It’s been fifteen years since writer/director Alejandro Amenabar terrified audiences across the globe with his gothic ghost story The Others. The prolific filmmaker has found success in several other genres, as he’s responsible for such gems as The Sea Inside and Abra Los Ohos (Open Your Eyes), a.k.a. the original Vanilla Sky, but after all those years, something called him back to the darker side of cinema. Now, with his new film Regression, Amenabar takes on the task of telling the tragic tale of a young girl named Angela Gray (Emma Watson), who was abused by those close to her in an ongoing series of satanic rituals. With police officer Bruce Kenner (Ethan Hawke) on the case, and Professor Kenneth Raines providing help to the victims through regressive therapy, the truth is bound to surface. However, the facts are uncovered, the results turn out to be even more outrageous than anything anyone involved in these horrendous acts could have ever imagined.

“Right after my last period movie I wanted to try a horror movie, and I thought about the devil, and why not try to explore the world of satanic cults?” Amenabar inquired. “I started to read a couple of books, but I couldn’t find an interesting approach, something that made the movie sort of special so I put it aside for awhile. Then, I read about satanic ritual abuse, and the psychological techniques that were used in the ’80s and ’90s, which is something I never heard about. So, I thought that would allow me to make a movie about the devil, but secretly a movie about our mind, and how our mind shifts and plays with us, and that’s something that always interested me”.

As for star Ethan Hawke, his initial interest in the project was less about the world of the occult, and more about the man behind the camera. “I have a lot of respect for Alejandro Amenabar, I took him incredibly seriously” Hawke explains. “I didn’t really understand the script or the character, and I went to meet with him to tell him so, and he was such a compelling person, and the desire to make the movie seemed so sincere and interesting to me that I decided just to take a chance on him”.

Not only does Hawke hold a certain appreciation for Amenabar’s work, but the Sinister star also possesses an affinity for filmmakers that emerge from different cultures than his own.

“I like anything about working with directors from other parts of the world” Hawke says excitedly. “I got to work with Alfonso Cuaron when I did Great Expectations, Jean-Francois Richet when I did Assault on Precinct 13, and Pawel Pawlikowski when I did The Woman in the Fifth. I love working with different filmmakers; filmmakers that come from a different education, because I tend to learn more. You know, people who grow up in the U.S. kind of have a one-film vocabulary, and people who grow up in other countries have a different film vocabulary and they live differently, and they think about images differently, and they think about performances differently, and it’s fun to be a part of it”.

2016 seems to be the year of the devil, with films like The Witch, February, and The Devil’s Candy coming out, and even a TV show titled Lucifer airing on Fox. All of the films, each having to do with Satan, deal with the darker aspects of religion in their own ways. For Amenabar, Regression was about “portraying the world of the occult and about the rituals”, as he drew inspiration from books like Making Monsters, Satan’s Sirens and Satanic Panic, exploring and researching as much as he could about the followers and their forbidden religion.

Regression seems to fit right in with the year’s new trend, but popular horror sub-genres come and go, as Amenabar explains. “Sometimes in terms of horror, we go like in waves, so there’s been zombies, and after that there were vampires, and I think it’s about the devil again”. However, according to Amenabar, he simply sought to personify his own vision, and just happened to capitalize on a flourishing angle. “In my case, like I said, I was just trying to find the proper approach, and I thought it was right for me”.

Still, coincidental as it may be, it’s admittedly a pretty exciting time for horror, as it seems to be delving more and more into the taboo subject that made so many ’70s films so memorable. Amenabar’s new film, however, plays more on the engaging, tension-ridden aspects of the decade’s thrillers, pulling from movies like All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, just as much as he does from The Exorcist. “We wanted to get some of the style and the flavor from hose American thrillers from the ’70s,” says Amenabar. “We wanted to keep some of the gravitas or the seriousness of those movies”.

To Ethan Hawke, the film is less about religion, and more about the curious actions that people take once real fear sets in. His character Bruce starts out the film as a logic-based non believer, but as the case carries on, and he begins to suspect that members of the cult he’s investigating may be following him, he turns to the ancient artifacts of the bible and the crucifix as a way to cope with his concerns.

“I think what Alejandro’s saying is it’s not the idea of religion necessarily, but everybody, people start getting superstitious and they’re scared to get superstitious” Hawke emphasized. “I don’t think it’s religion that’s oriented in any kind of real faith, or pure exploration of his inner life, but more based in superstition. And I think that’s what Alejandro was most interested in trying to say at that moment in the movie”.

Through the film, Hawke and Amenabar collaborate to set out on an expedition to find what drives people to religion, and how everyone, whether religious or not, comes to believe their own superstitions and personally-based theories.

“I think that in general people like to be right, and one of the things that’s most interesting to me about the movie is that people, we all want to be right all the time, and even though sometimes this truth starts lining up that we might be wrong, but we still persist in not wanting to let go of the idea that we’re right” Hawke comments. “It becomes very important to us to stick that ground, and I think one of Bruce’s problems in this movie is, he thinks he’s right about Angela, and he starts being blind to certain facts because of his own desire to prove himself right”.

It’s always harder for people to see themselves as clearly as they can others, but as the film suggests, part of this self-serving bias is due to the iffy nature of psychotherapy, which is still to this day, and will always be, mostly based on theories. While Officer Kenner approaches the case through files and interviews, his partner Professor Raines tackles the issues through his own process, as he uncovers locked away memories of the victims through hypnotherapy.

Therapists, although seeking to help their patients, can sometimes point them in the wrong direction, especially because the mind is such a fragile thing. As Amenabar says, “One thing for sure is I would never submit myself to hypnotic therapy. I’m afraid of what I could find there”.

The process of how the mind interprets inspiration, coercion, and submission is a fascinating, endless journey of self-exploration. People often think of the factors that influence the mind as merely being interactions with other people, but in actuality, people are affected by every daily correspondence we encounter, whether that be with friends, family, or even the movies we watch for fun. Although shy to be a patient of hypnotherapy himself, Amenabar doesn’t deny the fact that the act of sitting down to watch a movie is just as much hypnosis as any session with phototherapy or use of a metronome. In an interesting way, his movie seeks to hypnotize the audience just as much as it seeks to explore the effects of hypnotherapy.

“Well the idea was something that has to do with movies, that also has something to do with hypnosis” says Amenabar. “People sit down in a theater and start watching the movie, and even we as filmmakers, we use that expression, we try to hypnotize them. So like that process, exploring it or portraying it in the movie itself, the process of hypnotizing, the images you see in the movie, you can see what is my approach to that”.

Was Angela abused by satanic cults? Is Professor Kenneth Raines extracting memories that ought not to be tampered with? Is Officer Bruce Kenner being stalked by the same cults that have tortured Angela for so long? Find all of the answers to this terrifying exploration of satanism and psychotherapy when Regression hits theaters on February 5th, 2016.