Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dustin Mancinelli Talk HONEY BUNCH, Marriage & Psychological Horror
- Feb 25
- 7 min read
By Shannon McGrew
In HONEY BUNCH, the sophomore film from directors Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dustin Mancinelli, Diana (Grace Glowicki) wakes from a coma with fragmented memories and, with her husband, seeks experimental treatments at a remote facility.
When the procedures intensify, their marriage is put to the test as Diana’s memories creep back in through haunting visions, leading her to begin to question her husband’s true motives. She soon must confront the possibility that her recovery might come at a far greater cost than she imagined.
For the release of HONEY BUNCH, Creepy Kingdom’s Shannon McGrew spoke with writer/directors Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dustin Mancinelli. During their conversation, they chatted about everything from the film’s deeply personal origins and exploration of love and devotion to collaborating with Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, crafting its experimental score, and the challenges of bringing this haunting psychological horror to life.
Thank you both for taking the time to speak with me. I was really struck by the emotional complexity of these characters and the moral gray areas they navigate. Where did the idea for HONEY BUNCH begin, and how did it evolve from there?
Dustin Mancinelli: It was born out of a couple of things. We were having long conversations about our expectations of love.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: We came up with the idea right at the beginning of our own relationship.
Dustin Mancinelli: It’s a response to this kind of popular idea in pop culture of the perfect one, true love, and soulmates, and us thinking that the whole concept was a myth.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: It sets you up for failure.
Dustin Mancinelli: We were really drawn to asking ourselves the question of what devotion is in a relationship. At the same time we were having these conversations, I had a little bit of a health scare, and I ended up in the hospital. We were like, "Oh, this is a really serious topic that's really affecting us." Then Madeleine joked and asked me if she could taxidermize me when I died, and I said no, that’s so disturbing [Laughs]. And she was like, can I make a leather jacket out of your skin? And I was like, oh God no [Laughs]. So we realized that this was a really interesting, fun topic to explore. That’s where the idea germinated from.
Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie deliver such layered performances. What drew you to them for these roles, and how did directing a real-life couple shape the emotional authenticity of the film?
Dustin Mancinelli: We just really love Grace and Ben. We’ve been following their work forever.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: We wrote the parts for them, and even before we wrote the actual script, we outlined the film and pitched it to them like, “Hey, this is what we’re working on, would you be in it?” And they said, absolutely. While writing the script, we sent them pages, had conversations about different topics and their opinions, and shaped the characters around people they’d be interested in playing. All of the characters have little bits of all of us in them.
Dustin Mancinelli: We joke that I’m more Diana, and Madeleine is actually Homer. That’s who we were writing at its heart. You can really see the magic of working with a real couple. There are looks that they’re giving each other in the film, and that’s Ben looking at Grace with love and vice versa. There’s a certain special quality that it possesses that was really interesting to us.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: It also bred a camaraderie between the four of us on set. They know what it’s like to be filmmakers, and we know what it’s like. It was a nice feeling knowing that they had our backs.
The music is such a powerful presence throughout the film. What was the process like in developing the film’s score?
Dustin Mancinelli: It was really complicated because the film really transforms at the midpoint and becomes a completely different movie. We knew we were playing with genre; the film was set in the ‘70s, and our visual aesthetic is really inspired by the camera work of the time. We knew we wanted the score to have a similar quality. It was very melodic, and we were trying to find themes early on that really communicated the story and the journey the characters were on. We worked closely with our composer, Andrea Boccadoro, to find the movie's sound through the characters.
It’s so funny how late things can happen because we really thought we knew the sound of the movie until we went to the recording session in England, and this amazing flautist was there, and he was so emotionally provocative in the way he performed.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: I’d say at that point we had about half of the music written.
Dustin Mancinelli: We were like, we need this sound. It was so amazing to discover that so late in the process. The actual composition’s there, the arrangement is there, but now you’re really creatively selecting what bars are being played by which instruments, but those sounds really become the touchstone of the feeling of what resonates with you as an audience when you’re watching the film. There was just something both melancholic and tragic, yet also very romantic.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: The way he played the flute as well, you notice how the musician really brings themselves to it, and the way he played the flute was quite raw, which a lot of flute players don’t have.
Dustin Mancinelli: We also were really inspired by experimental techniques. Extended techniques are when you play instruments in ways you’re not supposed to, to deliberately produce a new sound. In the sequence where she’s walking into the pool, we knew we wanted a sound that felt primal. Something that conjures the feeling of the beginning of time, and something terrifying rising from the earth.
We wanted to do this with a flute, so we had him say and shout things and experiment. He felt like we were really pushing the experimental quality of this with him, and he was like, “I’ve never played the flute like this” [Laughs]. But that’s the sound you’re hearing. It’s so interesting to see how those sounds can be evoked from the exact same instrument that we hear a gorgeous love song from.
Without getting into spoilers, what were some of the biggest challenges you encountered during production?
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: The biggest challenge was a big spoiler, so we can’t talk about that one [Laughs].
Dustin Mancinelli: Our first feature, Violation, starred Madeleine and a couple of friends of ours. We were shooting in the mountains with a crew of like 10 people usaling all natural light. It was very flexible, we could change the schedule whenever we wanted. With this, Ben and Grace were there all the time, which was amazing. Having two actors that you know are always there makes it very easy. But we were building a schedule around Kate Dickie and Jason Isaacs coming and going at very specific times. That became very stressful to know she’s coming in here, he’s coming in here, we have to shoot these sequences…
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: …certain locations that we could only use for very small windows.
Dustin Mancinelli: It’s so silly, I thought it was the right decision to shoot chronologically. As a filmmaker, you always think that’s the best way to do something. It just got harder, and harder, and harder, and harder. By the time we got to the end sequence of the movie, it was so hard. We were all so exhausted. Luckily, we did so much preparation in advance, working with Adam Crosby, our cinematographer, David Mariachi, our storyboard artist, and Tenille Shockey, our amazing special effects concept creator. Together, we were able to navigate those challenges pretty effortlessly because we had done all that hard work. We could pivot really quickly if something went wrong.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: It was a bit of a puzzle of a film as well, which I would say was quite difficult keeping the whole puzzle of it in our minds all the time. We had all this paperwork, these documents, these maps that linked, and pictures of different characters at different times. Sometimes it just felt so overwhelming.
Another huge challenge was the water scenes. Although it was stormy, which looked amazing, and that’s how we wrote and conceived it, we fortuitously got this big storm on the first day. It’s really hard for actors to act in cold water all day long.
Dustin Mancinelli: It always takes you 10 times longer than you imagine. We were supposed to film the opening and the end of the movie in one day, but it became clear to us that that would never happen.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: You can’t really have marks in the water either because the water’s just pulling you all over the place.
Dustin Mancinelli: It ended up taking us three days to do that.
How do you hope HONEY BUNCH challenges or resonates with viewers after the credits roll?
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: I hope it means something to them. That they have an opinion of what the journey meant personally. That’s the best thing.
Dustin Mancinelli: We have an idea of what the movie means to us, but if everyone adopted that idea, that wouldn’t be that interesting. The best kind of films are the ones that challenge your own worldview and make you think a little bit more deeply about who you are as a person and the way you relate to other people in your environment. If it makes you think a bit more deeply about your relationship or connects with you, that’s all we could ever hope for.
HONEY BUNCH is now available to stream on Shudder.
