Enter the American Dollhouse

Don’t ask John Valley about the NBA. Basketball is just the latest in a list of failed distractions from the state of the world. He said, “Every year, I try to get into a sport, just to give myself something to fixate on, and it inevitably fails and I get deep into the weeds about whatever day-to-day drama’s going on with political stuff.”

Those fixations inevitably seep into the Austin actor-turned-director’s story telling. His first film as a director, brutal conspiracy satire The Pizzagate Massacre, has gained a life of its own, and its depiction of a delusional conspiracy theorist taking on the perverted elite now seems oddly prescient. Valley said, “I’ve been getting a whole slew of messages from random people being like, ‘Are you following all the Epstein stuff? Pretty Pizzagate-y!’”

For his second film, he wanted to make something smaller, more character- and performance-driven. Yet, somehow, American Dollhouse feels just as pertinent and tragically timely as his first film. Debuting in the Midnighter strand at this year’s South by Southwest, it’s the story of a woman, Sarah (Hailley Lauren, Jack’s Apocalypse), who inherits her family home, only to become subject to the increasingly dangerous presence of her unstable neighbor, Sandy (Kelsey Pribilski, Man Finds Tape, Rondo and Bob). Valley said he wasn’t really planning to make something as nakedly political as Pizzagate, “but there’s something inherent in horror films and slasher films that it becomes a vehicle that’s really good to explore your own frustrations.”

John Valley

And he had plenty of frustrations after Pizzagate. The political debate around it often overshadowed the actual movie, and that contributed to a release cycle that Valley called “less than pleasant.” Yet, in many ways, that experience was liberating for the filmmaker when he approached his next film. Valley said, “I feel like I have already failed, so who gives a shit what we do now? You can do anything you want. Let the camera linger. I was constantly telling the actors, take all the time you want.”

Unlike Pizzagate, where every character was morally murky or just wrong, Valley deliberately wrote American Dollhouse as a more conventional antagonist/protagonist drama. However, he also saw similarities between Sarah and Sandy: two women who become connected over the ownership of that house. “They’re two sides of the same coin,” Valley said, and that parlayed into his advice for the actors. “If you’re struggling to find empathy with your character, just look to the other one, and find it there. If Sarah is finding it challenging to be angry or mean-spirited, look to the Sandy character. What would that selfish child want in this scenario?”

While he was able to create a new twist on the slasher/stalker genre, there is still an underlying political edge to the story. The house that Sarah has inherited becomes emblematic of the long-promised intergenerational transfer of wealth, but it’s no rambling multi-story Victorian home in the suburbs. In the $50 million Hollywood version of this story, Valley said, “It would be freshly painted, the wood would be all polished inside, maybe some nicely-placed cobwebs. That, to me, is such a lie.” Instead, like so many such inherited homes, it’s a single-story teardown in East Austin. Valley said, “I didn’t want to create some fantasy of American life.”

American Dollhouse Midnighter, World Premiere Saturday 14, 10:30pm, Alamo Lamar Monday 16, 8:30pm, AFS Cinema Tuesday 17, 10pm, Alamo Lamar Find more of The Austin Chronicle’s continuing coverage of SXSW.

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