‘Heretic’ Directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods on Hugh Grant Going Full Psycho, Mormons in Peril, and Blueberry Smell-o-Vision

The following article contains minor spoilers for Heretic.

You might not expect the movie that has been widely promoted as “Hugh Grant goes full horror” to contain a religious text's worth of thinky themes, from the blind faith of belief systems, and the afterlife, to whether anything is truly original. But that's Heretic, the new psychothriller from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the genre filmmakers best known for writing A Quiet Place.

Sure, it's predominantly a vehicle for Grant to chew the scenery as an unhinged theologist called Mr. Reed, whose door two Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) have the misfortune of knocking in the middle of a storm; while he initially comes across as kindly and benign, winning them over with promises of blueberry pie, his sinister side soon reveals itself. But on a textual level, it's atypically engaging for a commercial horror movie, grappling with the sort of existential questions that usually arise when it's 1.30 in the morning and you're trying to sleep.

Which begs the question: what was their starting point? “After coming off the heels of a few films that [were] very genre-driven, lacking dialogue, [we thought] can we swing in the opposite direction?” co-director Beck tells GQ over Zoom. “Can we make something that's a horror, that's a thriller, but the ideas are the weapons we're using? They're the jumpscares.”

For Woods, horror and religion make the perfect marriage. “At the root of all horror is the fear of death, ultimately,” he says. “And that is where religion comes in, for many people. Almost as a medicine to go, ‘It’s okay, you can die, it'll be great!'”

Here, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods talk to GQ about Heretic's cerebral scares, Hugh Grant's freaky era, and why audiences are still turning up for horror movies.

GQ; Why did Mormonism feel like the right way in?

Scott Beck: To us, it feels like it's one of the newest religions. You can look at Christianity or Islam, and it's rooted in thousands of years of history, but Mormonism, it's uniquely new, it's uniquely American, transplanting the story of Christ and putting it in America.

It also comes from a personal connection. Twelve years ago, we made one of our first feature films in Salt Lake City, the hotspot of Mormonism. Through that experience, we ended up making lifelong friendships with so many people from the Mormon faith, and that became our induction into the religion, the lifestyle, the culture.

Bryan Woods: One of the things we found is that whenever Mormons are depicted in the media, it's always with this kind of naiveté; a condescending, like, “Maybe they're not as smart as everyone,” this attitude that comes with it. And so one of the things we're trying to do with the film is subvert that expectation, and maybe touch on the hint of naiveté on the surface…but we also wanted to represent the depth of the people we know, [who] are smart, and cool, and unique.

How did those conversations go with Sophie and Chloe? I know they both grew up in the church.

Woods: They wanted to keep everything grounded, and wanted to find that authenticity that they know. Chloe has friends to this day that are missionaries on missions right now, so she was texting them while we were filming.

And I think Sophie, who had left the church earlier in her life, and who has family members that are in and out, it definitely helped layer her performance as Sister Barnes—somebody who grew up in the church, but has this lingering question of, “Is it real?” or “do I fit in here?” and “what do I believe?”

Everybody talks about how Hugh Grant is enjoying something of a career renaissance, picking up kooky roles in things like The Gentlemen and Paddington 2. What was the performance you saw that convinced you he was right for this?

Beck: The role for us was Cloud Atlas. Because up to that point, we were primarily familiar with what the world was familiar with, his romantic comedy roles. But when we started thinking about Hugh for the role, it was in retrospect [that] we started thinking that he's always had an edge.

You think about his situation coming to America with Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the quote-unquote scandal that happened at that time, that he's not shy about at all; in fact, he talked about it at the Heretic premiere at AFI. But like, [there's this] contradiction—America's sweetheart [who] came from overseas, and yet there's this other side to him. You see this side also reflected in his intellect, and his ability to challenge large organizations. I mean, look no further than him railing against the phone hacking scandals.

A lot of Hugh's familiar tics and traits are present in the film, as a number of critics have noted online. The stammer, the big toothy grin. Is that something that you're encouraging on set, or is that natural Grantiness?

Woods: We talked a little bit about that stuff, but not really, to be honest. Hugh is a character actor through-and-through, so he's diving deep into Mr. Reed—he's shedding his skin, he's not thinking about himself on those levels. Scott and I might be. We're like, “We're gonna weaponize 20 years of his relationship with the audience, particularly in the first 30 minutes.”

I've never seen anything as in-depth as Hugh's process. We spent four months in pre-production emailing each other essays back and forth. He would write, like, “Does Reed come from this part of the world,” and “Does he think this,” and we'd answer back…when I say that out loud, it almost sounds obnoxious, but it was actually a lot of fun.

So when it comes to the way he weaponizes certain tics that we're familiar with, my intuition would be that he's not even thinking about that. Every single take with him is slightly different, and that's because he's so present, and he just is the character at that point.

There are going to be special blueberry pie-scented smell-o-vision screenings of Heretic. Were you guys a part of planning that, and how did you feel about it?

Woods: It was a crazy idea that A24 came to us with, and frankly, it made us laugh. They're doing it in [indie cinema chain] Alamo Drafthouses, where you're already talking about bringing food into the building while you watch a movie, so the idea of resurrecting a multi-sensory experience as a theatrical gimmick is extremely amusing to us. And Scott and I are huge proponents of the theatrical experience. Whatever gets people to go to the movie theatre, that is where it's at with us.

There's a general sense that original horror movies have proven pretty resilient at the box office in the streaming era. Why do you think that is?

Beck: I think because people like being provoked; if they're living relatively safe lives, it's a way to go into the darkness in a safe space. I also think horror is a unique Trojan horse to wedge in headier ideas, things that might challenge you.

Woods: I wonder, and maybe this is a controversial thing to say, have movies just gotten boring? And to your point, Scott, horror is provocative by its nature, and there's something exciting about going to a horror movie. You feel like, “Man, I'm gonna see something tonight.” Whereas every other movie, I don't know…it's difficult not to become white noise at this point in our culture.

What gives you the feeling that movies are getting boring?

Woods: There's just this feeling that we've seen it all. You're on your phone all day, and there's videos, and there's this, and there's that, it's hard to make somebody pay attention. With Heretic, it was an active, conscious decision to write something — this is the ambition, I'm not saying we achieved it—that people can't ignore, and that is personal and means something to people.

It's just like, how many times can you sit through the same thing that you've seen a million times? And also, we have access to everything. I can watch Citizen Kane, you know. I don't necessarily need to see a bad iteration of it.

Beck: People got tired of MGM musicals at a certain point, and then all of a sudden you have Easy Rider in theatres. There's a degree of the ebb and flow to cinema as the newest art form. So we're just feeling our version of that boredom. And exciting filmmakers like Luca Guadagnino—I've just seen the trailer for the new A24 movie he's doing, Queer. I'm just like, I want to see that movie, because he's doing something entirely unique from what I'm glimpsing.

I sense a bit of optimism, then, on the state of the Hollywood ecosystem, right — because we are in a period where we are dominated by sequels, prequels, spin-offs, franchises. But Heretic is one of those few movies that breaks through as an original idea.

Beck: I do think cinema is evolving to where maybe it becomes a little more niche, because our attention is so bifurcated, or whatever the word is [for] being splattered across the pop culture of the world. But we do have hope for it. Here in our home state of Iowa, we opened up our own independent cinema called The Last Picturehouse, and it's been open for a year. And it's been so amazing to see people watch movies in a packed theatre, and react to them in unison.

It's the way that we designed Heretic, to have these moments where hopefully you're terrified, but other times you're laughing at some off-color remark that Mr. Reed says, and you're feeling that course through the audience in a way that enhances the experience. So our point of view is cinema will always have a place, [and] movie theatres will always have a place.

Woods: There's no question that every filmmaker right now feels an immense responsibility to deliver, to keep movies around. It's a privilege and a major responsibility to keep exciting people.

This story originally appeared in British GQ.