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| Madison Baines in The Sacrifice Game |
After opening the 2018 edition of FrightFest with her début feature, The Ranger, filmmaker Jenn Wexler's 2023 sophomore feature, The Sacrifice Game (2023), was chosen to close the festival. It's a remarkable privilege to have opened and closed the UK's most prestigious genre festival only two films into her directing career.
In August 2023, in London, I sat down with Wexler to discuss the Christmas-themed The Sacrifice Game — hours before she was due to walk on stage and introduce the film to the West End audience.
The striking thing about Wexler is her layered presence. While outgoing, you can sense an introverted side to her personality—her self-reflective nature, perhaps. Talking with her, you realise that there's a piece of her folded into her films, which reminds me of something filmmaker Rebecca Miller told me: "…if they are made honestly, all pieces of art are self portraits of the person making them. Even though film is such a collaborative art, if there is a real auteur behind it, then that person imbues the film with who they are, and what their concerns are at that moment."
As entertaining as The Ranger and The Sacrifice Game are, there's something personal, even a vulnerability imbued in their souls. The two films share similar beats, namely a group of characters finding themselves in an unexpected situation. Beyond that, and other similar thematic beats that are revealed to interest Wexler, the director carefully ensures the two films have their own identity.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Wexler discussed her creative process, concerns about an AI apocalypse, her enduring interest in horror and why she doesn't want to work outside the horror space.
Paul Risker: I remember speaking to a director who remarked that the term 'filmmaker' is a strange and slightly ambiguous one. I've spoken with others who say that it took a number of films before they felt they could call themselves a filmmaker. Do you feel that you can call yourself, if not a filmmaker, then a director?
Jenn Wexler: I feel like a filmmaker, and I proudly call myself one. Before I directed my first feature, The Ranger, I'd produced six features. I learned how to make movies as a producer, working for Larry Fessenden's production company, Glass Eye Pix, out of New York.
I love the term filmmaking because there's a connotation to it that you're making something — and especially making indie movies at Glass Eye Pix, it felt like we were making a movie with our own hands. I loved that vibe and sense of community, where people come together to create something out of nothing.
Certainly now, I feel I can call myself a director after my second feature, and also before The Ranger and The Sacrifice Game, I had directed shorts. So, I feel confident calling myself a director, but I prefer the term filmmaker because, especially in the indie world, you're doing a lot. You might not just be directing. There might be a little bit of producing in there too, and writing. Filmmaker is a great catch-all.
PR: Filmmakers I've spoken to have compared the experience of making a film to going to war or having a baby, and they frequently suggest making films is addictive. What are your thoughts on these chosen metaphors to describe the process?
JW: I don’t feel it’s like going to war. I find filmmaking so joyful. I'm so happy when I'm making a movie, and as soon as I receive the green-light, as soon as I know we're doing this, from prep through post-production, I am so happy and fulfilled. It's exciting to have the privilege to explore art and to create. I try not to take it for granted and I try to find the magic in every phase of the process.
The reason why I enjoy directing so much is I don't think I could ever get bored doing this. On every movie you have new challenges and things to discover, and so it's something that can be forever exciting.
PR What was new and exciting about The Sacrifice Game?
JW: I got to work with an incredible filmmaking community in Quebec. We shot the movie right outside of Montreal, in the old and beautiful Oka Abbey that was built in the 1800s. But it was really meeting the filmmaking community in Quebec.
When I was finished writing, I shared the script with my producer Heather Buckley, who was one of the producers on The Ranger. She introduced me to producers out of Montreal, Philip Kalin-Hajdu and Albert Melamed, who welcomed me into this community. They took me location scouting, and then they introduced me to all these incredible filmmakers in Montreal, like Alexandre Bussière, our director of photography, Mario Sévigny, our composer, and Arthur Tarnowski, one of our editors. I got to spend so much of 2022 living in Montreal working with all these people and pouring our passions into this film.
PR: Film goes through so many hands, and I understand the auteur theory, but at the same time, it can devalue the collaborative process. Do you see it as being valid, or does it need to be revised and developed?
JW: The way I feel about it is that somebody is going to be making those creative decisions. If it's not the director, it will be a producer or an executive. But the film isn’t going to get there by itself — someone is going to be the one making the final creative decisions with the final say. And the director's job is to keep an eye on the whole film – and every detail of it – to make sure it works.
That said, the director can't make the movie by themselves, and that's what's exciting about getting to work with all the different departments. They're the superheroes of their craft.
What I like to do as a director, as part of my prep, is create a lot of look books. I'll create an overall look book for the film, and then I'll create different ones for the different departments—this process begins our language and exchange of ideas around cinematography, around production design. These are our reference images, and this is the world we're playing in.
Then part of my job is to make sure everyone's making the same movie, so that what the art department is doing is going to work with what the camera team are doing. But the movie couldn’t get made without us combining our forces to get it done.
PR: Does it get easier making a film?
JW: It gets easier and more exciting because every time I make a movie, and this goes back to when I was producing too, I felt somebody had carved a hole in my skull and poured knowledge into it. You learn so much making a movie, and then you want to use those things on your next one. And that goes back to what you were saying about it having an addictive quality because you're like, 'Oh, I discovered this thing, and I can't wait to use it on the next film.'
I think Martin Scorsese recently said, and not to misquote him, that at his age, he's only just discovering what cinema can be.
PR: We think of directors like Scorsese as working in the modern era of cinema, but in reality, cinema is still in its infancy. The medium is still ripe for discovery and other directors like Christopher Nolan are actively talking about this.
JW Well, I think we're in a really exciting moment. In the past 20 years, as technology has become more accessible, more people have been able to make movies, and so we're seeing movies from different perspectives. We have great film festivals like FrightFest that celebrate independent cinema and specifically independent horror. We get to see stories from people who weren't able to get films made because Hollywood had been so insular.
For better or worse, as technology continues to advance, we're going to see new things with AI. Personally, I find that terrifying because I want to keep seeing stories from humans.
PR: Filmmaking is part instinct, and so, the question becomes whether we can programme a computer to think instinctively like a person would? What becomes of those happy accidents and spur of the moment decisions or reactions if the human element is removed?
JW: Those moments are what is so magical about the act of creation. When you're making a movie, you prep, you prep, and you prep, and then you have to surrender to the moment. You have to trust that you've done all your prep, the production has done their prep, and that's when you discover those nuances, like when you see something you didn't expect, or, say, the camera picks up something unexpected in the way the person moves in the moment. Whatever it is, you then take that into the editing room where there are even more discoveries.
All of it is so magical, and it's so sad to me that it feels we're entering a period when the algorithms might just recycle all these things that have already been created from a library. It just feels so soulless, and I hope as humans we can approach it in a way that doesn't impair our ability to explore and create.
PR: It's sacrificing nuance.
JW: And it's capitalism. I guess the overall goal of the billionaires is that it will be easier, cheaper, and faster to create and then put this content out — cutting humans out in the process. We're talking specifically about movies, but that's for all industries. Let's talk more about films and not the AI apocalypse.
PR: Watching The Sacrifice Game, I was thinking about whether it has a spiritual connection to The Ranger. However, reading your director's statement, you wrote The Sacrifice Game first. So, the question is about how The Ranger honours the spirit of this film?
J: I wrote the first draft of this [The Sacrifice Game] in 2013. I thought "This feels big." I hadn't directed or produced anything yet at that time, and I needed to do something smaller. So, I put this script to the side, and I focused on The Ranger.
I've been a horror fan for a very long time — since I was ten-years-old. When I was in college, I got an internship with the horror TV channel, FEARnet, which was owned by Sony, LionsGate and Comcast. Out of college, that became my first job. As a marketing coordinator, I got to discover horror as an industry and learn how these companies promote horror. After that, I worked at Glass Eye Pix producing genre movies. So, that's all to say that I have been thinking about horror for a long time.
I only want to make movies in the horror space, and I like to think about how I can pay homage to my favourite genre movies. I like to take all that and then combine it with my teen-hood trauma and put it on the page and see what happens. That's kind of my process for how I like to approach filmmaking, and so, I think that's where that connection [between the two films] comes from.
PR: Is horror broad enough to hold your interest and explore your creative voice, or do you think at some point it'll become constraining?
JW: Right now, I don't see how it'd be constraining. Maybe in 20 or 30 years I'll feel differently, but right now, there's so many sub-genres of horror to explore, so many new ways to combine these sub-genres, and also combine them with new anxieties we are facing as a society. As the world changes, our anxieties are changing — they're new, but they're also the same. So, I think it's just about people looking at it in new ways and keeping their minds fresh. The horror genre has, and it has since I was a teenager, fulfilled me in a way that I don't think I'll find boring anytime soon.
PR: What do you find so fulfilling about horror?
JW: It allows us to pour our fears into something and deal with it. You're also connecting with other people about those fears. There's a sense of community between people who have all seen the same horror movies, and that's special. You relate with the character and the fear that's on the screen and that allows you to explore those anxieties instead of repressing them. Then, you get to relate with other people that are grappling with those same things.
P: When you picked up the script again after finishing The Ranger, you mention in your director's statement that something wasn't quite right. What was stopping the film from being what it needed to be?
JW: Well, Sean [Redlitz] and I are married. We were dating and living together at the time we were writing this script. In life, we bounce ideas off one another all the time—that's part of our relationship. I was just going through a little writer's block with a structural thing. Sean does a lot of mic drops, where he'll walk into the room, say a sentence, and walk out of the room. I'm like, "Oh my God. I was stuck, and you just said three words and opened it up in my mind. You've allowed me to see it again."
In the film, the gang arrives at the school, intent on doing something. What are they intending to do, doesn't work out the way they thought it was going to work out. The specific way it doesn't work out is what he contributed versus a more conventional reason, which is where the story originally started. So, if you've seen the movie, you know what that is and for those who don't, at least you'll have some sense.
Now, with The Ranger, when I was working on the script, Sean walked into the room and suggested a key plot point in four words. He then walked out of the room.
So anyway, with The Sacrifice Game, because we already bounced ideas off each other, I asked if he'd be interested in writing this — whether he'd want to open up the project in Final Draft and write scenes? He was into it, and then it became a back-and-forth, so much so that we ultimately had a hard time remembering who wrote what. I'd be like, "I wrote that joke" and he'd be, "No, I wrote that joke." We'd argue about whose brain it came from.
PR: You describe this story as being about two outsiders that find themselves. It feels like a chapter in a larger story, and I wonder if it's less about finding themselves, and more about them beginning to discover who they are?
JW: I'd love to do a sequel or prequel, or all the 'quels.' I'd say when Sean and I first started talking about this script, when he first became part of the process, he asked me, "If you had to sum this movie up in one word, what is it about?" I said, "Friendship. It's a horror movie about friendship." And that was really important to me, not only plot and character wise, but tone wise too. I want you to leave the movie feeling what that first friendship felt like.
I definitely dug into my past experiences of those moments when you first start to cement a best-friendship, and it's almost like you're falling in love. It's so magical and that person takes up your whole world. Then, you feel you're no longer lonely, and you're now in the world as part of a team facing it together. I love horror movies with a 'final girl', but I also love horror movies where the final girls team up together. That arc was really special.
PR: The problem with modern horror is it can be too message-orientated. Cinema can be a Trojan Horse, addressing themes and ideas in a less direct way. The outsider themes and finding one's place in The Sacrifice Game don't compromise it being a fun genre picture. Instead, the subtext is gently communicated to the audience.
JW: My favourite horror movies do that and what's so wonderful about the horror genre is that you can tell a really entertaining story, and also talk about the world through metaphor or character. So, with The Ranger and with The Sacrifice Game, I think about that balance. You don't want to be too heavy-handed, of course, because more important than anything else is telling an entertaining story, but yeah, I'm trying to pour myself into the movie. Instinctively, what comes along with that are the things that I have anxieties about.
PR: If as you say, you filter the film through your traumatic experiences, then The Sacrifice Game is an act of self-compassion. What's so striking is how you're able to create an entertaining genre picture, and beneath the surface, have so much more happening.
JW: What is so beautiful about art is that you're doing something on the surface and while you're doing this, your subconscious is doing other stuff, and it's going to come out in surprising ways. You look at it after and think, 'Oh, that's something I am dealing with, okay.' But not all of it is in the front of your mind when you're actually making it, and it's cool to hear you put it in those words. I find that process fascinating.
The Sacrifice Game and The Ranger are available on Shudder.
