You think you know somebody, but you don’t. Especially not if she’s Ma (read my review). The new thriller from Tate Taylor, the director of The Help, tells the story of a mild-mannered veterinarian (played by Octavia Spencer) who gets asked to buy beer for a group of teenagers, invites them to her house for a drinking party, and proceeds to insert herself into their lives. One thing leads to another, and horror inevitably ensues.

But Ma didn’t come from nowhere. She found herself in a state of arrested adolescence because of a traumatic event in her past, and without giving anything away, that sets her in firmly in a cinematic tradition of victims who get their revenge, twice-filled. And Tate Taylor knows it.

“The DNA of Ma is Misery and Carrie,” Taylor explained to us.

“And for me, Carrie had her resolution and her breakdown at the prom. So I looked at Ma, like what if Sissy Spacek had buried it all, walked home with the blood, and just got into a hobby. Veterinarian. Got into animals. And buried it, buried it, and did not treat the mental abuse she had, and what would that look like when Carrie was reminded of it again? That’s what I liked.”

“And then with Misery…” Taylor pondered, then said, “They also say that, about ‘Why don’t you do a superhero movie?’ I would like Hulk because you can get into their mind and have empathy for them, and that’s what I liked about those two movies [Carrie and Misery]. The loneliness of Kathy Bates’ character.”

Tate Taylor also knows that there are even more films in the teenaged revenge tradition, in which a “prank” (usually code for “something unforgivably traumatic (and often sexual)”) emotionally scars a victim of bullying, who snaps and turns on their oppressor(s).

“A lot of what you’re saying is what I wanted to do with this,” Taylor said. “To be modern, but also be a wink and a nod to those films of the past, which I think is so fun. Like the John Hughes movies. I want it to feel like that.”

The “evil John Hughes movie” invites itself into theaters on May 31, 2019!