Kate Dickie: Black sludge was talk of 'Matriarch' horror set

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 21 (UPI) -- Kate Dickie said the black sludge in the horror film Matriarch, which premiered Oct. 11 at the Screamfest horror film festival, caused debate and discussion on the set.

"Would it drip out my mouth?" Dickie told UPI in a Zoom interview. "Would it pour? There was a lot of trial and error as we went along in the shoot."

In the film, which streams Friday on Hulu, Dickie, 51, plays Celia, a mother who has not seen her daughter, Laura (Jemima Rooper), since Laura left home. Laura is forced to stay with Celia while she recovers from a drug overdose, but discovers her mother is involved in some dark magic.

Writer/director Ben Steiner said he didn't anticipate the complexity of the black sludge when he created the mythology. Steiner said every day of the shoot involved some sort of meeting regarding the sludge.

"Every time I hear the word sludge, I kind of start getting PTSD," Steiner said. "We talked about the color of the sludge, the consistency of the sludge. We talked about sludge from every angle, every day."

Matriarch is full of black sludge and other creepy creatures in Celia's garden, but it's about more than that to Dickie and Rooper. For the actors, Matriarch also addresses a conflict between mother and daughter that's more universal.

"The best horror films only work when the center is pinned in something truthful and very real," Rooper, 40, said. "Then everything that springs from that can be as wild as you want it. If you don't have that, it won't work."

Dickie said Celia is less concerned with repairing her relationship with Laura than her daughter is. Matriarch reveals that Celia is involved in magic that keeps her young and involves the whole town.

"She's just so focused on something else to the detriment of everything with Laura, her daughter," Dickie said.

Steiner said those themes came through his screenplay unconsciously. In addition to the parental themes, Steiner said he realized he'd written a metaphor for consumerism, too, Celia's magic representing finite resources.

"Celia and her community are like Boomers who are riding the consumerist wave," Steiner said. "This is going to crash eventually."

Laura begins to suspect something is not quite right with her mother. However, the town deflects her questions, just as Steiner said too many people ignore very real environmental crises.

"Environmentally, we're all going to burn," Steiner said. "We're just going to keep riding it for as long as we can and no one's really going to talk about where this is going or whether it's going to end."

Steiner said one of his major horror influences was The Omen. While he's not comparing Matriarch to the Satanic classic, Steiner said he hopes he followed The Omen's lead.

"All of this bad mythology and brilliant nonsense, but nonsense all the same, is happening to this loving couple," Steiner said. "There's a tragedy at the heart of The Omen, which is why it's so good."