Cult Film Forum Talks to the Twisted Twins

"FrightFest draws ever closer and this week we catch up with The Twisted Twins themselves Jen and Sylvia Soska. We discuss the Grindhouse brilliance of Dead Hooker in a Trunk and their new surgically frightening flick American Mary, which will have its UK debut at Film4 FrightFest at the end of the month."

Before we headed across the ocean, courtesy of Universal Pictures, to the utterly cool Fright Fest in London, we had the opportunity to have a chat with Cult Film Forum about humble beginnings of DEAD HOOKER IN A TRUNK to the surgical sophomore of AMERICAN MARY, severe differences between the twins, comic nerdiness, and horror films that strike our fancy pretty fucking hard.

Do you think the audience will share the same emotional journey as Mary by the end of the film?  

S: God willing. I don’t like to preach in films, I don’t like to have a final moment where we tell the audience ‘this is how you should feel about this’. You definitely don’t get that in MARY. You get to make your mind up about the character, what she goes through, and her own actions in those events. I feel that a lot of films make characters without flaw and I love flaws. The film is full of deeply flawed characters that you can either empathize with or hate. From the reactions at test screenings and at the market screening in Cannes, the audiences have been sharing that journey with Mary.  

J: The experience you get from watching a film depends so highly on the individual. Everyone will take something different from it. I know what I take from it and I hope others will get the same or something of equal value. There are people who will love Mary and others that will villainize her. I’ve seen both reactions already. She’s an incredibly complex character. I find too often particularly in North American cinema the characters are black and white. You have no doubt who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. That’s just not realist. In reality, we’re all shades of grey. Maybe we wake up every morning wanting to be our best, but we’re only human. We all say things we wish we could take back, we all make decisions we regret. Sometimes we do things we hate ourselves for and it eats away at us. Sometimes, we’re everything we ever wanted to be and better. Mary is a real person. Every character in the film is flawed and human and I feel that makes them beautiful and fascinating, just like real people. I loved the hero in I SAW THE DEVIL and the moral battles he was locked in. It made him human. There’s speculation on whether those flaws made him any less of the hero, but, again, that’s all relative to the individual.

Check the whole rad interview here!!

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to support and promote the new film. It makes a world of difference and we are dying for everyone to get the opportunity to check out the flick!

-Sylv