Dacre Montgomery on His Heartbreaking Role in the Ghostly ‘Went Up the Hill’ [Dread Central Digital Feature]
Here at Dread Central, our Digital Features give us the chance to spotlight the creators, projects, and talent pushing horror in bold new directions. These profiles let us dive deeper into the genre stories we can’t stop thinking about. For this edition, we’re getting haunted alongside Dacre Montgomery, whose latest starring role in Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is a masterclass. You’ve never seen a ghost story quite like this.
Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things, Better Watch Out) calls the horror genre a Trojan Horse. He told me, “So, you get the audience into a cinema or to buy the thing or to stream the film by going, well, there’s blood, guts and gore, but then you’re talking about child abuse, domestic assault, all these things, and suddenly, there’s your Trojan Horse.” Montgomery’s latest, a starring role in Samuel Van Grinsven’s pulverizing genre hybrid Went Up the Hill, is itself a Trojan Horse. Yes, it’s a ghost story, but it’s also a deeply tragic, semiautobiographical interrogation of queer love and abuse.
“I got a script, and the pitch was a three-hander told by two people, so two people play the same third character together.” Montgomery stars alongside Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Vicky Krieps as Jack and Jill, respectively. Grieving son and grieving spouse both, in turn, possessed by the spirit of their deceased mother/wife. Such a slow burn lives or dies on the performances of its cast, and Montgomery and Krieps exceed expectations.
Montgomery, for his part, remarks on waiting for a script just like that. The offers coming in post-Stranger Things, especially, while lucrative, weren’t exactly scratching that creative itch all the best artists have. “I lost my anonymity overnight with Stranger Things and freaked out. I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”
He adds, “I didn’t want some offers that were coming in. They were money-based, big films, whatever. I was like this… I want to work really, really hard on character development, and I want to work with directors that really push me, and I want to do anything else.” No shade toward Power Rangers, of which I do, admittedly, consider myself a fan. Call it nostalgia.
Nostalgia is no doubt at the core of Montgomery’s drive, including the inexorable pull of Went Up the Hill. Montgomery is a drama school kid and a dreamer. He knows about theater, and off the cuff, reveals a fascinatingly rich life with echoes of mysticism and curiosity. His parents were creatives, too, though behind the camera, and I could sense the tangible desire Montgomery has internalized to create with purpose. Movies mean more that way, especially horror movies.
Went Up the Hill, he shares, “totally changed [his] life.” As noted, this was horror as a Trojan Horse. A ghost story that bundles its chills with thoughtful queer themes and elegiac reflections on the longstanding nature and cycles of abuse. “Went Up the Hill is definitely slow-burning horror, and it’s definitely extremely divisive, and not everyone will enjoy it. It’s not totally commercial, but it gets people in and talks about some really tough stuff.”
To clarify the point, Montgomery recalls recently seeing Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back. He loved it, adding, “That’s why I love horror. That’s why horror is one of the best genres around because it gets people in, it’s really entertaining, but it also can discuss really, really divisive issues on a broader, universal, more commercial scale.”
Movies are meaningful. In my review of Went Up the Hill, I fondly remembered Shirley Jackson and all the little parts of myself that hurt, and grieve, and heal. I wrote, “Went Up the Hill is a personal story with personal scares. It’ll haunt you, too. Not in the way something like The Changeling or The Conjuring might, but in another, altogether different and very human way. Everyone in our lives is is a ghost in waiting. One day, long after death, they might be back, and sometimes that’s neither welcome nor scary, just confusing and painful.”
Went Up the Hill swallowed me whole, and it swallowed Montgomery, too. He’s got Faces of Death coming up soon, and he’s starring in Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, poised to premiere at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. He credits those opportunities to Went Up the Hill, sharing, “I feel like this is very much, for me, not only the next chapter for me, but the chapter that I’ve been kind of reverse engineering since I was lucky enough to get my first job.”
In a lot of ways, our chat was an opportunity for me to reflect on my own kind of reverse engineering. Five years ago, I was subbing piecemeal editorials to Dread Central. Now, I’m a staff writer, and I’m sitting with Montgomery discussing the genre that’s been so key to our lives for the past several years. “At TIFF last year, where we premiered the film, I felt like I just bawled my eyes out the whole way through the screen, let a breath out.” Every new success of mine brings the same sense of relief. Maybe that’s the Trojan Horse of horror. It can change your life, even if you don’t quite realize it.
And those queer themes, so central to Went Up the Hill, cut straight to my core. Even today, queerness is often peripheral in horror, and still too often reserved for the indie scene. And generationally, at least from my old-man-armchair perspective, younger audiences seem less willing than ever to confront uncomfortable subtext. Montgomery shared, “The director, Samuel Van Grinman, was like, ‘I’ve never seen domestic violence explored in queer relationships in cinema before.’ So, that was a big thing for him. He was like, ‘It happens in queer relationships.’ So, I want to see that explored.”
It’s not bury your gays so much as it is unearthing them and better understanding the distinct nuances of queer love and how that violence, much like the love itself, remains too private, too hidden from the world. Love is scary like that.
We wrapped, naturally, with a conversation on ghosts, and I fear he may have had me beat. We discussed our favorites, and as a capstone, Montgomery captured what I’d been trying to messily convey, sharing, “My favorite ghost stories are ghost stories that do just that [end ambiguously]. At the end of the film, you go, okay, well, none of that was real, or all of that was supernatural. So, hopefully, they bridge the gap between exploring what actual trauma looks like in the human body, and also how that can become and feel almost supernatural.”
We’re haunted by ourselves. Our bodies know, even when our minds don’t. Rest assured, Went Up the Hill is going to haunt you. Bad. Yet, it’s no less curative and profound. Maybe it will or maybe it won’t, but there’s always the chance it might change your life. Horror is tricky like that. A Trojan Horse, some might say.
Categorized: Dread Central Digital Feature News
