DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
Director Michael Mohan on his new Sydney Sweeney-headlining horror Immaculate
BLACK NARCISSUS, ROSEMARY’S Baby, Barbarian, What Have You Done To Solange?, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times... These are just some of the films Michael Mohan namechecks when asked about the influences on his latest big-screen offering. While some directors are happy to paddle in horror waters, but have no deep love for the genre, Mohan is absolutely a horror man through and through.
“As a filmmaker, it’s the most challenging genre you can work in,” he enthuses to Red Alert, “because you need the performances to be grounded, but the filmmaking language is so much more sophisticated in terms of setting up jump scares in a way that the audience doesn’t see coming.”
In 2021 The Voyeurs, Mohan’s twisty, erotically-charged thriller for Prime Video, featured Sydney Sweeney as its leading lady.
Now he’s re-teamed with her for Immaculate, a psychological horror about a young woman of devout faith who finds herself offered a place at a convent in the Italian countryside.
“Sydney sent me the script in 2022, and I was really worried I wasn’t going to like it,” Mohan says of Andrew Lobel’s screenplay (Sweeney’s production company Fifty-Fifty Films is producing), “but as I was turning the pages I was like, ‘Andrew is an undiscovered talent here in the horror space.’ This contains scares that I’ve never seen before. And the reveals that happened in the script… like, I got to a certain page and my mind was blown. I’m someone who writes films with these big twists in them, so I can always see them a mile away, but this one I couldn’t. So when I got to the end of the script, I immediately called Sydney and basically begged her to be a part of this project.”
Few female actors are as hot at the moment as Sydney Sweeney, so to have the star of Euphoria (HBO’s drama about high schoolers) headlining a horror is A Big Deal. Mohan first worked with her on comedy-drama Everything Sucks!, a Netflix series he co-created with Ben York Jones, and believes Immaculate will show off Sweeney’s acting skills like no other movie before has.
“She’s an actress who can do unhinged like no other actor – I mean, you’ve seen Euphoria season two, right?” he says. “But she can also do quiet and subtle really well too. When I read this script I saw the potential to slightly modify the character to someone that gives us this huge arc, where she starts as this altruistic, innocent young woman, and by the end of the movie, turns into an absolutely feral creature.
“I’m lucky to work with an acto
