Maika Monroe may have starred in multiple defining horror films of the last 10-plus years, from her breakout in It Follows to the recent box-office smash Longlegs, but no amount of scream-queen credits could prepare her for the gory terror of Victorian Psycho. 

“It terrified me. I knew that it would be the hardest role that I have ever done — and so incredibly different from anything I’ve ever done,” the Santa Barbara native says. “There’s always a little part of me in roles that I do, something that I can ground it with or connect it with within my own personal life — but this role was really a departure from that. It was working from the ground up, creating this character where I couldn’t rely on my own self. It really, in the most magical way, took a toll on me. I felt it every day.”

Set in 1858 and adapted by Virginia Feito from her own novel, Victorian Psycho stars Monroe as Winifred Notty, an idiosyncratic young woman who arrives at the wealthy Pounds family’s old gothic manor, claiming to be the house’s new governess. She’s eager to please, but only reluctantly welcomed in by the matriarch and patriarch (Ruth Wilson and Jason Isaacs), and is tasked with watching over and teaching their children. She bonds with a fellow employee of the house, the kindly Ms. Lamb (Thomasin McKenzie), and expresses a plucky determination to fit in. 

“It’s fascinating to see an outsider who desperately wants to be an insider, and it’s simply impossible,” says director Zachary Wigon (Sanctuary). “It’s a very, very deep paradox. She will never belong — and she will never stop wanting to belong.”

Those irreconcilable truths are but one reason why things start going so very wrong inside the Pounds household. People go missing; blood starts littering the garden, the hallway, the kitchen. This isn’t just any oddball employee slowly losing her grip on her job. “I remember reading the manuscript of the novel, and it’s like, ‘What is this woman going to do?’” Wigon says. “There was an interesting visual language to be had in depicting this woman’s losing of her grip…. What was animating about it from an aesthetic perspective was to do something set in 1858, but with a contemporary style.”

The project came about organically for Wigon, who’d been collaborating with Feito on an unrelated script before she informed him of her then-impending next book. They pivoted to fast-track a screen take on Victorian Psycho and swiftly sold the rights to A24, with Margaret Qualley attached to star. That setup gradually fell apart. “It changed distributors, it comes with the territory of the volatile nature of independent filmmaking,” Wigon says when asked about how the project evolved from the A24 version to a new package headlined by Monroe and distributed by Bleecker Street. “We’re enormously pleased with all the support that Bleecker has given me to bring the film into the world.” 

What drew him to Monroe, who’s having a big 2026 as she comes off of leading the commercial success Reminders of Him? “She has this very, very intense internal quality, where you can tell that the gears are whirring and there’s a lot going on in the character’s head,” Wigon says. “I thought it would be perfect for a serial killer because we’re always wondering what’s going on in their head — that’s why this whole industry of nonfiction TV shows and whatnot exists about trying to understand the phenomenon.” 

To prepare for portraying a 19th-century serial killer, Monroe went through extensive rehearsals, zooming every week with Wigon to nail down the specific blocking. She needed to nail down the English accent, adjust her mannerisms and body movements. She suggested painfully visible prosthetic teeth. One memorable sequence from the film required Monroe to be covered in fake blood in the cold for an elaborate technocrane shot, at 4:30 in the morning. 

In short, Monroe needed to be all in. “I had every scene memorized because you’re running the script so many times — it was so ingrained in my head, and I could still recite probably for years to come,” Monroe says. “This character might be the character that I miss the most.” It helped that each of her principal costars kept her off balance.

Isaacs’ slithery Mr. Pounds shows a discomfiting interest in Winifred. “Your eyes are just absolutely glued to him, and he’s totally unpredictable, and his choices are always unusual as his wife,” Wigon says of the White Lotus alum. Wilson, meanwhile, plays Isaacs’ wife as a kind of desperate shit-stirrer. “Some of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever filmed in my entire career were with Ruth,” Monroe says. “Sometimes in the scenes, I would just be watching her blown away by what she was doing — and I find her role actually incredibly challenging.”

Then there’s the friendship with Ms. Lamb, a rare instance of seeing Winifred and another person able to enjoy each other’s company. “Most times with people, they look at her with a bit of disgust and don’t understand her,” Monroe says. “And for the first time, she feels this bit of connection with a person.” In these interactions, Winifred’s characterization gets more complicated — she’s an unhinged murderer, yes, but she’s after something relatably human. The tension then becomes: What happens if she gets what she is searching for, and what if she doesn’t?

The movie’s arch-horror-comic tone came to Wigon only after the initial script stages. “It’s a little bit more like engineering in the beginning,” he says. “It’s more about the structural math of, ‘How are we going to fit this narrative and how are these scenes going to be arranged?’ “ That led to a one-word descriptor that Monroe says defines his overall approach to the show: “Demented.” 

“When I talked to people about it in the beginning, I said, ‘This is a kind of manic madness,’” Wigon says. The presence of Monroe helped matters: “Every single time that we got into a setup, it was like Maika had the character in a vice grip. She never really left. You were always right there. It was like a magnet. It was just amazing to watch.”

The postproduction aspect, Wigon adds, was straightforward — if only because he’d laid out the movie so exactingly before shooting even began. He had access to the castle where they shot for prep. “We had almost everything in the shot list pre-visualized before we started shooting, so in a situation like that, there’s almost zero coverage,” he says. “You don’t really shoot coverage in these situations because you want to max out what you can get stylistically. If you have a more sophisticated or complicated visual idea that’s going to come at the cost of coverage, that’s fine because you’ve visualized it.”

For her part, Monroe saw that all come together in the final edit. “Zach had such specific visuals and certain shots, and you’re filming it like, ‘That looks cool, hope that works out, seems cool’ — and then seeing it all put together, it really blew me away,” she says. “As with most actors, it’s always a bit odd watching yourself, but what was really nice about this project is that it was very different for me — that little part of me was able to take myself out of it.”

Indeed, it’s not just the fake teeth — Monroe may have scared you before on screen, but never quite like this.

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Victorian Psycho premieres May 21 at the Cannes Film Festival. Stay tuned for more Cannes 2026 first looks and exclusives.