Festivals - Frighfest 2025 : Self-Help: Erik Bloomquist on Blending Horror, Dark Comedy, and Family Trauma

By Mulder, London, 14 august 2025

Premiering at the 2025 Chattanooga Film Festival, Self-Help marks a bold new step for writer-director Erik Bloomquist, who trades the high body counts of his previous slashers for a darker, more psychological exploration of family wounds, manipulation, and the fine line between healing and harm. Following Olivia (Landry Bender), a college student reluctantly attending a self-help retreat with her estranged mother Rebecca (Amy Hargreaves), the film plunges into an unsettling world led by the enigmatic Curtis Clark (Jake Weber), where therapy, control, and danger intertwine. Blending horror, dark comedy, and intimate family drama, Self-Help challenges viewers to question morality, trust, and the true cost of transformation, cementing Erik Bloomquist as one of the most versatile and intriguing voices in independent genre cinema.

Q: The opening childhood incident between Olivia and Rebecca sets the emotional foundation for the entire story. How did you approach staging and shooting that moment to immediately establish their fractured relationship ?

Erik Bloomquist: Oh, the beginning. I mean, we wanted it to be from a child's point of view. So, we wanted it to feel very immersive and dreamy. And a lot of the faces are not in that, partially because she can't see them and partially because the memory is obscuring them. So, there's only, in that opening, one face that you see—still obscured, but one real face that is kind of seared into her memory.

Q: Jake Weber’s portrayal of Curtis keeps viewers guessing about whether he’s a dangerous cult leader or a legitimate guide. What specific direction or conversations did you have with him to maintain that ambiguity ?

Erik Bloomquist: We wanted him to feel like a norm. He has a lot of gravitas and he naturally brings that, but to really feel like a normal guy in some ways—that he's not trying to play a cult leader. He's saying, "I'm not." He's trying to be there. There are scenes where he's just, "I'm just a guy. I'm just like you." And I think that that's really important because it's both disarming and also very alarming—because there’s something at odds with that. And so just being able to find normal human moments, or seemingly human moments, I think makes him scarier but also makes it more confusing for the people there.

Q: Madison Lintz plays Sophie with a mix of warmth and unease. How did you decide to cast her, and what was your process in shaping that layered performance together ?

Erik Bloomquist: Landry was already involved in the movie, and so finding somebody to complement that energy but also contrast in an interesting way—and I was familiar with her work and she's great—and we met and talked, and she was so down to work in this way and really gravitated to the script and the character and understood it. I've been doing this for a while, and it's having a hunch with pairings and just sensing that energies will match—and they certainly did. They were great together and really, really good friends.

Q: This film moves away from the high body counts of She Came from the Woods and Founder’s Day toward something more psychological. What motivated that shift in storytelling focus ?

Erik Bloomquist: We love making movies like She Came from the Woods and Founder’s Day. We were just interested to do—and there will be more—that are broader, more huge cast ensemble movies. But we were just interested in doing something different this time. Not making the story feel small—it's still a very expansive world—but having fewer people and focusing on one or two relationships was really interesting to us. And mining horror in different ways, because while there are fewer bodies, the way people speak to each other, the mistakes people have made, the self-hatred that people have—those all manifest as acts of violence in this movie as well. And there's just something off and scary, and a real throughline of dread and suspense that I hope is somewhat omnipresent in this movie.

Q: The retreat’s rituals and philosophy feel eerily authentic. Did you draw on specific research or real-life examples from self-help movements or cults when building this world ?

Erik Bloomquist: We watched a lot of cult documentaries and cult movies—not to steal from, but just to be aware of the world and how people might behave in it.

Q: Many scenes switch suddenly from disturbing to absurd, creating tonal whiplash. Are those moments meticulously planned in the script, or do they evolve during rehearsals and shooting ?

Erik Bloomquist: It's both. We wanted there to be these absurd moments because I think that's natural and I think that would happen. There are moments that are really scary to someone while hilarious to somebody else, because it's about your point of view and where you are, which feeds into themes of self-help. I alluded to earlier that there is more comedy at the ends of some takes where people were improvising a little bit. That is great in and of itself, but we had to calibrate. The out-of-the-blue scare or the out-of-the-blue laugh is definitely something—laugh in the sense that, "Oh, that's really dark," and it's coming from the same place. It's coming from this place of discomfort. It's just—am I laughing or am I screaming? I'm cringing either way.

Q: The film makes a strong statement that parents owe their children everything, but children owe their parents nothing. Was this theme part of your vision from the very start, or did it grow naturally during the writing process ?

Erik Bloomquist: I think it was just asking a lot of questions about the parent-child relationship, because in some ways Olivia has been taking care of her mom more than her mom has been taking care of her. But Olivia wants to be taken care of, and there's that hope that the inner child can be healed. I think in some ways Mom wants to do that too, but doesn't know the path. And so there's this steadfast hope that that can happen. I think it's less that nobody owes the other anything—it's a matter of what that negotiation looks like, and when is it time to call it quits, and what do you owe somebody?

Q: The relationship between Landry Bender and Amy Hargreaves feels incredibly authentic. How did you work with them to build that believable tension and emotional history ?

Erik Bloomquist: Landry and Amy are great. We all had dinner and talked about the characters and the histories and just got to know each other. I think so much of it is just being comfortable with each other as people and performers, and having a shared idea about where these people came from and building that trust. They're both great actors, so a lot of that stuff just comes in the work. We shared what we think the timeline is like and what the key moments were. So when we got there together, we were speaking a similar language. If I gave a note, they both understood what it meant in that context—because they're both great actors.

Q: Now that Self-Help has premiered, has there been a particular audience or critical reaction that surprised you or made you see the film in a new light ?

Erik Bloomquist: It's interesting—at our premiere, there were laughs that we got that we weren't expecting, which was cool, and then there were moments where we were expecting a laugh and we didn’t. That's not a bad thing, because there were moments of absurdity where we've seen it in the edit and we laugh because it's so absurd, and we wonder what people are going to do—and then there's nothing. But then we came to realize, both in the moment and in talking to people in the lobby after, that they were just really uncomfortable. They just didn't know what to do with whatever they were feeling. That’ll switch between audiences, as it always does. Laughter is a contagious thing—if somebody laughs, that might put somebody else in that frame of mind; if nobody does, everyone might feel differently. So I'll be interested to see how it plays at Frightfest—a crowd that I love so much, and a venue I love so much, and a group that's just the best. It's always surprising. It's heartening when you get what you want, but it can also be cool when you don't get what you expect.

Q: How did you find those great masks for this movie ?

Erik Bloomquist: We spent a lot of time researching and finding different pairings. We looked at a lot of versions of all of these different masks, and it's just a taste thing—what individual masks look good, what have the texture and the color, and then ultimately, are they going to look good together? Thanks for saying that, because we spent a lot of time on it, and on what’s going to reflect the character.

Erik Bloomquist is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and actor whose work has steadily built him a reputation as one of the most versatile voices in contemporary independent cinema. Known for seamlessly shifting between genres, he has tackled everything from the psychological tension of his debut Long Lost to the retro vampire thrills of Ten Minutes to Midnight, the haunted hotel mystery Night at the Eagle Inn, the holiday drama Christmas on the Carousel, and the nostalgic slasher energy of She Came from the Woods and Founder’s Day. Often collaborating with his brother Carson Bloomquist, he crafts stories that balance genre entertainment with deeper emotional and thematic undercurrents. In Self-Help, his latest feature, he turns his lens to the world of cult-like self-actualization retreats, blending horror, dark humor, and family drama into a provocative examination of trauma, manipulation, and the fragile bonds between parents and children.

Synopsis:
A young woman infiltrates a dangerous self-help community after her mother becomes involved with its mysterious leader.

Self-Help
Directed by Erik Bloomquist
Produced by Carson Bloomquist, Erik Bloomquist
Written by Erik Bloomquist, Carson Bloomquist
Starring Landry Bender, Jake Weber, Madison Lintz, Amy Hargreaves, Erik Bloomquist, Carol Cadby, Blaque Fowler, Adam Weppler, Marlee Eaton, Nikolay Moss, James Nash, Ira Carmichael, Annette Saunders
Music by Haim Mazar
Cinematography: Mike Magilnick
Edited by Carson Bloomquist, Erik Bloomquist
Production companies: Mainframe Pictures
Distributed by WTFFilms
Release date: TBD
Running time: 85 minutes