In Kit Steinkellner’s TV pilot Are We Still Married?, Jack (Dustin Milligan) comes to the window to talk to his wife, Laura (Taylor Misiak), since he’s no longer welcome in the house without an invitation following the bat bite that turned him into a vampire. In this entertaining and unexpectedly sweet story, the health of a marriage is examined in a delightful way when it’s not clear what the commitments this couple has made to each other mean in this new and unexplored content.
Awards Buzz spoke with Steinkellner about the event in her own life that led her to conceive this wild premise:
“I remembered this thing that I hadn’t thought about in ten years. About ten or eleven years ago, my husband got bit by a bat. People often ask, how does that happen? I’m like, that’s a great question. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong. There’s an ADU with high rafters, someone leaves the door open, the bat’s there and nobody realizes. A day or two later, a husband falls asleep on the couch and gets bit. Anyway, in the wake of that, you got a rabies shot, talked a $50K hospital bill down to like $0. It was a whole thing. I don’t know. It just really felt like a near miss. For us, the way we deal with trauma is with bits, so we just started making a lot of vampire jokes. The joke, it became a debate, is, would I let him back in the house?”
“I just started thinking about this and I was like, to me, that’s how a house feels like more than a house. It feels like a fortress. There are real stakes involved. The more I started thinking about it, the more exciting it became to me. I really wanted to check myself, and so I rewatched a whole bunch of favorite classic vampire movies especially and visited some new ones. I don’t have so much hubris. I’m sure everything has been done, but I was having trouble finding something in the vampire genre that was grounded and adult and like the kind of thing that I wanted to do. It felt really exciting to me, the idea of taking a genre that is very familiar and taking this approach, and by combining the two with hope, doing something that felt fresh and conversation-worthy.”
Watch the video above to hear about finding the right actors and what she has in mind next for these characters.
Are We Still Married? makes its world premiere in the Independent TV Pilot Competition at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
