When Jenn Wexler and Sean Redlitz were first talking over the script for “The Sacrifice Game” from an idea she’d been mulling for years, Redlitz had asked her to sum up what the story was about in one word.
“My answer was ‘Friendship,’” Wexler recalls, a surprising choice for a film about a boarding school that becomes terrorized by a murderous cult during their holiday break. “And I [said] ‘Maybe it doesn’t read that way on the page yet, but I know at the core emotionally that’s what this movie needs to be about, and now when I watch the movie, it’s clear that it is about friendship and loneliness, connection, and about found family.”
“And sometimes you find the wrong family and they’re a little toxic and they take you in directions maybe you shouldn’t have gone,” Redlitz is quick to point out, if in case fans of the genre might fear “The Sacrifice Game” might be a bit too mushy from that description. “But when you find the right family, it can be liberating.”
In that way, what unfolds before the camera in “The Sacrifice Game” mirrors what happened off of it – at least, the good half of it as Wexler, who first came up as a producer at the venerable indie horror outfit Glass Eye Pix before making her directorial debut with “The Ranger,” and Redlitz, who had long worked in publicity and marketing for horror streamers Fearnet and Shudder, first became romantically intertwined and took their relationship to another level when she invited him to start writing the script with her. Anyone who has even spent a little time in the horror community can tell you that despite the gore that brings them together, you’d be hard-pressed to find a group with deeper and more heartfelt bonds anywhere else in filmmaking, and it’s that experience – besides a clearly encyclopedic knowledge of how to make a death count on screen – that gives “The Sacrifice Game” emotional reverberations well beyond shock as the film settles into Blackvale, an all-girls’ school in December of 1971 where instead of awaiting Santa’s arrival, the misfortunate Samantha (Madison Baines) and Clara (Georgia Acken), as well as Miss Tenner (Chloe Levine), the teacher put in charge of taking care of them when their parents can’t pick them up, live in fear of a quartet of bloodthirsty twentysomethings whose exploits have been making the nightly news as they terrorize the community with a random series of brutal murders.
If you thought “The Holdovers” could’ve been improved by throwing the Manson family into the mix, Wexler and Redlitz have you covered, applying the same level of sharpness to the knives wielded by the nihilistic thugs led by Jude (Mena Massoud, subversively flashing the same grin he did as Aladdin) as the wit of the script. But “The Sacrifice Game” also observes one tight-knit group coming together as Samantha, Clara and Miss Tenner grow from those who simply see each other in class to true confidants while another frays at the seams when their prey becomes a bit too hard to kill, yet still you discover what led them to band together in the first place. Set on a fortress-like estate, it leads to a holiday gathering unlike any other when Jude and friends would love nothing more than to serve up Samantha and Clara up as a roast, but in the dead of winter, there is naturally a raging fire going at all times and a less expected warmth growing between those who have to lean on one another for their survival. On the eve of the release of this bloody Christmas treat on Shudder, Wexler and Redlitz spoke about coming to collaborate on “The Sacrifice Game” without making any compromise of their own, the place where it’s always the Yuletide season and blending familiar genre ingredients to find something original.
How did the two of you come to team up on this?
Jenn Wexler: I wrote the first draft back in 2013, and then I realized I needed to learn how to make movies first, so it took a couple of years to do that. I produced several and then directed another called “The Ranger.” Then in 2018, after that came out, I felt like ready for this one and I was bouncing ideas off Sean, who is my now-husband and then-boyfriend, and he came up with a great idea, which unlocked the whole story for me, so I was like, “You know what? That earns you the keyboard.”
Sean Redlitz: Yeah, so a lot of this writing and rewriting collaboration happened during lockdown when we’re stuck in the apartment and [didn’t have] a lot of social things to do and it was a really great time to focus. It was also a great time to think about being trapped at a boarding school or somewhere else you maybe don’t want to be.
After Jenn loved the idea that I gave to put it in a new direction, I saw some of the scenes and some of the monologues [for the guys like Jude and Doug, played by Laurent Pitre] and I was like, “Oh, this guy, he’s a bit full of himself. I think I know that guy. I think maybe I’ve even been that guy from time to time. Could I take a stab at writing this monologue, maybe throwing in a few other lines?” [laughs] And Jen was like, “Sure, have at it.” So that led to more opportunities for us to collaborate on scenes and bits and plot twists. It’s just been great.
You’ve got the most amazing central location in the film for this boarding school. Did you know where you’d be filming from the beginning?
Jenn Wexler: The script was mostly finished when in 2019, we did a location scout and the producers in Quebec brought me to this amazing location Oka Abbey, and I just fell in love with it. Aesthetically, it just captured everything I was interested in — it feels very old. It has this slight European quality to it and it feels like a place out of dreams. We made a couple tweaks for our shooting script as we were in pre-production, and I’ll also say, because we were at the same location for the whole month that we were shooting — except for the very last day, when we shot the cop scene on the road and the church scene — it was really exciting to me to have a one-location movie, but a location that had a lot of locations within it, because there’s so many great rooms within that location that provide a whole variety of aesthetics and it keeps the eye interested.
Sean Redlitz: Yeah, it’s rare that you find the opportunity to shoot that kind of basement or that kind of parlor scene or dining room scene, and those creepy hallways. All of that was there and even more. If we had another week, we could have found more stuff to shoot, but it was such an amazing extra character that we hoped for when we wrote the screenplay, and Oka Abbey brought all that and more.
Is it true you had to put in a fireplace? It was so well incorporated, if so.
Jenn Wexler: Yeah, our production designer, our art team and our effects team were amazing at that. At first, they were like, “There’s no way you can have fire in this room. Are you joking? This is a historical location.” And obviously when you make a movie, there’s a lot of compromises that have to happen, but that was just one of the things that I was like, “There has to be a fireplace in this room. The fire is emotionally a core element of the movie.” I really wanted you to be able to feel like we’re starting in a heavenly place in the beginning, and then slowly descending into hell with our characters.
Sean Redlitz: And hot and cold, and snow and fire. There are these great juxtapositions that you really needed it there and if you take it out, you’re missing this whole important piece.
Jenn Wexler: So our producers figured out how we could make this happen, and then once they got the okay from the location, our art team and then also our effects team, they made it happen.
Sean Redlitz: A real working fireplace, vented out of a window that’s covered up and you can’t see, but it looks like it’s always been there and it always should have been.
It looked amazing. And from “The Ranger,” I had this suspicion that Chloe Levine might’ve been a real leader on set, as she has a position of authority in the film, when she knew the kind of craziness that might unfold that others who were new to one of your sets might not yet. Was that the case?
Jenn Wexler: Well, after “The Ranger,” Chloe and I became very good friends and I was dreaming of Chloe for that role when we were writing the script — and because she is one of my best friends, it was fun to torture her a little bit on screen. [laughs] And because we have this language already from working on “The Ranger” together, it was really easy to slip right back into our creative language with each other on set again. Then it was really sweet watching this kind of mentorship relationship develop within our group of actors — we had some, like Georgia Acken, who plays Clara, and this was their first feature.
She seems like a real discovery and that seems like such a tough role to play because you’re subverting ideas around a traditional creepy kid character, but have to play into that a bit to make it work. Was that a tricky role to get right?
Sean Redlitz: The twist of that character was actually my entry point and what we talked about earlier [where] I gave a suggestion that took the original idea in a different direction, and really as people who are so in love with horror and have so many friends who make horror movies, we’re very familiar with the tropes and we know audiences are too, so we [think about], how can we do something fun and different that will shake this up in a way or combine two or three of them — home invasion, demonic possession, creepy kid, Christmas horror. We loved the notion of “Let’s mix it up and try to see if we can make something new for all of that.”
It’s all in there, and I’ve heard Jenn has this habit of having conversations with the actors beforehand where it goes deep into their backstories, and I wonder if those talks are two-way streets where they can shake things up for you?
Jenn Wexler: A hundred percent. That’s part of developing the language part of it. In prep, I like to have these one-on-one meetings with each of the actors individually and I’ve been with the script for a long time and I have ideas about the script, but then when the actor comes on, I feel the character is being handed over to them and they have to take it and discover the inner lives of the character. So I have suggestions for things, like I’ll make the actor a playlist and [say] “These are songs that have been inspiring me,” and sometimes they’ll share playlists with me and sometimes they’re not interested in music because that’s not part of their process and that’s totally cool. But it’s really about what are the different touch points and the different ways that we can bond over this character? Let’s both pour our ideas into it so that we now have our language around the character and when we’re on set, we have our couple words that we say to each other from time to time while we’re shooting.
Sean Redlitz: And from a writing standpoint, I’m not there when Jenn is doing all that prep work with them, but [for instance] we wrote some of these lines for Doug to be off to the side, a little snarky, a little bit skeptical and then someone like Laurent [Pitre], who really, relates to that character, finds the layers and the depths that make those lines, not just clever or funny, but really, really meaningful for who the character is and what’s motivating them, and when I got to set, I’m just sitting there off on the side, watching Laurent take these words and just make them magical. Really it was such a great experience watching everything that the whole cast brought that [originally] just lived on a file in our living room. Now it’s out in the world and it’s real and it’s so incredible.
Plenty has already been said about the film’s remarkable opening scene with the gang staging their first murder, all unfolding in one fluid take, but what’s the feeling like when you get something like that in the can, with everyone having to get everything just right in order for it to work?
Jenn Wexler: It’s amazing because that was one of two scenes that I wrote in 2013 that are still in the movie and when Sean came on, I was like, “We can’t lose these scenes. They’re so important.” The [other was the] first dinner scene.
Sean Redlitz: The mashed potatoes.
Jenn Wexler: I was like, “Whatever we do, we have to write around those they’re staying in.” So when we shot that, it is the kind of situation where every department has to be on their game. You have to rehearse the blocking over and over because everybody has to know where they are at all times and there’s also stunts and effects going on there. So behind the scenes, our special effects guy with the tubing has to hit the thing at the right time and they’ve all been practicing with the stunt coordinator for hours. And we have extras in the beginning of that shot, but from the first day of pre-production when we were going location scouting, I think everybody was really excited too because they knew how special the scene could be, so all the departments were super stoked to just give their all to that.
This may be silly to ask, but from what I understand you were filming in the spring. Is it a bit disorienting being in this Christmas world and does it give the film a certain quality?
Jenn Wexler: It’s so funny because I feel like I’ve been celebrating Christmas every day for like two years now and I feel the same about Halloween because we’re making horror movies. I always feel like I’m celebrating Halloween, so if I don’t have the most amazing Halloween or Christmas day as a holiday, I’m okay with it because it’s just like, it’s been part of my life every day for so long.
Sean Redlitz: And really there’s a whole industry in Canada, especially in Quebec that shoots all of the Hallmark movies and the other holiday movies that fill the calendar this time of year, so they know how to do it in December, they know how to do it in March, they know how to do it in July. They’re incredible at it and they can bring the Christmas whenever you need it.
Jenn Wexler: Yeah, they have all the tricks, like the costume team knows if we’re shooting a Christmas movie in July, here’s what we do for the texture of the costume so that the actor’s not sweating in the heat.
Sean Redlitz: Yeah, the Christmas sweater that’s not really that warm — things like that. They’re so good at all of that stuff.
“The Sacrifice Game” will screen theatrically in New York on December 5th as part of the Shudder Showcase at IFC Center at 7 pm and will start streaming on Shudder and AMC+ starting December 8th.
You must be logged in to post a comment.