Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jamie Alvey. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jamie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us about a time that your work has been misunderstood? Why do you think it happened and did any interesting insights emerge from the experience?

I think that I’ve spent far too much of my life being misunderstood and mischaracterized. I was never the most popular kid in school and was singled out by my peers early. The weird girl label stuck to me like proverbial super glue, and even as an adult, I don’t think I’ve ever shook it. I have embraced it, but I am eternally the weird and off-putting gal. That’s become my brand so to speak because I think that sometimes the best way to persist is to take your inherently uniqueness and own it, especially when it’s vilified. I was bullied to the point that I was taken out of 8th grade during the spring by my pediatrician for a while in order to recoup my mental health before entering high school in the fall. My pediatrician was (and still is) a brave and a bold woman and advocated for me because I was literally at a point that I was being systematically abused by my peers and the administration and teachers did little to prevent it. In the coming years she would go on to diagnose me with PTSD when trauma responses to what I endured as a young teen started to crop up in my sophomore year of high school. Even when it felt like everyone was against me, I knew I had her in my corner to aid my parents in protecting me as best as they could. My mom and dad were excellent during these years because they had the foresight and the wherewithal to seek help for me instead of suppressing the growing depression and anxiety I was feeling.

I think I learned that no matter how many people dislike you, there will always be people who will see your worth and love you and fight for you. It took me a while in this world to find kind people who wanted to invest in me in a genuine way, but I have found them. The world can be lonely, confusing, and alienating. I still don’t have all the answers. I am still frequently misunderstood and mischaracterized, and I am an adult now. I get exhausted with it all, but I manage, I adapt, and somehow, in the end I wind up knowing more about myself. Recent events with miscommunication and misunderstandings gave me the much needed push to seek cognitive testing for autism. I long suspected that the reason I always seemed so different from everyone else was rooted in the fact I was autistic, and spoiler alert, I am. I’ve been able to recontextualize and understand myself and my life through this diagnosis. Everything makes more sense now. I know why I communicate differently, why I process emotions more slowly. I cannot over stress the importance of understanding yourself to the point that people not “getting you” doesn’t matter so much. They may not get it, but you do. You aren’t a mystery to yourself anymore, and my God that is freedom at its finest. So, yeah, I am the weird girl, but that’s where my strength lies.

I’m also in the midst of my creative work being misunderstood and mischaracterized right now too as a matter of fact, but I think my past prepped me for people being generally unkind, unreceptive, and obtuse. The feature film I wrote and starred in, Bystanders, released on video on demand in January, and of course because of the content and the uncommon approach people have their hackles up, but people also love it. It’s already some people’s comfort watch! How cool is that? Those are the people I create for. Those are the people that matter. I guess you could say I create for those that are misunderstood and mischaracterized because I bring that perspective to every little project I tackle. I think the positives have largely outweighed the negatives as a creative and as a person when it comes to being mischaracterized and misunderstood. I’ve found myself, I’ve found my audience, I’ve found my people. And the best part? I haven’t found all of them yet. There’s more beauty out there than we want to admit there is, we just have to search for it and sometimes even fight for it.

Jamie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a Kentucky based award winning writer, actress, filmmaker, and educator. To say I am perpetually exhausted is not an understatement, but my life is full to the brim with all kinds of storytelling. From the time I was a young girl I was drawn to the macabre elements of life, so horror naturally became my chosen genre. Again, I was the weird girl and didn’t quite fit in with the landscape of conservative rural Kentucky, which seems more and more southern gothic flavored as I answer this. My mother is an unrepentant horror fan who saw The Exorcist way too young and my father is an avid film lover with a passion for many different genres, so I was inundated with art from an early age. My parents shared their love for literature, movies, music, etc with me from the time I was little, and I think that has definitely shaped me creatively. My parents also never discouraged me from pursuing the arts. They’re my biggest supporters to this day. This is, in essence, where I got my start. My parents aren’t creatives themselves, but my father often laments that I wasn’t born a nepo baby so I wouldn’t have as many obstacles to creation as I have had in my life. I like to think that those obstacles have made me more driven and fueled my desire to create even more, but I will admit I am also always in need of a nap and learning to balance all of my different endeavors as well as tend to college students and teach writing.

My life and my creativity have taken me down some weird paths. I was started acting at nine and then I began writing at thirteen. I spent a lot of my youth and early twenties exclusively as a prose writer and as a stage actress. It was after completing my BA in English and theatre at Brescia University that I discovered screenwriting. I had always wanted to try, but I was intimidated. While researching grad schools and helping my parents with my grandmother, I decided to throw caution to the wind and try a new format of writing. The result was a first draft of what would become my first feature film Bystanders. I say first because I am planning on making as many as I possibly can in whatever amount of time I have left. To sum up Bystanders, it is a synthesis of my parents artistic influence and a result of my anger at rape culture. Around that time Brock Turner was a hot button issue in the news, all the disgusting details laid bare. I was furious at how people blindly excused him, how they victim blamed Chanel Miller in the process of it all. At the time, I had not yet come to terms with the misogyny and harassment that I had endured at the hands of men, and I was certainly starting to parse through the reality of living with PTSD for the rest of my life. My mother had introduced me to the cinema of Wes Craven as a teen and my father subsequently introduced me to the 1972 version of The Last House on the Left. My dad always had a passion for gritty indie films and that love rubbed off on me. My mother had grown up loving fare like Halloween and Friday the 13th. I became interested in indie horror quite young, so my love for subversive indie horror, violence as commentary, and anger at how our society treats rape converged and thus Bystanders was born. It was then that I kept working off and on learning the craft of screenwriting while editing and editing and editing my little feature. I knew that the movie was a hard sell, a long shot that was filled to the brim with 70s exploitation horror style sensibilities smashed together with social commentary and dark humor. However, I believed in Bystanders, pushing it out there into the world when I barely believed in myself. I had something to say artistically. I was proud of finding my voice as a writer. Thankfully, a fellow horror journalist and academic, Mary Beth McAndrews become interested in reading a draft around 2019 or 2020. She fell in love with the piece, calling it one of the best depictions of PTSD she had ever read, and when she eventually was able to advocate for the screenplay after becoming the EIC of Dread Central, the rest became history and an angry little feminist horror film was finally set into motion. I went on to play the lead female character, Clare, in the movie as well because sometimes if you want it done right you have to do it yourself.

My screenwriting didn’t just begin and end with Bystanders because it felt like I had finally found a medium that melded a lot of my innate talents. In the midst of it all, with an insane amount of anxiety and pressure, I found out just what I was made of. Filmmaking came to me as natural as breathing. In the months after Bystanders, I turned back to writing to stave off grief and depression. It was odd to pull inward after something that collaborative, but I found myself again. I found that drive to create more. That’s how my production company Love and Horror Productions and my proof of concept short film “Your Husband Was a Good Man” was born. Those decisions weren’t easy and there were a lot of sacrifices that came along with them, but I was pushed by my students who wanted to learn more about screenwriting and filmmaking and I was pushed further by my love of the craft. I think that speaks to who I am. When life is weird and difficult and too much it’s always going to be art that I turn to in order to figure it all out. “Your Husband Was a Good Man” was received well on the festival circuit as a screenplay and the short film received its first festival acceptance at Short. Sweet. Film Fest out of Cleveland, Ohio, so I would say it’s going pretty dang good to be made by a fledgling filmmaker with a fledging company and a mix of young professionals and interns.

I think that my humanity and my drive will always set me apart. I want to go deeper and interrogate more and mine the human condition through horror in ways that are thought provoking and artistically and socially relevant. Genre cinema and media in general are often reduced to paltry entertainment, and horror fans are often labeled as sickos and freaks, but it’s always been more than that. It’s about trauma, the human spirit, the crushing weight of life, the daily anxieties and terrors that we deal with. I want to explore it all and lens it in a way that will speak to my audience in a way that feeds their souls creatively. Art is nourishment, it always will be. It gives us escapism as well as a place to come and grapple with real life issues. It’s this passion that carries me through when people aren’t exactly vibing with my works. I couldn’t be more proud to have devoted myself to this medium and this genre because it can bring about such beautiful connections and life giving stories.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I think that there is reward in creation in general. I love being able to build characters and plots from the ground up. There are always little rewards along the way that make it all worthwhile on the journey to the bigger picture or. a finished project. There’s serendipity in cracking open a plot or finding a facet of a character and immersing yourself in something that is destined to be bigger than yourself. I love those moments of sheer joyous discovery because it’s almost like divinity. You’re creating something out of nothing. Learning to love the minutiae and the tedious parts of creation have been rewarding as well. Editing and refining and fighting with a piece are all pats of the creative joy. It’s frustrating but there is value in the struggle and the resistance of it all. You’re learning about yourself a a creative and growing in your art. Those breakthroughs when it’s all impossible are some of the purest moments I’ve experience in my life. I don’t think the proverbial hard parts of creativity get enough love. That problem solving process is when I feel most alive as a person whether it be chopping up a script with edits, figuring out how to create an edible fake raw steak or recutting an entire scene to make it play with more tension. (A big shout out to my SFX guru and editor Petra and John Mulligan for being key players in this process as well as Emily Fabrizio who sees all my writing when it’s still fresh and goopy and not fully formed yet.)

Lately, I have learned more about there is joy in connecting with others through what you create. Nothing restores your faith in yourself than when some total stranger understands your work perfectly. I’ve got to talk to so many likeminded and beautiful people because of this. That connection has been something I’ve craved my whole life, and it’s honestly thrilling and humbling. It’s been an honor to make something that has provoked people’s thoughts and emotions.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I think the mission for me has always been to create and to create more and to create as loudly as I can so that people on the fringes of society know they’re seen and heard and can do it too. I’m obnoxious because I was once a starry-eyed teen girl watching Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody make one of the most inventive horror movies of my time and then get a tongue lashing from critics because it didn’t live up to the pitifully inaccurate marketing. Still, these women showed up and they created and they lived to see their work reevaluated and find its audience. I wanted to be Kusama and Cody when I was fifteen, and I still do. I want to return that favor to someone out there. I want people to see me and know they can create their own loud and creepy and weird art. I’m not the type who wants to pull up the ladder behind me. I’ve longed to make art more accessible and disrupt the studio system that can often be alienating. So my mission is twofold in a sense. I started a production company and started offering internships to my students so they could gain experience and bolster their resumes. Watching them grow and learn and create in ways I couldn’t at their age is rewarding. I want to give them the tools outright I often had to stumble upon to find. Creating with compassion and openness and killing the idea of gatekeeping are crucial to me. I want us all to thrive and keep doing what we love.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jamiealvey.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamiealvey
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@madewithloveandhorror
• Other: https://bsky.app/profile/jamiealvey.bsky.social
  https://loveandhorrorproductions.com/

Image Credits

Callie Kirk, Emily Fabrizio, and Bryan Houston.