It wasn’t what Jessica McLeod had in mind when she took up acting, but she has often been told she has a future as a scream queen.
“I’ve had a fair amount of experience with that, actually,” she said with a laugh. Indeed, the Victoria-raised actor is no stranger to thrillers and horror films.
“I don’t know why, but they seem to like me for it. On every horror movie they say I have a really good scream, so maybe that’s it.”
McLeod’s scary screen adventures include episodes of R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour, director Jason Bourque’s Stonados and Hollow in the Land, writer-director Scooter Corkle’s upcoming thriller starring Glee’s Dianna Agron.
The Claremont Secondary School graduate is taking a walk on the dark side again in The Hollow Child, Victoria-born Jeremy Lutter’s spooky fantasy that made its world première at the Victoria Film Festival Thursday night at SilverCity. The film Lutter directed from a screenplay by his longtime friend and collaborator Ben Rollo will be shown there again on Saturday at 4 p.m.
While The Hollow Child does have horrifying elements, including evil fairies, and a creepy-kid poster that recalls The Ring, Lutter dismisses comparisons to Gore Verbinski’s grisly 2002 remake of the Japanese horror hit. Nor would he term his film strictly a fairy tale. “Well, maybe it’s a dark fairy tale,” said Lutter, whose film stars McLeod as Samantha, a rebellious 15-year-old foster child whose younger sister Olivia (Hannah Cheramy) vanishes after wandering into the woods near the family home.
When Olivia returns and begins exhibiting bizarre behaviour, Samantha is convinced she is a supernatural impostor.
While McLeod’s role affords her the opportunity to convey dramatic characteristics that have made her a good fit for suspenseful dramas, it’s less about screams than delicately nuanced anguish, fear and slow-burn tension.
“She definitely nailed it in the audition and she came prepared every day,” Lutter said. “She was a huge pleasure to work with.”
He says she could portray her tough yet vulnerable character in a way that makes the audience feel for her, which was essential.
“She’s one part rebel and one part orphan. There was a fine balance between being rough around the edges and relatable.”
McLeod, 20, said it was a thrill working with Burnaby-based Cheramy, then an 11-year-old newcomer, as her twisted sister.
“Was she not just so good? She is, like, nuts, amazing,” McLeod said.
Lutter was so impressed with how scary Cheramy could be, they moved filming from Victoria to Burnaby and vicinity.
“We had to shoot over spring break. We couldn’t pull her out of school and I couldn’t afford to hire a tutor on a micro-budget.”
Lutter had already scouted locations on Vancouver Island, including a visit to Horne Lake Caves for a key scene set in a cave.
“That was the most fun location-scout I’ve ever been on,” he said. “I hadn’t been in a cave since I was a kid.”
While The Hollow Child is “ultimately the story of an orphan trying to find a family,” Lutter said it also fulfilled his desire to make a film with a supernatural element as his feature debut with Rollo. He has collaborated with his fellow University of Victoria Writing Department grad on several short films, including their festival hit Joanna Makes a Friend, about a lonely girl who makes a robot out of spare parts.
“Ben has a really overactive imagination. All his stories have a monster or a robot in them, and I like making these things come to life,” Lutter said. “Ben wanted to do a changeling movie, so we came up with the idea of people who go missing and, when they come back, they are not who they claimed to be. We broke it down to a small scale and made it about a family person who goes missing.”
Lutter said he and Rollo were going for more a Stranger Things vibe than the gruesome horror film some might expect.
“Ben writes really interesting nostalgic characters and as soon as I saw Stranger Things I thought this is totally Ben, that dark nostalgia, slightly mysterious thing. I’m sure the people who make Stranger Things are the same kind of film nerds we are, guys who grew up in the 1980s watching E.T., and that comes across,” said Lutter, who has another nostalgia-inducing film in the festival.
Caw, which Lutter filmed while completing the short Reset and The Hollow Child, is a 16-minute short about a shy teenager who falls for a strange new girl at school with a secret.
After wrapping The Hollow Child, McLeod went on to play a small role in writer-director Shana Feste’s Boundaries, which she called “the best movie I’ve ever done.”
She plays True, a spoiled and delusional 16-year-old in the drama starring Vera Farmiga as a single mother on a road trip with her estranged father (Christopher Plummer) after he’s kicked out of a nursing home for dealing weed.
“Vera is just the nicest woman, very spontaneous and her acting is so good,” McLeod said.