Trailer for “Cuckoo”: Hunter Schafer plays the lead role in new horror film
“Euphoria” star Hunter Schafer plays her first leading role in Tilman Singer’s new horror thriller “Cuckoo.”
Spoiler alert! We discuss important details about the new horror film “Cuckoo” (now in cinemas).
Move aside, long legs.
In the stylish new thriller “Cuckoo,” “Euphoria” star Hunter Schafer takes on the scariest horror creation of 2024: a screaming, Hitchcock-esque glamazon known as the Hooded Woman (Kalin Morrow). With glowing red eyes and a severe blonde updo, the mysterious monster stalks rebellious teenager Gretchen (Schafer) through an idyllic resort in the German Alps, where hotel owner Mr. Koenig (Dan Stevens) is conducting bizarre genetic experiments on women.
The film leaves much of the plot up to the audience’s interpretation, putting a science fiction spin on familiar themes like grief, reproduction, and patriarchy. As the film progresses, Gretchen takes it upon herself to investigate the malevolent, cloaked figure whose piercing siren song sends convulsions and time loops into anyone within earshot.
“She’s being chased by this strange woman who looks like a disturbed, sick Marilyn Monroe type,” says screenwriter and director Tilman Singer. “There’s something ghostly about her that I can’t put into words, but it’s this haunting energy that really touches me.”
And this is how the unique retro villain was created:
Kalin Morrow is the bloodcurdling shooting star of “Cuckoo”
When Singer cast the role of the hooded woman, he knew he wanted a professional dancer. “They can come up with moves that are a little animalistic or robotic or just a little off,” he says. They have such good control over their bodies and can exude “that weird, otherworldly feeling.”
Morrow, 38, is an actress and trained ballerina from Oklahoma who now lives in the Netherlands and teaches dance. For the role of the character, who has no dialogue, she studied videos of insects and cuckoos. During movement rehearsals, “we talked a lot about birds: how they behave when they are attacked or when they are waiting for their prey,” she says. “A lot of research went into that.”
The glamorous look of the Hooded Woman is modeled on Audrey Hepburn
Part of what makes the hooded woman so creepy is that she’s out of place in the modern world. She’s dressed like an old Hollywood vixen, wearing a sleek tan trench coat, leather boots, oversized sunglasses and a headscarf. Singer specifically modeled her after Audrey Hepburn, who wears an almost identical outfit in the 1963 thriller “Charade.”
He remembers giving the costume, hair and makeup departments a picture of Hepburn in that film. “When you compare them, we came very close,” says Singer. “That was my visual inspiration.”
The glowing red eyes are meant to resemble those of a cat. “We thought about how her eyes reflect light in the dark,” adds Singer. “We wanted that glow to shine through her sunglasses.”
Their siren song had to be “violent” and yet “musical”
The hooded woman’s ear-splitting scream was partly created by composer Simon Waskow, who worked with a voice actor to create the distorted yet “ethereal” sound. “We tried a lot of things,” recalls Singer. “It couldn’t sound too much like a singing voice, but we couldn’t scream too much like an animal either. We wanted it to have a certain musical quality.”
“It’s very piercing,” says Morrow. Although she didn’t sing, “it felt like it was coming out of me. We played a lot with how wide the mouth should be and how physical it has to be coming from the whole body. It felt pretty brutal, in a great way.”
Hunter Schafer’s film “Cuckoo” has a shockingly “emotional” ending
One of the film’s most tense scenes is when the hooded woman runs down a dark street, chasing a frightened Gretchen as she rides her bike. “It was a fun day, although I definitely got some shin splints,” Morrow recalls with a laugh. “I was wearing high heels and Tilman said, ‘Would you like to wear more comfortable shoes?’ I said, ‘No, she would walk differently in high heels.'”
The hooded woman meets her end in a bloody battle with Gretchen, accompanied by the Italian pop song “Il Mio Prossimo Amore” by Loretta Goggi, which translates to “my next love.” Her death scene is surprisingly bittersweet: In his twisted medical experiments, King has used the hooded woman’s eggs to impregnate the resort’s female residents in a twisted attempt to create a species with her supernatural abilities.
Meanwhile, Gretchen mourns the loss of her mother recently and realizes that this once terrifying creature is also a mother with many “children” of her own.
“In some ways, our story is about understanding where behavior comes from,” says Singer. “I wanted to make it absolutely clear that she’s not a monster. We see her humanity in that moment – there’s something very familiar and familiar about her.”
“I’m glad that people are connecting with the film. I wanted it to be a thrilling ride, but it can also be very emotional if you’re open to it.”
