​‘Touch Me:’ sticky, splattery fun

By Sabrina Hornung

JD Provorse is a horror movie enthusiast and Fargo-based podcast host. Both he and cohost Michelle Roller have a comedy background and started the wildly entertaining podcast “We Watch Shudder” in 2022 as an outlet to discuss new original and exclusive releases from Shudder. If you’re not familiar with Shudder, it’s essentially the Netflix of the horror genre.

In 2024 their passion for slashin’ jumped off the podcast waves and into the Fargo Theatre. This eventually led to last summer’s Darkest Day of Horror film festival, captivating indie horror fans of all genres.

On Saturday, March 28, they’re heading back to the Fargo Theatre and partnering with Yellow Veil Pictures for a one night screening of the erotic sci-fi horror comedy film “Touch Me.” We had the opportunity to chat with JD about the film, the indie horror community, cringe millennial anxiety and…tentacles?

HPR: I imagine the indie horror movie community is a pretty tight knit group?

JD: Yeah, especially right now. Obviously the internet makes everything smaller, but it's a place, right now, where a lot of the filmmakers are very accessible. To me, it feels almost like an extension of the convention culture, just into a more far reaching sort of scenario. Folks are very open to hearing from fans and interacting with fans. There are several small independent filmmakers that I just chat with on a regular basis — like, we're buds now. And it's pretty awesome.

In a lot of ways, it's like indie rock and roll in the idea that it hits you and it seems like such a big thing. For me, at least, these people are just as big as, like, some some huge celebrity, right? Because what's important to me is what they've made and how it impacted me,

To be able to get to meet them — and not just meet them, but to be able to eventually develop relationships where I feel comfortable calling them friends — it's pretty incredible and overwhelming at times. But for them, it's just a reminder that the work that they're doing matters; and not just matters, but there is an audience for it, and people love it and they want people to want them to keep doing what they do. Right?

But these are also people who have said it's more important to us that we make the art that we want to make than it is to be a massive, celebrated success. And I think there's a middle ground you can find there, where you know you have very significant success, to the point where this is all you need to do to survive, is that you get to make your art. So it's kind of a mutual respect. And again, the internet makes everything so accessible,

HPR: In reading the description for ‘Touch Me,’ the main characters were described as ‘cringe millennials,’ and in watching the film trailer, it looked like one of the film’s largest underlying themes was anxiety. Do you think anxiety is a big factor in the millennial experience?

JD: I would say for sure. There is a whole new world that's opened up because of an awareness and more focus on mental wellness. At 46 years old, I was just diagnosed with ADHD. I'm old enough to remember a time in the 80s, where you started hearing about young kids getting these diagnoses and adults still just not taking any of it seriously — “Oh, they're just kids. They're rambunctious. They just need discipline.”

There's a completely different mindset around that now. For artists, what that has now opened up is a whole new wave of themes and ideas that you can bring into horror movies that function now because your audience has more of an awareness of it. So that’s obviously better for everybody.

As we all should know at this point, to not repress those things, to channel them in some way or another…and some folks are able to do that in a creative fashion and make things that symbolize this. For other folks who aren't necessarily of that creative mindset, it at least gives us some place that we can gravitate to and say, “Yes, this is my experience. This is what it's like for me.” And it's just…it's very unifying.

But also, again, for horror stuff, it just opens up new avenues to be able to scare people. It makes you aware of options and new ways that you can do things. And it's been pretty great.

HPR: I suppose part of what attracts us to horror movies is they allow us to set up a mirror to society that plays off our fears and plays on our anxieties.

JD: Definitely, it has that element. Some of us have had traumatic experiences or just have a certain relationship with fear. For a lot of us, it's about confronting that, right? It's about finding a way to be able to to think about and address those things in a way that it, weirdly enough, feels safe — even though psychologically, it could be rattling.

But, you know, I’m not gonna lie, for horror fans —for most of us — there is also a certain amount of just morbid curiosity, right? There is a certain amount of, “Yeah, I like when my horror has themes and ideas and resumes, but there's a part of me that just likes watching somebody's head explode, and I don't know how else to explain that.” I understand that it's not everybody; but yes, it is that too. But like I said, when you can layer that other emotional and thought provoking stuff on top of it, then you have the best of both worlds, right?

HPR: So in reading up on ‘Touch Me,’ it’s described as a live action hentai. For clarification, hentai is a racy Japanese genre of anime/manga.

JD: I'm sure, as you can tell from the poster — I know it shows up in the trailers — there are tentacles. That's the touchstone word for me in this movie — tentacles.

It's been a smash on the festival circuit. It premiered at Sundance last year. The website called “The Daily Dead” referred to it as the “horniest movie at Sundance.” They're not wrong. It's an erotic science fiction horror comedy. It’s very sexual. We're not letting anyone under 18 come to see the movie. It's not pornographic by any means, but it's up there. It's sticky and it's splattery, and there's tentacles and it's a real good time.

Michelle and I refer to it on the show as a “purple movie.” And there's a lot of context with movies like this. You can even see from the poster…for whatever reason, movies in horror right now, over the last several years, if they're really kind of, “tentacle-y” or if there’s a little bit of a sexual theme going on, there's always this theme of purple in their artwork and in their lighting and everything. So we called them “purple movies.”

HPR: What else should we know about ‘Touch Me?’ Or rather what do you find most interesting about it?

JD: It premieres in New York the night before we show it here. I guess what I'm really happy about is; this is the kind of movie that will play significantly. It played Sundance, it played SXSW, Brooklyn International. It played Fantasia, which is one of the biggest international genre film festivals in the world. So it's hitting all of these big festival stops, and it's getting all this buzz, but frankly, it's the kind of thing that probably would never make it this way if it wasn’t for our relationship with Yellow Veil.

I do believe there's still value in being able to see a movie theatrically. And so that, to me, is the biggest thing about what we're doing and what we're trying to get rolling here is just being able to make Fargo a place where every now and then something like this can happen here. We can bring it here and possibly have more of a presence and be known as a place where independent films can come and get some notice.

HPR: Definitely. There is a really great film community in Fargo.

JD: There is, very much. So we're screening just a couple weeks after the Fargo Film Festival, which is always a big deal. We did our own one day thing, the Darkest Day Film Festival last summer. That was a real success. We're not doing it in the summer this year, we're going to bring that back in October. More information on that is coming up.

IF YOU GO:

WWS Presents: “Touch Me”

Saturday, March 28, 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Fargo Theatre, 314 N. Broadway, Fargo