‘The Sacrifice Game’ Director Jenn Wexler on Female Friendships and Killer Cults [Fantastic Fest 2023]
Director Jenn Wexler is, frankly, punk as fuck. Since she started working with Glass Eye Pix, started by the DIY horror legend Larry Fessenden, Wexler has been ingrained in the world of indie horror filmmaking and making films with whatever resources available to tell unique stories. She burst onto the scene with her directorial debut The Ranger and now, she’s bringing on the holiday cheer with her new film The Sacrifice Game.
Read the full synopsis:
With nowhere to go for the winter break, Samantha and Clara must spend the season at their snowy boarding school. Unbeknownst to them, the building is the end point of a series of demonic sacrifices, and the two students are the only ones left to put a stop to the summoning ceremony before it’s too late.
Dread Central spoke with Wexler and producer Heather Buckley at Fantastic Fest about the deep power of female friendships and the heartbreak of losing a good friend. We also discuss teenage loneliness, the film’s music, and much more.
Dread Central: Where did the idea for The Sacrifice Game come from?
Jenn Wexler: I originally wrote the first drafts in 2013.
DC: Oh, wow.
JW: Yeah, I wrote it before The Ranger. It was when I was just first starting to learn how to make movies. I had just started working for Larry Fessenden’s production company Glass Eye Pix. So I wrote the first draft of The Sacrifice Game as I was working for his company and learning how to produce. I was like, “Oh, this is really big. I’m not ready to direct this yet.”
So I put it to the side. After I had figured out how to make movies and produced a couple, I directed The Ranger, then I felt like I was ready. So I pulled it back out. And then Sean [Redlitz], who’s my husband, we were together every day during COVID-19, and that was our project. We just started working on it together and kind of updating it to our sensibilities. That’s one of my favorite things creatively when you have an idea from years ago, and then you’re able to see it differently.
DC: So what were some of your main influences in the aesthetics and the sensibilities of The Sacrifice Game?
JW: I went to New Jersey Public School, so I was really inspired by just the boarding school setting. I feel like the boarding school is mysterious and romantic because that just wasn’t my adolescent experience. The Shining is one of my favorite movies of all time. So obviously that’s just an influence in general. And then boarding school movies. There’s this movie from 1971 called Don’t Deliver Us From Evil, this French movie about two boarding school girls who are up to no good, and they do dark things. That was an influence.
Then it was combining all of that with home invasion elements like The Last House on the Left. And then obviously Black Christmas is an influence.
DC: I love how you meld different subgenres here and really just keep us all on our toes. But it’s amazing how you flip the script a bunch of times, and I love that. But your cast is amazing, especially Mena Massoud. What was it like directing him? He was just off the rails.
JW: I found Mena so charming in Aladdin and also in life. I knew that I wanted this character to be charming, but I wanted him to be in a really fucked up in the way where you can convince a bunch of people to go on a murder spree with you. So that was my pitch to Mena when I first met him. I was like, “I want to take your charm and twist it to a really evil version.” And he was so into it. He was so down, and it was just really fun on set. It was really fun with him because he starts off in a very dark place, and then he has an arc, but it continues to get dark. So finding the nuances of that was really fun and exciting.
DC: I want to hear how you found the boarding school because it is the perfect location. Was the basement in that building?
JW: Oh yeah, the basement was in the building which is so lovely when you’re making a movie, to get to be in one place for a month. It’s hard when you have a lot of locations. But it was such a dream to just get to go back and forth every day to the same space. But it’s called Oka Abby, and it’s outside Montreal. We got connected with them because producer Heather Buckley, who was the producer on The Ranger, shared the script with her friends, Philip Kalin-Hajdu and Albert Melamed, who are producers out of Montreal. And they dug it and they knew the exact right place. So we went to Montreal and they brought us here to Oka Abbey and instantly fell in love. I was like, this is it. This is the Blackvale School for Girls
DC: Did you sleep there?
JW: We didn’t. I kind of wish we could have, but it didn’t work out that way. But no, we slept in a motel 20 minutes away.
DC: Was it spooky?
JW: Okay, so we have heard stories from our crew that they had haunted experiences. I was very much in my own head space, and I was like, ghost, you better not fuck with me. I’m trying to direct.
Heather Buckley: It’s not haunted. I spent like 3:00 AM in the basement by myself and walking around the perimeter late at night just to see.
JW: Some people said candles were knocked down in a room that they were in.
DC: This is Georgia Acken’s first feature. She’s incredible. How did you find her?
JW: So we watched a bunch of auditions with teen girls from across Canada, and we watched her audition and our jaws were on the floor. We were like, “She’s amazing, she is Clara.” Interestingly, I don’t always feel that in an audition the person has to do it exactly as I have thought about the lines when writing them, because there are a lot of ways things can be interpreted, and I am really looking for just their energy. So the way they’re reading the lines isn’t that important to me. But Georgia happened to read the lines exactly how I had written them, how I thought about them in my head when writing them. And that was just an extra perk, an extra amazing perk.
DC: She has such a presence, too. I think one of my favorite things about The Sacrifice Game is how you look at the friendship between two girls. And not just in that mean girly boarding school way, but in this beautiful, sweet, loving way.
JW: I mean, I was a lonely teen. I moved towns when I was 12 years old.
DC: Oh god, the worst time to move.
JW: The worst. I was like, “Mom, Dad, what are you doing to me?” To go through puberty and stuff? It’s already awkward. And now they’re shoving me into a new school where I didn’t know anybody had to meet all new people. I was in seventh grade, I was in a new town.
DC: Objectively the worst grade of all time. Awful.
JW: And I’ll say I didn’t feel comfortable in life until I got to college. That was a good six years of time where I just felt very lonely and it was hard to make friends. At other points in my life, I’ve fallen into deep female friendships. A good deep female friendship is the best thing to ever exist. With The Sacrifice Game, I was specifically thinking about that moment when two best friends first meet each other and first start to fall in love with each other. It literally feels like falling in love with somebody. It is though.
DC: It is falling in love. Friendship breakups are worse than romantic breakups
JW: I agree with that a hundred percent. It’s devastating. And also going into some of my own female best friendships where those early days, they’re mysterious, especially when you’re around this age. They’re mysterious and cool and there’s something older about them, even if you’re the same age. I feel like we see it a lot in more traditional straight relationship movies.
DC: I love queer relationships, obviously, but I do also love when it’s deep, platonic love. We don’t see a lot of that, especially between young girls. It always is young girls pitted against each other. So we need more of that, especially in horror movies.
JW: And we need outsiders, misfits finding connection with each other, finding love. I think even somebody who does not seem like a misfit at all from the surface, I think most of us feel like misfits deep down.
HB: I see a lot of guy films that have that kind of camaraderie The Sacrifice Game has. Think about Reservoir Dogs and a lot of gangster films. There’s intimate stuff, even in mean streets, they’re sleeping in the same bed together. You don’t see that in a lot of female friendship movies, that intimacy that almost feels queer and maybe is, but that it’s like a deeper love. I know Jen has talked about some of her female friendships. It’s almost like you’re married.
DC: It is. Yeah, exactly.
HB: And I don’t think that the world knows that about female friendships
JW: Because we all know that because we’ve experienced it. But maybe it’s just a pop culture thing for reasons that we don’t see depicted in our pop culture that much, even though we live it in real life all the time.
DC: I think this movie is so important in showing these friendships are crucial. You don’t need to be mean to other women.
JW: I mean Maisie is the cool girl. She prides herself on going around being the center of attention with all these guys. So her arc was really important to me too, where she starts to realize, “Oh, I’m stronger than that. I’ve been using my sexuality and my seductive skills to do this, but now I have to use my detective skills.” Olivia, by the way, was so awesome with her arc as well.
DC: She has that cool girl pick-me vibe, but you give her so much more depth than that. We see her grappling with that a little bit more. And it’s really cool to see the matriarchy kind of come out in this movie. Pivoting a bit, tell me about the music of The Sacrifice Game.
JW: We wanted the score to be a mix of Christmas songs that we’re using in fucked up ways, and also late sixties Psychedelic Occult Rock. One of our songs that’s a set piece in the movie was actually written by our good friend, Anton, and it was really cool to have him create that. We want to do some special kind of release for that song.
DC: Why Christmas?
JW: The scariest horror movies play with childlike imagery and twist it, like The Babadook and It and movies like that. I think the reason why we collectively love Christmas movies is because it takes this thing that we all have all these sentimental feelings about and it twists it and makes it really messed up.
DC: I mean, there’s nothing better than watching people get murdered by a Christmas tree.
JW: Obviously the production value of that is important, the lighting, and also it works with the overall concept of being stuck here for Christmas
DC: So what’s the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?
JW: Can I answer with a TV series?
DC: Absolutely you can.
JW: Marianne. It is the scariest thing. Legit. I’ve seen a lot of movies and TV, but Marianne has stayed with me so long after I watched it. I don’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t seen it, but there is a line of dialogue in it that if my husband says to me, I will be freaked out. Even though I watched it three years ago, if I were to say this sentence, it brings the whole horror of that show back. For anybody out there who hasn’t seen it, fucking watch it.
Categorized:Interviews
