Nothing is quite what it seems in Heretic, the latest heart-in-your-mouth thriller from Iowa-born filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.
The story is simple — deceptively so. Two Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, are out proselytizing and knock on a door, with the hopes of converting whoever stands on the other side.
The two young women, played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, respectively, are greeted by a seemingly affable and congenial Englishman named Mr. Reed, played by a beguiling Hugh Grant.
But beneath Mr. Reed’s blueberry pie-scented, homespun hospitality lies something much more sinister — a deadly game that puts the missionaries’ faith to the ultimate test.
Belief and disbelief
The film’s exploration of faith — of belief and disbelief — has been on Beck's and Woods' minds for the better part of two decades.
“The idea for Heretic, the earliest place where we can trace it, is back when we were teenagers making movies here in Iowa for no money whatsoever,” Beck told IPR. “And we loved this idea — and it was very fuzzy at the time — of doing a story about religion and looking at it from so many different aspects of people that are religious, that are non-religious and from many different faiths.”
“We've always found the question of what happens when you die to be kind of the most terrifying thing in life. It's what we're all really afraid of. Is there something? Is there nothing? And for Scott and I, who are scared of just about anything, it's creepy either way,” Woods added. “So the movie is really just a conversation about all of our fears.”
Dialogue and ideas
These existential fears are manifested in Heretic, which unfolds as a confined, claustrophobic chamber play that relies more on dialogue than on conventional horror movie tropes. Beck and Woods, who wrote the nearly silent post-apocalyptic thriller A Quiet Place, discussed this shift in storytelling in a Q&A following the film’s Iowa premiere Nov. 2.
“With A Quiet Place, the fun of that film was trying to write a modern-day silent film and see if we could sustain an emotional story without any dialogue. It was just a fun challenge. And similarly, with Heretic, we thought it might be a fun challenge to lean into dialogue,” Woods said. “Instead of using the usual bag of tricks to kind of jump-scare the audience, we thought maybe dialogue and ideas — psychological ideas, philosophical ideas — could replace the jump scare.”
“Also, it stemmed from trying to make a film as personal as possible,” Beck explained. “And a lot of the conversation pieces in this film, not meaning literally the dialogue but the idea behind the dialogue, stemmed so much from decades of conversations that Bryan and I have had about, ‘Why do we believe what we believe? Or why do we not believe?’”
A personal place
The deep conversations between Beck and Woods also extended to the film’s small cast on set. According to the filmmaking duo, it was important for Grant, Thatcher and East to explore their own relationships with their faith in order to more fully develop their characters.
“We had a rehearsal period of two weeks with Hugh, Chloe and Sophie. And so much of that wasn't talking movies. It wasn't even necessarily reading through the scenes. It was simply having existential, religious conversations, really, to come at this project from a place that felt very personal to all of us,” Beck said. “Even at the end of the movie, there's a rendition of Bob Dylan's ‘Knockin’ on Heaven's Door’ that's sung by Sophie Thatcher, who's the star of the movie. And that was a way, because she's a musician, to imbue this with a sense of just getting everybody's fingertips as deeply imprinted on this movie as possible.”
Thatcher’s co-star Chloe East was in attendance at the Iowa premiere of Heretic, which was held at The Last Picture House in Davenport, the independent theater co-founded by Beck and Woods. She joined the filmmakers on stage for the post-screening Q&A, alongside costume designer Betsy Heimann.
East, who previously played a deeply religious character in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, described the process she undertook to slip into her role as Sister Paxton.
“If it doesn't click initially, if it doesn't feel right for me among the first couple reads, I'm like, ‘There's someone out there that is going to do this better, that doesn't have to work so hard to get it right.’ So that's kind of how I always felt,” East said. “And when I read the first monologue that we did in our readings, there was something about it that just felt really comfortable.”
Inside the cardigan
Before joining the crew on Heretic, Heimann previously worked as a costume designer for many critically acclaimed films, including Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jerry Maguire. She described the research and planning that went into the film’s costumes — particularly, for Mr. Reed’s cardigan-clad attire.
“I personally thought a cardigan would be appropriate. It's something that he could take off in case he wanted to not get his cardigan dirty, in case things got a little bloody in the basement,” Heimann said with a laugh. “There's a fine line with a cardigan, that people have the image of granddad, a fuddy-duddy.”
Heimann went on to describe the interplay between the film’s three principal characters, as well as how their respective costumes reveal elements of their personalities.
“The whole movie, to me, is about perception and deception. And with each costume, there's three characters, three parts of a puzzle. They all have to fit together. And like Chloe's character, when she comes in, she kind of fits in that front room, all the colors,” Heimann explained. “Sophie's more strict, more questioning, a little bit older, a little more fashion-forward, and so I wanted her to have very hard lines. And so then Mr. Reed is in the middle of that, and every color that is around him is in that sweater.”
Iowa nice
Heavy on dialogue and big on ideas, Heretic is a horror film with something on its mind. According to Beck and Woods, the film provided an opportunity to explore some otherwise taboo subjects — above all, religion. As Iowa natives, the filmmaking duo recalled the attitudes surrounding religion that they witnessed while growing up in the Quad Cities.
“Where we come from, the topic of religion is something, in Iowa specifically, we felt you can't really bring up at the dinner table without it kind of causing a rift or hurt feelings, depending on where people lie on the spectrum. We see the horror genre being one that is a vessel to have conversations about deeper ideas like this,” Beck said. “There's a lot to discuss about religion and a lot to reflect upon it and why you come to the beliefs that you do or the non-beliefs that you do. So I think it's just asking our immediate community to look at it that way. And hopefully, it spurs conversations.”
Having friends and family of all different faiths and beliefs, Woods explained, made the writing process extremely personal. The finished film, he said, is an attempt to equally represent these many diverse viewpoints and expressions of faith.
It was also a chance to showcase their home state’s “Iowa nice” attitude on a larger-than-life, cinematic scale.
“I hope Iowans recognize that kind of trademark ‘Iowa nice’ in the film,” Woods said.” You're going to see very polite, nice people come up against a very dangerous situation. And I hope Iowans are proud of how they handle themselves.”
Heretic, which is distributed by A24, opens at The Last Picture House Nov. 7 and premieres nationwide Nov. 8. Beck and Woods will visit FilmScene in Iowa City on Nov. 10 and the Varsity Cinema in Des Moines on Nov. 16 for a directors' Q&A.
