Warning: This article comprises spoilers for Immaculate.

As each producer and star of Immaculate, Sydney Sweeney had lots of concepts for the movie, however she had only one main request.

“My big thing was, by the end of the movie, I just wanted to be drenched in blood,” she tells Entertainment Weekly, citing Ready or Not and Carrie as examples of inspiration. “I love those moments where, at the end of the film, you have the female badass that just went through the wringer and takes it all at the end.”

And undergo the wringer she does: By movie’s finish, Sweeney’s virgin nun Cecilia learns that her physique has been used towards her will to offer start to what a mad scientist priest is hoping might be some form of clone of Jesus Christ, and the one strategy to escape all of it is to go on a bloody killing spree — throughout labor, no much less.

If this sounds excessive, that is as a result of it’s — however the movie shouldn’t be all blood and gore. In reality, there are some comedic moments — what’s funnier than a nun casually dropping an f-bomb? — and the horror parts themselves do not all fall into one neat class.

Sweeney and director Michael Mohan, who beforehand labored collectively on the 2021 movie The Voyeurs and 2018 TV sequence Everything Sucks!, particularly sought to discover a “great balance between moments of levity and moments that we really wanted to go for it,” says Sweeney. “I am a big fan of all types of horror genres, and I really wanted something that had a bit of a mixture of everything,” she says. “I love jump scares, so I pushed for a lot of jump scares in the movie. Mike likes a lot of psychological thrillers, so a lot of the longer, more thrilling psychological shots were from him. So it was just a mixture of all of our favorite loves from horror films, and then creatively what’s fun and interesting and exciting and pushes the boundaries to do.”

One horror factor that viewers will not discover in Immaculate, although, is a supernatural antagonist. The evil entity right here is only of the human selection, which is why, despite the fact that she first auditioned for the position 10 years in the past, the script “stuck with” Sweeney all this time.

“I love horror films and I’ve been looking to do them, but scripts that I’ve been getting were a lot of just, like, getting chased by this supernatural creature, or it just didn’t feel grounded in a psychological space,” she explains. “I always kept thinking about Immaculate, going back to it, because the scariest parts of this film were reality and mankind. And I loved the fact that what she was trying to escape and run from was actually growing inside her.”

Immaculate, which additionally stars Álvaro Morte, Simona Tabasco, Benedetta Porcaroli, Giorgio Colangeli, and Dora Romano, is in theaters now.

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