Playing The Sacrifice Game

“It’s always nice to light your scene with Christmas lights.” Director/co-writer Jenn Wexler on The Sacrifice Game starring Madison Baines, and streaming now on Shudder (Image Courtesy of Shudder)

There’s no place that stokes the flames of possibility than a closed school at Christmas.

It’s the idea of being away from friends and family at the most magical time of year, when those tracks in the snow could be from either Kris Kringle or Krampus. A mainstay of early 20th century children’s literature, in recent years it’s been the source of comedy in The Holdovers, kid-friendly hijinks in Christmas Break-In, and pure horror in The Blackcoat’s Daughter.

It’s safe to say that The Sacrifice Game, the second feature from The Ranger director Jenn Wexler, has more of a whiff of Satanic sulphur about it than Santa’s seasonal scents: As Scrooge might delight himself by saying, there’s more slay than sleigh to this feature (streaming now on Shudder) as a murderous gang with demonic intent invades a girl’s boarding school. “It’s Dickensian,” says producer Heather Buckley, “because it’s almost something awful happening at an orphanage.”

Wexler nods. “These girls have their different reasons for being there, but they’re lonely, and they’re misfits. And there’s something really sad about Christmastime. You’re a loner, and also your family isn’t there for you. That’s another level of sadness.”

“And Christmas is a great time for things to escalate, and get worse and worse and worse,” adds Buckley. “Which is what horror is about.”

“Plus,” Wexler notes, “it’s always nice to light your scene with Christmas lights.”

Jenn Wexler, director and co-writer of The Sacrifice Game (Photo by Abi Lieff)

Austin Chronicle: The school itself. I love anywhere with wood paneling.

Jenn Wexler: We shot at Oka Abbey, which is just outside of Montreal. It’s a monastery that’s no longer in use – it’s available for weddings and film shoots and stuff – and we just got to own this place for a month. It was so incredible because, if you’re making a movie and you’re in a new place every day, it’s really hard on the production. It’s such a luxury that we’re set up here and we just get to come back to the same place every day.

But while we’re coming back to the same place every day, what was cool about it was that there were so many different aesthetics within the school. Making a one-location movie, if you’re not careful with how you light it and whatnot, can sometimes get boring to the eye. So it was just so lovely that we had all these different spaces within this place to build a movie. Then what was really fun was, how do we take certain spaces, set them up in a certain way, and then come back to them later and make some art adjustments to give the same space some different meaning?

AC: And you give yourself plenty of opportunities to recontextualize spaces because you pull a lot of rugs out from under the audience. On the story side, how do you make sure you’re not doing that too much, so the audience just ends up with narrative whiplash?

JW: I cowrote it with my husband, Sean Redlitz, and it’s really about character. And this goes for all of the characters in this eight-person ensemble piece. Who is this character really? Who does this character know themselves to be? And who does this character appear to be to others? We play with that in a really big way, obviously, but that’s just part of the process of developing characters and working with actors, is who does this character want the world to think of them as and who are they actually, and what are those layers, and defining that with each of the actors in our creative language, so we have our key words as we’re shooting the movie.

For instance, Mena Massoud [who plays cult leader Jude], he wants power, so we talked about his backstory, and what happened in his past that makes him feel like he has to overcompensate. Who does he want this gang to think he is, and what is he actually striving for, deep down? Some of that isn’t text, it’s subtext, and some of it doesn’t come across specifically in plot points in the movie, but for me, for each of the characters it gives them more nuance.

“Who does he want this gang to think he is, and what is he actually striving for, deep down?” Jenn Wexler on Mena Massoud’s character, Jude, in The Sacrifice Game (Image Courtesy of Shudder)

AC: There’s something of the Manson Family in Jude’s gang, and much like Christmas they just carry this whole subtext. This whole idea of evil, roaming Satanic cults that are coming to get you. This is kind of like the Manson Family smashing into Home Alone.

JW: You just say ‘Manson’ and most people have tons of feelings around that. There’s a shared knowledge and shared story and shared understanding of what happened there. And it’s the same thing with Christmas: We have a collective understanding of what that means. And I do really enjoy taking these kinds of big cultural references and seeing what happens when you smash them together.

I read Helter Skelter when I was about 16, and that deeply stayed with me. I mean, how can it not? And what’s deeply fascinating is that it’s something that happened that’s stayed with the public for generations, and there’s a line in this movie about how these things will be remembered for generations. When something pierces the public consciousness like that, it’s crazy.

AC: Manson’s had this odd, enduring power as a cultural phenomenon. The ‘80s was the golden age of the serial killer in pop culture, and everyone had a dozen coffee tables about them, but no one talks about Richard Ramirez any more in the same way they do about Manson.

Heather Buckley: That’s because he’s influenced culture cinematically. How many movies can you name that the Night Stalker influenced?

JW: It’s also the circumstances around it. It’s Hollywood, a Hollywood starlet and her friends.

HB: Because the press hasn’t let it go for all these years, and neither have movies. It’s so sensational, and anytime there’s a new book, it’s constantly covered and we have so much cinema based on Manson. I think the only other killer that a lot of cinema is based on is Ed Gein’s atrocities, and that would be your second killer, but I think he’s less known by the general populace. Manson, everybody knows the name.

JW: And we all know what Hollywood is. We all know that house in the hills looks like, and we all have an understanding of that late ‘60s time period, so we can very vividly imagine what that night could have been like because, again, of our collective understanding of the elements involved. And, you know, the thing that Manson had a lot of young women in the desert – and men as well – all living together. It’s that late ‘60s flower child moments but turned really wrong.

AC: And they were also the ‘cool’ cult. You go from the popular representation of cultists being accountants in black robes to suddenly wearing leather jackets.

HB: They talked about serial killer chic in the ‘90s, so this was cult chic.

JW: And just the dynamic of them all being out these, being family. Yes, of course, the murders, but all the stuff leading up to those – the drugs and the sex and the rock & roll – kind of makes it, for the lack of a better word, sexier to the public imagination than the stories around a lot of serial killers.

The Sacrifice Game is streaming now on Shudder.