PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Back in 2020, I watched this incredible indie horror movie called Lucky. Written by and starring Brea Grant (read our interview with her HERE), Lucky was directed by Natasha Kermani, a filmmaker who had just wowed genre fans with 2017’s Imitation Girl. After blessing us with last year’s Abraham Boys, Natasha is back at it again with the phenomenal The Dreadful, a beautifully made folk horror film about isolation, trauma, and fearing those you know the best, starring Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones), Marcia Gay Harden (The Mist), and Kit Harington (Game of Thrones).
The Dreadful follows Anne and her mother-in-law Morwen who live a solitary, harsh life on the outskirts of society – but when a man from their past returns, he will set off a sequence of events that become a turning point for Anne.
To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Natasha about crafting the film, casting, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: The Dreadful is such a beautifully made film that I can’t wait to talk about it with you.
Natasha Kermani: Cool, thank you! Thanks for watching; I appreciate it.
PopHorror: What sparked the idea for the film and how did the project come about?
Natasha Kermani: This project has actually been with me for a very, very long time. I made a movie that was doing the festival rounds in 2018, and this was going to be my next project, so I had the script in my back pocket. And you know, of course, life is full of left and right turns and unexpected things and so I didn’t get to make it until recently, obviously. But over that time, it’s really evolved quite a bit. It started as a really, really simple story. I really loved the idea of these two women living in isolation and needing to survive together, and all of the other elements around it have evolved and changed quite a bit over that course of time. But really at the end of the day, I really just loved the idea of having this intimate almost family drama set in this wild setting, this expressionistic environment within this sort of supernatural element weaving through it. Really, I just loved the idea of a codependent relationship between two women, specifically a woman of an older generation and a younger generation and examining that relationship, which I feel like we don’t get to see all that much.
PopHorror: I would agree with that, yes. How did you convey your vision to your cast and crew?
Natasha Kermani: I think it all starts with the script. Sophie read the script first as the main role of Anne and I think for her, she really saw it as a story of liberation and a story of a woman deciding ultimately her own path forward instead of the path set out for her by all the people around her. With Marcia coming on, Marcia really wanted to examine where this character was coming from. She understands she has this dependency on this younger woman, but why? What is she scared of? What’s on the other side of Anne leaving? We just really talked through why each of the characters made sense and tried not to make any of them too much of an archetype. We didn’t want Marcia to just be the crone, or she could very easily slip into Carrie’s mom territory. We’ve seen that certainly plenty of times. But instead to make her this three-dimensional relatable human character who is doing what she feels she needs to do to survive at any cost. I think in the end, you end up getting these very, very human performances from these incredible actors who could have been very heightened but instead we tried to keep everything very small, intimate, and grounded in the real-life motivations. Just keeping it very, very grounded.
PopHorror: The whole cast is great, but you brought up Marcia. She just shines in this role. She is phenomenal. I feel like we haven’t really seen her in this type of role before and if you didn’t know who she was, she was unrecognizable and she was so, so good. What was casting her like?
Natasha Kermani: That’s why I think she wanted to do it, because she hadn’t done it. Obviously, she’s done horror before. She’s a great villain in The Mist. She’s flirted with horror before, but I don’t know that she’s ever been able to go like full folktale fairytale horror, so I think that was very appealing to her. For me, it was like the minute her name came up in conversation I was like, she’s a legend! How cool to see her put this character on. It was fun for me because I see Marcia as playing very posh. She’s very glamorous in real life. Always very put together and every detail polished. She’s very glamorous. To see her strip away that glamor and get a little bit ugly was really exciting for me and I had a feeling it would work really well. I’m really happy with the fact that she came on and joined us. She just finished up with the trifecta so beautifully.
PopHorror: When I think of Marcia Gay Hardin, I always picture her in The First Wives Club.
Natasha Kermani: Oh yeah! That’s amazing! She’s in so many classics. I forgot she’s in The First Wives Club. Of course, she’s in so many fricking great classic films. And some of her humor, though. She’s also very funny. I think that was also really an element we wanted to hold onto was her willingness to go too far and come back and have Sophie be the throughline through those scenes. I think it was a really nice dynamic for all of us.
PopHorror: Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the film no matter what?
Natasha Kermani: That’s a really interesting question because so much ends up on the cutting room floor. I think it’s the children. The children were really important for me. There’s a separate timeline that’s playing through the movie where we get a glimpse at the characters as children and to me that was super essential because if the film is Anne coming to realize that the most important people in her life around her are not who she thought they were, I think we need to see the nostalgia and then we need to see the nostalgia being taken apart. The first time we see the kids, it’s very sort of beautiful and they’re just playing and everything seems fine but then we realize that this toxic dynamic had been there the whole time. For me, I really wanted that mirror from the current timeline to their past. And of course, in the course of post there’s always like, do we really need the flashbacks? For me, it was super essential to see that relationship and then have it be as an adult, she’s able to see them for who they truly were.
PopHorror: Why do you feel that so many people resonate with the horror genre?
Natasha Kermani: For the same reason I do. It’s the macabre. It’s being able to dance with death and all the ugliness in the world from a safe space. It’s our ability to look the scary things in life in the eye and say, “Okay, I see you; you see me and we’re going to move forward together hand in hand.” And that I think is the healthiest thing that you can do as a human being.
PopHorror: I love that and I completely agree. I always say the same thing. We can survive a slasher in the safe space of our home. We can survive our loved ones killing people in the safe space of our home without having to actually experience it.
Natasha Kermani: This is such a stupid pedantic and thin way of thinking about it, but it really is therapeutic. These are things that we need to think about because it is the realities of our lives and so sometimes to look at it through the lens of a story is sometimes an easier way to process and understand what’s happening around us.
PopHorror: I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?
Natasha Kermani: I was just talking about this with my friend who’s a wonderful horror screenwriter and we were having a drink and there’s a new Silent Hill movie out, and I was like, “You know what? That first Silent Hill movie really fucked me up.” I think I don’t give that first movie enough credit for my fascination with horror, specifically filmmaking horror, because I have obviously a much longer relationship with horror novels or reading Frankenstein for the first time or anything like that. But as a filmmaker, I think that first Silent Hill movie… The complete freedom of fucked up shit that happens in that movie that is truly, deeply upsetting, I think stuck with me in a really significant way.
Thank you so much to Natasha for taking the time to chat with us. The Dreadful is currently in theaters and On Demand!
