Director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II-IV, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Mother’s Day, Abattoir) will see his religious horror St. Agatha open in theaters and on VOD platforms this Friday, February 8th.
Set in the 1950s in small-town Georgia, the film centers on a pregnant con woman named Agatha (Sabrina Kern) who is on the run and seeks refuge in a convent. What first starts out as the perfect place to have a child turns into a dark layer where silence is forced, ghastly secrets are masked, and every bit of willpower Agatha has is tested as she learns the sick and twisted truth of the convent and the odd people that lurk inside its halls.
Bloody Disgusting sat down with Bousman to discuss several religious-themed horror films that influenced his St. Agatha.
“I was a huge fan of The Devils, which was a 1971 movie that Ken Russell directed,” he tells Bloody Disgusting. “It deals with a convent of nuns and it was absolutely terrifying. That film was horrific, and at that time I hadn’t seen anything like it.”
While The Devils was the film’s main inspiration, the score was influenced by The Omen.
“I think The Omen is obviously another one, especially from a standpoint of music,” he explained. “If you listen to the music of The Omen and you listen to the music of St. Agatha they have a very, very similar feel to them. I’m a huge fan of The Omen, specifically the score. The Omen carries one of the most frightening scores ever and I think that, for me, music plays such an integral role in the movies that I do. I wanted the music to have the same type of feel as The Omen. Another huge thing is the soundtrack from Jerry Goldsmith. When we were writing the script we kept playing that in the background so The Omen is another one.”
“Another one that was a huge inspiration as well as Suspiria. That really haunting music from Goblin helped to intensify everything. Again, music being such an integral part of St. Agatha, Suspiria was another movie that I really watch and had people take a look at when coming into [working on St. Agatha].
He also harkened back to both Rosemary’s Baby and Flowers in the Attic for inspiration.
“Obviously, and this isn’t necessarily a religious horror film, though it deals with religion, is Rosemary’s Baby. I’ve always put it out there as being one of my favorite films ever made. It does deal with religion, as it deals with the birth of Satan or the Anti-Christ. That was another huge one for me, I loved it.
He continued: The fifth film is not a religious film but it’s one that very much held a place for me in wanting to make this, and that is Flowers in the Attic. One of the things I like about St. Agatha is it reveals itself not to be religious at all towards the end when you realize that it’s a bunch of con women who are doing this, not actual nuns. When I grew up, I found one of the scariest books was ‘Flowers in the Attic’. They eventually made a movie in the 1980s with Kristy Swanson, so that movie has always been an inspiration for me, specifically when it deals with gaslighting and torturing. I think that in the case of ‘Flowers in the Attic’, it’s a bunch of kids who are forced to live in an attic and they are beginning to lose their minds. They have this mysterious presence coming up – the grandmother who is basically tormenting and torturing them. I think that’s always been something that I’ve loved and been drawn to, so doing this, realizing that it has a lot of similarities, in the case that it’s not an attic but it’s a convent and instead of a grandmother it’s Mother Superior.”
Our own Meagan Navarro loved St. Agatha, explaining in her review that it “revives nunsploitation with nerve-fraying results.” It opens in theaters on on VOD platforms February 8th.