Genre stalwart Maika Monroe (It Follows, Longlegs) transforms as Winifred Notty, the peculiar governess with a penchant for murder in Victorian Psycho.
Set in Victorian England, Victorian Psycho introduces Monroe’s Winifred as she takes up a new position at a remote gothic estate, drawing suspicion as strange occurrences begin to plague the household. Monroe leans into Winifred’s eccentricities and rage in equal measure, bringing her own spin to the character first conceived by author Virginia Feito (Mrs. March), who adapts her novel to screen.
Her take on the character surprised even filmmaker Zachary Wigon (Sanctuary), in the best possible way.
Speaking with Bloody Disgusting, Wigon explains: “You want someone who’s going to do both of those things. You want someone who is going to get you the quality that you’re looking for in a way that you never could have anticipated them getting it. She did that every day. I remember vividly when we were doing Zoom work together, talking about the character over Zoom. We would read some scenes together, and then she came to Ireland for prep. I saw it all come together in this first rehearsal. It was exactly how Winifred was supposed to be, but I never could have imagined it would be done with these details until she brought it to life. That’s the dream. When you work with an actor, you’re basically trying to guide them to a place where they can surprise you.”
Monroe really embraced the character, including how the feature adaptation of Winifred Notty would look.
“That was Maika’s first idea, actually, was to have the prosthetic teeth,” Wigon points out. “She also wore a wig, a phenomenal wig. I think it’s important when an actor looks in the mirror to not recognize the person who’s looking back at them. I think that helps you get outside your own head and your own persona in some way. So, with the look of Winifred, these things were essential.”
Much like Patrick Bateman, Winifred Notty tends to satiate her rage and pent-up emotions by giving in to bloodlust. That is to say that Victorian Psycho spills a lot of blood, but often to comedic effect. Wigon walks us through the tightrope walk of approaching the gore in his latest: “With something like gore, you want to be realistic to a point without being excessively so that it draws attention away from what the gore’s role is serving in the story. In other words, it’s like the gore has to look real enough that the suspension of disbelief is held, but it can’t be so overdone that it becomes the point as opposed to a load-bearing element in the story. Because the gore is there to emphasize the shock and the catharsis of what happens at the end of the movie. You’re walking a fine line with gore, I think.”
That also applies to adapting some of the novel’s more taboo bursts of violence. The director teases that one particular grisly moment clinched his desire to adapt Feito’s story.
“I don’t want to give anything away; I’ll say it like this. There’s a scene with a baby swap in the novel. I vividly remember reading that scene, and that was the moment where I was like, ‘All right, you’re making this movie.'”
The gore, humor, and violence combine with stunning period artistry, with one of the world’s oldest castles providing the setting.
“We had a wonderful production designer named Jeremy Reed, who knows this world very well,” Wigon explains. “He did a phenomenal job. It was really a dance between what Jeremy brought to the castle; we shot at Dunsany Castle in Ireland. It’s, I believe, the oldest continuously inhabited residence in the country. It was built in 1180. So, you’re shooting in a castle that’s almost a thousand years old. There’s a lot of history. And there was a lot that we got from the location that we wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise. The frames, the portrait frames for the artworks on the main staircase, these belong in museums. It’s the real, it’s the genuine article. So, we were trying to emphasize the things that worked naturally about the setting.”
He continues, “Then, the goal in terms of the aesthetic was two things. Basically, what I said to Jeremy at the very beginning was, as much color as possible without beggaring relief, beggaring reality. Because I am a fan of jewel tones and of saturation, especially with something like this where there’s a lot of emotional intensity, and there’s a lot of intensity that’s being repressed. That was the jumping-off point. But in terms of the production design, the costume design, Allison Byrne did a wonderful job with the costumes. It was always to try to ground the world aesthetically as much as possible.”
The commitment to Winifred’s frenzied slaughter, employing as much practical effects as possible, becomes even more impressive when considering their filming location is a historic site.
It did create some production challenges. “This was what most of our prep was spent dealing with. There were certain rooms where we just couldn’t have any kills occur. For example, in the scene where [redacted] is killed, that room is blue everywhere. There’s all this gorgeous gold ornamental furnishings and whatnot. The center of the floor was bowing a bit because the materials in the ceiling, the room underneath, were starting to sag. The center of the floor was slightly bowing. If you walked from here to here, you would feel yourself walking on a little bit of a decline.”
“I knew that I had to have that scene occur in that room because aesthetically it was perfect for that,” Wigon continues. “But you couldn’t have a dolly in that room, certainly not in the center of the room. We had to be very careful with where the equipment was arranged and where the camera was put and whatnot. We had to shoot around that obstacle. So there was a lot of stuff like that that we had to navigate.”
Finally, how does Wigon feel about the connective tissue between Winifred Notty and American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman?
“Well, it’s interesting,” he answers. “I thought mostly about the connective tissue between the stories in the very beginning of the development process. And then, once you have a handle on something, you’re on that train, and that’s kind of it. I guess the connective tissue between the films was that both of these characters are outsiders who desperately want to be insiders. They’re in very different positions in society, but they both don’t belong. There’s a line in the beginning of American Psycho where Reese Witherspoon says to him, ‘Your dad basically owns the firm. Why do you do this?’ He literally says, ‘I want to fit in.’ It is very much in that tradition. If Winifred could speak from the deepest level of her soul, she would probably just say, ‘I want to fit in.'”
