Director of The curse. The origin, Arkasha Stevenson was destined to become a journalist-photographer. She took classes for it after high school, in Los Angeles. She will even work, for a while, for the Los Angeles Times. “I really enjoyed doing that, until I discovered the films of David Lynch. My heart and mind exploded.”she remembers. The first films she makes, she believes, will be deeply informed by her experience as a journalist.
In 2015, his short film, Vessels, the story of a transsexual who plans a dangerous operation to increase her femininity, won the Iris prize for works on an LGBT subject. The interest aroused by her film opened the doors to television for which she produced episodes of series. She remembers the filming of Pineapple, co-written with Tim Smith, filmed near Yosemite in a ghost town. All the local residents joined in the filming: “It was like a community film experience. »
The storyline of a prequel of The curse (1976), by Richard Donner (1930-2021), had been in development for years. One of the producers suggested that she read it. Arkasha Stevenson admits to having approached it with a certain skepticism. “All these prequels Or sequels are often disappointing and The curse is such an extraordinary film. How to compete? Then Tim Smith and I read the script and noticed that this is the first time in the entire franchise that the main character is a woman. That’s what got us excited. »
For Arkasha Stevenson and her writing partner, the whole story revolved around a birth. “This allowed us to talk about anatomy, to feminize the issues of what we call body horror and to materialize my most intimate fears. There are a lot of women in this story which takes place in an orphanage for young girls, and what interested us was also describing the relationships between them. »
Political speech
This desire to emphasize the feminine issues of the story convinced the studio managers. “At the center of the film, there is an initial trauma repressed by the main character which matters more than the purely supernatural elements of the story. » Should we also see, in the fact of having located this story in Italy in the early 1970s, a particular political discourse?
Arkasha Stevenson recognizes that the real subject of the film is not the devil, but the spiritualization of terror and how it is used as a political tool. “The situation in Italy at the time, with the emergence and activity of neofascist groups, is unfortunately quite close to what is happening today in America”, she judges. During scouting, during a visit to an exhibition on the Shoah in Rome, she came across this quote from Hitler: “If we have terror, we have no need of God. » A terrible statement which will constitute the deep heart of his film.
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