It’s 2009, and Julin Jean is in the town of Uncertain filming Boggy Creek, a sasquatchploitation horror film that needs beautiful women to run screaming from monsters in the woods. Creepy locals with long beards stare as she and Denise Williamson search by moonlight for the set in the countryside. By this point, Jean has already made a name for herself as a top scream queen in the Texas indie horror scene, with parts in both Spirit Camp and Sweatshop. When the effects team smears mud on her to simulate blood and gore during a night shoot, she’s ready.
It’s 2025, and this time Jean is in an abandoned warehouse in Houston. Instead of gore-covered monster bait, she’s every inch the marketing professional woman managing a film team dedicated to helping her client, Mission Air Conditioning & Plumbing, increase their name recognition and online presence. Her company, Foxforce, is a woman-owned and led company that specializes in serialized online video content, everything from law firms to wellness clinics to regional MMA promotions. It’s all very professional and data driven.
However, Jean has never forgotten her indie horror roots, and she needs them for this project. Her grand idea for Mission AC is The Clog, a seven-part short film series perfect for TikTok and Instagram that has the crew of the company fight a haunted toilet. Remembering Boggy Creek, Jean mixes some dirt and water to smear on a toilet handily provided by the team so that it looks visceral and disgusting. When it comes time for the corrupted commode to attack with wires and tubes, Jean herself handles the puppetry.
It’s silly, but according to Google Analytics, The Clog and work by Foxforce increased Mission AC’s online footprint by 1,000 percent over the same time period in 2024. Mixing her horror heritage with the supposedly more polished world of marketing has always been part of Jean’s journey.
“I would be covered in blood and then go the next day to an oil convention and tell people about, you know, European oil brand or something,” she says in a phone interview. “It was great because marketing helped me pay my bills so when low-budget horror films came along, I could take more of those jobs. I would do commercials for Jeff Haas Mazda or NASA.”
Filmmaker Jeremy Sumrall, who played the killer called The Beat in Sweatshop, remembers Jean’s jovial attitude and professional nature while working together. During COVID, he would assist her in several projects she directed, including a horror book trailer.
“She’s incredibly smart and talented, and impresses me each time I’ve been fortunate enough to work with her,” he said via an emailed interview. “Filmmaking is all about problem solving, and I’ve never seen her rattled on set. She’s always calm, cool, and collected, and she’s never seemed to let anything get to her. She’s a true gem, and an absolute joy to work alongside.”
Like many aspiring stars, Jean headed to Hollywood to try and make it as both an actress and a branded content creator. She moved to Los Angeles and produced a musical web series called Heart to Beat in 2013. The $50,000 price tag was out of her budget, but Jean had the brilliant idea of partnering with Bose to make it scripted content for their brand. A creative entrepreneur at Bose turned her down, but the idea of pairing her filmmaking aspirations with corporate money stayed with her.
“I pitched it to him, but I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says. “I didn’t pitch it the right way or anything. I was like, pay for my web series! They didn’t really get back to me, but that was the first connection.”
Jean struggled to get her company off the ground and returned to Texas dejected. As she was feeling sorry for herself, her father encouraged her to give it one more try. She returned to L.A. and within months had produced a viral video for the YouTube channel Totally TV that garnered half a million views. She continued producing for brands and found a niche wedding inspirational lyrics to inspirational imagery designed to help girls going through hard times. Within a couple of years, she had gathered a group of other female creatives to make Foxforce a serialized video producer.
“We’re like a community of female filmmakers and, you know, any creatives that are not so mainstream,” she says. “We all work together, and we want to expand our community. That’s the big goal, is to really help creators all over kind of get sustainable work and be able to support themselves by doing what they love.”
All of which led her back to Houston, bringing evil toilets to life for a corporation. And that’s not the only way her life has come full circle. Inspired by Reese Witherspoon’s company Hello Sunshine, Foxforce is using their connections in film and television to produce feature films. They started with a short called Mother’s Day directed by Kathryn Boyd Brolin, and they have a horror film in the pipe, naturally.
Jean herself will be playing the lead in a feature musical styled after Hustle and Flow. With her new career secured, she wants to return to acting just as she did when she would promote oil products between gigs as slasher bait.
“I didn’t want Cherry Bomb to be my last film ever,” she says, laughing as she remembered another gritty, violent film from her indie horror Texas past. Rest assured, the future is bright.
Great Job Jef Rouner & the Team @ The Texas Signal Source link for sharing this story.
