Just when you thought you’d managed to shake off your fear of candles after Shudder’s 2020 sensation, Host, the streaming service brings us yet another crepuscular creep show with BAFTA nominated British filmmaker Corinna Faith’s The Power, which appeared on 2018’s Brit List of best unproduced scripts.
Told from a female perspective, with the female experience used to inform the horror aspects of the film, The Power takes place in 1974, when Britain was preparing for electrical blackouts across the country as a result of the miners’ strikes. Trainee nurse Val (Rose Williams) arrives for her first day at the crumbling East London Royal Infirmary and, with most of the patients and staff evacuated to another hospital, she is forced to work the much-darker-than-usual night shift. And if that weren’t enough for a first day, the hospital walls hold a sinister secret, forcing Val to face both her own traumatic past and deepest fears in order to confront the malevolent force that’s intent on destroying everything around her.
The Power premieres on Shudder today, April 8th, so we sat down with Faith who revealed the genesis behind her classic ghost story which administers not only a healthy dose of dread, but also a thought-provoking dissection of the persistent resistance to silence and passivity that came with the #MeToo movement.
Words: Howard Gorman
