had a brother.

The story ends as a tragedy, revealing that the real horror was not a hidden brother, but what repression and denial can fester into over time. Dana’s refusal to acknowledge her family’s trauma results in herself falling victim to is punishment, and curses Olive to an inherited ife of isolation.

This is where WE NEED YOU!

With a mix of personal outreach and blind hope for interest from internet strangers, we are hoping to raise $10,000 total to complete our budget. The more we raise, the more we can bring to the screen and to YOU (via incentives~~)

All the funds will go towards physical production and post-production, including but not limited to: equipment, locations, permits, cast and crew, VFX, festival submissions, food and transportation.

We are currently in the midst of pre-production- building our core crew, finding our dream cast, and everything else in between that will prep us to shoot over the course of three to four days in Los Angeles at the end of September.

If this story sounds like something you want to see and not just read, there are a bunch of ways you can help us get it made!

#1 DONATING | Donating is the fastest method to help us make this film a reality. 

Anything, and I mean ANYTHING, helps. From $15 (aka a classic California coffee + croissant order) to $1000, whatever you can provide will help us secure the dream cast/crew/locations/VFX/and more.

#2 SHARE OUR STORY | Follow and share our Seed & Spark campaign to help us get in front of more eyes and ears who may be willing to donate as well!

#3 FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM + TIKTOK | Our IG is @dananeverhadabrother, our TT is @dnhabfilm. 

(pssst... you can also find our info in the social media tab above) 

Leaning into my affinity for genre-bending content, I want to open this story as a relationship-driven dramedy that subtly morphs into an atmospheric horror film.

Visually, I found myself constantly returning to images from surrealist photographer Summer Wagner’s 2022 photo collections throughout this projects' development. The composition/color of these photos captured the quietly unsettling features of suburbia in a way that felt grounded, familiar, and surreal all at once. Additionally, films like Donnie Darko, I Saw the TV Glow, and The Fallout rang out to me for their unique visual explorations of grief and suppressed identity among suburban spaces. 

My goal, both visually and narratively, is to create something that feels akin to a liminal, alternate version of the present day. The film will feature washed out natural colors alongside an analog film look to evoke a hazy, dissonant energy. I want to open the story with a rigid, observational tone, reflecting repression through visual control — symmetrical compositions, long takes, and stillness — mirroring Dana’s emotional withholding and Olive’s repeated attempts at maintaining composure.

However, as the social and physical environments begin to isolate Olive, the frame becomes less predictable and more emotional. Scenes begin to slip into Olive, Dana, and Taylor’s psychological state through subtle changes in lighting, sound design, and framing.

We’re emphasizing horror as emotional rather than tangible — focusing not on the monster’s form, but on the way others change when it appears. The audience will never see Austin’s full face, allowing viewers to project their own fears onto him through their reactions to those who witness him — jagged breaths, frozen postures, bloodshot eyes — allowing the monstrous to live in absence rather than spectacle.

[Jumping up and down like a kid in a candy store writing this part]

I have joined the forces of two of the most talented, experienced producing teams I get to call my close friends as well as my long-time collaborators for this project: 

Sworn Friend Studios Carolyn Knapp + Giovanna Trujillo 

and 

Odd One Out Films Maria Paula Quesada and Gabby Fiszman <3

An all-female producing team crafted from my dreams, our large variety of experience in the narrative, music video, and commercial film space has prepared us to make this story as big, bold, and memorable as we can. We are so excited to work together in this capacity and appreciate any and all contributions that are made towards getting DNHAB to the finish line.

We are also SO lucky to be joined by our Executive Producers

Eduardo Sanchez (co-director of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT)

and Jed Shepherd (writer of HOST)

through our partnership with Decentralized Pictures.

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THANK YOU for your time and interest in our story, it's already so surreal to be at this step in the process - I hope we have made you just as excited and passionate as we are to get this project to the finish line! Any way you can support us in the next 30 days, whether it be financially or by sharing our campaign/social media with anyone you know (especially the brother you may or may not have) is immensely appreciated on our end.

In an effort to make it even MORE worth it, we have incentives for different levels of donation, from a BTS look at how we pull off some of the crazier scenes that go down, (interested in how a child can be safely thrown down a flight of stairs? Yeah, me too.) to a public shout out on our social media.

Follow us on IG/TikTok @dananeverhadabrother / @dnhabfilm for updates as we start this crazy journey towards production at the end of September (EEEE!) and beyond.