A young nurse is haunted by a supernatural presence for a sordid past and must unravel a sinister puzzle in order to survive the night. Distributed by Shudder, The Power is a grounded Victorian gothic written and directed by the talented Corinna Faith. During our 15-minute interview, Faith gave me a peek behind the curtain in creating one of the most horrific and terrifying films of the year.

"At the time I started to plan my next project, there were these stories breaking in the U.K. about abuse within these institutions and I was very disturbed by them. The actual premise started as the monster being the victim and that story evolved from there," Faith said about the inception of the film. 

Surprisingly, Faith says The Power — a period piece and female-led horror story — wasn’t a hard sell.

"It was quite easy to pitch," she said.

"It was going to be set in one night and mostly dark with lanterns. I think people got the atmosphere right away and there weren’t many Victorian gothic horrors out at the time and people wanted to see that."

The film marks Faith’s second venture into horror, a genre she is very comfortable in. She has her own rules for writing horror elements in her scripts.

"The fear factor is something I had to go back and check. I was aiming to track the character’s journey in relation to the supernatural with an arc and how the supernatural will see that, as well as when and where Val [Rose Williams] would see that within her own emotional journey."

Faith’s personal horror preferences heavily impact what she creates as a storyteller.

"It’s hard to do a film with possession that doesn’t reflect back on The Exorcist. In terms of what I love, horror and sci-fi and I would like to stay in the space, however I do not care for slashers. I don’t like violence and gore. I love suspense and ghost stories," she said.

Visually, the movie is eerily stunning. Playing both writer and director, Faith had a vision for how the film should be shot from early on.

"We wanted it to have a dark beauty. We didn’t want it to be completely depressing to watch and I didn’t want to exhaust the viewer with loads of darkness and tiny lights. There were long conversations about what kind of darkness I wanted, what kind of lights. From day one, it was the palette and the colors we used to move through the story."

The last 10 seconds of the film will leave a chill down audience members' spines days after watching. According to Faith, the ending that was written turned out to be vastly different from the ending that was shot.

"It had a very different ending because I was talking about something that wasn’t being talked about at the time. I wrote this film before #MeToo, so originally it ended in a much darker place. We did add the closer at the very end, which is a genre staple," she said.

In closing, Faith had this writing advice to offer to her younger self:

"Keep it simple. Keep on track. Particularly with this genre, it’s so hard to not be sucked up by other things you’ve seen."

The Power is available on VOD, Digital HD and DVD on September 21, 2021.