An Interview with "The Devil's Doorway" director Aislinn Clarke

​(Photo Courtesy of Aislinn Clarke)

​Aislinn Clarke made history by becoming the first Irish woman to direct and write a feature-length horror film, The Devil’s Doorway, currently streaming on Hulu. The film focuses on the real horrors of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, where, from 1765 to 1996, women were put away if they became pregnant out of wedlock, had mental issues, or were scorned by any male family member who said they should be put away. They were then placed into forced labor by the Catholic Church.

Set in 1960, Clarke’s film follows two priests, Father Thomas (Lalor Roddy) and Father John (Ciaran Flynn), as they investigate strange circumstances happening at one of the laundries. Shot in 16 mm and borrowing from the found footage genre, the film rewrites a lot of the possessed girl/exorcism tropes, specifically the way women are often punished in these films for their sexuality. Clarke is a name to pay attention to in the genre. Recently, she won the second Academy Gold Fellowship for Women Grant, which also entails a year-long mentorship from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
 
She talked to us about her career, horror’s natural ability to explore trauma and societal issues, and the gender and political issues at stake in The Devil’s Doorway. Additionally, she offered sound advice for young female directors.

 
Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into filmmaking?
 
I was always a film fan. My father was always into films, particularly horror films and westerns. I’m the youngest of four kids in a Catholic family, so by the time I came around, I got to see horror films that other kids didn’t see. I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street when I was seven. I really loved all of that. I rewound it and watched it again because I was so into it.
 
When I went to university, first I studied English, but just for less than a month. Then, I moved to film. I really wanted to study film, but I thought I’d never get a job doing that. I decided to just do it. I studied film and then did a master’s degree in film. So that’s where it started in earnest, but even as a teenager, I was making films in some way. It took a long time to get to the stage of making a feature film. I worked in TV for several years. I worked in radio. I worked in theater for about eight years. All of that was useful in terms of developing my voice as a director.

 
You’re the first woman to write and direct a horror film from Northern Ireland. Could you talk about your relationship to the genre more and why you chose horror for your first feature?
 
I have post-graduate degrees in film, so I’m interested in film generally. But I think horror is my favorite genre generally. Horror allows us to dig into the human psyche in unique ways that we can’t necessarily do with other genres of film. Horror is quite wide, and its usefulness is probably limitless. There is so much we can do in terms of unpacking human trauma and really looking at social issues, using it {horror} as a mirror. I think that’s what’s most interesting about it, the scope and how useful it is in helping us understand our own trauma as a society and as individuals. It’s very attractive as a filmmaker to get to play with all of that.
 
 
I read in another interview that your dad would make you sit outside of the room during “unsuitable” parts of a horror film. Can you talk a little bit about that experience, both as a film viewer and director? I am thinking specifically of how that affected the narrative for you.
 
The clearest memory I have of that is The Exorcist. My father is a pretty devout man. I think The Exorcist is particularly terrifying if you are Catholic. I saw The Exorcist when I was seven. People think that may be terrible, but I had a great family upbringing. It was in no way negligent.  I really enjoyed that kind of film. I was allowed to watch that film pretty much in its totality, except for the crucifix scene. I think that was the only bit that was censored. My father didn’t think that Regan’s (Linda Blair) head spinning around was unsuitable, but he thought the crucifix scene was unsuitable because it was sexual in nature. So, I was put out of the room for that.
 
I was an imaginative type of kid. My mind veered towards dark things, so I sat on the stairs and wondered what was happening in the film. I can’t remember what I came up with, but I would patch the narrative up myself. I think it’s interesting that lot of the horror that I respond to or create myself comes from the sound and the world that’s not seen rather than what is seen. I think that sometimes showing the horrible thing is less terrifying than not showing the horrible thing. That might come from my earliest experiences {as a film viewer} because I would be convinced that what I was not allowed to see was the most terrifying bit. Besides, if you’re hanging out at the bottom of the stairs in a reasonably old house and it’s dark and nighttime {while the film plays upstairs}, that can be scary!
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The Devil's Doorway uses the found footage technique, and it was shot mostly in 16 mm to mimic the type of handheld camera that would have been used during that period. Were there any specific found footage films or documentaries that served as an inspiration?
 
The producer came to me because I was pretty well known as a theater director. He had an idea but didn’t have a script. It was just a one-paragraph summary about a found footage film set in a Magdalene Laundry, kind of like a modern Blair Witch Project where we would use it to create scares rather than dealing with the issues in any way. I suggested creating a 1960s, 16 mm type of film. I like a lot of found footage horror films, but of course, there are bad ones, too. I think the genre has become maligned. People have a knee-jerk reaction to it. I felt like this should sit outside of it. I wasn’t looking for found footage at all as an inspiration. I was thinking of it less as a found footage film and more like a documentary that turns bad. I was thinking about filmmakers of the time, in particular the Maysles Brothers and Cinéma Vérité of the early 1960s. I wanted it to have that kind of aesthetic. I wanted it to seem like the younger priest (Father John/Ciaran Flynn could have been a filmmaker. He has a good eye. He is passionate about shooting things. Rather than it being hurried, grainy, and grungy in its aesthetic, I wanted it to be a bit quieter and a bit more still.
 
 
The world premiere of The Devil's Doorway coincided with Ireland's decision to overturn a constitutional amendment that made abortion illegal. Considering the subject matter of your film, do you want to comment on the timing?
 
The premiere was at the Seattle Film Festival. When we went into the theater, we still didn’t know what was going to happen. By the time we came out, returning polls looked like it {the constitutional amendment} was going to be repealed. It felt like a pivotal moment for women in Ireland. I had my son when I was 17, and that was in 1997. That was one year after the last Magdalene Laundry closed in Ireland, so I always felt like I could have been one of these girls. I didn’t grow up with the kind of family who would have done that to me, but I could have {grown up with that type of family}. About twelve years ago, I worked in TV and researched a documentary. It was commissioned for development but didn’t end up happening. It was about Magdalene Laundries. I spoke to people who had been in these laundries and also people who had been born in them, mostly people who were then adopted by Americans, and were looking for their mothers. I always felt a closeness to these stories. The timing felt poignant. 
 
 
The Kathleen O'Brien (Lauren Coe) character is such a powerful figure in the film. She reminds me of the mad woman trope, but also shows how women were punished if they got pregnant out of wedlock. Do you want to comment on her character?
 
Lauren Coe, who plays Kathleen, is a really great actress. We were really lucky to get her. She was cast while we were shooting. There was another actress cast in the role, but because of circumstances, she had to pull out at the last minute. I literally auditioned people in the evening, after we had been shooting all day long. I auditioned Lauren in the actual location where we shot most of the film at night. It was quite spooky. It was just the two of us and quite late. She took a taxi down. I auditioned her. She was so good and so nice.
 
The producer really wanted to have a possessed girl in this story. I felt that with the story and circumstances we were dealing with, it needed to be handled delicately. The trope of the possessed girl in horror films is about punishing sexuality. Given that is what Magdalene Laundries were for, I didn’t want to reinforce that idea. I wanted to get into the complex relationship that even the most traditional Irish people have with the idea of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Jesus’ mother. In Ireland, she is probably even more worshiped and more sacred to many people than even Jesus is. The Virgin Mary is everywhere. Virgin Mary shrines are all over the place. The Virgin Mary was pregnant out of wedlock, essentially. It wasn’t her husband’s baby. Given how demonized women were for falling pregnant out of wedlock or out of the ideal circumstances, and the lack of empathy people had for them, I wanted to play with the complexity of all of that.  I didn’t want it to be the possessed girl trope. I wanted to tread a line between what we expect from that kind of well-trodden ground and more complex ideas between what goodness is and what decency is. Other people have other readings of the film, and they’re valid. I don’t necessarily believe in authorial intent, other than it means what it means to me and other people can have other readings. For me, Cathleen is a pure soul, a Virgin Mary character. Because she’s such a fundamentally decent soul, that’s why she’s attractive to the dark energies. That’s who she is to me.

​(Photo Courtesy of 23ten)

{Moving forward, what do you hope people learn from the history of the Magdalene Laundries and your film?
 
We’ve already established that these are not good places. It’s fairly well accepted that we never should have had these places that women were placed into for all kinds of reasons. They didn’t even need to have had a child out of wedlock. They could have been too pretty and at risk of rape. Even if they had mental issues, they could have been put in. If any male member of your family signed a document to put you in, you went in. The fact these women were enslaved and had to work for the Church for profit is something that we can all agree is bad.
 
It’s not just that these places are bad. There is a complex route of how this happens. Particularly in Ireland, there has been a tendency to think that the Catholic Church, priests, or nuns are bad.  It’s too easy to demonize specific institutions and sections. It’s all humans. We are capable of doing terrible things. We do it over and over again. History shows. We can’t just comfort ourselves by saying, it’s these people and not me. I wanted to think about what it means to be good and how to be good, specifically, in this case, if you are a priest {Father John}. The only thing he wants to do is be good, but he’s in this system where it’s impossible for him to be good or create any real change. So often, that’s the case. It’s not about individuals. It’s about systems.
 
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What general advice would you give to independent filmmakers, especially female directors?
 
My major piece of advice is to trust in your own vision. I think that women are often told to be team players. Being a team player is great, but to be a director, you also have to be forceful. A film has to have a unique, central vision that’s driving the thing, or otherwise, it becomes messy and cluttered. Know exactly what it is that you want to make. I see, too often, women who become insecure if someone says, I don’t understand why they’re doing it like that. Then, they change. You just need to remain calm, trust in your vision, and continue. Once they get it, they’ll get it. You might have to fight some battles to get there, but believe in yourself. It doesn’t mean you’re not a team player. You still are. Filmmaking is a very collaborative process. You’re putting a lot of trust in your other creatives, the DP {director of photography}, and the actors. The key thing is that they’re all in tune with your central vision and they all know what it is. It’s your movie, so you need to stick to what you’re doing. That’s not to say you can’t change anything. Sometimes, people might make suggestions to me, and I see that it’s a good idea. Be open to that, but trust yourself. I think that’s the hardest lesson for young women to learn when they’re making movies.
 

Can you tell us about what you're working on next?
 
I have some projects with producers and others that have landed. I have a couple of projects in London and a few in LA. It really depends upon so many other factors, including financing and scheduling, so I’m unsure what I’ll actually be shooting next. But there is a project that I’m excited about. Adam Nevill {author of The Ritual, basis for the Netflix film} decided to try his hand at writing a screenplay. He really liked my film. He wrote a screenplay and sent it to me. I think it’s absolutely brilliant. It’s surprising and fresh. I think because he’s coming from the novel world and not the screenplay world, it doesn’t have all the tropes that we expect. It sidesteps expectations at every turn. It’s an interesting piece. I’m hoping that will be the next project I direct. It’s folk horror, like The Ritual is folk horror. That’s kind of his wheelhouse, but it’s an extremely interesting, rich piece of work. I don’t know what else I can say about it at this point. It’s also the same producer of The Ritual, so it’s a good package all around. We’re currently trying to get that off the ground. Fingers crossed.
 

Would you ever consider directing another historical period film again?
 
Yes. I love historical work. I love period settings. A lot of what I’ve done in theater has involved period settings. If it’s the right project, absolutely. It’s an arena that I’m comfortable working in.

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Author

​Brian Fanelli fell in love with horror movies the first time he watched Night of the Living Dead as a kid. His writing on the genre has been published by Horror Homeroom, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Signal Horizon Magazine. He is also the author of two books of poems, Waiting for the Dead to Speak (NYQ Books), winner of the Devil's Kitchen Poetry Prize, and All That Remains (Unbound Content). His non-horror writing has been published in The Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today, Paterson Literary Review, Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. Brian has an M.F.A. from Wilkes University and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. Currently, he teaches at Lackawanna College. www.brianfanelli.com.