Since its world premiere at this year’s SXSW (where it also won Best Film in Competition and Best Debut), Raging Grace, the debut feature from British-Filipino writer/director Paris Zarcilla, has been one of the most buzzed about horror movies of 2023. The gorgeously Gothic horror thriller follows Joy (Max Eigenmann), an undocumented Filipina immigrant in the UK, desperately trying to secure a visa and a better life for herself and and her young daughter, the eponymous Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla). When Joy is hired as housekeeper by the stern and stately Katherine (Leanne Best) to care for her dying uncle Mr. Garrett (David Hayman), she soon discovers that the cavernous old home hides secrets far more sinister than she originally imagined.
Ahead of the film hitting theaters in the US and UK this month, we sat down with Zarcilla to talk more about the righteous fury that went into making Raging Grace, and what’s next for the Rage family (Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity).
It’s been an absolute whirlwind of a year for you and the Raging Grace family – from SXSW to Busan International Film Festival to London’s FrightFest, where you and the film received a standing ovation. How have you found the reaction to the film?
Paris Zarcilla: Reactions to the film have been quite varied but, overall, very positive. And thank fuck! Because that’s something I’ve been really terrified about. Making something that feels like a diary entry, that sits so close to your heart and to you as a human being, and then putting it out into the world feels like an invitation to criticize my human being. When you make something that takes aim at things like British colonialism and new and old white power, you have to steel yourself for the reactions and discomfort that a film like this might unearth.
That being said, the reactions I’ve had from some people have been truly profound. At SXSW, a Filipina doctor came to me and told me her story – she said she’d been adopted at a young age by an Irish Catholic family, and had never wanted for anything. She essentially had no interest in learning about her culture, grew up very happy and is now a successful doctor. But after watching Raging Grace she said to me, “I had no idea I wanted to see myself up there on screen. I had no idea I could be a main character in a film.” She spoke to me with tears running down her face and I knew then that there was no award, no review that could ever give me that level of fulfilment. It reminded me that this is who I made the film for.
And what about the reaction from the horror crowd? They can be a notoriously tough crowd to crack!
PZ: I’ve had sleepless nights thinking about horror fans and what they’re gonna think of this film [laughs]. The obvious critiques have come through: “This is not a fucking horror, man! This is a thriller, blah blah” and to be honest, I felt most terrified going to FrightFest. This is a festival that’s dedicated to all kinds of horror, the biggest in the UK, and I had a preconceived perception about the audience. But the love and the warmth we got from that crowd is something I’ll remember for my whole life. It felt so welcoming, being at home in London with a crowd who genuinely enjoyed what we had to say on screen. That’s who I care about, and they’re who matter to me.
You’ve spoken very candidly about your impetus for creating this film – namely the abuse and bigotry suffered by immigrants in the United Kingdom not just at the height of the pandemic, but across all of Britain’s colonialist history. Did you always know a story like this needed to be told in the horror genre? Or did that reveal itself along the way?
PZ: The latter, in a way. I didn’t set out to make a horror film, as much as I love it as a genre. I just knew in the initial draft that it had to be an expression of my anger and frustration. It was messy as fuck. But as I found a way to hold my rage that felt helpful to the craft, I began to see where it needed to go, and horror was the natural direction.
When you’re dealing with real life stories of immigrants who have literally been thrown out of windows because they didn’t clean the kitchen right, or have been starved to death, or literally been put in boxes … and even things that aren’t as bad as that; just the every day immigrant or diaspora experience can be horrific.
So the genre element of it really began to take shape once I had found a way to embody a lot of the themes that I wanted to talk about with Joy, Grace and that big Gothic house. Of course, Raging Grace is not just a horror. And that’s not to take away from the genre itself – but this film needed to be a thriller, and it also needed to be a drama, and it needed comedy. The blended genre nature of the film feels so reflective of real life. Constraining it to one genre felt unhelpful to me.
And speaking of Joy and Grace, Raging Grace has a small cast but they do so, so much. Joy, Grace, Katherine and Mr. Garrett go to some really extreme and intense places together. Every character is carrying their own hurt, hate, rage and even madness. Was it ever a challenge to cultivate that dynamic on set?
PZ: I’m so glad it wasn’t, no. We all had to stay together in that house for four weeks because of the pandemic so not only was there not any room for that, but that also didn’t happen because of the time and the process that we took with our casting directors and my producer [BFI Vision Award winner Chi Thai]. The people we were hiring were ones that really understood what we were trying to say. Leanne Best and David Hayman understood the responsibility of the roles they were taken. These are characters who were going to be saying incredibly hurtful things, things that many of us on set had heard in real life. They had a real duty of care to the film, to the set, to these characters, and everybody conducted themselves in such an incredible way. It made a very challenging production feels like their best work.
You mentioned that gorgeous Gothic house – just one of the features of the film that make Raging Grace feel almost like a fairytale at times. We see the film through the childish and innocent eyes of Grace, and there’s even a moralistic moment where Mr. Garrrett warns her towards the end of the film that she should ‘be careful what you wish for.’ Did you always intend to play with that fairytale vibe?
PZ: I love fantasy, and I think that while it might have been a step too far to add that genre, there are fantastical elements in there. I’ve always been very interested in Aesop’s fables or the older versions of the fairytales and stories taken by Disney and wiped of all their griminess. At the core of so many of these stories are these lessons, that warn you about what it means to be a selfish person, or finally getting what you actually want. I wanted to put elements of that into this film.
As for the house itself … what the house represents is something that’s really difficult to ignore, especially when talking about immigrants, especially undocumented ones. At the time this film was made, immigrants were being vilified but also used to prop up an under-resourced and underfunded national health system. It felt like, even at the time, we were living in the ruins of the British Empire. Literally – the house is falling apart under the government that we were in then and what we’re in now. Often I felt, we need to burn this fucking house down! Metaphorically and literally. We all live in the master’s house, one way or another. That Gothic house was the perfect symbol to encapsulate and embody all of those very complicated things. Visually it serves as a scary place but also as something symbolic.
The hugely exciting news for Raging Grace fans is of course that the film marks the first in an upcoming ‘Rage’ trilogy – will the next two features also have a horror focus?
PZ: The third will go further into that magical realism area. But what’s important for me, or at least to effectively tell the stories that I want, is to continue playing in the blended genre sandbox. I think each one is always going to have an element of horror to it, but another genre may take the lead. The second film is an unlikely heist film; a young Filipino couple running a cafe in ’90s London, who on the weekends set up covert rescue missions to help domestic workers escape their abusive employers. It’s far more a thriller than a horror, although it does have horrific moments in it. There’s a lot more drama in it, but there’s a lot more comedy there too. If I’m lucky enough to continue making the rest of these films, they will certainly be in the same vein as Raging Grace.
Raging Grace is playing from today, December 1 in select theaters across the US, and will hit UK theaters on December 29.
