Aaron Lovett Does Not Have an Underwear Fetish

Partway through DemonBoy, a man breaks into a stranger's apartment, pokes around his things, and sniffs his jockstrap. Depending on who you're sitting next to, that moment gets a laugh, a cringe, or a very quiet reaction we won't speculate about.

Aaron Lovett, the filmmaker behind it, has watched all three play out in theaters. DemonBoy is only his second short, and it has already played festivals in Europe, South America, Australia and North America, including BAFTA-qualifying stops at Aesthetica Short Film Festival and BFI Flare, all without a single line of spoken dialogue.

I caught up with Aaron to clear his name, talk about the particular loneliness of Los Angeles, and find out what he'd make his cast and crew watch before shooting his next film.

First, let's clear your name. True or false: do you have an underwear-sniffing fetish? And what do you think it says about audiences that when a character does something transgressive on screen, they conflate fiction with reality? False. Filed under things I never expected to be asked, though I should have seen it coming since I put it in the film.

The film is structured like a thriller. One guy is stalking another, and you're meant to wonder how bad it could get. I like playing with tone, so when he finally breaks into the apartment, nothing that terrible happens. He's just being a little freak, looking through the guy's stuff, and then he sniffs his jockstrap. I thought it was funny and weird.

At festival screenings, some people laugh out loud and some visibly cringe. Others, maybe the ones getting something out of it in another way, keep that to themselves. At least in that setting.

People have come up to me afterward, half-joking, asking if I'm into sniffing jockstraps. Some people are, and I'm not judging. But it's a movie. Media consumers have become incredibly literal. Social media makes people think everything someone posts is exactly who they are, so everything they make must be too. Parts of the film come from my life, and parts have nothing to do with it at all.

What's something from your past that still shows up in the way you think as a filmmaker? In college I took an experimental film class, and we watched such a wide range of strange things, from German Expressionism to weird pseudo-documentaries. I think that had a real impact on how I think cinematically.

Most of DemonBoy is structured like a pretty traditional film. But in the dream sequences, there are a couple of shots where it's obvious we're in a studio. In one wide shot you can see the studio floor and a light pointed back at the camera. Rather than cover that up, I embraced it as an acknowledgment that the film is constructed. That's normally a no-no, especially in scripted filmmaking, but leaving a little of it in those dream sequences just felt right. I think that came from that class I took in college.

By day you work as a video editor and producer, with credits at Playboy, BuzzFeed and Morning Brew. How do you balance the work that pays with the work you love? Balancing that is incredibly hard. I freelance as a video editor and have worked at a lot of different places on a contract basis. Years ago I was a staff editor at a production company, mostly cutting social media ads. It's nearly impossible, because either you have a good job and money coming in and your creative work suffers, or your creative work is going really well and you feel fulfilled, and your money job suffers. I'm still figuring out that balance. Freelancing is hard. That's all I can say. It's hard.

DemonBoy deals with the addictive pull of screens and social media. What's the strangest multi-hour doomscroll rabbit hole you've personally fallen down? Mine wasn't a doomscroll so much as a very deep Wikipedia hole a few years ago. I spent hours reading about turn-of-the-century Western esoteric occultism, Aleister Crowley, sex magic, all this weird stuff that I found fascinating and kind of overlooked. That rabbit hole is how my next film ended up being a homoerotic gothic fairy tale. So sometimes spending too much time on the internet actually leads somewhere.

You grew up in North Carolina and moved to LA, a city known for being hyper-connected and also deeply isolating. How much of DemonBoy's queer loneliness and search for intimacy comes from your own experience there? That's the part of the film that comes straight from my life. Maybe not the plot points, but a guy alone in his apartment, sad and lonely, whose main window to the outside world is his phone? That's all me. I think a lot of people struggle with that, especially introverts. I'm not the only one.

I love LA, but people warned me before I moved here that it can be a very lonely city, and I think it's because of how it's designed. I think of LA as a strange collection of little villages, and nobody wants to drive more than twenty or thirty minutes if they don't have to. It's hard to meet people here. I'm lucky to have a really great community now, but that piece of the film and that piece of my life line up.

For only your second short, DemonBoy has had a remarkable run, including BAFTA-qualifying festivals like Aesthetica and BFI Flare. What did you enjoy, or struggle with, once you were actually there? Struggle? Nothing. Kidding. BFI Flare was the first festival I'd been to where it felt like everyone had a stylist. People I knew were showing up saying they'd had their whole look done, and I'm thinking, y'all are shelling out for this? I spent all my money on the flight. It's a miracle I had anything to wear.

Mostly I'm just happy with where it screened. It went to festivals in Europe, Australia, South America and North America, which was more international than I expected. I assumed people in the US would connect with it most, but it got rejected from a lot of US festivals and did really well in Europe and South America. I think part of that is because there's no spoken dialogue, so it's easy for international festivals to program. It's a pretty easy film to understand no matter where you're coming from, even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface. And the UK festivals in particular, Aesthetica and BFI Flare, had programmers who were really smart and on top of it. I'm grateful it landed where it did.

Speaking of no dialogue, what made you make that choice? Every time I make a film, I set myself a few creative goals and limitations. With DemonBoy, the main goal was to tell a simple story visually, and the main limitation was no spoken dialogue. I cheated a little with a scene where they're texting, so you get their messages on screen. Constraints force you to make more creative choices, and that's how you learn as a filmmaker.

Your work tends to uncover the monster within, and it keeps circling isolation and desire. What is it about horror that lets you express those ideas as a queer filmmaker? Strictly speaking, DemonBoy is a thriller, but I think of most of my work as horror, and I put DemonBoy in that genre too. Horror is one of the most effective genres for communicating human experiences that are unsettling, painful, charged or unsavory. You can take the darker sides of yourself and express them in a container that's both safe and very expressive. Some of the best movies ever made are horror movies.

It wasn't like I sat down one day and decided to make horror. I was a writer before I was a director, and at some point I realized that most of the features and short stories I was writing had some element of fantasy or psychological horror. Combining those two things is what interests me most.

Did you consume a lot of horror and thrillers growing up? Yes and no. Plenty of the movies and shows I watched shaped my taste, but I'm not a horror buff. I'm a little against the idea that you need to have seen every movie to make movies. I think you need to know the movies you like, the movies you don't like, and what your own voice and taste are.

Your next project is Caligula, a homoerotic gothic fairy tale. If you could hand your cast and crew horror or thriller films to watch before production, what would they be? I'd have everyone watch Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria. Then The Favourite, which isn't exactly horror but works as a psychological drama, even a thriller in certain ways. And The Witch.

Aaron Lovett wrote and directed DemonBoy, now streaming on Lavendr. Raised in North Carolina, he now lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a freelance video editor and is developing his next film, Caligula.

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