One of the most intriguing film adaptations at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho, premiered in Un Certain Regard. The psychological horror set in the 1900s follows a suspicious governess named Winifred Notty (Maika Monroe), whose appearance at the castle doorstep begets mysterious happenings. In anticipation of the film’s world premiere, Cineuropa met with Wigon to discuss his new film.

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Cineuropa: How does genre filmmaking help you tell stories that are social and political?
Zachary Wigon: Through genre, you are able to access aesthetic elements of the art form that you cannot access in more naturalistic filmmaking. Psychological horror, for example, gives you the licence and freedom to do things with the camera that you are not able to do in more realistic films. I am interested in the most intense, extreme and complete expression of psychology and emotion that can be achieved on screen, and genre enables me to pursue this through unusual images and unusual sounds.

Victorian Psycho is a revisionist version of the gothic narrative. How do you approach the question of identification in that sense?
The subjectivity of this film enables the audience to identify with someone whom they would never identify with in real life – someone who would simply and immediately be labeled as a monster. But here, the audience gets to sense the world the way they do. To that end, a lot of the formal elements are opportunities for you to get deep inside Winifred’s psyche.

But at the same time, it is also doing the opposite, isn’t it? The voiceover is confessional, but it is also laden with irony.
Certainly. Winifred is the definition of an unreliable narrator. It is up to the audience to decide whether she can be trusted. But when someone is a psychopath, they are obviously not going to admit guilt or take responsibility for anything. Instead, they will try to draw close to you and pull you into their own subjectivity.

Winifred's allure, though, is very different from that of the male psychopaths we’ve seen on screen. Did you discuss it with Maika Monroe, the power of being angry as a woman?
We talked a lot about the sense of being dislocated from society. Winifred is in this terrible paradox, where she wants to belong in society, but she cannot. She needs to repress who she is in order to fit in and the more she does, the harder it is to fit in.

The castle where the film is set is as labyrinthian as Winifred’s mind. Can you tell me more about your attention to detail and period filmmaking?
We had wonderful heads of departments, such as Jeremy Reed, the production designer, and Alison Burns, the costume designer. I am incredibly grateful to them. But to return to the idea of the labyrinth, my references were The Shining and Last Year at Marienbad – both films in which space itself becomes a kind of mind. The hotel in Last Year at Marienbad is a living cognitive entity that exerts an influence over the characters and, obviously, the Overlook Hotel in The Shining is doing something to Jack Torrance. The more a film is able to visually evoke the psyche of its protagonist, the better.

How did you construct that subjectivity through the use of score?
Ariel Marx, who scored my last film as well, is just phenomenally talented! What I told Ariel at the beginning was that this should be a demented film, so the score needed to be as demented as possible. She sent me a five-minute suite of different musical ideas — not cues for specific scenes, but rather a broad palette suggesting what the score could sound like. When I listened to it, I said: “This is all great, but you can go even weirder!” There is definitely a very intense relationship between subjectivity and score, because music is the quickest way of establishing it. The moment you hear a single note, a mood is already in place.