Shudderbugs was born while quarantining with my parents in my childhood farmhouse in spring 2020. Our frustrations and confusions during this unprecedented time were tempered by throwing ourselves into an incredible challenge. We’d make our own feature film, start to finish. With the soaring pandemic in New York came vast limitations. As our locations, crew, on-screen talent, and other key elements of traditional filmmaking were stifled, we replaced those pieces with what we did have available: the natural beauty of our isolated environment, time, excessive planning, the three of us, youtube tutorials, cinephilia, and bugs. Lots of bugs.

Shudderbugs is our attempt to capture the psychological experience of a woman unraveling, and to portray our minds’ abilities to inform and adapt our realities, beyond logic and reason, often by necessity. In equal measure, we were drawn to telling a story of grief: the weird ways we wrestle and wrangle it, and the very different ways we learn to live with it. In the spaces between childhood and adulthood, memory and present, imagination and reality, live all the versions of who we are and how we may behave in the scariest and most difficult of moments.

We hope Shudderbugs may offer a voice in our collective portraits and conversations on grief.

– Johanna