Summer of 1992. In a world haunted by the AIDS crisis, an ex-altar boy counting the days until he can escape to art school barrels headfirst into the two sins he's been told will send him straight to hell: summoning the dead on a Ouija board and sex with another boy.

Summer of 1992. Vinny is a former altar boy, a fledgling artist, and the supreme misfit in his suburban Connecticut hell-hole. With high school in the rearview mirror, Vinny is desperate to ditch his Italian American family and overprotective mother and escape to art school. He passes the time printing out dot-matrix porno and filling his sketchbook with angst-ridden art, longing for his first hookup with another boy.

Vinny’s only friend is Jade, another misfit, newly obsessed with Ouija boards. She entices Vinny to meet a spirit named Chris who’s been dying to meet him. Chris quickly becomes the confidant Vinny can’t find among the living, a gay punk ghost who has the power to enter his dreams and turn them white-hot.

But when Vinny finally meets a living, breathing Goth boy from the city named Gabe, Chris turns jealous. Vinny’s first-ever in-the-flesh sexual encounter devolves into a waking nightmare for everyone around him as Chris refuses to stay buried.

Pseudo-Realistic Monsters conjures the anxiety of Vinny’s sexual awakening in the early ’90s, reaching back into Chris’s past, where queer love, loss, and rage from the dawn of the AIDS crisis can not be erased.

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WRITER/DIRECTOR BOBBY ABATE (Brooklyn, NY) is a queer artist, filmmaker, and editor whose work has been showcased at the MoMA, The New York Film Festival, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. Critics celebrated their first feature, Certain Women, co-directed with Peggy Ahwesh; and the MoMA called the film “as sustained and as successful as Todd Haynes’ acclaimed Far From Heaven” with an “almost opposite approach.” Film Comment Magazine named Bobby one of the top 25 emerging filmmakers for the 21st century. They were also the recipient of the Princess Grace Award, the DVAA fellowship, and Leighton International Artist Exchange Grant. A member of the Television Academy, Bobby served as editor for seasons 3 and 4 of the Queer docuseries “We’re Here” on HBO, which recently won a Peabody Award. Additionally, they create animations for renowned drag performer Sasha Velour. They have a master’s in filmmaking from Bard College and a certificate in screenwriting from the Binger Institute in Amsterdam. Visit Bobby’s website at Sweetkitty.com.
PROOF OF CONCEPT | The Ghost at Skeleton Rock (2026)
In the summer of 1992, at the height of the AIDS crisis, 18-year-old Vinny reels after his first hookup with another boy—a goth from the city named Gabe. In the tiny enclave of Callicoon in upstate New York, Vinny’s only confidant is a ghost named Chris that he conjures via a homemade Ouija board. Consumed by fear over his first sexual encounter, Vinny brings Gabe beneath the ruins of a crumbling bridge to summon Chris. Gabe quickly discovers Chris isn't just a figment of Vinny's imagination—he's a jealous ghost with the power to twist reality into nightmares. 
The Ghost at Skeleton Rock premiered in at the 2026 editing of Out on Film in Atlanta.
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