In the upcoming horror/thriller The Night House, we meet Beth (Rebecca Hall), who is trying to come to grips with the death of her husband as she stays in the house he built for her deep in the woods. Soon she begins to see visions within the home and against the advice of her friends, tries to seek them out and find answers.
We spoke with Rebecca Hall about the complexities behind her character Beth; she told us, “I found her very intriguing. She was quite enigmatic.” She added, “The timeline of the movie greets her at a very specific movement where I think she hasn’t entirety got to the kind of grief where she’s able to cry, and she’s more in this sort of angry, volatile, messy, reckless sort of place. Which makes her a very dangerous heroin of anything that might be scary because she’s unlikely to run away from it, she’s more likely to run towards it.”
Her director David Bruckner (The Ritual, V/H/S) is no stranger to the horror genre, which was part of the allure for Rebecca who told us, “He is sort of unique, as in there aren’t many directors out there who only want to make horror films. I mean, he has zero interest in making any other kind of film.” She added, “His understanding of where an audience would be at, at every point in the movie. Knowing when they would be most susceptible to a jump scare, for example, or needing a quiet moment to take something in. He really had such an intuition for that sort of stuff.”
We ended our conversation with Rebecca by discussing what makes this film such an amazing movie theater experience. Rebecca joked, “It’s way more fun to scream in a room full of strangers than it is on your own on the couch.” She later added, “Sound is so huge in this movie and to experience it a surround sort of environment is heads and tails the best way to experience it.”
Check out our experience in the virtual junket for the premiere of THE NIGHT HOUSE:
THE NIGHT HOUSE opens on August 20!
All images courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.