Director Sasha Rainbow On The Gory Horrors Of Beauty Standards & Filming ‘Grafted’

Horror has always been a genre that captures the terror of women. Madeleine Crutchley speaks to director Sasha Rainbow about why intense body horror was right to explore Grafted’s scary tale.

1920. The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari premieres in Berlin’s Marmorhaus theatre. German actress Lil Dagover shrieks as she’s tormented by the spooky Cesare, who has abducted her in the dead of night. Her screams are so expressive she nearly shatters the film’s technologically mandating silence.

1978. Hollywood is obsessed with excessive slasher films, spritzing actors with barrel-loads of fake blood. In Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis plays the quick-witted final girl as she fights off Michael Myers with a coat hanger.

2024. The International Film Festival brings indie horrors to New Zealand theatres. In Grafted, a teenage girl named Wei slices through flesh to Frankenstein a new beautiful creation – threatening the lives of everyone around her.

In the 124 years since Dr. Caligari’s first showing, we’ve seen women play countless scream queens, final girls and monstrous villains on screen. Over that time, the genre has been employed to explore more complex and personal terrors than those experienced by those early, patriarchally imagined damsels.

This year, there’s a full slate of rich and rewarding roles within the horror genre. Sydney Sweeney starred in Immaculate as a nun confined to an oppressive convent. For MaXXXine, Mia Goth reprised her starring role in the slasher-horror trilogy X. Lupita Nyong’o led the hushing third iteration of A Quiet Place. Later, this year Naomi Scott will play a famous pop star tormented by grinning faces in Smile 2.

The genre has also been a fruitful launching pad for plenty of stars throughout Hollywood history. Jenna Ortega was a Scream queen long before playing Wednesday Addams. Anya Taylor Joy caught critics’ eyes for her role in The Witch. Maika Monroe had her breakthrough in It Follows (she’s also the lead in Longlegs, which is in New Zealand theatres right now).

Why are women pulled towards the horror genre?

“Lee Murray, the writer I worked with, she seemed to think it wasn’t a coincidence that a lot of women were directing horrors. It seems to be a kind of feminist reaction to be able to explore the world that we’re confined to and constrained to, and the expectations put upon us.”

Premiering in Aotearoa at the New Zealand International Film Festival, Grafted is another entry into the long lineage of horror films fronted by women. It also builds on our recent industry embrace of the genre (last year, New Zealand was the backdrop for M3GAN, Evil Dead Rise, Pearl, Loop Track, The Tank).

Grafted follows Wei (played by newcomer Joyena Sun), a scholarship student who moves from China to Auckland to pursue a medical degree, living with her aunt and cousin. Timid, introverted and made to feel culturally alienated, Wei has difficulty navigating her new environment and making friends.

Due to those building pressures, she becomes captured in her want to complete her late father’s research, which experimented with removing their shared much-stigmatised facial birthmark. The scientific experimentation merges with a pursuit of impossible and discriminatory beauty standards and Wei’s quest quickly turns deadly.

Sasha was sent the script, which was originally written by producer, director and actor Hweiling Ow. Hweiling has starred on Shortland Street and Mean Mums and, most recently, she produced and directed episodes from the similarly scary Ao-Terror-Oa series. Mia Maramara (Kainga and Beyond the Veil) worked on a co-write with Hweiling, before Lee Murray (renowned New Zealand science fiction and horror writer) also joined Sasha in the process of adapting the screenplay.

“I really tried to stay true to the vision of Hweiling Ow, it’s very much her story and this crazy world that only she could conjure up.”

Sasha’s references for the film also included Takashi Mike’s 1999 film, Audition, John Woo’s action-packed sci-fi Face/Off and teen comedy Mean Girls.

“Tammy Williams, the cinematographer and I, on the first day of scouting, we went into one house. It was like, typical scary house, dark wood, peeling wallpaper and everything. It was what it said on the page – a scary house. Then, we went to this second location. It was this stucco mansion – this picture-perfect kind of space.”

The potential for contrast from other horror settings was exciting for the director, and she decided to lean into the candyfloss world.

“It was always [important to] let the blood pop against the pastels. Because we’re talking about a world where people present facades and don’t allow what is truly going on to be exposed to the world. So, what better place than all of this candy-coloured, pink-curtained pastels? I found that way more interesting than like, ‘okay you’ve seen this before’.”

The glare of the blood is vivid against that backdrop. No gory detail is spared from an extreme closeup, as Wei’s experimentations become increasingly bloody and unhinged.

The gore, as the actors slice and dice their way through the story, firmly cements the film as a body horror. Sanguinary film-making is tricky to get right, with reviewers often gagging at the use of excessive or exploitative violence. Why was graphic gore the right tool to tell this story?

“Thematically, it’s more intertwined in the story and the character’s journey about a young woman trying to come to terms with society’s idea of beauty and how she fits into that,” says Sasha.

“The gore and the horror, quite obviously, needs to respond to those things – it can’t just be there for the sake of being there. In the end, it has to have substance and meaning. But in the horror space, I don’t think there is anything that is ever too much, as long as it’s responding it the storytelling.”

For the film-maker, and the writers who’ve penned the graphic story, body horror has offered an opportunity for powerful storytelling. Grafted is able to hold a magnifying glass to various oppressive social systems and harmful attitudes and call out their impacts through a thrilling and bloody story.

“I think it’s a very apt genre to explore these situations. It makes sense with so much focus on the body and the female form, especially through the male gaze, that body horror would be a really interesting place to express what’s going on.”

Grafted will show at the Embassy Theatre in Wellington on August 9 as a part of the New Zealand International Film Festival. It will have a general release on September 12.

Madeleine Crutchley is a multimedia journalist for Viva and premium lifestyle and entertainment at the New Zealand Herald. She covers stories relating to fashion, culture and food and drink, from her hometown of Auckland. Recently, she’s written about fashion and the climate emergency, sporty street style and the best books of the year.

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