[Editorial] Interview with Director Edoardo Vitaletti of The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021)

The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021) is a dark and gothic tale that examines the consequences of life under a repressive and restrictive society. Interspersed with witchcraft, the supernatural and occultism, director Edoardo Vitaletti explores the dynamic relationship between protagonist Mary (Stefanie Scott) and her secret lover Eleanor (The Orphan’s Isabelle Fuhrman) as they come up against their forbidding Catholic household, as well as the intrusion of a stranger, played by Rory Culkin (Signs, Scream 4). As the uncanny folk horror style feature hits the screens through Shudder, we sat down with the director, Edoardo Vitaletti to discover more about this seriously creepy and unnerving feature. 

First off, I’d love to know what your inspiration was for The Last Thing Mary Saw, especially as it’s such a dark and gothic looking film, yet with a lot more depth than the usual creepy aesthetically pleasing movies:

I was visually inspired at the time of writing this movie. When I was still in college I was doing a lot of personal study of art history and 19th century paintings and visual threads that run through especially Northern European paintings, like funeral scenes and very stark environments, dimly lit rooms. There’s a great Danish painter, his name is Hammershøi and his paintings of female subjects left alone in a room reading a book by a window and they’re very quiet and understated. They’re very evocative in the sense that you’re left wondering what the subjects are thinking about. The other part of it which is a lot more personal is I grew up in Italy which is a very homogeneous country when it comes to religious orientation with things that have been taught for years as far as who is to be accepted and who is not to be accepted. I’m 25 and it's been a 20 year reckoning of realising that the things I've been taught are just very restrictive and evil and mean spirited and unfair. Especially for me being part of a culture which proclaims itself to be very inclusive. Christianity says they love everybody, but then you realise they don’t love you if you're not straight or you're divorced. So I wanted to expose that culture for what it is. I’m a very spiritual person but it's hard to reconcile with the secular aspect of christianity which puts people in a box. The characters and antagonists in the movie really were a way for me to expose that and also expose the insecurities that lie behind them. I wanted to tell their story and I became very attached to them .

There is an underlying supernatural aspect to the film, yet it is left quite ambiguous and almost as if audiences are not meant to know if the occult tones are real or not. Was this the case or is it more that you wanted to convey what the human psyche experiences under a huge amount of pressure when forced to atone for something that is beyond their control?

I’d definitely lean towards the all out supernatural. In my mind, the things that are happening visually are really happening. For me it was a way to explore insecurity and fear about my upbringing of seeing things and hearing things that were representations of god and christianity. It does make you feel like you're dealing with things like magic that is bigger than you and it’s always watching and you have to deal with the ever watching eye. That was an image I wanted to portray in the movie and that is very much real to the world I was trying to portray. That eye is very much open and always watching, things that are happening are very much happening, and I think that's something I've realised over time that I am subconsciously scared of. Being watched and judged and being surrounded by things that are impossible to escape and I think the supernatural lens lends itself nicely to that feeling of inevitability. 

With underlying themes of witchcraft in the film, why do you think films, like Robert Egger’s The Witch (2015) and Fear Street 1666 (2021), about female persecution and particularly to do with witchcraft, have been so successful in the horror genre recently?

I think there is something interesting when you look at the history of witchcraft and the trials of the 1600s and the puritan culture. It was a way to put a label on women. It was a way to label women negatively. It was a way to shut up their actions and their sheer existence in the world. I think the reason it's becoming so popular in the horror genre is because we continue to see forms of that. It was witchcraft in the 1600s and nowadays we address women who stand up for themselves as “loud” and “crazy”. I think witchcraft and being called a witch was the 1600s version of that and realising there is a pattern. It's becoming more and more popular because unfortunately the labelling hasn't stopped. The specificity of the language has changed but the pattern of behaviour and attitudes are the same and we have to keep exposing this as we see it.

Was your decision to show a queer relationship part of that as well, as in sexuality is something else women have been and are still being persecuted over?

Yeah very much so. I think even nowadays where we’re seeing queer characters get to finally lead their own stories, I think there is still a problem where queer characters are being relegated to a label of otherness in some many stories. It's something that is accepted but it's still “outside the norm”. When I was working with the actors I let them decide the boundaries of their relationship, the lines were very clear but how they interact with each other, how they approached their story and the reality of their story, it was important it wasn’t too “othered”.

In a lot of folk stories we see a dark mysterious stranger that symbolises the devil character, was that the case with Rory Culkin’s character? Although the film is set in a matriarchal family, did it symbolise that the patriarchy is always that shadowy figure?

Yeah that was definitely one of the goals with Rory’s character but the thing about him is the way he's represented is, he’s evil and he has power as long as the world outside is giving him that power. When I was talking to Rory about him, we both liked to think of him as a bit of a wimp which I think every male character sort of comes down to. They take pleasure in having power but as soon as the tables are turned, is it the environment that is giving them power? They themselves don't really have it and they are relying on it. The idea was the two protagonists were getting so close to achieving their goal in the way they wanted to achieve it and then his character is a wrench in the works and they realise he didn't come by chance and there is that ever watching eye that is purposefully creating obstacles. The type of character he is, is that he is evil cos he was bred in evil  but at the same time he walks out of the room kind of bowing his head, its the environment that gives him power which a lot of men don’t realise. As far as who he is, he doesn't have a lot of resilience, or intrinsic qualities and so he disappears just as he came. 

The Last Thing Mary Saw is now streaming on Shudder, so go and give it a watch!

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