The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw writer-director Thomas Robert Lee on his folk horror inspirations, “elevated horror,” his director’s cut, and more

The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw pulls no punches. The haunting and bleak sophomore film from Canadian writer-director Thomas Robert Lee, the film follows a devout religious community somewhere in the U.S. in 1973 (the exact whereabouts are never specified). For seventeen years, the community has been experiencing plague and pestilence, following a mysterious event known as “the eclipse.”

While the rest of the community is suffering, Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine Walker, A Dark Song) somehow manages to maintain her crops, which she sells to the rest of the distrustful villagers. We soon learn that Agatha had a daughter in secret seventeen years ago, and has been hiding Audrey (newcomer Jessica Reynolds) from the rest of the community for her whole life to keep her safe. When Audrey sees the distressed villager Colm (Jared Abrahamson, American Animals) strike her mother during an altercation at his young son’s funeral, Audrey is pushed to exact her violent revenge on the villagers, using the very methods the community has always feared most.

Unlike many folk horror films, The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw makes no illusions about its central character; Audrey can perform black magic, something we glean just a few minutes in. That reveal ups the narrative tension, given that the audience knows about Audrey’s powers early on, and makes for a more dynamic and disturbing main character. For writer-director Thomas Robert Lee, the choice to upend the conventions of the genre was less about keeping the audience on their toes, as it was about crafting a set of well-rounded characters.

“A lot of the tropes that are in the film are sort of well-established within the genre,” explains Lee. “So anytime that there was an opportunity to kind of go in a different direction, that was something I wanted to jump onto. So, showing within the first ten minutes that yes, she is actually a witch, and there is a reason why she’s doing well and the town is circling the drain.”

“I think I just wanted to give as much dimension to each of the characters as possible,” continues Lee. “We meet Colm at obviously one of his lowest moments, at the funeral for his own son, and then we see him hit this woman. But then we follow him and we see that maybe, he’s not entirely — you can’t define him by this one moment. So it wasn’t even so much about wanting to take the enjoyment out of making choices with the characters, as it was about wanting to just show different dimensions to each of them.”

With a slow-burning sense of dread and an isolated, striking location, the film slots into the lineage of such classic folk horror entries as The Wicker Man and Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, alongside more recent works like Robert Eggers’ The Witch.

“I’ve kind of always been a fan of horror and that kind of stuff, but I liked how the folk horror genre has a heavy emphasis on landscape, on tradition, and on religion,” says Lee. “There’s a lot of obvious visual potential in that type of narrative. And religion and family relationships is something that I’m super interested in. A lot of my favorite filmmakers continue to explore those themes, and it’s something I like to do in my work.”

Lee grew up in Alberta, and is no stranger to the beauty of wide-open landscapes, and he brings that sense of scope and isolation to the film, which was shot just outside of Calgary on a small-town set that was originally used for the hit ‘80s western show, Lonesome Dove.

“I was raised in Alberta, the landscape out there is so beautiful,” says Lee. “There’s the Prairies on one side, the Rocky Mountains on the other. I grew up watching a lot of westerns as well, many of which were obviously shot in that region. I’m a big fan of that. That sort of mythic haunting landscape is so appealing from a narrative and a visual standpoint.”

As the titular Audrey Earnshaw, newcomer Jessica Reynolds delivers a knockout performance as a young repressed woman who suddenly realizes the full potential of her dangerous power. Lee explains that he purposefully sought an unknown actress for the role, “to give it almost a meta thing, where the audience is discovering this actor at the same time as the townsfolk are discovering this character.”

After hiring a pair of casting directors working out of Dublin to sift through countless audition tapes of young theatre school actors, they settled on Reynolds, who makes her screen debut in the film. “[When] Jessica’s tape came in, it was really exciting,” gushes Lee. “On-set, she had logistical questions, or nuts and bolts filmmaking questions like, “What is this shot?” But that aside, you would have never guessed that it was her first time in a production. She went toe to toe with all of these other seasoned actors, and it was super exciting. Everybody else was really excited about this discovery. And I think she just did an amazing job.”

While the film’s opening scrawl provides some backstory that sets up the plight of the villagers, the film is still ambiguous in certain respects, letting the audience fill in the missing gaps for themselves without resorting to large exposition dumps that can often drain a horror film of its lingering unease.

“Certain drafts of the script would be more explicit and others would be more ambiguous,” says Lee of his writing process for the film. “Ultimately, I think we ended up cutting out more in the edits than what was on the page. Like, there’s still certain details [in the film] that were never made explicit on the page, but there are other things like lines of dialogue, just like here and there, that that we ended up sniping in the edit. It’s a tricky balance, and it’s also just a learning experience about how what worked on the page might not necessarily work on-screen.”

While working through the edit, Lee put together what he considers his director’s cut of the film, which he hopes to be able to show eventually if there is enough interest. “The director’s cut is not set in the 1970s, the original score only features Bryan Buss’ compositions, and that the overall colour grade is much more naturalistic,” explains Lee. “It’s not a whole lot longer, maybe ten minutes longer, but it’s got a very different pace,” Lee continues. “The chronology of the film is more true to the screenplay. It’s a little bit out of my hands, but it’s definitely something I would love to get released.”

After the editing process, there was still one more last-minute change: the title of the film. Originally titled (and accepted into some film festivals) as The Ballad of Audrey Earnshaw, the choice was then made to change it to Curse before its wide release this month.

“It was not my decision, let’s put it that way,” says Lee, diplomatically. ”It was pretty late in the game. The film had already been accepted into a couple of festivals, and then I was told about the change. I think it was just a marketing thing for them.”

With a central storyline featuring disenfranchised villagers striking out against a perceived slight by someone they consider to be “different” while a disease tears through the town, it’s easy to draw parallels between the film and today’s ongoing political strife and the pandemic, but Lee insists those notions were only on the periphery of his mind during the creative process.

“[It was] something that did kind of creep in throughout the writing process,  especially after the 2016 American presidential election,” says Lee. “And being on Twitter and seeing the way people just rip people apart. But honestly, a lot of it I sort of came to notice myself, after the film was complete, especially with the pandemic.”

While the cancelation of physical film festivals this year has been a major hurdle for filmmakers who often rely on the personal and professional connections they make during festivals throughout their careers, the ongoing lockdowns in many parts of the world means that there is a bigger audience than ever looking for new horror films to consume at home, especially as we inch ever-closer to Halloween.

“Obviously, the dream would be to travel around to a bunch of festivals and watch it in-person and chat with people and meet other filmmakers as well,” admits Lee. “But at the same time, my fiancé and I were locked down in Toronto for four months, so anytime there was something new on iTunes or on Netflix, it was like, I knew exactly what I was going to be doing that night. From an audience point of view, I’m just happy to get it out. You know, I’m personally waiting for a bunch of stuff to drop.”

With the film’s period setting and slow-burning intensity, what does Lee think of The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw being labeled as “elevated horror,” the often-contentious term used to describe recent films like The Witch and Hereditary?

“I mean, I understand that it’s probably useful from a marketing standpoint,” says Lee. “Like, would you call Mad Max: Fury Road an “elevated action movie?” It’s just a great action movie, right? So I don’t know if it’s people trying to say, “Oh, this is more artistically minded, or this is quote-unquote, a good horror movie,” it’s not clear what that term is. It obviously makes for interesting conversation, but you know, at the end of the day it’s just a horror movie.”

The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw is out in select theatres and on VOD now and hits Blu-ray and DVD on October 20.