By Kevin Nickelson
“Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt”-Plautus
In the morally gray muck that is the battlefield in the human mind between right and wrong, guilt is a player affecting both ends. It can prevent us from making a certain poor choice or lead us away from the correct road. A cunning driver handling the automobile of life down future’s path. This subject is mined, in a way, in Jaron and Olivia Lanier’s 2024 debut horror feature Haunted By Her Name, which just landed on the streaming service Tubi.
A crackerjack film that manages to evoke fear and just the right amount of unraveling of the mental state for its lead character Jaron and dually sends the hero and viewer on an odyssey of self-reflection into responsibility and causality, especially as it pertains to the
suicide of someone close to us.
Co-directed by Jaron and Olivia, the low budgeter follows the nomadic Jaron as he travels home in a 1998 Dodge Ram 1500 van from the funeral of an ex-girlfriend who killed herself. Along the way, his own feeling that he launched her depression by breaking things off with her begins to settle in to the point where he keeps having dreams and visions of her presence that begin to truly creep him out. During the road trip, he befriends another loner, a musician on his own journey to Seattle for a new job.
The pair try to get to the root of the visions Jaron is experiencing. Talking to the hosts of the Grim and Bloody podcast recently, the Laniers offered up how the idea for the picture came about. “I think we were at the Mopop Museum (of Pop Culture) in Seattle, and we were in this section with all of these costumes, with, like, from horror movies and different things like that. And I was just looking around at them and thinking about this idea we had talked about about doing van life. I was like, it would be so fun if there was, you know, a van life thriller or something like that” said Olivia.
Creating the shooting schedule for this was no easy feat, considering they were due to get married at the time in very short order. Said Jaron, “We were very busy. We were talking about when we're gonna get married and when we're gonna do our honeymoon. As we were talking about it, we were like, alright, you know, this idea that we have for this movie. It sounds cool but, realistically, when are we ever gonna have time to do it? We've got all these things. It was Olivia's idea to, basically, use the only days that we had free in our schedule. These 10 days that we had to get from Kansas City, where we were living at the time, to Seattle, Washington, where we were gonna be married around there on Bainbridge Island in Washington.
Creating the shooting schedule for this was no easy feat, considering they were due to get married at the time in very short order.
Scripting came about after, with only the base idea of something centering on van life to springboard from. “We had just the idea of let's do a van life scary movie. We didn't have a concept. We didn't have a story. We didn't know who was gonna be in it or how much money we had to make it” explained Jaron. In the next 90 days, the cast of four (the minimalism of that allows for much fleshing out of the characters and the pungent dialogue to really hit with the audience) set out on the highways and byways to lens this unique tale. The locations used were lush but not without issues per Jaron. “A big chunk of the film was in Southwest Colorado on some Bureau of Land Management land. A big chunk in the middle of the movie where Jaren and Jude are camped in this big field.
That's where that was. That was, I think, one of the only locations that we had planned out before filming. As far as obstacles, it was hot. Man, it was hot, and the bugs were insane. I don't wanna spoil anything, but there is a sequence a sequence by the water at the end of the film. We aimed to shoot that scene at nighttime when the sun was down. So we started
shooting it when the sun went down, and we didn't end up being able to wrap it until a few
hours after the sun had gone up. Wow. Haunted by Her Name has plenty of fresh twists in the finale to intrigue even the most veteran of chiller movie fans out there so give it a look-see. Please note: if you suffer from frequent guilt complexes you may want to see a therapist after watching this picture. Just in case of triggering.
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