When critics first asked Dallas filmmaker Brock Cravy what his debut film was about, he didn’t know how to answer. He’d been waiting to make a movie for 40 years. When he did, he says, “I vomited color and expression and pain and anger and fear.” The short film, called Innocent Boy, is a crazed, grotesque, neon fever dream set on a seedy stretch of Texas highway. Its genre is queer horror. “It’s a mess,” Cravy says affectionately. “It’s a colorful mess. It bleeds outside the lines.” It’s creatively gory and shamelessly bizarre. And it’s exploding boundaries in the horror genre, just as Cravy intended.
Innocent Boy is the debut project from Cravy’s Dallas-based production company, The Contested Edge, which he started last year to make room for queer characters and actors in areas of the industry where they’ve been left behind. Cravy, who is gay, wants to focus on experimental genres, specifically horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, where openly gay, trans, and nonbinary characters have been historically absent or poorly portrayed. The goal is to elevate queer artists at every level—within the stories, the casts, and the crews. With Innocent Boy, Cravy accomplished just that.
