Reviews and accolades for the new horror film ATTACHMENT have been making the rounds online for weeks. The film, released exclusively on Shudder, is a winning blend of sapphic romance and religious horror, with well-timed comic relief to round it out. The familiar possession-exorcism beats in ATTACHMENT are freshened up with Gabriel Bier Gislason’s script and direction and are perfectly executed by the film’s stars, Ellie Kendrick and Josephine Park, who play central characters Leah and Maja, respectively.

Recently, Nightmarish Conjurings’ Chloé Gold chatted with Ellie Kendrick and Josephine Park, where they discussed how they prepared for their roles, the mythos in the film, and what their favorite scenes were from ATTACHMENT.

How did you prepare for your roles, both individually and as a couple?

Ellie Kendrick: I’m quite research-oriented as an actor. So when I got in touch with Gabriel, and we started talking about the character’s layers as a Jewish academic, I really wanted to learn as much as I could about the kinds of things that she would be learning about and thinking about. So I basically got Gabriel to send me a big stack of books about the sort of stuff [my character Leah] might be reading and also just other things with a bit more cultural context. Gabriel also set me up with someone who is queer and raised in a Hasidic Jewish household in London. They were really helpful in answering lots of questions that I had.

For the more supernatural elements of the film, I weirdly watch a lot of videos of foxes, and also had a lot of movement direction and training with a really brilliant dancer, choreographer, and movement director called Anne Neibo. Also, [Josephine and I] just met up every weekend when I was in Copenhagen, and we went through all the lines over and over again and did a lot of homework on it. I think we’re both slightly nerdy actors, aren’t we? So we enjoy putting in a lot of time and effort.

Josephine Park: I was in the project from the beginning, because the story came out of an experience of mine, where I was in between apartments with my ex-girlfriend, and I lived with [her mother] for a couple of months. And that was a very special experience.

And I think that my big challenge was acting in English, actually. I think that your language is so connected to your emotions, right? And to all of a sudden switch my native language out with something else, even though I do speak English, it was quite challenging. And I really came to enjoy it. I was so grateful that Ellie also wanted to hang out so much because I really wanted to say the lines, like, 1,000 times and I wanted to speak English and I wanted to practice that part as well.

Did either of you have any previous knowledge of the mythology that was going into this film?

Ellie Kendrick: Not really no. That was one of the things that I was really excited to research. And, in fact, there’s a book, which I have somewhere on my bookshelf, where there’s [the] short story which inspired Gabriel, about a woman who gets possessed by a dybbuk.

I hardly knew anything about the Kabbalistic mythological side and folkloric side of this particular part of Jewish culture. So that was so exciting to get to read a bit more about. I really admired how Gabriel, as a Jewish guy, wanted to bring in parts of the mythology of the religion that he’d grown up with, the culture that he’d grown up with. He wanted to bring parts of that into this film, but to be playful with them in the same way as directors are playful with Catholicism in horror movies, and can just have free rein to do whatever they want without justifying themselves. I really liked that Gabriel was drawing on this really rich vein of mythology and folklore, which isn’t so much touched on in horror conventionally.

Josephine Park: I didn’t study it as much as you [Ellie] did. [My character Maja] didn’t know anything about it. She was just experiencing it while moving into this Jewish society. So I didn’t study it as much.

What was your favorite scene to film?

Ellie Kendrick: I really enjoyed doing the final scenes. They were really fun as an actor because you don’t normally get the chance to just go mad. And we’re doing lots of improvisation in those scenes and lots of different things happened, which was really fun. But also, I loved the beginning scenes, you know, the early scenes, which we ended up filming at the end because that always happens that way. It was quite nice after having gone on this crazy journey of making the film to then just go back to the basics, back to the scenes where they’re in the flat and they’re first getting to know each other.

Josephine Park: Yeah, I think those are mine as well. And I really enjoyed that we shot them in the end, actually. So we actually knew each other pretty well.

ATTACHMENT can be seen exclusively now on Shudder. To learn more, check out our review.