WATCH: Did you know the founder of Barry’s Bootcamp directed a very gay horror movie?
The Way Out, which just so happens to be very, very gay.After the death of his abusive father, a young man named Alex (Katy Keene’s Johnny Beauchamp) finds himself drawn to a charismatic stranger, Shane (Days Of Our Lives‘ Mike Manning), who becomes his roommate.
The mysterious newcomer says he sees a lot of himself in Alex, and takes him under his wing as a mentee, teaching him important lessons about “life, sex, and fighting back.”Of course, this is billed as a horror-thriller so you know it’s not quite that simple.
As Alex and Shane grow closer, the tension between them becomes downright psychosexual—Alex becomes more and more attracted to his new roommate just as he’s starting to suspect he might be leading a double life.Jay, who is gay, says that the story is a very personal one for him, which he admits was difficult to write, but that he “wanted to tell an honest story of overcoming trauma like mine.”The Way Out—which co-stars Riverdale’s Ashleigh Murray and the iconic Sherri Shepherd—premiered last year at the Burbank international Film Festival, where it won both an audience award and the Best Feature Film honor in the LGBTQ+ category, the latter of which Jay says he is especially proud of:“When I started having feelings of being different, I couldn’t tell anyone,” he shares in a press brief about the film. “In my small town, nothing like that was ever talked about.
I became isolated, I had a secret, I was depressed and thought something was wrong with me. So, to win these awards is [something] I could have never seen coming.
