As a creator, inspiration often strikes at the most random of times... sometimes, it manifests as one isolated sentence you leave in your notes app, waiting to be contextualized into existence.

That's how Dana Never Had a Brother began.

"Since college, I’ve kept a notes tab on my phone for stray inspiration— dreams I remembered, out-of-context sentences, random visuals I wanted to recreate someday," said Destinee McCaster, writer and director of Dana Never Had a Brother. "One of those half-sentences was scrabbled down some odd night in 2023 : “but Dana never had a brother.” I don’t remember what inspired it, but I loved the ambiguity— why never? Who’s Dana? Is it a statement or a question?"

This isolated sentence and the questions that arose with it laid the foundation for a haunting, emotional story that blurs the lines between family secrets and the supernatural— where horrors that linger are not in what we see, but in what's left unsaid.

On a holiday trip home, Destinee revisited that note and felt the pull to write more. Family dynamics can be complicated, and the holiday season just so happens to put those dynamics on full blast.

"I wrote the first two-thirds of the script overnight, no outline, just following the curiosity that sentence opened," said Destinee. "While it has been rewritten a number of times since then, I knew it would always involve a queer couple and a dysfunctional family harbouring a secret they were somewhat justified to keep once revealed."

Dana Never Had a Brother is a psychological queer horror that dives into the monsters we create ourselves, becoming a study of silence, repression, and identity. What stands out to me as a viewer is the gray area in what we define as monsters, or our human flaws we often tend to villainize.

What Destinee does with this film is delve more into that gray area, and less into the blame. There is no specific villain, no one monster that terrorizes everyone. Instead, as the ever-non-present brother appears, we're left to wonder what he looks like, what horrors he represents, based on the others' reactions to him... and what gets triggered in our own brains.

Austin, the brother, became more than a missing family member: he evolved into a haunting metaphor for the things families bury to maintain their illusion of perfection.

"For myself, the brother is a literal character in the film and a symbol of erasure— he is a figure both the characters and the camera refuse to acknowledge because his mere existence uproots this illusion of normalcy and stability that everyone feels they need."

Destinee believes every family has their version of "the brother"— the truth, a person, or history tucked under the rug to keep the peace. But in Dana Never Had a Brother, the act of hiding becomes the source of horror itself, summoning a presence that feeds on repression.

Oscar Wilde's "Life imitates Art" belief stands true today, but I'd like to think it's evolved past the point of imitation, into a two-way mirror. We create based on what inspires us, and if done effectively, what we create transforms us in our core. Destinee and the team that brought Dana Never Had a Brother to life used the horror genre, silence, and visual repression, to force us into a place of contemplation: what parts of ourselves are we scared of? What horrors are we willing to live with for the sake of what we've defined as normalcy?

How long can we sustain the illusion of normalcy we've crafted around ourselves before we must reap what we've sown?

"Dana Never Had a Brother was never a horror film about violence or scary monsters you could see— it was always about the horrors of what's hidden away."

The result is a film where sound, atmosphere, and what's unseen do the heavy lifting. Even the camera becomes complicit, refusing to fully reveal Dana's brother, allowing the audience to project their own fears into the void.

"The monstrous lives in absence, not spectacle."

This level of intentionality speaks volumes, and it resonates deeply with lovers of nuance and metaphorical storytelling.

Destinee is clear: Dana Never Had a Brother exists because of community. Receiving the DCP Horror Filmmaking Initiative Award provided both funding and faith; a reminder that stories like hers have a place in the industry.

"The award not only acted as the financial kickstart we needed to begin production, but it also reaffirmed that people aside from us believed queer horror holds a worthwhile space in the film industry."

For her and her team, that belief transformed into momentum. Locations that mirrored the eerie calm of suburban repression; a cast and crew who cared about every emotional beat; connections with other filmmakers redefining what horror could be.

Indie filmmaking never comes easy, right? For this cast and crew, it was three nights, twenty pages, and endless logistics— all in the dark. But it's that pressure, Destinee says, that sharpened her vision.

Balancing creative vulnerability with production reality forced her to adapt, to focus on what truly mattered in each scene.

"Each morning, my cinematographer Sonali and 1st AD Maddie would meet up at a coffee shop to go over the day's shotlist... I never felt alone when the need to figure out a creative workaround appeared, and that sense of teamwork was deeply appreciated."

That collaboration became the film's anchor: a testament to resilience and shared passion. Really, the blueprint of independent filmmaking.

It's filmmakers like Destinee McCaster who inspires us at DCP to keep going, and who solidify our belief in our mission to support filmmakers breaking into the industry.

And simply as a film-lover, seeing the horror genre molded into a mirror to our own human fallacies is, to put it simply, a thrill.

Dana Never Had a Brother started as one lonely sentence, and became proof that a story doesn't need permission to exist.

To Destinee and her team, we're proud to have been a small part of your journey, and we can't wait to see what's next.