Chicago filmmaker Jerry S. Gonzalez has announced the lead cast for Big Spooky House, his feature directorial debut from Candy House Productions. Ben Bishop takes the role of Seth O. Spooky, with Angela Aiello joining as Luna — two leads who Gonzalez describes as central to a story he’s calling a “love letter to the season of Halloween.”
Big Spooky House is a creature-filled live-action horror comedy built around practical effects and puppetry, designed as a nod to the haunted house cartoons of the 1930s and ’40s — think Scooby-Doo for adults, with humor and themes that skew decidedly older. The film leans hard into Halloween atmosphere while aiming for the kind of practical-effects nostalgia that genre fans tend to go wild for.
Bishop brings both horror-adjacent genre credentials and a close working relationship with Gonzalez — he previously played Grant Best, Kinger’s human counterpart, in The Amazing Digital Circus, and starred in Gonzalez’s award-winning short Hamster in My Head. Aiello, who recently appeared in 40 Before 40, selected for the Kickstarter and Tubi FilmStream Collective, rounds out the pairing.
Gonzalez has been building his genre voice through a run of inventive shorts: There’s Something in the Woods (2019), Intergalactic PizzaBoy (2022), and the award-winning The Spaghetti Man. Big Spooky House marks his leap to feature length, with production based in Chicago.
