How to make a... horror movie

Saint Maud wowed festival audiences, made critics rejoice and sparked a bidding war for distribution. Firsttime writer/director Rose Glass explains just how she did it and hands out tips for any would-be filmmakers…

- JAMIE GRAHAM

With Saint Maud, writer/director Rose Glass has made one of the most extraordinary horror debuts – or debuts, period – in years.

Set in an English seaside town that oozes sadness and faded glamour, it sees a young carer, Maud (Morfydd Clark), begin a new assignment looking after Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a once-famous American dancer who’s now dying of cancer in a hillside manor. Smoking, drinking, throwing parties, Amanda is raging against the encroaching darkness. Maud, whose faith protects her from past trauma, views it as part of her job to save her patient’s soul.

“I was thinking of Repulsion vibes because I love how that movie is so contained yet so imaginatively epic,” says Glass, whose own film is likewise set, largely, in a single location – Amanda’s old dark house is not so very different from the castles in Universal and Hammer monster movies – and bleeds reality into fantasy as the sanity of a lonely woman begins to splinter. “We’re not just seeing things literally,” points out Glass. “We are experiencing Maud’s sensory emotions.”

Saint Maud is a character study, psychosexual drama, trippy horror, religious enquiry and more. Danny Boyle, no less, compared it to Carrie, The Exorcist and Under The Skin, though it equally evokes Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? and Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus. Most impressive of all, though, is that it wears its influences lightly. This is a fresh, dazzling, personal work from a bold new voice.

Here, Rose Glass tells Total Film how she made others believe as she shepherded her vision to the screen.