THE RECKONING

DIRECTOR NEIL MARSHALL ON HIS GRUESOME (AND PLAGUE-ADDLED) RETURN TO HORROR

IT’S NEIL MARSHALL’S HOMECOMING After a decade as a blockbuster TV director (Game Of Thrones, Westworld, Black Sails, Hannibal), Neil Marshall made his 2019 Hellboy reboot — which didn’t go well. “I ended up making the wrong decision for the wrong reasons,” he says. His new film, The Reckoning, was “a complete creative purge for me”.

IT’S INADVERTENTLY RELEVANT Filmed pre-pandemic in 2019, The Reckoning is set during the plague years of the 17th century. Charlotte Kirk plays Grace, a young widow falsely accused of witchcraft. “I hadn’t done a proper horror since The Descent,” says Marshall. “I hadn’t found anything as powerful and original as that until this came along.”

IT’S HIS MOST EXPERIMENTAL FILM Grace undergoes a gruesome four-day “inquisition” at the hands of witch-finder Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee), but the horror tends to the psychological and the style, for Marshall, is somewhat experimental: “I played around with the timelines in the edit, and some of it’s a bit impressionistic and surreal. I had fun being a little bit artsy-fartsy. Maybe I’m getting old...”

IT STILL DELIVERS THE SPLATTER

“I couldn’t resist,” says Marshall of the film’s head-smashing. Ian Whyte’s Devil packs a punch too, but, “I insisted he would not be red. We’re not doing another red guy with horns, ever!”