Michael Mohan on Crafting the Haunting Beauty of 'Immaculate'

The director sits down with Isabella Vega to discuss making the Sydney Sweeney-helmed horror film

Image courtesy of Neon

By Bella Vega

The Michael Mohan helmed Immaculate is one of this year’s most anticipated releases, shrouded in as much mystery as it is iconography. It follows the doe-eyed Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), who joins a convent deep in the remote Italian countryside. After experiencing what is heralded as an “immaculate conception”, things turn eerie as Cecilia and the nuns around her begin to slowly be stripped of their bodily autonomy, culminating in a ferocious and animalistically savage third act. 

Talking with Mohan, his passion for the film takes the form of giddy smiles and fist-pumps as he tells me about his first foray into horror - his warmth is so palpable it feels like talking to an old friend, complete with laughs and riffs galore. If Immaculate is any indicator, we are looking at someone whose emotional intelligence is only surpassed by his intuitive awareness for the rhythm of life, making him one of the most versatile and deft directors working today. 

Mohan sat down with me to chat about all things Immaculate, from how his Catholic upbringing impacted his direction, to the art of crafting a perfect jumpscare, and how he wrote that hauntingly beautiful, deliciously horrifying ending. 

IV: As someone who grew up Catholic, I thought your expressions of Catholic iconography on this film were so well done. Specifically the chapel, where the altar was raised so much higher than in traditional Catholic churches, giving this overall sense of the unapproachableness and an imbalanced power dynamic between the clergy and the worshippers. What was it like for you, as a director, to put your own perspective into these holy places?

MM: I grew up super Catholic, I was the leader of our youth group, and a lapsed Catholic now, but when I was in these spaces, it did feel powerful to me. My main goal with making the film was to not make it too long, I wanted it to be short, I wanted to get in and get out. I wanted to skip over all the boring parts that you typically see in horror movies. And by virtue of that, rather than delving too deeply into Cecilia's backstory, I wanted to make people understand why she felt this calling. The way that we were shooting all of those scenes in the church, to create that sense of magnitude and power, that I did feel at one point in my life as it pertained to religion, in terms of how the altar was set up there. I wanted it to seem, not pornographic by any stretch, but just the image of a woman on her knees in front of a man, who's towering over her, and lifting his hand in front of her to kiss his ring. To me, it was just like the perfect way to set up the patriarchal dynamics of the convent where the men are in charge. And the women are beneath them, literally. 

IV: There’s this very big, overwhelmingly mystical and supernatural presence to the story, and I found the most touching scene, for me, was the scene where the girls are playing with the sheets, while they learn to be sisters - there was just such a lightness and a tenderness to it. Can you tell me a little bit about balancing those elements throughout the film? 

MM: That montage is one of my favorite parts. The music in that montage is actually taken from an old Giallo film called The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. It's our most direct Giallo homage. We had to make this movie so quickly, and montages take forever to shoot because you have to get a lot of pieces. Oftentimes, what we would do is, we would just create a setup. I would just say to Sydney and Benedetta, ‘hey, just go fool around’ and oftentimes, we would take one little piece. Like, when they're sitting eating dinner, there's a moment where Syd gets honey all stuck on her fingers, and she's trying to figure out what to do with it. Those little specific bits of busyness help make it, especially in a movie that's trying to be so economic. If you have a couple of those little, kind of like happy accidents, right? But they make you feel like there's this relationship between the two characters, because the two actors themselves are forming their own relationship on screen.

IV: Would you tell me about what your favorite scene to direct was?

MM: I think all of it was pretty challenging. My favorite scene is the interrogation scene, where the clergy asks Cecilia if she’s been chaste. What I liked about shooting that scene that day is that it was the only thing I had to do that day, so I could devote my entire day to just one scene. I also wanted that scene to have that level of vision. Same thing with the visual dynamics, the power dynamics of the patriarchy versus the women. So staging, Cecilia is seated at the end of the table with a lit fireplace behind her, almost like they're viewing her as this heretic. And it's like she's surrounded by hell behind her. But then from her angle, then they're all standing around the table, above her, that power dynamic represented visually. I also just really love how that scene looks. 

IV: What was the hardest part for you about directing this new genre? 

MM: You know, the genre wasn't the hard part? It's really just all technique, you know, and I will say the art of crafting at jumpscare is very finicky. You have to really keep in mind the timing of when is the scary thing being revealed? When is the reaction to the scary thing being revealed? How is that being captured? And then, at what moment are you going to choose to punctuate that moment with a sound effect? And the balance between those three things. It's very easy for jumpscares to become muddled because those three beats are stepping on top of each other. So you have to be really careful. You have to get options. You have to try things out in the edit to make the timing as effective as it can be. I think one of the most challenging days to film was the scene where Cecilia is running away from two men in the field. It was an awfully cold day. We had a lot to get done that day, but also Sydney was just too fast. And everytime we would shoot the scene, she would outrun them, so we kept having to slow her down so that they could actually catch her. And Alvaro [Morte] and Giuseppe [Piccolo] were exhausted by running and trying to catch up to her. 

IV: Let’s talk about the third act of the film - I think it's one of my favorite endings to any movie I've ever watched, because it was completely not what I expected. You gave this character full agency to express every emotion she’d been denied, and you kept the shot on her face. You let Sydney just go for it. What was the writing process and directing process like for it?

MM: This is the first thing I've directed that I haven't written aside from parts of Everything Sucks!. The ending was originally, you know, it was a studio movie, so it was written more conservatively. When I read the script, I was like, this isn't going to give people the catharsis that they need. So the concept for this ending for the last scene just came to me, I just saw it. I pitched it to Sydney who was totally on board. I had financiers who completely supported me, though they did ask me to film alternates just in case it didn't work, which I agreed to. On the day, we just mapped it out, we figured out where it was going to happen and where the camera blocking would be, how it would work. Sydney doesn't like to rehearse, and so for me, I know if the first take ended up being incredible I wanted to make sure that it was totally focused on that, because she has to go through such a physical transformation to do it, I don't want to take to be ruined because of a technical mistake. We rolled on the first take, and the first take is what's in the movie. We did it a few times, we did a shot of the thing that she births, we got other coverage and ultimately everybody just knew that what we had shot with the first day it was just it felt classic, you know, it felt very right and so that's what's that's what everybody's gonna see this weekend.

IV: What's your favorite memory from making Immaculate?

MM: My favorite memory was when we found the location for the main convent. We had been scouting all different types of convents. When we came across Villa Parisi, it just felt so unreal, the walls having all of those murals on them, and the ceilings, and there was such a history to it. It felt like no other religious harmony. But most importantly, it was the look on Sydney's face of joy, as she was skipping from room to room going, ‘I can't believe we get to shoot our movie here’. Her joy and how much she was excited for that location became everyone's joy, because it's contagious. Once we were set on that location, it sort of unlocked all sorts of other possibilities in terms of shooting, like “Okay, we're gonna go full Renaissance painting with this.” 

IV: I wanted to talk about the keyhole scene, where Cecilia is looking into the keyhole and sees the nuns torturing Sister Mary. The point where the camera changes perspectives and the score matched up with her tears right in the eyeline of the keyhole was brilliant. Tell me about the schematics of filming this scene and how it felt from your perspective?

MM: It was very technical. It was a night where, the effects, it wasn’t behaving properly. The tongue removal was a practical effect, it was a thing () had to wear, and it kept falling. Ultimately, that is a place where there is a little bit of visual effects, but not in the way you would think it's two different takes that we stitched together to make work. And then the blood coming out is all practical, and all of that to the actual shot of the keyhole. That was one of those things where I just couldn't believe that city did it, where we had her I matched up perfectly with the keyhole. And then at one tear happened to fall exactly where the space in the keyhole was, which was just like, I don't know how she does it, but I just don't question it.