Dasha Nekrasova and Madeline Quinn on Their Epstein-Inspired Horror Film

The award for Deeper Into Movies’ favourite title of the year goes to The Scary of Sixty-First – the directorial debut from filmmaker, Red Scare podcast host and Succession star, Dasha Nekrasova.

Co-written with Madeline Quinn, The Scary of Sixty-First was born from the conspiratorial fervour which sprung up in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein’s death, and explores the many ellipses around the case. The plot follows two young women – Noelle (played by Quinn) and Addie (played by the phenomenal Betsey Brown) – who inadvertently move into an Upper East Side duplex previously owned by Epstein. Mania takes hold of all who cross its threshold, and Noelle becomes embroiled in a psychosexual partnership with Nekrasova, who steps in front of the camera as an obsessive amateur investigator known only as “The Girl”. 

The Scary of Sixty-First uses genre elements to create the maddening feeling that the curtain you caught a brief glimpse behind has now closed, and the answers will remain forever out of reach. While it draws from the visual language of directors like Dario Argento and Polish filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski, the film’s heightened register and comedic sensibility feel completely original. But, as funny as the film is, there’s both real horror and real pathos to be found in its depiction of conspiratorial thinking, owing to the writers’ sincere and compassionate interest in the subject matter.

Read our interview with Nekrasova and Quinn below, accompanied by a photoshoot by Don Stahl in which they recreate Damon Albarn and Liam Gallagher’s football match from the 1996 Britpop derby.

VICE: If we start at the beginning, how long have you two known each other?
Dasha Nekrasova: We had been friendly for nearly a decade, and had some overlap in SF and LA, where we both lived at various points. When I moved to NY in 2018, we started to see one another more regularly.

What was the first idea you had for the script. How did it come about?
Nekrasova: We were both quite shook by Epstein’s death, and I think out of a sense of powerlessness and futility vis a vis the ruling class felt a screenplay would be the best way to channel our fervour.
Madeline Quinn: We’d discussed working together for quite some time and it just sort of naturally culminated following that event. We’d both joined Equinox around this time, and I was very taken by the liminal, creepy aura of the 61st Street location. It had a spacious rooftop with lots of foliage and lounge furniture, so I’d started calling it Kubrinox and pestering Dasha to come check it out. I distinctly remember the shit-eating grin of her getting off the elevator and saying “I get it.”

Pre-Epstein, were you conspiratorially minded?
Nekrasova: As my character says in the film, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, the only conspiracy is the one between the elites who depend on a permanent underclass for them to exploit.” But yes, I’ve always been wary of official narrative.
Quinn: I think that sums it up wonderfully.

Did you ever consider approaching the subject matter through non-fiction? Or was the genre element always a key factor?
Nekrasova: No, I'm simply not a documentarian and think the film, through conventions of genre, gets at a greater truth about the Epstein story.
Quinn: I think our natural inclination is towards cerebral and/or comedic storytelling. We wanted to reflect the nebulous reality surrounding Epstein.

Tell me about the research process that went into making Scary.
Nekrasova: We had done a lot prior to scripting, as we both had a lot of natural interest in the case and there were so many emergent details. The process was more about selecting what was the most visually legible and compelling. We did research into the occult aspects of the film, and the tarot deck we selected was part of an esoteric order called “Builders of the Adytum” who had all sorts of creepy beliefs about “Ageless Wisdom”. We chose the Sun card because it most closely resembles the sun on Epstein’s paedo island.

How did you find the apartment you ended up shooting in? Was there anything strange about its history or anything like that?
Nekrasova: The apartment belonged to my producer Mark Rapaport’s mom. She very graciously let our crew desecrate her living space.

Dasha, you’ve said you feel that “the Upper East Side had this kind of Satanic vibe”.
Nekrasova: Well, Epstein’s lived there, first and foremost. But the film attempts to elucidate something about the relationship between wealth and worldly evil, which is shown in the opening sequence through affluent architectural details.

How did you find the experience of writing and directing, and both writing and starring in the film? Does that make light work or just a lot more pressure?
Nekrasova: It was definitely challenging in many ways, though for me at least it streamlined the process as well because I knew what I needed from my own performance in the gestalt of the film. It helped to have the great crew that we did, and to have as much trust as we did in our cinematographer Hunter Zimny.

The film doesn’t hold back regarding Epstein or the Royal Family. Has there been any uneasiness or backlash about showing the film?
Quinn: No. I hope the Royals see it and have a think about all the naughty shit they’ve done.
Nekrasova: We’d hate to get blacklisted from the UK because we feel such a spiritual affinity with it, especially Manchester.
Quinn: The Mancunian ethos will always be a big part of our creative process. That downtrodden nascence that threads Joy Division, the Smiths, the Fall, Oasis, all the Factory bands— what they came from and what they became— for us, coming from similarly humble means, was very inspiring. The forever-fighting, scrappy spirit of it all.
Nekrasova: Yeah, the movie has a kind of anger, obviously, and an urgency that comes from an experience of disempowerment. I hope the condemnation and desecration of the royals is resonant on that level.

Do you have a sense of how Scary has been received by the kind of hardcore online sleuths you play? Have any of them shared their thoughts on the film with you?
Nekrasova: I’m sure they think I'm a CIA op.

One of my favourite sequences in Scary incorporates the real-life drone footage of Little St James Island. How did you go about putting this sequence together?
Nekrasova: I was so obsessed with that footage, and the imagery of the island in general, and wanted to incorporate it into the film. I screen recorded it myself on my laptop. It took a while to choreograph with the PDF of the black book and the curating of the open tabs and information on the screen, but it was pretty simple.

The other scene I wanted to talk about was Betsey masturbating outside of Epstein’s townhouse. How did you pull off that scene - I’m guessing you shot in secret and just stole the shot?
Quinn: You guessed right.
Nekrasova: Yep, we bravely broached the townhouse in the dead of night. No one bothered us at all, actually. The “JE” monogram was removed after Epstein’s death, so we had it fabricated and reinstalled for the shots of Betsey caressing it.

The score by Eli Keszler is incredible. What was your collaboration like?
Quinn: We knew Eli was going to score it before we even finished scripting. I had just seen the Philharmonic perform Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique”, and became obsessed with the fifth movement, “Dream of a Witches' Sabbath”. I sent it to Dasha, who was in Thailand feeling very cursed at the time, and she became equally obsessed. Really early on we had discussed Eli doing a variation on it, as Wendy Carlos’ had done for The Shining theme. But as he started sending drafts and bits of song, it became quite apparent that his own original ideas were capturing the ominous spirit of the movie more fittingly than any variation could have.
Nekrasova: Our editor Sophie Corra had assembled a great temp score that we used as a template, but even prior I had started to have conversations with Eli about psychological notes and references. [Filmmaker Paul] Schrader’s Hardcore was one of them, which does this really interesting thing with choral music, and I wanted to apply that logic to New Age music, and explore its ability to evoke dread. The scene in the film where our characters first take Vyvanse [an ADHD med] and tear apart the study was cut to score, and that was one of the first pieces of music Eli composed.

Eyes Wide Shut is a film that is closely linked to Scary, when did you first see it and how did that interest develop over time?
Quinn: I first saw it in my early teens, when I was curiously making my way through Kubrick’s work. I’d always been interested in secret societies, even trying to break into a Masonic temple with my friends when we were 12 or so. I saw EWS around Christmas and had never seen that sort of stuff depicted in a movie, so I was immediately taken. It just became a holiday ritual for me to watch and with every passing year I’ve gleaned more and more from it.
Nekrasova: I don’t remember the first time I saw EWS, but it was having a kind of renaissance in the cultural consciousness at the time, because of its insights into power and elite secret societies. The film is a love letter to Stanley Kubrick, obviously not formally, but in its attempt to honour his world view, his understanding of power, its brutal machinations, the world’s worst secrets and the futility of discovering them.

A lot of reviews have commented on the allusions to directors like Roman Polanski and Andrzej Żuławski. Are there any other influences which you feel have been overlooked by audiences?
Quinn: The shadowy world of Demonlover was a mutual favourite. The buddy nature of Ghost World and Withnail & I are heavily imprinted in the friendship between The Girl and Noelle. The essence of Todd Solondz carries itself in all our humour, on and off-screen.

@deepermovies

Find a screening for The Scary of Sixty-First here and listen to / buy the soundtrack by Eli Keszler from Deeper Into Movies Records.

Photography: Don Stahl
Styling: Kirk Millar
Prop Styling: Elaine Winter