If you ask Brea Grant what her worst non-filmmaking job was, she’s got an easy answer: a certain now-defunct Austin Tex-Mex chain, where she worked as a kitchen expediter while she was in grad school at UT. “It was so tough,” she said. “Sometimes I’d be on shift until three in the morning and end up with a 6am shift the next day.” Even worse was their spillage policy. Drop too many plates, and you had to take a class. Drop alcohol, and it came out of your paycheck. Grant recalled, “They would post how much we cost the restaurant, how much food we had wasted by dropping, and I was always at the top because I was working with the most food and I was the most clumsy.”
Experiences like that inspired her new film as writer/director, anthology horror Grind, which receives its world premiere at this year’s South by Southwest. In four interlocking stories of workplace horror, stressed-out employees and hustlers end up grist for the mill of the demonic and pervasive corporation called DRGN. All corporations seem to be evil these days, “but it’s truly from Hell,” Grant said.
Grant explained that she and Grind co-creator Ed Dougherty had wanted to work together for years. They were both huge fans of anthologies, so now they just had to settle on a topic. She said, “We both come from this punk, anti-establishment background, and we’re looking around and the thing that people are really bothered by now right now is work, capitalism, and the lack of money.”
While she previously acted in creepy Christmas anthology All the Creatures Were Stirring and has directed three features before (the Austin-made Best Friends Forever, medical fever dream 12 Hour Shift, and crazed country shocker Torn Hearts), Grind is her first anthology as a filmmaker. For the format, she was inspired by one her personal favorites, 2015’s Southbound, where the individual chapters interlink to build a bigger world, “so it feels like a feature, it feels cohesive, but it also feels like four different stories,” Grant said.
That’s why, rather than taking the path of having each segment written by different people, like the V/H/S franchise, she and Dougherty wrote the entire script before bringing other filmmakers on to direct some chapters. Grant said they approached the job like showrunners. “We wanted to treat it like a TV show or a movie, and so we wanted to create the whole world ourselves:”
That dedication to coherence continued through production. “We used some of the same actors, we used the same color scheme, we used the same lenses. We were doing everything so it felt like the same universe.”
And a full universe is exactly what they created. She added, “We have so much lore for this world, you wouldn’t believe. We had a writers’ room with one of our buddies where we sat down and built the entire universe. There’s so many things we have references to that don’t make it into the movie. Hopefully, if there’s a Grind 2, we get to keep spreading the lore of Grind.”
Their initial inspiration came from Grant and Dougherty “swapping war stories about horrible bosses we’ve had,” she explained. However, opening segment “MLM,” which they shot as a proof-of-concept a year before the rest of the film, was inspired by the 2021 Amazon docu-miniseries, LuLaRich, about the LuLaRoe apparel empire. Other chapters came directly from scanning Reddit and conversations with friends, where the horror comes from the real fear within the modern workplace. “Union Meeting” gets inside how you can’t trust your bosses or your colleagues and “Content Moderation” gets on the never-ending treadmill of promised promotions, while “Delivery” extrapolates its fears from the “loneliness and the repetitiveness” of app-based delivery driving. Grant said, “It’s such a part of current-day hustle culture, and a lot of people I know do that to subsidize their acting career or their filmmaking.”
