“It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” duo Nick Toti and Rachel Kempf, who made waves by vowing to never release their word-of-mouth hit horror film onto streaming, VOD or physical media, are back with their newest indie feature.
The duo is releasing the trailer for their follow-up film “Homebody‘ exclusively with Variety, and are currently planning how they will officially premiere the work.
Per the official synopsis, “Meg, a young widow whose husband recently died of cancer, is stuck in the life they were supposed to be building together. One night, Meg meets a woman who lives on the street and claims she can talk to ghosts. She tells Meg things only Cory could have known. Meg invites the woman home to live with her on the condition that she has to keep channeling Cory, no matter how painful it becomes. And it will become painful.”
‘Homebody’ was written, produced and directed by Kempf and Toti, and stars Julie Linnard, Elizabeth Joanne, Eric Stevenson, Meredith Sladek, Shane Mullen, Avery G. Tillett and Bob Mielke. Matt Latham edited the film, which features music by Pocket Vinyl and special effects makeup from Jeffrey Sisson.
In addition to the clip and poster, Toti shared his vision for how he’d like to continue work on “Homebody” in an unconventional way.
“Homebody” is a movie that I’m already super proud of. I absolutely love the movie we made, but I also know that it’s a weird movie that was made in a weird way. We wanted to make a movie that fully embraced its DIY aesthetic, so we shot it on miniDV (which we later transferred to VHS to give it even more analog awesomeness) and in black and white. It’s glitchy and strange and looks unlike any movie I can think of. We also worked with a lot of (though not exclusively) non-professional actors, and we had an extremely minimal crew, with sometimes only two or three people on set.
When we were planning the movie, we said that we wanted to make something that felt like the “demo version” of a movie. Specifically, I wanted to make a movie that felt as intimate as the demos and B-sides of the band Teen Suicide, which I listened to obsessively while we were in production. I think we accomplished what we set out to do, and the movie feels uncomfortably intimate and aesthetically raw. Watching “Homebody” is like reading someone’s diary and then immediately feeling guilty about it. It’s a movie that makes you feel bad, but in a good way. Sometimes you want to live inside of bad feelings. Catharsis doesn’t always come easy.
But having made the “demo version” of a movie leaves us in a unique place. The natural question now is: What would the “studio version” of this movie look like?
What we’d really like to do next is remake “Homebody” on a larger scale, with a budget of $3-5 million. We’ve already made it once with a budget we scraped together working day jobs and saving every penny. We made a scrappy underground film that’s full of big feelings and bold ideas about what a movie can be “Homebody” is already a pure artistic expression, so now we want to see what the bigger budget version of it would be.
Would the vision become compromised, or would it result in a film that’s even more powerful?
If anyone reading this finds this idea exciting, reach out to our management (Lauren Dinely and Matthew Dartnell at Writ Large) and tell them you want to see “Homebody” and set a meeting to discuss. My own dream is for there to eventually be a Blu-ray release with both versions of the movie, so that viewers could decide which version they like best. This is an idea that, to my knowledge, no one has ever attempted before. Things are weird in the film industry right now, so why not embrace that weirdness?
And while this may risk sounding like a pompous ass, Rachel and I do have a pretty strong track record with this type of thing. Our last feature, “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This,” was released only-in-theaters (never to be released on streaming or home video) in 2023, and we have since booked well over 100 screenings worldwide, turning a profit without distribution, marketing or a PR team. More recently, we made the short film “Dead Grandma,” which won the Slamdance Jury Award and has currently been viewed more than 4 million times across platforms online, even though we don’t personally use social media. Maybe we’ve just been lucky, or maybe us two dumb kids from the Midwest have figured something out. Watch “Homebody” and judge for yourself.
Watch the trailer and see the full poster, designed by Evan Jordan and with a painting by Lindsey Dunnagan, below.
Courtesy of DieDieVideo
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