Ryan Kwanten Faces Glory Hole Horror in New Lovecraftian Film

Glorious
Glorious

A wild new Lovecraftian horror film set around a glory hole is coming to the horror streaming service Shudder this month!

We’re in an interesting era now where movies were being written around the possibility that production would have to be extremely limited due to pandemic restrictions, but where they frequently wound up shooting after many of the restrictions that would impact the final product had been lifted.

Glorious falls into that category, set largely in a rest stop bathroom and featuring just two actors going back and forth with one another as otherworldly events play out around them.

The film follows Wes (Ryan Kwanten) after a bad breakup with his girlfriend. He gets drunk and ends up at a rest stop away from the hustle of civilization, only to discover one of the stalls is inhabited by a god (J.K. Simmons) who, from the look of the trailer, wants him to engage in some sort of sex act through the glory hole allegedly in order to save all of humanity.

“Glorious speaks to my adoration of Lovecraft, gore, absurdist humor, philosophy, and the type of transgressive movies that leave you thinking I can’t believe I just saw that,” director Rebekah McKendry said. “It is a wild mix of horror, humor, and heady moralistic concepts about our own existential realizations of who we really are, forcing each of us to stare into our personal abyss. And sometimes, the abyss stares back… and maybe has a favor to ask.”

McKendry spoke with Entertainment Weekly about her initial plan to just shoot the film in her garage during the early days of the pandemic, but how a solid, fun script got better actors (and presumably a larger budget) on board and they decided to wait to do it right. Still, the two leads were ultimately never in the same room with one another during the shoot, something characteristic of this particular era in filmmaking.

Glorious drops on Shudder August 18, and if the trailer is at all indicative of the final film, it’s something horror fans won’t want to miss.

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