We’re looking forward to introducing you to Jamie Alvey. Check out our conversation below.
Jamie, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: Are you walking a path—or wandering?
I have a clear vision for my future, but I am one of those people that is always up for a detour that will aid me in the long run. One of my major problems in life is that I have always know what I want. This can breed frustration and unrealistic expectations. I put a lot of pressure on myself to achieve my goals. However, life often isn’t as clearcut or as direct as we want it to be. So, the detours have brought me closer to my path and attaining what I want in ways I never thought possible. Learning to become more flexible and leaving behind rigidity and allowing my life to have more flow has been difficult for me. I had a whole timeline in my head at one point, but in the past few years I had to throw that out and start from scratch, and that has been one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. Giving that constricting plan up has allowed me to create more and realign with myself. I was able to write more and shoot two short films thanks to affording myself space. Of course, this has given me even greater gifts and new connections that are respectful and loving. Is it scary? Yes. Absolutely. I despise unknown variables, but letting go and following the tempo of my life and feeling the rhythm of it all instead of resisting has saved me a lot of heartache. It’s been a blessing to go through this personal metamorphosis and grow even though there were devastating moments that I thought would rip me apart. Along the way, I learned more about how despair is temporary and how you will always find yourself back on your path in the strangest life affirming ways. So, I think you could say that I am walking a path, but I am open to wandering because there is wisdom and learning to be gained while you’re wandering. You just can’t lose sight of what you want. Detours are essential. I still have a clear path, I still know what I want. I just now know there is more than one way to travel to your destinations. Sometimes you’ll walk, other times you’ll be on a bullet train. Perfecting the skill of surrender is an ever ongoing project for me. Regardless, you’ve got to enjoy the proverbial cliched ride and mine it for all its worth. Pain and joy both breed good art while you’re deciphering the routes you can take. Let it all propel you forward a you’re figuring it out.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am Jamie Alvey, and I am a writer, actress, and filmmaker. When I am not terrorizing people with my own writing, I am an educator who aids college undergrads in finding their voices as writers. If I seem vaguely familiar, you may have seen me on your TV killing misogynist frat boys with rocks as Clare Caulfield in Bystanders, which is an award winning feminist riff on 70s exploitation horror films. In addition to starring in Bystanders, I also wrote the film and worked on it diligently for years (specifically from fall 2016 to late summer 2023) while I essentially taught myself screenwriting. It’s essentially an offbeat labor of love that was born out of my personal rage at rape culture, patriarchal complexes, and misogyny. One of the greatest joys of my life so far has been connecting with those who see themselves reflected in the story and characters. Honestly, there are days I’m just jazzed it exists outside of my head now, but it has opened up a world of exploration and creativity that I hope to share further with you all.
Post Bystanders I formed my own production company, a dream that I always carried with me and once thought would be a plan for the faraway future. However, life had other plans, and I wanted to try striking out on my own. With a lot of support, gumption, and perhaps a little delusion, Love and Horror Productions was born in December 2023. We shot our first production, the short film “Your Husband Was a Good Man,” in March 2024, and it debuted on the film festival circuit in March of 2025. I wrote, directed, and starred in the short which follows a bereaved widow whose teacher who husband died in a school shooting as she resorts to ritual magic to resurrect her beloved spouse. This project is a wild departure from Bystanders but has been no less essential to my artistic growth. “Your Husband Was a Good Man” has played at various festivals including the fabulous Chattanooga Film Festival and has won awards including Best Horror Short June 2025 from HollywoodJust4Shorts and Best Horror Featurette from Wallachia International Film Festival.
We wrapped on our latest short, “The Second Circle,” in October and are currently in post-production on the project. “The Second Circle” is a bit of a genre bender that is both achingly romantic and stunningly bloody. Once more, I wrote, directed and starred in the short which is my most personal work to date and meditates on my experiences as an autistic woman navigating a confusing world and at sometimes more confusing inner landscape. So, while the through line is heavily inspired by Dante’s Inferno and the real life romance and tragedy of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, it’s deeply rooted in the idea of emotionally autobiographical writing. As a whole, it’s a story that explores love, autonomy, emotion, repression, and desire and is wrapped in a Dante by the way of southern gothic package. There’s a synthesis of my identity as a creative, a neurodivergent woman, and a scholar baked into the project. It has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life and has given me a fantastic sense of intellectual and emotional freedom. Watching it evolve and working with the cast and crew has given me a deeper connection and a renewed outlook on the material. I can’t wait to share the project with anyone and everyone because it has been such a fruitful and rewarding creative experience.
There are also quite a few other projects percolating in the mean time including revised drafts of existing screenplays, a short story collection, and a few new screenplays thrown in there too. The world is kind of boundless now in a good way, so I’ve given myself over to the power of process and creative chaos.
Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. Who saw you clearly before you could see yourself?
When I was a kid my father told my mother I was going to be a writer. At that point I was dabbling with stories and starting to write more consistently. Thankfully, none of my juvenalia exists, but the choice to dedicate myself to craft remains. My father saw that and looked past what I am sure were hackneyed paranormal romances with vampires and werewolves. He saw a young writer who was experimenting and honing her own intrinsic creative voice. I’m not sure if he pictured me as solely a prose writer or a screenwriter, but he knew I was destined for writing. It’s his foresight that gave way to a world of love and support that has nurtured me in innumerable ways. A lot of creatives have horror stories of unsupportive parents, so I realize that I have been blessed to have two parents who have fought for my works and encouraged me to continue when I wanted to give up. Dad’s pride is infectious, and I know that even on my worst days he’s out there harassing someone to watch Bystanders. In fact, he did that today in front of me to several members of our extended family.
My dad had a horrible work related accident toward the end of 2023 and had to have an extended stay in the hospital. When I would show up, the nurses knew me as his filmmaker daughter. He told all of them about Bystanders and how I was gearing up to make a short. That man was fighting for his life and enduring multiple surgeries, but he never lost his joy and belief in my work. My dad called me a filmmaker when I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with the title or even considered myself one.
So, my dad has continuously seen me many times throughout my life when I couldn’t see myself clearly. It’s nice to have someone dedicated to you in that way. However, that poor man dearly wishes I would write a western. It’s my mom that I inherited my affection for horror from.
When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
Honestly, it took me until my mid twenties to make peace with my pain and start actually engaging with it on a level where I could draw power from it. We’re all a sum of our experiences both positive and negative, but the negative threatens to destroy us. Bottling that up is detrimental. I had spent so much of my life at that point pretending I was fine or more so wanting to be fine. I wanted to reach a sense of actualization and healing that was not going to come to pass if I kept shoving it all down in order to make other people comfortable. It was then that I started grappling with it on the page more. At that point, Bystanders existed but was still something that I only talked about in passing. I had to engage my own text so to speak. I was editing and finding new traits of the characters and revealing parts of myself while doing so. New plot points gave me a new sense of self. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was slowly working through my trauma via both Gray and Clare and this strange story of compassion, hope, and protection amid great violence, harmful societal structures, and nihilism. It was my first real experiment with emotional autobiographical writing. There’s a lot of rage in Bystanders, but there’s also a lot of love.
I also started writing personal essays so I could deal with it all in a more direct manner. If we don’t talk about trauma or pain we will all die in silence, never knowing that we have that thread of connection that can keep us here and aid in healing. I grappled with how horror had helped me survive intense bullying as a child in essay format. It didn’t end there though. I had made public vulnerability a mission. Have people used that against me at times for their own gain? Yes. People will. Yet it’s worth it. Choosing softness and actively trying to encourage others to be similarly gentle with themselves and embrace their experience is worth it. I have only ever momentarily regretted the choice to be vulnerable with my experiences because the innate vulnerability of others has saved me, and I always hope that my trials in life can make others feel a little less alone in this vast and vicious world.
Channeling my emotions into my writing both as a creative and essayist has allowed me the power to harness it and make it useful. That doesn’t mean that I am resolved and that my trauma doesn’t haunt me. It means that I have found a way to alchemize it and better myself and others. I still struggle to not hide myself away, so there are days where shrouding it all in fiction is easier than being direct and essay like. There are times working through the emotions themselves detached from me and recontextualizing them in a different environment can help me process and understand them better.
Alright, so if you are open to it, let’s explore some philosophical questions that touch on your values and worldview. Whose ideas do you rely on most that aren’t your own?
When it comes to ideas I have a small but mighty circle of people that I rely on for feedback and general collaboration. I know that I can always rely on them to tell it to me straight. They give me feedback and advice that I need to hear and it all comes from the heart and with my improvement and well-being in mind. Being held in that way is amazing and fulfilling. It’s taken a while to get my footing and find those people in life, but it’s been worth it. Among those people are my longtime friends from college Emily Fabrizio and Lesley Henderson; my favorite married creative duo Petra and John Mulligan; and my parents. Those are my constants and first people I go to when I need a creative soundboard or talk out an idea. Petra and Emily talk a lot about how you have to trust the process with me because the ideas can seem overly ambitious or disparate at first, but they know I’ll pull it together in the end. They have more confidence in me some days than I do myself, so I am always thankful for that when I’m mired in my writing or knee deep in pre-production. When I have a promising idea forming they’re the first people who hear about it while it’s still new. I’ve recently gone to Petra for creature design because she is a talented artist and one of my favorite collaborators. I was listing off various elements for her to mull over in the meantime while I start writing. I know she’ll come up with something spectacular and augment the initial ideas I had in ways that fulfill my wildest dreams and even exceed them. I think having people in your life like this are important to the creative process. Learning to trust and be in communion with others in this way has been healing after years of feeling like the odd one out and being isolated.
All in all, you need to be able to rely on the ideas of your collaborators as a whole when you are out there on set or revising a screenplay. You need to be able to listen and adapt because the project goes from being solely yours on the page to being a product of the whole team’s work. A good team will be your backbone and hold you up in the process. That’s why I am meticulous about selecting the people I work with from actors to cinematographers to assistants. We all have to be compatible and on the same page while also bringing ideas and energy to augment the vision I have brought to and entrusted them with. On “The Second Circle,” there was a beautiful moment of creative chaos where we had to entirely reconfigure a scene because Petra (who worked on the short as production designer, SFX supervisor, storyboard artist, and executive producer) wasn’t sure that the planned effect would work as well as she wanted it to. So, within the next thirty or so minutes Petra, Shay McCleavy (our cinematographer), and I were out in a stable and coming up with the best ways to block and reframe the entire segment. We were all bouncing off of one another and seizing the moment. I think I finally understood why everyone and their mother talks about the importance of synergy. We then brought the actors, Cedric Gegel and Douglas Dean Mitchell, into the fold, and they were throwing out ideas as well. It was fantastic because everything was in line with the characters and the overall vision I had for the project. I didn’t have to veto anything because it all worked that well within the framework of the reworked scene. Nothing is more affirming than having further confirmation that your actors are the perfect fit for their roles. They were out there changing my brain’s chemistry because it all fell together smoothly. The result is this gorgeous heartrending scene that is ridiculously evocative and much better than what was on the page originally yet retains the ideas presented there. I have such love and respect for my cast and crew on that project because it was all just that natural and made me more confident as a director and writer. There were other moments where we had to reconfigure due to weird constraints that cropped up. I had to work out another scene because we could not fit the necessary personnel into the tiny bathroom on set for the scene. It was a mad dash to work out where this would move to due to how much of the story hinges on that scene. Regardless, moments like that never felt scary because I knew I could implicitly trust those around me, and as always, I am thankful for that kind of environment, community, and grace.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
I don’t think I have ever done what I am told to do as far as my career goes. If I had done that, my life would look exceedingly different. The arts were largely not valued by those around me as a young girl, and I was lucky to have parents that prioritized art and culture in my life. They have strived to cultivate and nurture my interests throughout the years. From the time I was small, I knew I wanted to tell stories and connect with others in that way. I initially started out as an actress at nine, and then I began exploring storytelling in other mediums including writing. Not limiting myself and instead choosing to double down and learn more about different forms of the craft was one of the best decisions I could have made at such a young age. Young Jamie had some deeply inherent wisdom and foresight that I would love to access in the present day. Not many people can say they made such concrete and lasting decisions before they entered their double digits. So, yes, I am doing what I was born to do. My natural hunger to create meaningful stories and art is a reflection of that. I am at a point in my life where I’m not taking no for an answer and will continue to follow the trajectory I chose for myself over 20 years ago. Most days I wish I could visit myself at 13 or 14 and tell her that she was meant for something greater and that all the traits she was bullied for would become her greatest vital assets. I owe a lot to the stubborn heart and determination of the teenage girl who muscled through a lot of heartache to get where I am now.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jamiealvey.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamiealvey/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@madewithloveandhorror
- Other: https://bsky.app/profile/jamiealvey.bsky.social
https://loveandhorrorproductions.com/
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