THE RECKONING
Neil Marshall’s back, bearing the mark of the witch in The Reckoning
Neil Marshall suffers a witch to live in his latest horror.
“I WANTED TO RETURN TO THE horror genre,” says director Neil Marshall, who made his name – and ignited his career – with the visceral chills of Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent (2005).
Marshall’s latest, The Reckoning, isn’t just a return to his filmmaking roots. As he shares, it’s also a reaction against his last movie, 2019’s misfiring Hellboy reboot.
“I was kind of handcuffed on that film,” he tells Red Alert. “It was really miserable, because I didn’t get any creative input in the project. And so for this one I deliberately sacrificed having a budget for having complete control over the film. It was tough, but it was a way more satisfying experience. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved out of very little.”
A tale of persecution set against the plague-blighted backdrop of 17th century England, The Reckoning stars Charlotte Kirk as Grace Haverstock, a farmer’s widow accused of witchcraft. In the custody of the fanatical Judge Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee), the country’s fiercest witch hunter, she faces not just physical torture but her own – potentially literal – demons.
“We started doing some research into the witch hunts,” says Marshall, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kirk, his partner. “The more we got into it the more intrigued we became by the idea of telling a more authentic story of witches during that period. A more psychological horror, about questions of sanity and questions of faith that are going to be raging in someone’s mind as they are going through this persecution.”
GOING PEAR-SHAPED
For Marshall it’s a story that has modern-day resonance. “Witch hunts are still very much in existence but they’ve just taken on a different form, like cancel culture. We thought, ‘Okay, we can tell a story that’s certainly going to be horrific but also has something to say, and is also a very strong female empowerment story’. We wanted to make it topical and relevant to today’s audiences without going down a route that was too supernatural. We were going for more psychological horror.”
Marshall grimaces as he remembers researching the torture implements of the time. “Oh God! Part of the problem was that I had to
choose torture experiences that were authentic but which Grace could survive, in order to make it through the story. They weren’t so much torture devices as methods of slowly killing somebody. They had that built-in catch-22 of ‘If you die, you’re innocent, and if you survive, you’re guilty’. We settled on two methods that were real – witch-pricking and the Pear of Anguish. They’re survivable, but they’re grim.
“I’m not interested in torture porn. I’m not interested in watching that kind of movie, let alone making one. So it was very important to me that although I had to establish those tortures were happening, I was never going to dwell on them. You know what’s going to happen and we leave it to the imagination, because that’s far worse anyway.”
So just how do you navigate that line between exploitation cinema and something more empowering?
“It’s a very fine line,” Marshall admits. “We have to stick to the truth here, and this did happen, and these women did go through this. But doing it without being exploitative is tricky, because the whole thing was exploitative. They were exploiting women and keeping men in power.”
Grace confronts more than physical torture. “She’s seeing visions of her dead mother and dead husband and the Devil, and they’re all tormenting her and basically fucking with her head,” says Marshall. “It was the idea that going into the cell every night was like walking into the bedroom in The Exorcist. You knew something bad was going to happen, that sense of dread…”
Marshall shot the film in Hungary. “I’d imagined filming it in the UK, in winter, and it being kind of rainy and bleak and moody. But of course we ended up shooting it in Hungary in the height of summer. Certainly the fields and the trees pass for England, and that’s absolutely fine, but my worry was the weather. I was thinking, ‘Oh, that’s just not the vibe I want…’
“So I flipped it on its head. I thought, ‘We’ve got characters riding around on horses, they’ve got big hats and they carry guns. And there’s a town, and a corrupt guy ruling the town, and then there are farmsteaders… this is a Western! So why don’t we just take onboard that aesthetic and make it hot and dusty and Once Upon A Time In The West… of England!’” NS
The Reckoning is in cinemas (where applicable) and available digitally now.
I’m not interested in watching torture porn, or making that kind of movie