Natasha Kermani’s film began with a dark vision she couldn’t shake.
“I couldn’t let go of this idea of two women living in a very desolate, barbaric landscape,” she says. “I felt like that was a relationship I didn’t see a lot, and one I wanted to explore. We see a lot of mothers and daughters, but we don’t see a lot of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, two women of two different generations who have been thrust into coexistence.”
From there, the idea of “The Dreadful” was born. The film, headed to theaters today via Lionsgate, is a dramatic horror tale set during the War of the Roses, at the tail end of the Dark Ages. Sophie Turner stars as Anne, who is living with her mother-in-law, Morwen (a fiery Marcia Gay Harden), while her husband is at war. But when her childhood friend (Kit Harington) tells her that her husband has died, they grow closer and evil starts lurking.
While Kermani, who wrote and directed the film, is upfront about her love of genre films, she says she is always careful to make sure the scares work in service of the characters.
“I don’t think anything I do is a horror conceit first,” she says. “Everything I do is based on relationship and a character’s journey from Point A to Point B. The horror needs to express that journey. The horror needs to be a color in our palette that we’re using to tell this character’s story. Often these characters are experiencing fear, so it’s always the question of, ‘What is this character afraid of?’”
Sophie Turner and Natasha Kermani on the set of “The Dreadful.”
Kate Eccarius
Beyond traditional scares, “The Dreadful” amps up the eerie atmosphere and discomfort. One meta element comes from the casting of Turner and Harington as lovers, which feels a bit wrong given that their “Game of Thrones” characters are raised as siblings. Even Turner admitted it felt odd. But Kermani says it’s a happy accident that audiences are coming in with that subtext.
“These characters were always childhood friends,” she says. “One of the themes of the film is growing up, so she has these memories of this character as a child and their childhood together. Now here they are as adults, reevaluating their relationship. They’re not related in our film, but there is a bit of a love triangle, so there is a forbidden fruit feeling in our film. I think it’s interesting that it worked out that way.”
Kermani went on to praise Turner’s performance as uniquely intuitive, able to draw even more from her character beyond the script.
“One of the things she latched onto was the character’s spirituality and inner strength,” she says. “I think that was something I didn’t necessarily see up front. I thought maybe this character would feel more childlike, a bit of a blank slate that evolves. But what Sophie brought that I loved so much, and I’m so glad she did, is that you can actually see that strength and steeliness in her from the first time she appears onscreen. She has these instincts and intuition for the characters that she is able to string through in a very consistent way.”
“The Dreadful” is a melting pot of influences, including a reimagining of the folk tale that inspired the classic Japanese horror film “Onibaba.” Yet even as the stakes rise and the scares come along, Kermani says it’s a small-scale story at heart.
“That core relationship between the two women, specifically the older generation and a younger generation, and the struggle between them as it starts to fray and to fall apart, and the one character is trying to move away, and the other one is trying to hold onto her, felt to me like an interesting sandbox to play in,” she says. “Everything else — the mythology, the fantastical elements, the period — really came out of exploring that core relationship.”
Watch the trailer for “The Dreadful” below.
