‘Consecration’ Star Jena Malone and Director Christopher Smith Talk Their Subversive New Religious Horror
Christopher Smith’s latest film Consecration, which is out now in theaters, is the director’s take on religious horror. But don’t go in expecting a tale about possession and troubled priests. No, Smith delivers something much more interesting, a detective tale wrapped in the divine feminine, all supported by a stunning performance by Jena Malone as the lead, Grace.
Grace has just learned about the death of her brother, but the circumstances are murky at best. In search of the truth, she decides to travel to the remote church in Scotland where he lived. There, she meets reluctant nuns and a commandeering priest (Danny Huston) who try everything in their power to protect their secrets.
Dread Central spoke with Smith and Malone over Zoom about the divine feminine, subverting religious horror expectations, asexuality, and more.
Dread Central: Where did this idea for Consecration come from?
Christopher Smith: For a long time I’ve been trying to come up with a story that deals with religion, but comes from the position [of] what would happen in religion if someone said, “Hey, I’m a second coming”, or, “Hey, I thought you were dead. No, someone brought me back to life.” <laugh> These kinds of silly supernatural questions, but do it in a serious way. If someone in the middle ages said, “Hey, I have powers”, well, they would’ve called her a witch and burnt her. What would’ve happened if it happened now?
I was toying around with this idea for about five or six years, and then I met a producer friend of mine who had come up with just a basic catchline for a movie, which was there’s been a murder and someone from the Vatican comes to clear up the murder. And I was like, ‘I love that idea, what’s the title?’ ‘Consecration‘. Great title. I’ve been obsessing about this for ages. Let me do it. I’ll write it, gimme the idea. And then, so I wrote the first draft, and then he came in after and it kind of came together like that. He had a little bit of the puzzle that I couldn’t find. I had the subtext, but not the story. So it kind of came together that way.
DC: Chris, with your filmography, I feel like you’ve hit so many different sub-genres with the kinds of films that you’ve made. And I feel like this one is religious horror, but also nunsploitation. So I wanted to hear about your relationship to nunsploitation films and if you drew any inspiration from that subgenre of horror.
CS: I don’t know why, but I find all kinds of religious stuff creepy. You know, I went to Sunday school as a kid and I’ve definitely gone away from everything, but I’m still intrigued. I’ve sort of replaced it with looking into Buddhism [and other religions]. But when I see nuns, they give me the creeps and more so I get the creeps with priests, I think I was scarred by The Exorcist definitely as a kid. So this isn’t so much nunsploitation for me, but, but it’s definitely a more sober version of it.
The big reference for me was Agnes of God. I’m just obsessed with Meg Tilly in that film. She portrays [a character] who’s been raped, but then she says, ‘No, I wasn’t raped, it was the son of God.’ And that kind of story is exactly the thing that intrigues and scares me about religion. I remember in Bad Lieutenant, the nun gets raped and Harvey Keitel goes up to her and she goes, ‘It’s okay. I’ve forgiven them.’ And it’s like, what do you mean you forgiven them? No, you can’t forgive them. And this kind of faith is so interesting.
DC: Jenna, I would love to hear from you about how you got involved in the project and what drew you to this project, and this character specifically.
Jenna Malone: You’d think it would happen more often than not, but it’s very rare that a script makes you feel like a four-year-old in some ways, where you’re just like, wait, what’s going on? And I think that for me, that’s always an indicator of something that’s really interesting. I think that I’ve had a little taste of that on my tongue since Donnie Darko. I love when my agent sends me something and is like, ‘Can you read this, I don’t really know what to make of it.’ So, I feel like that was my first green flag because when I read it, I kept going back and going back and realizing that it’s not just this simple story.
There are all these layers and then it’s also about like the divine feminine, and then it’s also about religion and sort of the second coming, but what is that? And I don’t know, it just had so many layers. I was excited. It instantly made me wanna sit down with Chris and start talking [those layers] through and charting them out and trying to make sure that each one hit in the right way. I love the character. I really thought Grace was cool, it’s something that I hadn’t done before.
CS: You know, look at the scene when she first comes into the long table scene with Mother Superior. It’s that trying to be rational when everyone around you is talking about the death of a brother and saying the devil got him. It is similar to Jane Fonda’s character in Agnes of God, I just realized that, r=you led me to that reference <laugh> through nunsploitation. But it is still nunsploitation because I’m definitely playing nuns is creepy. Especially we love Little Meg, the girl who’s obsessed with Grace, the one who’s got the sort of girl crush on Grace.
DC: It’s really cool. Well then Jenna, we spend so much time with Grace’s character and we get a lot of her interiority. We spend a lot of time with her alone. I’m curious about that experience playing Grace and spending a lot of time in her head and what that experience was like for you, especially in shaping her very complicated character.
JM: Thank you. I think that for me it’s always a gift, getting to play a scene without dialogue or when filmmakers are not scared to show more of the actions or the embodiments of a character because I feel like that’s all the really interesting stuff. You know, how does a character feed their cat? How do they sit down? How do they fill all of those, uncharted lonely moments that every human has. But also [Consecration is] a little bit of a whodunit type of thing. And traditionally, I love that genre, I always think it’s so interesting and so that a very important part of that is showing a character, trying to figure something out, which is a very interior journey.
CS: And I think what’s interesting is that Grace comes with a very black-and-white understanding that ‘I can get to the bottom of this’ like a detective. But then gradually everything becomes gray until actually the scene when she’s with Young Meg when you realize that she’s changed. And I think we do capture that in those quiet moments, but it’s easy to have quiet moments when you’ve got Jenna. Some people, you don’t want to leave the camera on.
JM: Anyone can have an honest moment on film <laugh>. You just have to know how to get it out them.
CS: I dunno how it is with actors, you tell me Jenna, but I find it much easier when the hush finally comes on the set and you’re in it. I mean, I’m quite chatty but hopefully it gives off something that helps. I mean, I guess you can look and go, ‘I can’t be more ridiculous than you’, so it makes you relaxed as an actor.
JM: I mean, if your job is to run a mechanic’s auto shop, your job is not to be quiet. My job is to come in and be a fine sculptor of a fucking tire. I’m gonna come in and create my space, create my quiet place, create what I need. The loudness of the mechanics is not going to interrupt me because I know what my journey is though, you know? So like, you don’t, you don’t have to be quiet. I’ll be quiet for you. <laugh>.
DC: We talked about the divine feminine. In a lot of films like this, it’s always a male figure who is seen as this pinnacle of the second coming. But here we have a female character, and I really love how Consecration is a very feminine film. It does kind of spit in the face of patriarchy quite a bit. And I just wanted to hear first Chris from you about that approach in the script, and if that was your intention at first, or if it kind of just came out as you were working on it.
CS: I do, I have to say in many ways, the camera has a male eye. even when you have a woman in the role. I struggle with many horrors that don’t have a female lead, to be honest. But because I want this question to be, well, what if it was a woman? You know, what if it was a woman and someone came back and said, “Hey, I’m here. I’m the second coming and I’m a woman.”
I mean, for me the character was a modern woman. It’s a woman who was independent. It’s a woman who doesn’t need a boyfriend in her life. You know, at the beginning I wanted her to be someone who says, ‘I’m not lonely. I’m alone.’ And, again, that idea of not the Virgin Mary, but this idea that she doesn’t feel that she needs men. I felt that was empowering.
JM: But also, the thing is that what’s so beautiful about truth is that you don’t have to know it’s true to think that it’s interesting. I love, Chris, that you wrote these themes into a script without even fully thinking that you’re building this divine feminine character. Like the fact you don’t give her sexuality, which always becomes a subplot. It’s always the one that they convert back to, and then they linger on and blah, blah, blah. I feel like there were a lot of setups where that could have happened, you know, between the DI.
CS: Well, that’s why we made him handsome, so you think that’s gonna happen.
JM: There could have been sexual assault brought up in the father. I mean, there were a lot of areas that traditionally this type of story would have veered into. But I really appreciated that you chose not to do that. And I think for me, I responded to that and then I helped you take it even further, you know? We talked about Grace’s sexuality and I said ‘I absolutely think that she’s asexual.’ I don’t think that there is a moment where she’s trying to discover sexuality or she’s hiding from it, but that she’s actually rather quite comfortable in [her asexuality].
DC: She has a confidence about her. And I do love that. In watching the movie, I was thinking, ‘alright, what tropes are gonna happen?’ And [Chris], you surprised me by not falling into these tropes that we see with female characters in horror.
CS: We definitely cast it that way. We wanted the cop to be this kind of slightly kind of cheesy, handsome cop, you know? And then Danny Houston comes in, and here’s a secular woman surrounded by nuns, but the young nun is more sexual than Grace. She’s, she’s got much more going on than Grace.
DC: So, wait, what was it like, Jenna, working opposite Danny Houston as a priest in this movie?
JM: It’s sweet. I worked with Angelica Houston on one of the first films I ever did. She directed me. And so I sort of knew the Houston family and have always felt like it’s been part of my family a little bit. But I hadn’t really known Danny that well. So I feel like when we met, we instantly had a lot to catch up on. But he has a very commanding power. He chooses good work. He knows what he wants a scene to do. And it was fun sparring with him for a bit.
CS: I know there’s one scene at the end when he shouts at you, Jenna and Jenna just runs off. And it was in the script. I just immediately said from behind the monitor, “That’s amazing.” Do you remember you fled? He told you off and you were scared. You should have been the most powerful then, but you were like, “no, run still, I’m scared.” And that was your last resistance before you hand yourself over. But that came from Jenna and Danny together of being really great actors and sparring off each other
DC: Jenna, I have a more general question. You’ve been in a lot of different movies, but you’ve worked in so much horror. What continues to draw you to the horror genre. Are you a horror fan?
JM: You know, I’m more like a conceptual horror fan. I think before I was a parent, I liked them more, but I just don’t really watch any scary or violent or bloody things. Cuz I feel like I have this antenna for the bad in the world, and I’m just already so keyed into like, if there’s an earthquake, if there’s an intruder, what are we going to do? It’s not exhausting, but I feel like so much of my time is already spent imagining the horrors of the world and trying to pre-visualize to alleviate anxiety, fear, and stress so that I could lead in those moments with my child and not crumble.
So yeah, I don’t know. I wish I had more time to watch horror films. I feel like I’m not quite there yet. He’s six, you know. But what’s interesting is he’s really into creepy stuff. So I see a future where we’re gonna be rediscovering horror films together, which I love. I can’t wait for that.
Consecration is out now in theaters.
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