Alex Casey talks to the creative team behind Grafted, a skin-crawling new local body horror.
There’s a crumbling empty McMansion somewhere in Coatesville that became the “beating heart” of new local body horror Grafted, director Sasha Rainbow tells me. “When you walked in there, it had this creepy feeling, like nobody had lived in it for years,” she says over Zoom. “Everything looked all garish and new – creams and whites and silky fabrics – but then there’d be mould and spider webs, and it smelled like damp. It was a really haunting kind of feeling.”
That house, with its barely concealed decay beneath the veneer of aspiration, represents much of what Grafted is all about. Following the story of Wei (Joyena Sun), a Chinese science student who wins a scholarship to study in New Zealand, the film explores what happens when someone will do whatever it takes to fit in. Born with a facial deformity, Wei lets her late father’s grafting experiments get quite literally under her skin, and bloody body horror ensues.
The story came from Malaysian-born horror writer and director Hweiling Ow, who drafted the script after receiving the Women’s Short Horror Film Fund and attending an accelerator lab in Melbourne in 2018. “I thought long and hard about where I sat in the Venn diagram of me being a migrant living in New Zealand,” she says. “I wondered what it would be like to live in someone else’s life – to experience their privilege, their empowerment, their politics in a foreign country.”
Rainbow was living in LA and had been working on a script exploring similar themes of identity, status, outsiders and beauty, when she was sent the script for Grafted. “I’d been just completely embroiling myself in all of these ideas for the last year and a half, and then this all came to me in this really interesting, original, fresh, exciting script,” she says. “I read it once, and I just wrote back straight away and said, ‘I’m really interested, this is fantastic.’”
Referencing modern horror films like Smile, Bodies Bodies Bodies and Get Out, as well as cult classics like Audition and Memories of Murder, Rainbow says she wanted Grafted to have a specific and ultra-modern feel. “I felt like the script was set in that same kind of world [of those movies] where there’s a levity to the way that the characters move through, but it doesn’t take away from them being engaged in the truth of the story.”
Directors Jordan Peele and Emerald Fennell were also key inspirations. “Aside from the fact that they’re both incredibly fantastic filmmakers, they both had low budgets and 25 shooting days on their first movies,” Rainbow laughs. “I was looking to them to see how you can build very rich, full worlds without a huge amount of time. It was very key for me to watch films that have been made on a small budget but still have a big feel to them.”
Shooting around Tāmaki Makaurau, including the Coatesville McMansion with its cobwebs and damp, there’s a hyper urban, sometimes suffocating feel to Grafted that sets it far apart from the bush-dwelling, outdoorsy offerings in our local film oeuvre. “I think that I just wanted it to feel timeless and of its own world,” says Rainbow. “There is a universalness to this story that I really was attracted to, and one that makes more of a point in the beating heart of a city.”
Speaking of beating hearts, much has already been made of Grafted’s gorier scenes, including some skin-crawling close-ups. Rainbow remembers endless men’s mannequin heads succumbing to all sorts of horrors, but one scene in particular that she found hard to stomach. “Without giving away too many spoilers – it’s the drill. That was insane, ridiculous and gross, and there was a really good air bubble at the end, which just added to the disgustingness.”
Delighting in the disgusting is something that many New Zealand filmmakers are very familiar with, thanks to our proud history of horror and splatter films. “I do think that because there aren’t large budgets floating around New Zealand, filmmakers have to be really, really creative with genre,” says Rainbow. “Horror is a genre where you can be really creative, world-building, fantastical, original, and you don’t necessarily need a huge budget.”
She adds that horror is also a great space to explore ideas, which Ow agrees with. “Let’s face it. Real life sucks at the moment,” she says. “Horror is a way into real ideas that is still fantastical, a place where themes can sort of sneak in as an afterthought.” There’s also a feeling of freedom in seeing terrible things unfold. “The expectation of horror is that something bad is going to happen,” says Ow. “It’s cathartic to live a character’s shitty life instead of our own.”
As Grafted garners comparisons to The Substance and a gnarlier version of Mean Girls, Rainbow hopes its themes resonate with young audiences in particular. “I want people to come away being reminded that they have everything they need already,” she says. “There’s real danger in trying to mirror the bullshit expectation of society that doesn’t even exist in reality.” And for those scaredy cats, Ow says Grafted is probably closer to M3GAN than Maniac.
“Just lean into the campy.”
Grafted is in cinemas nationwide now.