Sergio G Sánchez on The Secret of Marrowbone

The Secret of Marrowbone begins like all good fairytales, with the turning of a page. A young man named Jack (George MacKay) introduces us to his tight-knit family while flipping through a hand-drawn picture book describing how they fled their home in England and an abusive father to take up residence in the mother’s family home of the title, a secluded, crumbling villa on the beautiful wind-lash coast of America that looks like it’s been lifted from an Andrew Wyeth painting.

As well as Jack there’s his hotheaded younger brother Billy (Stranger Thing’s Charlie Heaton), his sweet younger sister Jane (The Cure for Wellness'sMia Goth), and youngest sibling Sam (Matthew Stagg). There’s also Jack’s mother (Nicola Harrison), who doesn’t make it past the opening credits. On her deathbed, she does make Jack promise that he’ll keep the family unit together when she’s gone, no matter what.

This pleasingly old-school horror is the first feature from director Sergio G Sánchez. He may be a greenhorn in the directing chair, but the 45-year-old Spaniard has form in the horror genre. He penned 2007’s The Orphanage, a wonderfully effective Spanish ghost story that proved a breakthrough for its young director Juan Antonio Bayona, who recently brought the same gothic sensibility to blockbuster Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Together the pair also made The Impossible, which recreated the devastating Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that hit South East Asia on boxing day 2004, although telling this tragedy from the point of view of a western family spending their Christmas holiday in Thailand was in poor taste.

The Secret of Marrowbone brings Sánchez back to the spirit of The Orphanage. There’s something that goes bump in the night in the attic of the old Marrowbone house, while for some reason several rooms are out of bounds and every mirror has either been smashed or covered in dust sheets. When Sánchez visited Edinburgh to present the film at the city’s film festival, The Skinny spoke to him about his influences, his talented young cast and the current rude health of genre films.

You’ve had great success as a screenwriter. What was it about this script that made you want to direct also?

I’ve always wanted to direct; I never wanted to be a writer. I wrote the screenplay for The Orphanage in 1998 and then I made a short film, which had similar themes to The Orphanage. It was a ghost story set during the Spanish Civil War strangely enough, and then two years later Guillermo [del Toro] did The Devil’s Backbone and then Pan’s Labyrinth. I made that short film hoping to get some producers who’d hire me to direct the script that I’d written, and what happened was that I met Antonio Bayona at a short film festival and he had Guillermo on board to produce his first feature film.

So I let them read the script as a sample of my writing so that they would hopefully hire me to write something else for them, but they said, ‘Let’s do this!’ I said OK and I had no idea The Orphanage was going to become such a popular film. I got labeled as a writer but I always wanted to direct, so after making three films that were very successful I told them, ‘I’m going to direct this one, no one else is going to do it.’ I had to impose myself on it basically.

The film feels out of time in some way. It takes a while before you reveal this is all happening in 1969. Why did you choose that year?

There’s this recurring theme in the film about thresholds. When the movie starts the mother performs this ritual with the children where she draws an invisible line on the floor and says ‘Once you cross this line, the past will stay behind.’ So I think the film explores those frontiers between childhood and maturity, reality and fantasy, life and death, and I had to find a time setting that had an echo of that frontier. Their world is almost like a Norman Rockwell postcard, and I guess that’s year is the very end of that world, man is going to the moon, there’s social revolt.

I also liked that year because around that period it was such a wonderful time for fantasy and horror movies: Rosemary's Baby, 2001, Planet of the Apes. I think fantasy and horror sprout in very turbulent times. That’s why we’re having this new wave of great new horror because the world is falling apart.

The film has a fable-like quality. When George MacKay’s character, Jack, reads from the book he’s written it’s like we’re being drawn into his fairytale...

I like that device because most of my influences are literary. I was exposed at a very young age to the works of Edgar Allan Poe and I read Turn of the Screw when I was ten, which of course meant I didn’t understand anything and that’s why it fascinated me so much and I kept going back to it. I also loved the novels of Shirley Jackson, like We Have Always Lived in the Castle or The Haunting of Hill House.

I was always fascinated by that type of horror that doesn’t give you all the answers. There are always stories with an unreliable narrator where the horror is never upfront, it’s like hidden in the cracks of the story. Marrowbone is a fable about how you create the world you want to live in, so I thought it would be interesting and the best way not to cheat the audience to know right from the start that somebody’s telling you the story.

Then nine minutes into the film, when the kids receive an unexpected visitor, there’s a jump six months into the future, there’s a big gap, so you’re questioning right from the start, what am I seeing? It’s a jarring moment, and that’s where I throw the first thing at the audience letting them know it’s going to be a game. Do they want to play?

Sergio G. Sanchez on set with his young cast: Charlie Heaton, Matthew Stagg, George MacKay and Mia Goth

The young cast is impressive, particularly George MacKay. Can you talk about the casting?

It was extremely difficult doing the casting of this film because the challenge was double: I had to find the right actors to play Jack, Sam, Billy and Jane, but I also had to find a group of actors who you would buy as a family. I actually started with Mia [Goth], she was the first person I offered the role to. Then Charlie [Heaton].

I had so many options for actors to play Jack, I was very confused actually. But once I had Mia and Charlie, I had two siblings, and I could believe George [MacKay] being their older brother. But also George’s such an incredibly talented actor. He’s the most generous actor I’ve seen on a set. He’s capable of anything. He’s very technical because he’s done a lot of theatre, he’s super conscious of every little movement in his body.

There’s something special about his physicality and his face too; he can change a lot. He can seem really tough one minute, then really vulnerable the next. It’s almost like, depending on the angle where you shoot him from he becomes a different person, so he was the perfect instrument to bring Jack to life.

You’re best known for your collaborations with Juan Antonio Bayona. It seems he brought some of the gothic sensibility you showed together in The Orphanage to his most recent gig, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom...

Well you know what happened, Frank Marshall offered Bayona Jurassic World – the first one – when we were promoting The Impossible in 2012. At the time he just didn’t see it happening because he really wanted to make A Monster Calls. Colin brought his name back on the table for the sequel and I think it was Colin’s idea to do a haunted house with dinosaurs film, and because of The Orphanage he thought Bayona would be the man to do it.

You mentioned how modern horror is in rude health. Have you seen Hereditary yet? It seems it shares some themes with The Secret of Marrowbone...

Actually, I just saw it two days ago and I was like, ‘Oh God, no’. There are actually similarities too with the series I’m writing. In my story, there’s a treehouse right outside the protagonist’s window, so I’m going to have to remove that now. But yeah, it’s the same thing as Marrowbone, it’s that frontier world where you ask, is it real or is it not? I think that’s always scarier, to doubt yourself. The minute you know something, the minute you’re certain about things, it’s not horror anymore, it’s something else.

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The Secret of Marrowbone had its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival and is released 13 July by Entertainment One