Axelle Carolyn on ‘The Manor’: ‘Growing old is scary at any age’
The Hindu
The Belgian filmmaker says there is no horror in ageing; that is a natural process. It is what we make of it as a society that is horrifying
Axelle Carolyn says she was always into horror. Speaking on a video call from a room in Los Angeles, full of classic horror movie posters, the director of The Manor, the eighth instalment of the Welcome to the Blumhouse film series, says, “Even as a little child, I was into ghosts, skeletons and spooky things, even in cartoons. There is a Disney cartoon that I remember very specifically being the beginning of my obsession with skeletons. Little black-and-white skeletons came out of rooms, did a little dance, and when the time was up, went back to their grave. It was adorable.”
The Belgian filmmaker describes herself as being the kind of child who was anxious about death. “That was my way of dealing with death — look, you can be a cute little skeleton who dances at night! There is comfort in thinking that there is potentially something else out there that we cannot explain, that we do not know.”