PLATTSBURGH — Former Ticonderoga resident Zachary Donohue’s 15-year grind in Los Angeles pays off with Paramount’s release this weekend of “Passenger,” a scary good jump scare.
Directed by André Øvredal, the supernatural horror flick stars Jacob Scipio as Tyler; Lou Llobell as Maddie, Tyler’s fiancée; Melissa Leo as Diana; and Joseph Lopez as the Passenger.
LOCAL VIEWING
North Country audiences can see the movie at the Regal Cinemas at Champlain Centre, where Donohue spent his youth watching movies with his father, Dave.
Donohue, now from Los Angeles, co-wrote the script with T. W. Burgess, of London.
“It wasn’t until four years ago that this idea sold to a production company at Paramount,” Donohue said. “Ever since, it’s just been working on this and getting this movie made.
“I’ve always thought that back roads are creepy, and there is a very haunting quality to them. Obviously, driving a lot of the back roads in upstate New York as a teenager, there are a lot of scary visuals that you can have when you’re out on the road alone on some of these more wooded roads. I had just wanted to write a movie about that experience.”
PROCESS
This was a first outing for Donohue and Burgess, who had never written together before but were mutual fans of each other’s work in the horror space.
“We both kind of connected on doing a horror movie about a haunted road, essentially,” Donohue said. “So we teamed up on this idea that we started developing.
“Then we brought it to some producers (Walter Hamada and Gary Dauberman) who got really excited by it and got behind it, and then we got hired to write the script.”
The horror duo were in project development right before the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, which paused them for about six months.
“When we came back, we were kind of pedal to the metal and wrote very quickly just because we’re very excited and we had producers who believed in it, and we wanted to keep the momentum up,” Donohue said.
“It probably took two to three months to get a really good draft, and then from there, they sent it to the director, André Øvredal, who has done a number of other movies that are really great in the horror space.
They continued to workshop the script for nine month to a year with feedback from the studio.
The project was greenlit in 2024, but filming didn’t start until February to March of 2025 in Washington state.
ELEVATOR PITCH
“Passenger” names the evil in the movie, and Donohue’s mission was to creep people, calling it “a movie that makes you scared of driving at night.”
“I’m a very collaborative person, and I love to learn from others,” he said. “André had done several studio movies, and this is my first movie working with a studio where the movie is actually happening.
“I learned all of the ins and out of what that looks like throughout all of the stages of development and then pre-production.”
Donohue was on set for six weeks out of seven.
“It was very cool. They kind of gave me this opportunity to be up there, so I was working with the crew whenever they had questions about the script or the actors when they had questions about their characters and there to kind of support the director with a lot of the questions he had about the script,” he said.
“It was a lot of fun, and it was great to kind of see a director who has made great movies and made movies with a bigger budget level to see how they approach the work. I got a lot out of it, and it was an incredible experience.”