[Editor’s note: The following interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike began on July 14, 2023.]
Feminist horror icon Jennifer Reeder is looking to debunk the cultural anxiety of seeing a “pack of girls” together onscreen with her latest film “Perpetrator.” The filmmaker opted to translate the identity-seeking pain of female adolescence into a (literal) supernatural shape-shifting thriller set in high school, complete with a custom role for ’90s high school heroine Alicia Silverstone.
Reeder, whose past films like the feature “Knives and Skin” and short “A Million Miles Away” chronicle characters working their way through fraught teen years, recently told IndieWire that previous audience questions during Q&A panels led, in part, to her writing “Perpetrator.” Reeder expands on her 2021 short “Forevering” with the new feature, which follows a troubled teen Jonny (Kiah McKirnan) who is sent to live with her estranged Aunt Hildie (Silverstone).
On her 18th birthday, Jonny experiences a physical and emotional metamorphosis, care of a family spell known as Forevering. When several teen girls go missing at her new school, the newly (and, per the film’s official synopsis, quite “mythically”) feral Jonny goes after the person responsible: the titular Perpetrator. Melanie Liburd and Christopher Lowell also star in the film, which debuted at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, before hitting the festival circuit in advance of a theatrical and streaming release care of Shudder.
“The films that I have made leading up to ‘Perpetrator’ all feature so many of the nuanced experiences among girls and women,” Reeder said during an interview conducted during her visit to the Tribeca Film Festival in June. “A couple of things that I realized in touring around with those films was the idea that we are a culture obsessed with youth and beauty, especially among young women, and yet we are also a culture that’s kind of built a machine to constantly disrupt their evolution. I wanted to try to figure out how to build that reality and that concept into a film.”
Reeder continued, “I was also getting asked the question, oftentimes in press Q&As in these previous films, for instance, about how was the experience working with so many girls on set? Of course, my answer was always, you know, the same: It’s fantastic. That’s why I keep working with so many girls and women. But I realized after twelfth time I got asked that question was that there was an assumption it was awful and terrifying to work with a sort of a pack of girls. We use these terms like ‘wild’ and ‘out of control’ oftentimes, especially towards young women to diminish their agency. I thought about making a film about a wild and out of control girl who becomes literally wild and out of control, which is really the premise of so many kind of classic shapeshifter stories.”
Reeder opted to give character Jonny the ability to locate people based on reading their emotions, a play on how women are deemed “too emotional” in an effort to undermine their abilities. “When I realized that I wanted to make a kind of a shape-shifter story, I knew at the very least I didn’t want her to be a werewolf or a vampire. I didn’t want to have her kind of shifting these be so typical,” Reeder said. “If we as creatures could lean into empathy more or if some people who were even had the ability at all to sort of be a tiny bit empathetic that the world could be a sort of a kinder place.”
She added, “The more that I really started to write that into her power and to make her being overly emotional be her superpower, it also just made perfect sense to think of it in this story with so many women, this lineage of really powerful women who were powerful because of their intense ability to to emote and to feel. As a grown woman, the idea that you are overly emotional or unpredictable based on your emotions is totally absurd and is just insulting.”
At one point in the film, Silverstone’s character notes that being emotional “can be a tremendous weapon.” Reeder added, “I stand firmly by that statement.”
Reeder said she drew additional inspiration from Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” beloved indie horror film “Gingersnaps,” and “The Cell” to craft “Perpetrator.” Actress Silverstone, whose character Aunt Hildie embodies the long lineage of female shapeshifters, rewatched “American Psycho,” “The Hunger,” and early monster B-movies like “Wasp Woman” to pair a charisma and campiness to the role.
“I was very much having [Catherine Deneuve in ‘The Hunger’] in mind that I changed my voice quite a bit for this,” Silverstone said of preparing for her role. “I spoke differently, and just felt like saying those words with that sort of old wisdom. I could also feel my mom in there a little bit, … Aunt Hildie has this old feeling while being so obviously chic, sophisticated, and fabulous. That’s almost witchy, but really she loves her niece Jonny deeply and just takes no nonsense.”
Reeder wrote the role of Aunt Hildie for Silverstone, especially after the “Clueless” alum was a hopeful casting for “Knives and Skin.” “I’d been thinking about her for a long time and really had this sense, like I will work with her one day,” Reeder said. “I was on a plane once when we were actually casting for ‘Knives and Skin’ and the person in front of me across the aisle was watching ‘Clueless.’ I was like, ‘I am not giving up on this dream.’”
Asked what drew her to Silverstone for this new role, and Reeder was clear. “Alicia is an incredible actor. I love her personal provenance as a mom and as an activist, but also as someone who we were introduced to as an actual teenager, who we’ve sort of watched evolve,” she said. “That personal story felt very meta to this, with Alicia playing a powerful matriarch who’s guiding a teenage girl through an amazing transformation. It felt like it was important that we had this little kernel of remembering how we were ever introduced to the most brilliant goddess Alicia Silverstone to begin with.”
Signing on for “Perpetrator” was a no-brainer for Silverstone, the actress said. “I feel really lucky that I get to work with filmmakers that I love working with,” Silverstone said. “This film for me was so special because my agent said such great things about Jennifer Reeder and he was all excited because [Bong Joon Ho] had declared Jennifer Reeder one of the top filmmakers to watch out for.”
She added, “[Jennifer] wrote me a letter and it was the best director’s letter I’ve ever received. It was so lovely. I just knew I was dealing with an artist. I just felt like she has such a clear vision. Everything looks so beautiful and she’s dealing with girls and blood all the time, which is weird, but also just beautiful.”
As Reeder teased, hopefully more films with Silverstone are on the horizon. “I’m not done with her,” Reeder said. “I’ve got her close and I keep promising to make more films with her, which we will absolutely do.”
A Shudder release, “Perpetrator” will hit select theaters and start streaming on Shudder on Friday, September 1.
