JT Mollner discusses the scream-worthy legacy of Freakling Bros. and his summer thriller ‘Strange Darling’

The art of cultivating fear has been a lifelong labor of love for JT Mollner. The Vegas-born filmmaker inherited it early, from his days of running his family-owned Halloween haunt, Freakling Bros. Horror Shows. In recent years, he’s been granted the privilege of transferring that terror to the silver screen.

Mollner’s 2024 thriller, Strange Darling, has quickly become the breakout film of the summer. The story follows two lovers, plainly named The Lady (played by Willa Fitzgerald) and The Demon (Kyle Gallner), as they navigate a twist-fueled one night stand that goes terribly wrong. Stephen King has called it “too clever to spoil.” Critics have compared it to a modern-day Tarantino flick. Yet despite all the fanfare—and in the midst of his busy Hollywood schedule—Mollner still finds the time to come back each year to his family’s Freakling Bros. haunt in Las Vegas, where it all began.

“Everybody always said, ‘As your film career grows, as you start to make features ... are you going to be able to still do this?’ I said, I better,” Mollner says. “I really don’t care how much things take off and how busy I get, because it’s so important to me.”

Freakling Bros.’ unholy trinity of haunts—Castle Vampyre, Coven of 13 and Gates of Hell, Nevada’s first and only R-rated horror experience—have become synonymous with Halloween in Vegas, a true tradition of terror ongoing for the past 31 years—well, mostly. In 2023, Freakling Bros. made the difficult decision to cancel its season after its original site fell through. But when it returns on October 4 at its new Desert Breeze Park location, Mollner’s “family of freaks” will roam the Earth again.

I’m really excited to see Freakling Bros. return. I know it was disappointing having to cancel last year.

We’re really happy, too. It was the first time in 30 years, except for COVID and since my dad started the company, that it hasn’t opened. We were at IKEA, which was our best location ... and they started building an Ashley Furniture on that plot of land, so they told us we had to leave. We did find other spots, but we didn’t find anything in time to get permitted. Being at Desert Breeze Park is really going to be great. We like the new location a lot. We think it’s going to be a great season. It’s been a little tough for the company because we were closed and there was no revenue. So we’re deeply in debt, but we got some investors and we’re able to get back open, and hopefully one good season will get us back on track.

It’s commendable you’re still staying true to your family’s tradition. Why is the thrill of the haunt still so exciting to you?

I haven’t lived in Las Vegas full-time for a long time, but I’ve come back here every year for at least three months. It’s become so much more than a business or a job. My dad started scaring people at our home before I was born, back in 1976. I trick or treated twice, the rest of my childhood was always watching my dad scare people. When I was old enough, I would be part of it. He was the hunchback, I was the mini-hunchback. When he was Frankenstein, I was Igor. It’s so magical to me. It’s like people who grow up at Disneyland or people have memories of Christmas during the holidays. For me, it was green lights and fog machines and makeup. That’s how we celebrated Halloween—hearing people scream.

When I had to shoot Strange Darling in 2022, I trained somebody to take over the managerial operations of the [Freakling Bros.] show for me. But I still showed up for training the cast. I still showed up halfway through the season. I really wanted to get back [to Vegas] because I knew this was a crucial season. If we can’t open, then the company might die, because two years being closed would be dangerous financially for us. I told everybody in LA, listen, I’m gonna come back a few times to do interviews and to do meetings with studios ... but I need to go out to Vegas and make sure we get back open.

I haven’t seen a movie like Strange Darling in a long time. It was refreshing to feel like a participant in the plot, as out of loop as the characters. Was that intentional?

That was always the goal with this: for it to be sort of a ride, for you to be in it with them, and discovering things with them the entire time, and to feel like you’re in there. From the moment I was writing the script to then conceiving all the shots and everything with my [director of photography] ... there was a very clear idea of the stress level, the passion and the emotions that were going to be felt by these characters during the movie.

There’s nothing I love more than filmmaking than my family. It’s emotional for me. When you’re making a movie, it’s life or death. Everybody was committed to this—the cinematographer, the actors, the production designer. We wanted to go as hard as we could on every le

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