By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Opening in theaters this past weekend, IMMACULATE gives EUPHORIA and ANYONE BUT YOU star Sydney Sweeney the chance to get down and bloody in a gruesome religious frightfest–and according to director Michael Mohan, she relished it. He discusses his star and much more in this RUE MORGUE chat.
The IMMACULATE screenplay was originally written by Andrew Lobel over a decade ago and concerned a teenage girl at boarding school; Sweeney auditioned for it several years back and later brought it to Mohan’s attention. The resulting film, released by Neon, stars the actress as Cecelia, a young nun who travels to a convent in the Italian countryside. It’s not long before the place proves to house hidden horrors, and Cecelia undergoes severe physical trials (the title is a clue) that will test both her faith and her will to survive, leading to an especially intense and grueling closing scene.
Andrew Lobel’s original screenplay was quite different from the final film, so can you talk about its evolution once you came on board?
It started when Sydney texted me, saying, “Hey, are you interested in directing a horror movie?” and I was absolutely interested. I had actually been writing a horror script at the time. She told me, “I’ve got this hole in my schedule, a tiny window that I can try to slot this in, at the end of this year and the top of the next.” This was in 2022, I guess. And when I read IMMACULATE, I was very nervous, because she was making this movie with or without me. What struck me the most was a key reveal that happened in the middle of the story, which I don’t want to spoil for your readers, but it knocked my socks off. It was like, this is awesome!
But yeah, it was originally about a teenage girl who has lost her parents in an accident, and goes to live at a Catholic boarding school. So we needed to update it for Sydney’s age, and also, I had the idea that what happens in the movie, to me the most interesting character it could happen to was a nun. It gave Sydney a much wider arc to play, because she was starting in a more meek and mild-mannered place. So I told the producers, “I don’t think the movie works unless Sydney’s a nun”; that was the only solution I could see, and to all of their credit, they said, “Yeah, let’s figure out how to make this work.”
We didn’t have a lot of time, because I was on the ground in Rome three months later, so we were kind of building the plane as we were taking off, because it was a pretty substantial rewrite. It was all hands on deck; Andrew came to Rome with us for a little while and we whipped it into shape.
Once Cecilia was a young woman and no longer a teenager, did that allow you to go more extreme with the violent and sexual material?
I would still probably have gone there not with the sex, but with the violence, for sure! What was great about it, though, was with her being a nun, and especially trying to keep this film short–not counting credits, it’s 82 minutes, it’s very efficient–what that allowed me to do was wallow in the religious iconography on a deeper level. We needed to understand why Cecelia feels this connection to God, and rather than having a ton of backstory, where she’s talking about all these things that have happened to her, we have a very abbreviated version of that, and instead we get to see her become a nun, and do the novitiate ceremony. To be able to show that visually, with a sense of grandeur, allowed us a window into why she feels the way she does.
Are you a fan of religious horror in general, and are there any movies of that type that especially influenced IMMACULATE?
I’m not typically a fan of supernatural religious horror, and when I read the script, that’s what I loved about it–that it wasn’t supernatural. This is a nun movie where they’re not battling a creature at the end made of ones and zeroes; it’s a lot more brutal and terrifying. However, out of the religious horror films, I will say that one that stands the test of time is the original EXORCIST. What continues to fascinate me about that film is how truly disturbing some of the imagery is. William Friedkin went for it, like the scene with the crucifix where Regan is stabbing herself in the crotch; that is so unnerving and so shocking, and yet it is in this package that is very classy. That push-and-pull between imagery that is very lurid, captured in a way that is very beautiful–the intersection of that feels dangerous to me. So out of all those films, that’s the reason why THE EXORCIST was probably on our minds the most.
Was it difficult to find a religious location to shoot in, given the nature of IMMACULATE’s storyline?
It’s actually four different locations pieced together, if you include the catacombs. Of the main two locations, the cloistered area, the outdoor area, was an old convent that had been turned into an art museum, which was literally about 100 feet away from the Vatican! The second location was Villa Parisi, which is in the town of Frascati, and it’s not a religious institution. It has actually served as the backdrop to so many great Italian horror movies of the ’70s and ’80s; BAY OF BLOOD was shot there, BURIAL GROUND was shot there, BLOOD FOR DRACULA, so there was this history and legacy of Italian horror in this place where we were shooting.
As for the actual church we used–I have no idea how we got permission. No idea! The line producers worked their magic, and…what a stunning location, especially because it had that area underneath, the reliquary, where you go underneath the altar and can see what’s down there. That was super-creepy and super-interesting.
Having worked with Sweeney a few times before, did that give you a trust that allowed you to push her into the more extreme areas she goes into in IMMACULATE?
Yeah, but I didn’t have to push–she wanted to go there. She was pushing me! When she sent me the script, she was basically like, “Please, I just want to be covered head to toe with blood!” And when I came up with the ending, I was like, “I think we can go even further than that.” So it wasn’t about me pushing her to those dark places, it was about her as an actor wanting to challenge herself, and having trust in me that I would build the proper safety nets so she could go out on a limb and know it was going to turn out well.
Did she come up with any of her moments in the film?
Yes, she was really influential, especially in terms of the body-horror aspect. I told her a story that when my mom was giving birth to me, one of her teeth went black and she had to have it removed, and Syd was like, “We have to put that in the movie!” And later, there’s a very key and gross scene involving a fingernail, and that was all Sydney. She said, “Maybe my body can start falling apart too,” and so that part of it was an extra little horror layer she brought to the film.
Without giving too much away, can you talk about shooting her final scene? What kind of preparation was involved in getting her to that place?
You know, it’s so funny, because what I want to say is that I brought her aside, and I whispered something into her ear that allowed her to access her childhood trauma, and then she poured all that trauma into the work. But that’s not the case. What we did was, we showed up, we figured out the blocking of where she would stand, where she would move to, so that the operators knew what they were going to do to keep her in focus. We didn’t rehearse it performance-wise, because Sydney doesn’t like to rehearse; we were just like, “Let’s shoot and see what happens.” And the first take is what’s in the movie. We did shoot a second take, and a couple of different variations, but nothing compared to that first take. It was just magic.
I also want to ask about the music, which has a very European-horror flavor to it.
That’s Will Bates, and interestingly enough, he’s the son of Hammer horror star Ralph Bates. So if you’ve seen DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE, Dr. Jekyll is Will’s dad, and his mom is Virginia Wetherell, whom Ralph Bates met on the set of that and was also in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. He has a beautiful creative spirit. The basis for a lot of the instrumentation was the hurdy-gurdy and the Hungarian zither, and they’re both in a very specific key, so the movie ended up all being written in that key.
The starting point for the IMMACULATE score was, he had to write what we called the te deum. When Cecelia is revealed to be the Madonna and they have that ceremony, it’s what everyone is singing in the choir, and because they were singing on camera, Will had to write that in advance. When he sent me the first version of the te deum, I paused what was happening on set and we played it nice and loud for everybody to hear, and it just stopped us in our tracks. Honestly, it inspired the whole crew, because they were like, oh wow, this is powerful stuff! It really helped influence how we were lighting and designing our camera moves and such, because people could see the movie coming together in their heads if they pictured the visuals we were capturing with that music.
Were you concerned at all about what the reception to the film might be, because there is a certain conservatism creeping through the country at this point?
I think people need to have their world views challenged. I believe that’s healthy. I was not at all worried, because I think controversy is a necessary ingredient in our culture, in order to ignite conversation. If a fucked-up horror movie can conjure that, then all the better. However, I’ll say that this is also just a fun rollercoaster ride, and if people want to watch this movie and not read into it, they’re going to have a great time. It’s an extreme horror movie, and so if some people don’t have the stomach for that, if that’s not their genre, this might not be for them. But if you see one horror film a year, and you want to see one that’s different and unique and beautifully shot, with a performance by Sydney Sweeney that you don’t usually get in a horror movie, to me, that’s IMMACULATE. This is that one horror movie you do see a year that you’ll have conversations about for months afterward.
Do you have any horror films in the works right now?
I definitely have the bug. There’s no greater experience as a director than sitting in an audience when someone screams in reaction to something you created, and then you can hear their friend making fun of them for screaming. And also, the fact that people are coming out of the film deeply moved by Sydney’s character arc. Those two things coming together is the greatest feeling in the world. So I can’t talk about them yet, but I definitely have more horror films in the works.
