The fright stuff
Horror queen and talented actor finds Stephen King is the right fit
Sophie Thatcher says her fascination with horror and telling dark stories stems from a morbid fascination with death she’s had since she was young. The US actor, 22, who made her debut in a TV sequel to the demon-possession classic The Exorcist, is best known for her role as Natalie in the Emmy-nominated Yellowjackets, about a group of teens reduced to cannibalism after a remote plane crash. She is just about to take the lead role in The Boogeyman, based on the short story of the same name by horror-meister Stephen King.
“Why do I choose horror?” she ponders over Zoom from her adopted home of Los Angeles. “I think it feels the most like a release, in a sense. It can be therapeutic. Because you can go to that extreme that isn’t normalised in everyday life and being as intense as possible, there’s something very fulfilling about that as an actor and being vulnerable and opening up.
“And it’s just the most fun to delve into gritty stories and characters that are going through a lot because there’s a lot to break down. So I think it’s the most interesting and fun and f--ked up.”
Thatcher and her twin sister Emma used to rope in their friends to make zombie movies when they were children, and developed a passion for the horror genre, citing Danny
Boyle’s post-apocalyptic hit 28 Days Later, Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscarwinning dark fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth (“I was eight or nine when I watched that and it scarred me”) and Japanese creep-fest Audition as her favourites.
The fascination with death, she says, stems partly from losing a member of her extended family when young, and partly from growing up traumatised by an era where appalling gun violence and mass shootings afflict the US almost weekly.
“Coming up in this generation that is very close to death and very aware of mass shootings and school shootings,” she says. “It was mainly that for me because I’m at that age where that was just so f--king normalised and it just keeps getting worse.”
Growing up in the Mormon faith was another contributing factor in so far that she says it instilled an anxiety in her around “feeling watched and feeling like you’re not good enough or you’re not honest enough”. And the central tenet of an afterlife, to her young mind, was very much a doubleedged sword. “I like how optimistic it is … if you are good, then you get to go to a good place,” she says of the faith, “but I think when I was younger, I was on the other end and didn’t want to believe in that and kind of pictured a black abyss.”
Thatcher says it was her role as the young Natalie (Juliette Lewis plays the older version) in Yellowjackets that landed her the starring role in The Boogeyman after King had tweeted his admiration for the survival drama in 2022.
The original eight-page short story appeared in the 1978 anthology Night Shift and featured just three characters but the expanded featurefilm version got the stamp of approval from the revered writer, who is typically not shy about sharing frank and honest opinions. One was that it would be madness to release The Boogeyman to streaming as was first planned, and rapturously terrified test audiences confirmed the decision to release it in cinemas first instead.
In the film, Thatcher plays Sadie, a teenager grieving the loss of her mother. When a patient of her therapist father seemingly brings a malign entity into their house that feeds on fear and trauma, Sadie has to be the bridge between the sceptical adults and her terrified younger sister.
“Sadie is very different from my other roles in the way that she is much more internal and reclusive and very much internalises her sadness, and she’s in a very distinct stage of grieving right now with her mother,” says Thatcher.
She says she’s hugely grateful for Yellowjackets – the second season wraps today and a third has already been commissioned – not just for the roles and experience it has already bought her, but also for the ability to say no. “That’s something that you don’t really expect really early on in your career,” she admits. “That makes me feel like I have complete control and power.”