Florida Premiere / USA / 2025 / English / 91 min / Comedy, Drama
Director: Jon Salmon; Writer: Chris Carvalho, Chris Plaushin; Producers: Chris Carvalho, Chris Plaushin, Tony Estrada, Tim Harms; Editor: Peter Cabada Hagan; Production Cinematographer: Matthew Chavez
Key Cast: Lorraine Bracco, Leah Remini, James Austin Kerr, Christine Spang, Alfonso Caballero, Brian Tichnell, Kellan Tetlow, Jeremy Luke, Monica Bhatnagar, Judy Kain.
Contact: chris_p_carvalho@yahoo.com
Eddie Mathews dreams of being a successful horror filmmaker but currently struggles to pay the bills as a telemarketer, who schleps presidential bobble heads. His wife, Anna, is about to deliver their second child and with little money in the bank Eddie has no alternative but to move in with his disapproving mother-in-law and her son, a washed-up minor league hockey player.
Despite the circumstances, Eddie is unwilling to give up on his dream and hustle to complete the filming of his dark comedy about a vigilante who kills Karens. Driving him to succeed is his best friend, Joe, and his imaginary companion, The Menacer, who takes the form of a comedically villainous presence clad in a dark cloak and mask. Eddie scrambles to do whatever is necessary to bring Killing Karens to life — including selling his vintage Dracula poster collection, the family’s van, and enlisting some unlikely actors, including his wife’s gynecologist, to fill out his cast. Killing Karens has the potential to be his breakthrough show, and Eddie gets word that a big Hollywood streamer may be interested. But the clock is ticking and as Eddie’s financial and familiar responsibilities continue to grow his dream hangs in the balance.
Director Biography – Jon Salmon
Jon Salmon first picked up a video camera when he was 8 years old in Austin, Texas. He attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and afterwards became a founding member of the viral comedy collective 5 Second Films. As a result of 5SF, Salmon co-directed his first feature: Dude Bro Party Massacre III, which won the Best Horror award at the LA Film
Festival, and developed a cult following with a sold-out 10 city Alamo Drafthouse tour in 2023.
In addition to his comedic filmmaking Salmon is committed to a number of causes. In 2017 he worked as a Cinematographer with trans activist Miles McKenna on the revolutionary LGBTQIA+ series Hella Gay with Miles McKenna, and with Egyptian satirist Bassem Yousef on his political advocacy series The Democracy Handbook. Salmon’s documentary work has focused on causes such as speech oppression in West Africa, Black Lives Matter, Haitian infrastructure, and most recently, a 2024 Nickelodeon special that unlocked $2 million in funding for an underprivileged school.
Salmon is an advocate for better work hours and quality of life for film workers, which was central to his choice to direct The Mother, the Menacer, and Me, whose core themes concern choosing quality of life over LA’s hustle culture. Despite that, he still lives in Los Angeles with his girlfriend and a very high maintenance cat named Dillon.
Director Statement
Ok, fourth film of the day. Are we drinking water? Does the dog need a walk? I’ve witnessed how your festival programmers stare at laptop screens 14-hours-a-day for months on end. Programmers and filmmakers fall from the same tree. We love the work, and as a coping mechanism learn to love the long days. Yet we also both know the shock when the work comes to an end, and we’re reminded of the lives we had once.
Much like the amateur filmmaker Eddie in our submission The Mother, the Menacer, and Me, I too have ruined mom’s sheets with fake blood. I grew up very far from LA, in a neighborhood outside Austin where video cameras were for recording football games. Yet once I picked up a camera, I never let go. Years later, after graduating USC, I dove headlong into the 14-hour-a-day hustle culture of the film industry in LA. Yet as my career blossomed, I found myself horribly depressed. Eventually it dawned on me that movies are meant to reflect the life you’re living, not be the life you’re living.
So, when Tony Estrada reached out to me to direct The Mother, The Menacer and Me, the story of an amateur filmmaker trapped between Hollywood dreams and a normal family life in Wisconsin, I connected to the material at a cellular level. Carvalho and Plaushin’s script were full of colloquial specificity drawn from their own lives and families, capturing the backyard filmmaking of my youth while also skewering Hollywood in that way it loves to be skewered. Yet most of all, their story haunted me with it’s brilliant third act on what really matters in life, something I, like Eddie, had to learn the hard way.
To prepare to tell this story, I studied the films Living In Oblivion and American Movie, for their grip on the comic chaos when the lens is on the filmmaker. I pulled from my childhood video constantly, loading the filmmaking scenes with the duct tape solves of the no-budget filmmaker like casting your wife’s gynecologist as a scream queen. I cast the legend herself Lorraine Bracco as an against-type antagonist, in a role she catapulted to the moon.
Few things felt more autobiographical than telling the story of an indie filmmaker learning what matters most. And for indie filmmakers, the film festivals have long been the moonshot keeping us going, on deadline, year after year. It would be a dream for us to play on your screens, but to be honest, I’m just tickled you’re watching something I spent a lifetime preparing for.
Our movie is about chasing a dream. Thanks for keeping That dream alive. And please, remember to hydrate.