Hailey and Jaycob Hunter’s love story began comically at a karaoke bar. But there was no “meet cute.” No singing a bad duet together for the two young actors.
According to them, a mutual friend brought them together after a show in 2014. Jaycob thought Hailey was probably a dumb blonde. Hailey thought Jaycob looked like a tool. Despite that, they struck up a conversation. About comic books. About video games. About The Lord of the Rings. After that, they say they’ve been inseparable.
So, it seems strange that two cast members of the long-running Night of the Living Dead production at Fullerton, California’s Maverick Theater would not have already shared a love of horror. Jaycob grew up with it. Hailey had a near phobia of it.
“I remember my parents showing me The Birds when I was 6 or 7 years old,” Jaycob says. “The first time I’d ever had a ‘turn off all the lights’ kind of movie experience. I don’t remember being scared, but I remember how fun it was. Watching horror films was an experience.”
From there, Poltergeist and The Monster Squad became regular viewings in his childhood. He discovered Stephen King books and became something of a collector of horror films, books and video games.
Hailey had a different experience.
“I didn’t like scary movies, particularly after watching The Ring at a sleepover in middle school,” Hailey says. “I had to sleep with the lights on for a few months. It’s surprising now, but before Night of the Living Dead, I had a big phobia of zombies and often had nightmares about them.”
For a lot of couples, that divide might remain, even if they’re together a 100 years. But Jaycob was smart. He took care to introduce Hailey to it in a way that gave her a level of control over the experience. Something she didn’t have as a teen, naively watching the urban myth-like quality of The Ring.
“I didn’t really have any serious interest in horror movies until after Jayc and I played Until Dawn.”
The then-new Playstation game Until Dawn was a visual novel, choose-your-own-adventure horror game. “I thought she might have more fun if she could help make the choices and determine the outcome of the story, or at least feel like our influence as a team affected the story,” he says. “We had a blast and couldn’t put it down. From there we started seeking out other horror games we could play together. Resident Evil, Dead by Daylight, Alien: Isolation.”
From there, Jaycob says “Horror definitely brought us closer together.” They’d make a night of it, either playing a game like Resident Evil “turn off all the lights, crack a soda open, and huddle up together on the couch while we sneak through a spooky house and kill zombies. We would strategize and talk about the plot and moments from the night before.”
Then they turned Wednesdays into Horror Movie Hump Days. “It started almost like a Horror 101 session. We would take a horror franchise and watch all the films – even the bad ones,” Jaycob says. “We would talk about them and get excited for the next ones. It was a really good escape for us, particularly during the pandemic. We started to see the way horror movies shaped society and saw its historical implications on film. To see how older movies influenced the newer movies and it started to feel like we were a part of an exclusive club. It was something we did together and just became our thing. Now we go to Hollywood Horror Nights every year for our anniversary.”
Their travel through the landscape of horror, figuratively speaking, grew with both of them joining the cast of Maverick’s fall festival of carnage and mayhem, a.k.a. the Night of the Living Dead production. They play the young couple Tom and Judy, and every performance — spoiler alert — despite meeting their doom, the mix of artistic satisfaction and quality time together keep the weekends fun.
“Show weekends can be very exhausting,” Jaycob says, “but we’ve both been actors for such a long time, the weekends sort of have a routine to them. In terms of Night of the Living Dead, we try to give ourselves lots of down time during the day because we know how active and extreme the night can be — but even then, we have it down to a casual science, I’d say. The biggest thing is just finding spots of black all over us from the burn makeup.”
So, how do a couple of actors who love horror make their 2023 wedding … uh, memorable?
“The idea was born from a combination of things,” Hailey says. “Life circumstances made us need to plan a wedding in three months with an incredibly tight budget. We had to work with what we had, but a traditional wedding just didn’t feel right to us.”
Monsters, classic movie characters, and a bit of blood and violence did. All of it, of course, with tongue planted firmly in cheek and Journey song thrown in.
“Once we picked The Maverick as the venue, the horror theme was really the only logical way to go and really got us excited to plan a wedding together,” she says. “We also had a deep need to make it fun for everyone who was involved and attended. I think we achieved that because what’s more fun than horror, honestly?”
Naturally, planning a horror-themed wedding came with moments of sheer terror.
“We wouldn’t know if our vision was going to work out until it happened, which was honestly terrifying,” Hailey says. “It’s really thanks to our wedding party that it was everything we dreamed. We couldn’t have done it without them and their enthusiasm. If other people didn’t understand or didn’t like it, that didn’t matter as long as we were all having fun. And in the end, I think everyone ended up having fun.”
Fun meant using the theater’s Night of the Living Dead set as the alter, with the people in the wedding dressed as various characters from the history of film horror, including Frankenstein’s monster, a Ghostbuster and even a live-action Coraline. The ceremony played out a bit like a sitcom, with Hailey and Jacob, generally the straight men, reacting to the mayhem around them. Despite their fears, the guests ate up every minute of the one-of-a-kind ceremony.
According to Jaycob, “most of the guests were theater friends, so they were very excited when we told them the theme and style of the wedding. Our wedding planner and the vendor who made the cake were both very excited for something that was out of the ordinary. There were a handful that didn’t quite get it, but they certainly came around once they saw it.”
Horror Movie Hump Days still a part of their weekly schedule, but watching as newlyweds can make all that horror a little sweeter.
“We go out earlier that day and buy movie snacks, and then make a little nest on the couch and turn off all the lights,” Jaycob says. “Nowadays we’ve seen so many, we try to find more obscure films, like the last one we watched together, Norman Thaddeus Vane’s Frightmare. It certainly had lots of cheese, but was a fun trip through ‘80s slasher tropes, and a nice commentary on horror films and death itself. We try to keep up with recent films — just watched Talk to Me — but we love finding the less-known or forgotten horror films and seeing how they may have influenced what we see now. Our intent is always to find what’s good about it or what we liked. It’s easy to criticize the older effects, cheesy dialogue, or unrealistic plot points, but there is almost always something that can be fun or stir up interesting conversation.”
Although several bad and good movie themes come to mind here, one that seems apropos for Hailey and Jaycob is from Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Love never dies.