SPOOKABLE
Los Angeles, California | Series
Horror, LGBTQ
What do you get when you cross creature-of-the-week with a duo of trans BFFs… who might be falling in love? SPOOKABLE the TV series follows the adventures of Tahmina and Sean, whose woodsy getaway takes a turn for the bizarre as they become part of a supernatural world.
SPOOKABLE
Los Angeles, California | Series
Horror, LGBTQ
3 Campaigns | California, United States
Green Light
This campaign raised $30,052 for production. Follow the filmmaker to receive future updates on this project.
262 supporters | followers
Enter the amount you would like to pledge
What do you get when you cross creature-of-the-week with a duo of trans BFFs… who might be falling in love? SPOOKABLE the TV series follows the adventures of Tahmina and Sean, whose woodsy getaway takes a turn for the bizarre as they become part of a supernatural world.
About The Project
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
WHAT IS SPOOKABLE?
SPOOKABLE is a TV pilot that will serve as a proof-of-concept for a network television show!
SPOOKABLE tells the story of two transgender best friends, Sean (Marval A Rex) and Tahmina (Alexandra Grey of Empire), whose vacation in the woods turns into a Wonderland-esque journey into a supernatural world.
Sean is a jockish and arrogant mid-20’s white trans man who, through his fearless bravado and questionable intelligence, gets lost in the woods and accidentally turns into a werewolf. Tahmina, a gorgeous and book-smart Black trans woman with unrequited love for Sean, is compelled to save her friend and therefore chooses to face the very evil that took him. Together they become fighters of otherworldly forces while their lives, and relationship, change forever.
The series is a campy horror-comedy-romance. It follows a creature-of-the-week format similar to “Supernatural” and “Goosebumps,” subverting monster tropes within a queer-centric universe. Each monster introduced episodically is connected to the main villain of season one, the Fallen Angels, who must capture Tahmina in order to take over the world. Throughout the series the two lead characters are pushed and pulled by the ties of their friendship as it turns to romance, and the life-or-death, good-vs-evil choices they must now make.
TRANSGENDER || TRANSGENRE
Which would you rather see:
A) a trans coming out story?
or B) two trans people fighting supernatural evil with a bunch of sex and fart jokes that’ll make you laugh until you cry?
We’re not knocking trans stories as they’ve historically been told. But SPOOKABLE is taking a new direction, one that bends genre and provides a new definition for what trans film can be: a hard-R horror comedy that exists as some perverted trans lovechild of “Scary Movie,” “American Horror Story,”and “Lovecraft Country.”
As trans media representation continues to expand and diversify, we feel that it's high time for a series that is beholden to tropes of horror comedy while also being distincitively queer; SPOOKABLE is exactly that. Our trans characters are heroes, villains, renegades and rebels. We're excited to branch out of traditional trans narratives and into a new dimension of trans cinema.
The Nitty Gritty
This funding campaign is specifically for the pilot episode of SPOOKABLE, which we plan shoot in the fall of this year! (Check our wishlist to see how the specific funding shakes out.) The episode will be about 30 minutes. We'll then use the pilot episode to pitch the rest of the series. We have some very exciting people & production companies interested in us, and while we can't name names quiiiite yet, we're feelin' groovy.
But Why This? Why Now?
We consider this endeavor a form of creative activism. When trans people reclaim the freedom to tell our own stories we're able to create realities and worlds that reflect our lived experiences. To quote the brilliant Zackary Drucker, "We've come such a long way... in representing the lived experiences of trans and nonbinary people in film and television, and yet we have such a long way to go. These characters are unprecedented, the script is hilarious and original... it's just beyond what cis Hollywood and the status quo has in their public imagination."
Aw shucks, we think so too Zackary!
Ambitious Pragmatism
This series is ambitious and boundary-breaking, if we do say so ourselves. But filming the pilot will be grounded in the realities of our time. Our locations are budget friendly: the action centers on a single camp, the surrounding woods, and a small town. The special effects will have a gritty three-dimensional feel, much like Jim Henson’s Creature Shop films, with light digital enhancement. The pilot only requires three actors, and we can shoot with a small, dedicated crew.
We're also being realistic about COVID, and we've got a safety plan in place to make sure that everyone on our cast & crew is safe. We will be hiring a Covid Compliance Officer to moniter our health and safety standards. All standard proticols will be in place, including mask-wearing, mandatory temperature-taking, crew "pods," individually packaged meals and crafty, and COVID testing as directed by SAG rules and regulations. Because of our small cast & crew size, we're limiting exposure. Most of the shoot will consist of exteriors as well, and as we know, transmission rates are much lower in the great outdoors!
We hope you'll join us in making our irreverent, wolfy dreams come true. Your support will go towards paying the queer and trans cast & crew, raising the production value of this episode, and creating a pilot that we can all be proud of and that we will use to pitch the rest of the series.
For some of our visual and creative inspiration, see below.
Trust us, this is going to be good.
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Talent
Costs $7,000
Our hardworking and inspired actors, who will bring these nuanced trans characters to life.
Stunt Coordinator
Costs $1,500
We have some high octane action sequences and we need to ensure they look good & our actors are safe
Grip & Electric Package
Costs $3,000
A comprehensive G&E package to ensure a cinematic aesthetic.
Camera Package
Costs $3,000
Renting a high-quality camera package so we can do this story justice.
Cash Pledge
Costs $0
Crew
Costs $10,000
A diverse, queer-centric crew to help tell this story with grace professionalism.
Special Effects Makeup
Costs $1,500
Transforming our talent into frighteningly funny werewolves.
Locations
Costs $4,000
A woodsy camp where we can indulge in the cinematic spookyness.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Marval A Rex (Writer & Lead Actor)
marvalarex.com
Marval A Rex is a transgender artist, actor and cultural producer. Rex has directed, produced and performed in genre-bending live artworks and films since 2015. His first film "Man, and Me" toured internationally in 2018. In his first two years in Los Angeles, he curated seven performance series, including the 2022 Queer Biennial. In 2020, Rex hosted a solo art show in Los Angeles at LAST Projects Space. Rex has received generous support from the University of Southern California, Prosjektskolen in Oslo, School of Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia University, & the Nat’l Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Arts (NCECA). He works and lives in LA.
Zackary Drucker (Executive Producer)
zackarydrucker.com
Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent. She recently directed The Lady and the Dale on HBO Max.
Alexandra Grey (Lead Actress)
IMDB
Alexandra Jordan Grey is an American actress and musician, best known for her role as Melody Barnes on the Fox television series Empire. She had recurring roles on Amazon's Transparent and portrayed Denise Lockwood on the NBC TV medical drama Chicago Med. Grey has also landed guest roles on Code Black, How to Get Away with Murder, Drunk History and the period television drama series The Alienist.
Jonathan Andre Culliton (Writer & Director)
Jonathan Andre Culliton a Boston-born, Los Angeles-based trans filmmaker and comedy writer. A graduate of the New York Film Academy, Culliton is the creator of “Bombshell,” a collaboration between Heath&Henshaw and Mattioli Productions, streaming on Amazon. His work can also be found on Fearless, GayBingeTV, TLAVideo, HappiTV, and ReelWomen Network. Culliton has produced such projects as Michael Yip’s award-winning musical short “The Gay Mafia” and Sarah Taborga’s ball culture doc “Dear Queer Dancer.” He has a successful freelance career as a 1st Assistant Director and has recently worked on music videos for such artists as Fletcher and NOTD.
Current Team
Incentives
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
WHAT IS SPOOKABLE?
SPOOKABLE is a TV pilot that will serve as a proof-of-concept for a network television show!
SPOOKABLE tells the story of two transgender best friends, Sean (Marval A Rex) and Tahmina (Alexandra Grey of Empire), whose vacation in the woods turns into a Wonderland-esque journey into a supernatural world.
Sean is a jockish and arrogant mid-20’s white trans man who, through his fearless bravado and questionable intelligence, gets lost in the woods and accidentally turns into a werewolf. Tahmina, a gorgeous and book-smart Black trans woman with unrequited love for Sean, is compelled to save her friend and therefore chooses to face the very evil that took him. Together they become fighters of otherworldly forces while their lives, and relationship, change forever.
The series is a campy horror-comedy-romance. It follows a creature-of-the-week format similar to “Supernatural” and “Goosebumps,” subverting monster tropes within a queer-centric universe. Each monster introduced episodically is connected to the main villain of season one, the Fallen Angels, who must capture Tahmina in order to take over the world. Throughout the series the two lead characters are pushed and pulled by the ties of their friendship as it turns to romance, and the life-or-death, good-vs-evil choices they must now make.
TRANSGENDER || TRANSGENRE
Which would you rather see:
A) a trans coming out story?
or B) two trans people fighting supernatural evil with a bunch of sex and fart jokes that’ll make you laugh until you cry?
We’re not knocking trans stories as they’ve historically been told. But SPOOKABLE is taking a new direction, one that bends genre and provides a new definition for what trans film can be: a hard-R horror comedy that exists as some perverted trans lovechild of “Scary Movie,” “American Horror Story,”and “Lovecraft Country.”
As trans media representation continues to expand and diversify, we feel that it's high time for a series that is beholden to tropes of horror comedy while also being distincitively queer; SPOOKABLE is exactly that. Our trans characters are heroes, villains, renegades and rebels. We're excited to branch out of traditional trans narratives and into a new dimension of trans cinema.
The Nitty Gritty
This funding campaign is specifically for the pilot episode of SPOOKABLE, which we plan shoot in the fall of this year! (Check our wishlist to see how the specific funding shakes out.) The episode will be about 30 minutes. We'll then use the pilot episode to pitch the rest of the series. We have some very exciting people & production companies interested in us, and while we can't name names quiiiite yet, we're feelin' groovy.
But Why This? Why Now?
We consider this endeavor a form of creative activism. When trans people reclaim the freedom to tell our own stories we're able to create realities and worlds that reflect our lived experiences. To quote the brilliant Zackary Drucker, "We've come such a long way... in representing the lived experiences of trans and nonbinary people in film and television, and yet we have such a long way to go. These characters are unprecedented, the script is hilarious and original... it's just beyond what cis Hollywood and the status quo has in their public imagination."
Aw shucks, we think so too Zackary!
Ambitious Pragmatism
This series is ambitious and boundary-breaking, if we do say so ourselves. But filming the pilot will be grounded in the realities of our time. Our locations are budget friendly: the action centers on a single camp, the surrounding woods, and a small town. The special effects will have a gritty three-dimensional feel, much like Jim Henson’s Creature Shop films, with light digital enhancement. The pilot only requires three actors, and we can shoot with a small, dedicated crew.
We're also being realistic about COVID, and we've got a safety plan in place to make sure that everyone on our cast & crew is safe. We will be hiring a Covid Compliance Officer to moniter our health and safety standards. All standard proticols will be in place, including mask-wearing, mandatory temperature-taking, crew "pods," individually packaged meals and crafty, and COVID testing as directed by SAG rules and regulations. Because of our small cast & crew size, we're limiting exposure. Most of the shoot will consist of exteriors as well, and as we know, transmission rates are much lower in the great outdoors!
We hope you'll join us in making our irreverent, wolfy dreams come true. Your support will go towards paying the queer and trans cast & crew, raising the production value of this episode, and creating a pilot that we can all be proud of and that we will use to pitch the rest of the series.
For some of our visual and creative inspiration, see below.
Trust us, this is going to be good.
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Talent
Costs $7,000
Our hardworking and inspired actors, who will bring these nuanced trans characters to life.
Stunt Coordinator
Costs $1,500
We have some high octane action sequences and we need to ensure they look good & our actors are safe
Grip & Electric Package
Costs $3,000
A comprehensive G&E package to ensure a cinematic aesthetic.
Camera Package
Costs $3,000
Renting a high-quality camera package so we can do this story justice.
Cash Pledge
Costs $0
Crew
Costs $10,000
A diverse, queer-centric crew to help tell this story with grace professionalism.
Special Effects Makeup
Costs $1,500
Transforming our talent into frighteningly funny werewolves.
Locations
Costs $4,000
A woodsy camp where we can indulge in the cinematic spookyness.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Marval A Rex (Writer & Lead Actor)
marvalarex.com
Marval A Rex is a transgender artist, actor and cultural producer. Rex has directed, produced and performed in genre-bending live artworks and films since 2015. His first film "Man, and Me" toured internationally in 2018. In his first two years in Los Angeles, he curated seven performance series, including the 2022 Queer Biennial. In 2020, Rex hosted a solo art show in Los Angeles at LAST Projects Space. Rex has received generous support from the University of Southern California, Prosjektskolen in Oslo, School of Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia University, & the Nat’l Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Arts (NCECA). He works and lives in LA.
Zackary Drucker (Executive Producer)
zackarydrucker.com
Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent. She recently directed The Lady and the Dale on HBO Max.
Alexandra Grey (Lead Actress)
IMDB
Alexandra Jordan Grey is an American actress and musician, best known for her role as Melody Barnes on the Fox television series Empire. She had recurring roles on Amazon's Transparent and portrayed Denise Lockwood on the NBC TV medical drama Chicago Med. Grey has also landed guest roles on Code Black, How to Get Away with Murder, Drunk History and the period television drama series The Alienist.
Jonathan Andre Culliton (Writer & Director)
Jonathan Andre Culliton a Boston-born, Los Angeles-based trans filmmaker and comedy writer. A graduate of the New York Film Academy, Culliton is the creator of “Bombshell,” a collaboration between Heath&Henshaw and Mattioli Productions, streaming on Amazon. His work can also be found on Fearless, GayBingeTV, TLAVideo, HappiTV, and ReelWomen Network. Culliton has produced such projects as Michael Yip’s award-winning musical short “The Gay Mafia” and Sarah Taborga’s ball culture doc “Dear Queer Dancer.” He has a successful freelance career as a 1st Assistant Director and has recently worked on music videos for such artists as Fletcher and NOTD.