From corsets to carnage
Romola Garai is best known as a period-drama actor — so why is her first film as director, Amulet, a demon-infested horror?
ROMOLA GARAI’S CV is not short of English costume dramas: Atonement, Suffragette, the BBC’S Jane Austen adaptation Emma among them. You might be forgiven, then, for thinking her directorial debut would be along similar lines. At one point, she thought so too. “When I started writing in my twenties, I was probably writing more in the space that I had been working in as an actor — doing adaptations of novels,” Garai explains. “But I’ve always had a real love for the uncanny.”
Her first film as writer-director, Amulet, is not short of uncanniness. A slow-burn horror about an immigrant (played by God’s Own Country’s
Alec Secareanu) escaping the internal demons of war, only to confront a very literal demon, it is unlike anything we’ve seen Garai do before. But costume dramas were never a deliberate focus, she says. “The thing about being an actor is that, until you get to the 0.0001 per cent of the very top of the industry, you don’t choose the work that you do,” she says. “I’ve been very fortunate. But if someone said, ‘Look, here’s an amazing horror role,’ I would have been absolutely delighted. It didn’t happen.”
Garai has been a fan of fear ever since she watched cult classic The Dark Crystal. “I remember watching it very intensely as a child,” she says. “It’s not a horror but that certainly planted a love of, and interest in, creatures.” Later, Pan’s Labyrinth, Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion proved inspirational, too.
The recent success of filmmakers such as Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) and Julia Ducournau (Raw) helped, too. “There started to be this massive move of women into the horror space,” Garai says. “That made me think about how you could work in that area, because the money and the will is there to make those films.”
Still, working in an unfamiliar genre with a low budget — not to mention staging some Cronenbergian body horror, including a birth scene for the ages — wasn’t easy. “If my first outing as director had been an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, I think I would have felt very confident,” Garai says with a laugh. “I was pushing myself into some extremely new and different territories. I was constantly being challenged. But I can’t wait to do more. I’ve got scripts in lots of different spaces. Well, I’ve never written an action film…”john
AMULET IS IN CINEMAS FROM 28 JANUARY