IT WAS MARCH 2020, the early days of Covid lockdown, when Joshua Hull spotted a Facebook post from Hollywood horror screenwriter and producer Jason Scott Goldberg: “Day 8 of quarantine: Alright, I’ll read your script.”
For Hull, an independent writer and director with a day job brewing beer, the developing pandemic was just the latest in a series of career jump scares that left him leery to look around the next corner. After the encouraging micro-budget debut of a zombie comedy he wrote and directed in 2010 titled Beverly Lane, his 2014 slapstick sophomore effort, The Impersonators, had failed to generate any interest from distributors—a near guarantee that it would languish in limited-screening obscurity. And then, the creative compromises he had to make due to last-minute financial constraints on his next film, 2016’s screwball slasher Chopping Block, brought him to the brink of quitting filmmaking altogether.
It seemed every place he went, from his own movie sets to the brewhouse at Indy’s terror-themed Scarlet Lane Brewing Company, where he had worked his way up from brewer to part-owner, became the backdrop for a real-life survival horror. Complications stalked him like a dark figure with a face mask and a machete. Meanwhile, Hull was helplessly social distancing in his Pendleton, Indiana, home.
So, when he saw Goldberg’s open offer to consider new projects, Hull figured he had little to lose. He emailed the producer a script he’d been working on, a fictional behind-the-scenes work titled Once Upon a Time in Morristown about the making of the iconic supernatural gore-fest The Evil Dead. Goldberg, who had just written a horror flick distributed by AMC’s studio Shudder on its streaming service, quickly replied that while he liked the idea, it was too big in scope to make.
Did Hull have anything else? Hull’s reply: “I have this screenplay about a Lovecraftian glory hole?”
That screenplay—about a man who finds himself locked in a rest stop bathroom talking to a mysterious cosmic creature through a hole in the bathroom stall—became 2022’s Glorious, a film produced by Shudder. It starred Ryan Kwanten (of True Blood fame) and the voice of Oscar winner J.K. Simmons. The movie helped establish Hull as a name to know, an emerging mad scientist in the wild and quirky realm of dark comedy and horror.
“All of a sudden, everything is happening. Filmmakers I love are reaching out and asking, ‘What else do you have?’” says Hull. “This is the life I’ve been dreaming about since sixth grade.”
Hull’s connection to the world of slashers and the supernatural stretches back further than middle school. In fact, it’s in his genes.
Hull grew up with six siblings in a tucked-away clapboard farmhouse situated on 8 acres just outside of Pendleton. His mother, Val, ran a daycare out of the home, and that provided most of the entertainment for her own children. “We didn’t have cable or gaming systems,” says Hull. “She was big on storytelling and teaching us how to use our imaginations.”
Val’s own imagination was a little twisted. She loved all things spooky, made a big to-do of Halloween, and introduced the kids to great horror films like Jaws and Halloween at an early age. But Val took it a little further: When the boys invited friends for a sleepover, they’d camp out on the property in a 12-person tent. Val would wait until 2 a.m., don a mask, and sneak around the tent, poking holes in the shelter with a pitchfork and sometimes even pulling kids from their sleeping bags into the darkness.
“I think that house had a lot of influence on her as well as the kids,” says Sophia Spiegel, Hull’s girlfriend. “The kids saw a lot of crazy stuff. Josh took me out there, now this haunted, abandoned place, and I had night terrors for weeks.” Spiegel says a woman visited her in those dreams, crawling up the side of her bed, bringing a feeling of dread. “I mentioned it to Val once, and she immediately asked, ‘Does the woman have long black hair?’ The same woman had been visiting her dreams, too.”
Val also shared urban legends from her own Hoosier childhood. One story, about a place called Screaming Road and a mysterious lurker who killed passersby with a bow and arrow, made its way into one of Hull’s school writing assignments, complete with gory illustrations of human bodies pinned to trees. “I got in trouble for that one,” says Hull. “The teacher called my mom, who stuck up for me.”
In fact, Val always supported Hull’s early writing ambitions. He wrote stacks of screenplays in middle school and high school and even recruited a circle of friends to help stage and film them, though the shoots never quite came together. Upon graduation, he flirted with going to film school but decided to stay and work in the restaurant industry. The birth of his daughter, Phoenix, in 2005 solidified the notion that his path to filmmaking would have to go through Indiana.
Becoming a father forced Hull to get serious about his work. While humping 60-hour weeks as a manager at a Texas Roadhouse, he pieced together a screenplay about an office worker at his boss’s circus-themed retirement party who has to fight off zombies, unhelpful coworkers, and even the clowns, mimes, and magicians hired for the festivities. He finished the script, titled Beverly Lane, and came up with a $1,200 budget with co-producer Jim Dougherty. They shot the whole thing in four days in Anderson and premiered the finished work in Noblesville two days before Halloween in 2010. “It was not a great movie,” Hull says. “It wasn’t even a B-movie—more like a Z-movie—but I was proud of it. More importantly, we did the thing we’d been talking about for 10 years. And we were doing it on our terms.”
Hull went bigger with his follow-up, The Impersonators, a comedy about a group of birthday party superhero impersonators hired by a town, in the vein of Seven Samurai, to fight real criminals. He teamed with comedian Josh Arnold of The Bob & Tom Show, who co-wrote and starred in the picture. The cast, shooting schedule, and budget were considerably bigger than Beverly Lane. So was the disappointment when the film failed to get any distribution offers.
Hull took the blow and pressed on, returning to horror a few years later with Chopping Block, about a group of laid-off coworkers who kidnap their former boss’s daughter only to find that she’s the Final Girl for a killer still out for blood. It’s a smartly chilling premise. Hull was also set to direct, with a promise from a local investor and producer that he would have a budget big enough to afford a Screen Actors Guild cast and other resources—only to have the funds slashed so drastically he was forced to rewrite the script to accommodate a much smaller production. Crestfallen, he went ahead with filming to avoid letting down the cast and crew of 25 people, many of them friends he felt beholden to. The shoot was a grueling marathon of long days with several 24-hour shoots.
Sometimes he regrets his decision to go ahead with the movie, given the unsatisfying final product. You can still find Chopping Block on a few streaming platforms, and you can read the Letterboxd reviews that call it both “surprisingly well-written” and “half-hearted.”
“When I watch that movie now,” Hull says, “it’s a lot of terrible memories and sadness for what it could have been.”
Dejected, Hull returned to the solitude of his home office in Pendleton. He started a screenplay adaptation of a book called M’rth: A Psychological Nightmare by Todd Rigney, a sort of Nightmare on Elm Street meets Trainspotting story about a miracle pill that transports people to the happiest moment of their lives—thereby ruining every other remaining day. Hull insisted he was going to direct it only to realize it was too big for him to bring to the screen. He reached out to Rigney and asked if the author had anything smaller in scale.
“Well,” said Rigney, “I do have this idea about a Lovecraftian glory hole. …”
Goldberg loved Hull’s screenplay for Glorious, adapted from Rigney’s original idea. And with most of the action centered on a solitary actor in one room talking to a disembodied voice, it was a project tailor-made for the days of social distancing.
Initially, Hull asked to direct, but Goldberg passed the script on to Rebekah McKendry, a more seasoned horror director, who brought in another writer to go over the script. Hull, she said, would be kept in the loop. “I knew he had a unique, fun voice that I loved,” says McKendry. “I love Joshua’s writing style and how it blends absurdist humor and situations with characters based in our own reality. They all feel down-to-earth and relatable but forced to contend with these weird situations.”
Hull didn’t protest giving up the director’s chair; writing alone was the fulfillment of a surreal dream that went beyond the movies. In 2021, he wrote a nonfiction book, Underexposed!: The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made. And in 2024, he published his first novel, Mouth, about a hungry, tooth-filled hole in the ground. “Writing didn’t take the bad taste out of my mouth from my directing experience,” says Hull. “But that was OK. I was a writer—officially. No one was coming to me to direct movies. They were coming to me to write movies.”
Hull currently has several film projects in the works including a second collaboration with McKendry, a potential TV adaptation of Mouth. He has also has a contract to direct a script he wrote in 2022 based on a novel by Michael J. Seidlinger, a home-invasion movie from the perspective of the home invader called Anybody Home? He’ll travel to Atlanta for the shoot. But he’ll almost certainly return to Pendleton as he continues his roller-coaster career in horror, pulled back by his connection to his mysterious home and the supernatural stories of his youth.
Hull released his second novel this past August, a story about Paul, a podcaster who learns that an old friend died by suicide in the ruins of his childhood home. Paul returns to the scene to interview friends and other neighbors, hoping to understand the underlying causes. Instead, he unlocks a barrage of chilling memories from his childhood—including encounters with a mysterious woman with long black hair. The title of the book is 8114, the address of the Pendleton farmhouse Hull grew up in, now empty and dilapidated on the edge of a rural strip mall.
In the book’s afterword, Hull confesses that while writing, he started having nightmares about moving back into his boyhood home in Pendleton—and not being able to escape. But if this is a dark metaphor for Hull being trapped in the town and state he’s lived in all his life, then it is only half of the story. While his growing reputation in horror films and fiction may increase the pull of Hollywood or New York (locales that Hull hasn’t ruled out as places to settle in the future), he’s acutely aware that Indiana is more than just his home—it’s the wellspring of his inspiration.
After all, a horror writer’s nightmares are also often their source material. Their demons become their muses.
