How 'The Blackcoat's Daughter' Brings Humanity to the Horror Genre

The director and star of 'The Blackcoat's Daughter' talk "classic" horror films and more on Keeping Up With Kulture.

On Friday, March 31, 2017, indie movie company A24 (MoonlightRoomEx Machina) is releasing their latest entry into the world of horror, The Blackcoat's Daughter. The movie, which stars Kiernan Shipka (FeudMad Men), Lucy Boynton (Sing Street), and Emma Roberts (American Horror StoryScream Queens) was written and directed by Osgood Perkins, son of the late Anthony Perkins and actor in everything from Legally Blonde to Secretary.

We recently got to see The Blackcoat's Daughter and had the sh*t scared out of us, so of course that mean we had to get Perkins and Boynton on to Keeping Up With Kulture to talk about making the film and how it landed on A24.

The movie circles around two separate stories: one where two students at an all-girls prep school are experiencing some wild sh*t during a break when everyone else is gone. The other story involves a woman who is making her way to the town that the school is in. Telling you more would spoil the f*ck out of the film, but it's worth it, trust.

For those who were unaware, A24 picked up on The Blackcoat's Daughter back in 2015 after it screened at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival and was known by its former title, February. Perkins said there wasn't much specific behind the writing process: "I sat down wanting to write what I wanted to see." He went on to say that "at the time, there was a feeling around horror movies that they had gotten kind of shabby," but living in a post-Get Out world, The Blackcoat's Daughter is actually dropping at the right time, especially since Perkins wrote a more "humanistic" horror movie, which harkens back to the horror movies he loved as a child, like The Shining or Rosemary's Baby.

When we asked about that A24 co-sign for his film, Perkins said it was like "you're the nerds at school who never get invited to a party."

Interestingly enough, Boynton says she "hated" horror films before tackling this project, although she's "tentative" to say it these days, but reading the Blackcoat's Daughter script showed her that it was more about trying to say something than just being horror for horror's sake. Boynton says she has much more of an appreciation of the more "classic" horror films due to the work she did on Bhe Blackcoat's Daughter.

For those of you wanting to bone up on The Blackcoat's Daughter, Perkins gives a great list of films you should see, explains why they had to change the film's title, and even describes how they made bloody skull fragments for the Netflix film he directed (and had Boynton in), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. You can check out all of this in the video up above, and be sure to check out The Blackcoat's Daughter on demand and when it hits theaters on March 31.

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