By age 5, Michael Mohan knew he wanted to direct movies for the big screen. "Growing up in suburban Massachusettes, which was a cultural wasteland at the time, seeing Back to the Future as a kid was the most exciting thing ever," he recalls. "I've always wanted to make movies that were released theatrically."
Mohan made his feature debut with the low-budget 2010 dramedy, One Too Many Mornings, and directed the 2021 erotic thriller, The Voyeurs, which was released exclusively on Prime Video. His latest effort, the religious horror film Immaculate, is his first movie to get a nationwide theatrical release. "I could cry right now just talking about it," he says. "It's been amazing."
The filmmaker first got his foot in the door working as a coordinator for the Sundance Labs. "I made copies, and I got coffee. I was that guy," Mohan says. Still, "I got to be a fly on the most interesting of walls. I learned a lot secondhand by watching people like Philip Seymour Hoffman teach a young Cary Fukunaga how to talk to actors, and I was there when Taika Waititi was developing his first couple of films. I got to see a lot of artists grow in real-time, and I got to see all these amazing directors work and offer advice up close."
"One of the most important things I learned from all of that was that directors really succeed when they give actors an environment where they can fail and feel safe to do so," Mohan reflects.
That advice is what paved the way for what has become one of the most fruitful collaboration of Mohan's professional career: His ongoing creative partnership with actress and producer Sydney Sweeney. The two met on Mohan's short-lived Netflix series, Everything Sucks!, and he later directed her in The Voyeurs. Not long after that film, Sweeney approached Mohan about directing a screenplay that she'd fallen in love with years prior: Immaculate.
"I like how it kind of lulls you into a sense of safety at the beginning," Mohan says of the film. "It starts out as a kind of traditional horror movie, and then it just gets progressively more and more f****d up."
Below, the filmmaker shares with A.frame his own favorite horror movies. "I really love all horror," he says. "I love Death Spa just as much as I love Midsommar, and I think what I crave both as a filmmaker and as an audience member is when people just go for it. The best horror movies go beyond being over-the-top."
Written and Directed by: Roman Polanski
What I love about Rosemary's Baby is that it's so intimate and personal. It's performance-focused. I really love the horror films of the early '70s, because that was a time when filmmakers could get giant actors to do horror and really deliver interesting and nuanced performances. Doing horror wasn't seen as lesser back then, and I think by bringing everything she could to our film, Sydney made it feel very much in line with the spirit of those movies.
In spite of it being very intimate, Rosemary's Baby is also super cinematic. It's huge in scope even though it's set, basically, in one apartment. It was the biggest influence on Immaculate writ large.
Directed by: George Sluizer | Written by: George Sluizer and Tim Krabbé
There's no film that cultivates as deep a sense of dread as The Vanishing does, and the payoff is so metal. It's like, 'Yup. This is what happened to them.' That film just leaves you with this sick feeling in your stomach, and it keeps going and going. It's something you just keep feeling and thinking about. You walk away from that movie a changed person.
Written and Directed by: Ken Russell
The Devils isn't quite a straightforward horror film, but I'm a big, big fan of Ken Russell. Crimes of Passion was definitely a touchstone for me when I was making The Voyeurs, and when you watch The Devils, it's like, 'Here's a filmmaker who is fearless.' He's always gonna push the envelope. He doesn't care what people think. I care what people think, but Ken always makes his films in a way where I feel like there's a sense of anarchy in them that is missing from our current cinematic landscape. I'm trying to bring it back a bit, whether I'm making an erotic thriller or a horror movie. I think Ken is a perfect example of a filmmaker who does that. He's also apparently a very nice guy, and there aren't many, what I'd call, 'sensitive' cinematic provocateurs. I like to look to him as proof of how you can build a career, push the limits, and still be your true self.
Written and Directed by: Michael Haneke
Funny Games is a movie where you feel like you're in the hands of a madman. The movie doesn't play by any rules and, halfway through, it feels really unfair. People always talk about how, when you mess with structure or form in a film, you're taking a risk of some kind. But I don't think that's a risk; that's what audiences want. And Funny Games is hardcore in that regard. I love it.
Written and Directed by: Zach Cregger
Barbarian is a modern masterpiece, and if you want to talk about taking risks, just look at the structure of that film and how it evolves. At a certain point, it breaks and suddenly you're with Justin Long singing in his car while he drives along the freeway! I saw the movie four times in the theater, and whenever that moment came, the audience was always like, 'What just happened?! We didn't know movies could do this!' Sometimes people will talk about those moments and they'll say, 'Oh, they're taking cinematic risks. They're taking narrative risks.' I firmly believe that's not true.
It's not a risk if you do it confidently. Because, when I go to the movie theater, I want to be surprised. I want to be shocked. I want to feel like whoever crafted this movie I'm watching put as much creativity into it as possible — no matter what their budget was. Barbarian is a perfect example of someone really going for it, and going for it with gusto.
