‘The Sacrifice Game’ Director Jenn Wexler on Keeping Christmas Bloody and Her Horror Influences

Director/Producer Jenn Wexler’s sophomore feature, The Sacrifice Game, arrives on Shudder on December 8, just in time to spread holiday fear for the season.

With co-writer Sean Redlitz, Wexler’s latest infuses Yuletide horror with a maniacal Satanic cult set at a boarding school in the ’70s.

Mena Massoud, Olivia Scott Welch, Olympian Gus Kenworthy, Chloë Levine, Madison Baines, Derek Johns, Laurent Pitre and Georgia Acken star.

Bloody Disgusting spoke with Wexler about her devilishly fun Christmas horror feature, where she discussed her influences and ensured a movie titled The Sacrifice Game delivers on the bloodletting.

At the gooey center of a violent, bloody holiday horror tale lies the charming friendship between two teen girls held hostage by a deranged cult. Not only does friendship become the emotional backbone, but Wexler reveals that her horror movies ultimately speak to her childhood.

The filmmaker tells us, “The stories I want to tell, I always think, ‘What would 13-year-old Jenn would’ve liked? What would she have liked?’ I want to make stories for 13-year-old Jenn. When people asked me, when we were first sharing the script and the project with people, they were like, ‘What’s the movie about?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s a horror movie, but it’s also about friendship.’ Friendship is very important. It’s going to be intense, but at the core, the core of it is about friendship. A horror movie that makes you say ‘aww’ at the end is kind of the goal.”

That doesn’t mean that The Sacrifice Game is devoid of horror; far from it. Wexler enlisted talented SFX artists to bring her gory vision to life.

Wexler gives credit to her team, “It was really fun getting to work with the Blood Brothers FX and also Adrien Morot’s company. Adrien Morot made the M3GAN doll, and they won an Oscar for The Whale. So the Blood Brothers were our blood people. They were pouring the blood all over the set. And Adrien Morot’s was the prosthetics. It was a nice merging of teams. A lot of it was just everybody having all these pre-production meetings talking about, ‘Okay, who’s doing what? How are we going to all work together? We’re bringing the blood; we’ll tube it through your prosthetics and all that.’ It’s always fun on set when the effects guys come in with their jars of blood and their tubing and everything. Everyone’s always so excited. So that was so fun.”

The filmmaker and her co-writer bring a lifelong love of horror to The Sacrifice Game. When asked if that extensive horror knowledge makes it easier or harder to surprise savvy horror audiences, especially with unexpected narrative detours, Wexler tells us that being a massive horror fan makes the process more exciting.

She explains, “I try to write free of everything and just focus on the story. But then, over the course of the whole process, from writing to pre-production to production and post, I have a library of my favorite movies in my head. I have the library of influences of all the movies I’ve seen, obviously, since I was a kid. I’ve been watching horror movies since I was a kid. And so I have that library, and it’s nice that for me, it becomes this just instinctive, organic thing. I never want to copy anything specifically, but I like to have the influences playing in the back of my brain while also trying to create a story that has integrity to the characters that we’re creating.”

One way that library influenced The Sacrifice Game comes in the form of a dance number that visually calls Night of the Demons’ Angela (Amelia Kinkade) to mind.

“That was definitely on my mind, for sure. In fact, I’ll say that where we shot, there wasn’t a fireplace in that room. We built the fireplace, but it was a big thing. People are like, ‘Do we really need a fireplace?’ And I said, ‘We need the fireplace. We need the fire.’ That was one of my most important things. I can’t tell you how many intense conversations we had where I was like, ‘Okay, well, how’s the fireplace going? We need the fire. Are they coming in?’ We had to get all these legal things to be able to do that, but I think it was worth it.”

Get into the bloody holiday spirit when The Sacrifice Game arrives on Shudder this Friday.

 

 

 

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