‘Fréwaka’ Director Aislinn Clarke Talks Tackling Irish Trauma In Her New Folk Horror Film
Aislinn Clarke is unafraid to confront the harsh and horrific realities of Ireland’s past. In her debut feature film The Devil’s Doorway, she tackled the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries. Now, in her sophomore feature Fréwaka, Clarke is confronting the dangers of repressing your past and the destruction such repression has wrought in Ireland.
In the new Irish folk horror film:
Home care worker Shoo (Clare Monnelly) is sent to a remote village to care for an agoraphobic woman (Bríd Ní Neachtain) who fears the neighbors as much as she fears the Na Sídhe—sinister entities who she believes abducted her decades before. As the two develop a strangely deep connection, Shoo is consumed by the old woman’s paranoia, rituals, and superstitions, eventually confronting the horrors from her own past.
We spoke with Clarke at the HARD:LINE Film Festival (where her film screened ahead of its Shudder premieres) about creating a distinctly Irish horror film, the power of the Irish language, and finding her perfect cast.
Dread Central: Why was it so important to you to make an Irish language horror film?
Aislinn Clarke: I was raised with the Irish language my whole life, I was speaking Irish right up until I was in college. I even studied Irish third level. And then I changed to film because I wanted to get a good job, be a teacher, or something. But it weirdly never occurred to me to make a film in the Irish language. I don’t know, these worlds are just different in my head. But I did write one Irish language TV crime drama movie for a director friend of mine who always works in the Irish language.
After that happened, the producers said, “Hey, why don’t you do an Irish horror film?” And I was like, “That’s interesting.” But I didn’t want to just do a horror film in Irish. It felt like it had to have a reason to be in the language. I didn’t want to take some script I had and just turn it into an Irish language script. So I didn’t take them up on it right away.
But then, when I thought about it, it felt more and more interesting. I had really disengaged from Irish in ordinary life just because of practical stuff. I didn’t have as much opportunity to ever speak the language at all, especially once outside of the official sort of circles where that happens. My dad died 10 years ago, and was the one who would insist on [speaking Irish]. So I’d moved away from it a bit, but then I thought another language gives you another lens on everything.
It’s a different way of framing everything. And I thought that’s actually kind of cool. Then I came up with Fréwaka from that. The title Fréwaka means literally, if you’re going to translate it, “roots”. But that’s really crap. That word is just, it’s not a good word. It’s weak. Whereas Fréwaka has more heft to it. It feels like heavy, dense roots that are tangled up in the ground, and you have to really get your shovel and you can’t get them out, and you can’t plant anything. It’s got more heft and kind of tangibility to it. So that gives you a sense of what I mean when I say a language is a slightly different angle of looking at things.
DC: How did you then approach writing the film?
AC: Well, all Irish people and probably people from every culture have a complex relationship with our sense of cultural identity and how you fit into the wider cultural identity of the people. Then also I’ve got all this weird emotional stuff about the language because of my dad’s passing. And Ireland is already a very emotional place, but it’s all completely pushed down. So it’s my admittedly very subjective lens on Irishness, on Irish people, and where we are now.
I think the public face of the Irish is that we’re a very good crack at parties, a laugh to drink with, all that. But the reality is that we’ve got very high suicide rates, very high alcoholism, drug issues, homelessness, stuff like that. So the truth is that we actually have centuries and centuries of trauma.
DC: People don’t realize how colonialism has and continues to impact the Irish. I love that horror films try to get at that.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And with Fréwaka, there are these Irish beings that you’d call fae in another language, but it’s not the right thing.
They’re closer to demonic, but they’re not as outwardly just straightforward evil. But they want us to suffer for some reason. And my whole life, I was thinking, “What is their problem?” They just don’t like us. This land was theirs first. That’s like the thing in Ireland. We drove them underground and they are very pissed off. So it’s like we externalized that onto these other people and used it as a form of self-harm, which is so Irish to really whip ourselves. It’s the Catholicism. [Laughs]
DC: It’s very BDSM! Anyway, [Laughs] was it challenging to find a cast with the script primarily in Irish?
AC: It’s completely logical to say that. And that’s what I thought because we only have six million people in Ireland to begin with. Only some of them are actors. Only some of them are any good. And then only some of them, again, speak Irish. So I thought it was going to be hard, but it was actually super easy.
Clare Monnelly, who’s the lead, she’s so good. She’s a straight-up movie star. She’s just captivating. She was in the other Irish language film that I had written for another director. So that was just easy from the very get-go. We took self-tapes, as well, but it was always going to be Clare.
And then the other actress is the very seasoned actor Bríd Ní Neachtain. She’s very well known for doing Irish language theater and film. I actually had cast a different actress as Peig, but because of timing and schedules, it wasn’t going to work out. She said, “Here, talk to my friend Bríd.” I did, and that was it. So they were the two principles. They landed in my lap
DC: This is a big question, but it is my last question. What are you hoping people take away from Fréwaka?
AC: When I’m making a film, I’m not really thinking of the audience at all in that sense. I don’t mean that at all in an arrogant way. I mean, because the only thing you can do is communicate the thing that feels right for you. You’re presenting this thing that’s honestly from here [gestures to heart], instead of thinking about what would work out there. I think it’s the best way to make horror in particular.
DC: It’s more effective when you’re tapping into something that is close to you. You can feel that in a movie.
AC: Horror fans are very canny, very smart. They know the genre really well, and they can smell it a mile away. But in terms of what I would like them to take away, I think I just want people to feel something. I think that’s what you’re always trying to do. There’s that kind of intangible, in-your-bones feeling that horror gives you. It’s very emotional, but it’s hard to articulate. You want to create that feeling, and you never know whether or not you’ve done that until other people see it. So it’s really scary showing it to people for the first time.
But yeah, I want them to feel something. Fréwaka is very distinctly Irish, but I think it’s also universal. It’s not full of heavy mythology. To understand the film, you’ve just had to have been a human being in a stressful situation, which we’ve all done.
Fréwaka is streaming now on Shudder.
Categorized:Interviews
