Matthew Lillard is one of us. Though he is quite well known as the voice and often face of Shaggy in Scooby Doo!, it is not out of turn to claim him for ourselves as a part of the horror world. His first iMDB acting credit is in the infamous film Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College. He was a horror loving teenage weirdo in John Waters’s Serial Mom, Stu in Wes Craven’s Scream and (to skip multiple decades) the principal in Mike Flanagan’s Carrie series.
In addition to that mountain of horror street cred, he is now putting out high end booze under his brand Find Familiar Spirits. After first releasing a Ghostface vodka, they have now launched their Sangre de Agave just in time for Día de los Muertos. RUE MORGUE spoke with Lillard about starting the business, his favorite cocktail and what makes the horror community great.
What made you want to get into the alcohol business?
I had started, and I’m still part owner, of a company called Beadle & Grimm’s. We create high-end gaming accessories for Dungeons & Dragons. I was actively in the company for five years when all four of my other partners had quit their full-time jobs and came to work for the company. I was a fundamental part of its success because I wasn’t working. I could, nine to five, really grow the brand.
I realized that in that, I enjoyed having something to do other than acting. I’ve been an actor since I was 13. I’m 56 years old now. Having something else that gave me inspiration and was fun filled my life with a sense of purpose.
Around the time that my partners had come full time to Beadle & Grimm’s, a writer friend of mine, Justin Ware—one of the co-founders of the company—called me. He said, “Is there a world in which we combine high-end spirit drops direct-to-customer, within the Dungeons & Dragons community?” And thus was born the idea of Find Familiar Spirits, based on the Dungeons & Dragons spell “Find Familiar.”
The idea is to create high-end spirit experiences around fandoms. So when you look at a whiskey shelf at Total Wine & More, you’ve got 100 yards of brown liquid. Our business proposition is that we don’t really want to compete with those other brands. What we want to do is find a community and build something hyper-specific and authentic to that community. And then go to that community with a proposition like, “This is built for you.”
What do you think it is about horror as a film genre that calls itself to having such a tight community?
I love that question. I think what horror fans see is themselves represented. So many of us feel like outsiders. So many people in the world walk around feeling like they’re less than or different than and have never felt like part of that cool club. I think what happens is that people love to sit in the dark and feel things. When you’re watching a horror movie, there’s a visceral reaction. You’re having a biological reaction and that gives you a sense of joy. Then when you see yourself represented in t-shirts or in a Scream costume or at horror conventions, you don’t seem so alone in this big wide world. The best thing about finding these niche communities is that you see yourself represented in others. It fills you with community.
It’s awesome realizing that the tension between niche interest and finding community isn’t as thick as you thought it was. There are people out there you can connect with.
I think we’re having this renaissance in the horror community. You have these incredible filmmakers like Mike Flanagan, but also Curry Barker and this new generation of filmmakers.
I also think that there’s lots of horrible things about the internet and social media in general, but when you lock into the algorithm and see yourself reflected—it’s really empowering.
There are “tales of terror” included within the bottle itself. As someone who reads a lot of horror literature, I love this idea. How did this come to life?
Macabre Spirits is our horror vertical. So we have Dungeons & Dragons, and then we have horror. Both of them are run by Find Familiar Spirits, but we have Quest’s End Whiskey, which is high fantasy, and then Macabre Spirits.
The same thing that led us to Macabre Spirits is the same thing that guides our company to this day, which is that we follow our charm. In meditation, they have this expression, “follow your charm,” and we do that as a company. We, too, love horror.
We know that there’s a community there that we can speak to authentically because of my success. Because that’s who we are as people in terms of the company. We started this horror vertical and asked, “What would we like?” Because that’s where we start everything from. And we love the idea of a gothic horror.
We’re all big readers. And so we pitched this idea around and we came up with this idea that we would go to writers, let them write a story and we would then build a liquid profile off of what they’ve written. We started with Mike Flanagan, who did Rare, Fine, & Limited. Mike had never written a short story before, so he loved the challenge. He is so prolific, he turned it around in just a matter of a month. We absolutely loved the story. And with that, we ended up going out and sourcing a bottle that was reflective of what he wrote.
Having a good read on a stormy night, and if that happens to include a delicious bottle of liquid next to you, we think it’s a perfect combination. The hard thing is teaching the community what we’re doing. It’s difficult. Every single bottle is delivered direct to your home, direct to the customer and it comes with a book written by an author. The art that’s done by an artist is also curated. Mia Bergeron did Rare, Fine & Limited. She’s a painter my daughter loved.
It is interesting hearing that development starts with the story, because I thought it would be the other way around.
For the Day of the Dead drop, we went to a Mexican-American writer and to a Mexican-American painter. Authentically, we try to let them tell their story. Then we did an agave spirit that we’re super proud of.
Do you have a go-to drink recipe you would want to share?
I’m very simple. I do a tequila and soda and a wedge of lemon, not lime. I’m almost exclusively that. I will, on a bad day, do a filthy-ass martini with a potato vodka. There are a lot of people that are into the cocktail culture and I’m very old and very experienced at drinking. If I’m doing anything, it’s going to be really basic.
If you have a good spirit, you want to be able to taste it, right?
Absolutely. Especially tequila. As we’re moving as a company, we’ve got very exciting things to announce in the not-too-distant future. I was just in Jalisco, Mexico. There’s potential for a very delicious tequila in our near future.
What scares you?
A really easy question for me: the current political situation we’re living in, I have two queer kids. I find it horrifying. Everything about my life is about trying to make people feel seen.
I think that if you lead with love, 99% of the time you receive love. And I just can’t stand the division that’s happening in our country. If at the end of the day your answer is to hate certain people, we’re never going to make it as friends,
When I ask people that question, sometimes they say “spiders” and sometimes they say “failure.”
Quite the opposite. I’m actually a huge advocate for failing. You don’t learn anything in success. It’s only when you fail. And that’s born out of years and years of being in acting class and being terrible. It’s when you struggle that you really understand who you are and all the good things come from.
All photos within courtesy of Andreas Branch Photography.
