On Sunday night Logo (our parent company) is premiering a gay supernatural thriller called In the Blood, which deals with a college student (Tyler Hanes) struggling to come to terms with his sexuality as bodies pile up around campus and strange visions begin clouding his thoughts. (Check out the wonderfully creepy trailer for the film after the jump.)

I caught In the Blood at NewFest (NYC's LGBT film festival) and loved it. The setup's clever, the acting (particularly Hanes) is solid, and it's a completely fresh take on both the "coming out" film and the psychic thriller. I had the chance to ask director Lou Peterson a few questions about the film...

AfterElton.com: So what gave you the idea to do a gay supernatural thriller? Have you always been a horror fan?

Lou Peterson: I've always loved the supernatural thrillers of the 70's, especially the psychic ones -- like Carrie, The Fury, Don't Look Now -- and I wanted to do something similar, but with an interesting take on it. Those stories haunt us in a deep way because they are grounded in real world anxieties. Carrie really captures the turmoil of adolescent awkwardness and Rosemary's Baby is as much about the anxieties of pregnancy as it is about the devil's baby. Early gay experiences can have that same level of anxiety, and t hat seemed like a good starting point for a horror story. And all the Queer Fear stuff first came onto my radar while I was conceiving this, so I tried to tie it all in.

AE: The film manages to be a new twist on your traditional 'coming out movie' while also playing by the rules of a thriller. Was it tough to combine the two genres?

LP: It really just grew organically from the original idea for the story. The main character, Cassidy's sexual ambivalence is disrupting his psychic powers so his 'coming out' became the device around which the thriller plot revolves. So it wasn't necessarily a matter of fusing two genres, but of balancing elements of each one.