“Horror is such a great way to get outside of yourself and awaken your primal instincts,” Suki Waterhouse says, before a big grin takes over her face. “It’s a great way to bond with people and hold onto the person next to you and be like, 'Will you save me?'”
Waterhouse is the star of Seance, a new slasher-thriller flick that affords ample opportunity for clutching tightly to the person sitting beside you on the couch.
Written and directed by horror veteran Simon Barrett, the chap who penned cult classics such as You're Next and The Guest, and streaming on genre specialist service Shudder, the film blends supernatural horror with a blood-soaked mystery that will keep you guessing until its deathly, splatter-filled finale.
The model, singer, Instagram star and actor stars as Camille, a new girl at a prestigious girl’s boarding school where a seance devised as a prank instead awakens the murderous spirit of a dead former student.
Haunted by the death of an old friend and watching her new friends be brutally murdered night after night, Camille has to race to figure out what’s going on before she too ends up dead. This sees her and her friends continuing to hold seances using the seemingly cursed ouija board.
“I heard this story from a rock star once about how he did a ouija board with John Lennon. It’s crazy,” she says, before disappointingly clamming up when pressed for detail. “I can’t tell you. It’s slightly inappropriate. But it’s the most interesting one that I’ve heard of.”
So while she’s left us to hold our own seance to get the details from Lennon’s ghost, Waterhouse is more forthcoming about her own experience.
“I’ve done an ouija board before,” she admits. “Stuff was moving! It was answering questions for us. It’s strange. I don't know why it didn’t imprint in my head as something absolutely terrifying.”
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Advertise with NZME.She pauses for a second, then laughs and says, “It probably has something to do with drinking at the same time.”
That experience with the spiritual realm may have been played for laughs (“We were just asking silly drunk girl questions”), but she says that she does believe in the supernatural.
“I don’t have a massive sensitivity to that stuff. I’m not like one of those people who walks in a room and is like, ‘Woooooo the energy’s weird in here,’” she says, waving her arms around.
Instead, she believes in the readings from psychics. “I’ve definitely done my fair share of psychics,” she says, and the future that’s written in the stars. So much so that for a time she was doing astrological-based predictions and readings herself.
“I had to stop doing so much astrology stuff because I would get into arguments with people over what was in the astrology and their future,” she says. “I’d say things like, ‘I can’t believe you’re gonna be doing this,’ and they’d be like, ‘What are you talking about?’ When you read too much of this stuff you just start seeing things. Like, this is gonna happen to your friend or this stuff is gonna happen and you’re just like, ‘Argh. It drives you crazy. I think it’s better to just relax on it now and take it as it comes.”
Having been haunted by a murderous ghost in Seance she says she has no desire to return from the grave herself.
“I’d just hang out in the afterlife, I reckon,” she grins. “I might haunt some people that I haven’t really enjoyed on this earth but I’d most probably just peace out and relax in the afterlife.”
Seance is available to watch now on new horror streaming service Shudder.
