Johanna Isaacson
In March 2025 Aislinn Clarke visited my alma mater, University of California, Santa Cruz as part of a symposium exploring creative and critical intersections in the work of UCSC and Queens University Belfast faculty. I was fortunate to attend a screening of Aislinn’s amazing new folk horror film, Fréwaka, and to have the opportunity, along with Literature professor Renée Fox, to interview the writer/director in front of a live audience.
Fréwaka is an atmospheric, brilliantly-acted, Irish language film in which Shoo (Clare Monnelly), a young woman grieving her recently deceased mother, is sent to a rural town to care for Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), a disabled older woman whose home is either haunted by fearful memories or demonic fairies. The women seem to be opposites and antagonists, but, like the thorny roots which give their name to the film, their struggles and lives are complexly tangled.
Aislinn is very busy screening Fréwaka at festivals around the world, where it has been received with great enthusiasm in anticipation of its release on Shudder this week (Friday April 25, 2025). However, she still generously agreed to an interview between California and Ireland via Zoom.
Check out the trailer for Fréwaka, in theatres and streaming on Shudder
JI: Hi, Aislinn. I’m so glad we met at the UCSC/QUB symposium, where I was privileged to interview you alongside UCSC Professor Renée Fox. At this event we were treated to a preview of your film Fréwaka, which the audience received rapturously, followed by an enlightening interview. Here. I’m hoping to return to some of the themes we discussed that evening for a wider audience.
So just as an introduction. Can you say a bit about how you knew you wanted to become a filmmaker, and how you made that journey?
AC: Well, I as a kid, I loved movies. My dad was a big film fan. I’m from a very working-class kind of blue-collar background. My dad drove a van for a bakery, and my mom was a stay-at-home mother, and I didn’t know anyone that worked in the film industry in Ireland. Northern Ireland had the worst child poverty in Europe at that time and there was no industry, really to speak of, around me at all.
And even though we watched a lot of movies, and my dad even had a 16mm camera, and we filmed a couple of little skits, it didn’t occur to me that you could actually make films professionally. The idea that making films was an option at all was completely alien to me. I remember watching Nightmare on Elm Street, and thinking, how did they do this? And I remember thinking, oh, they must all just get together like a bunch of friends and do it. I didn’t even know that directors were a thing, but I loved films my whole life, and if you had asked me as a child, if I knew it was an option, I would have said, that’s what I want to do. I made up my own little stories and stuff, and we made short films with Barbie where she kept breaking her legs. We unraveled my mother’s tampons to make bandages and made all kinds of splints and stuff.
But then, I had my son when I was 17 and, while that might ruin your life, it jolted me into some sort of, oh my God! What am I going to do? I’m an adult. I have to do something. And I was a single parent, but I went to university. I was the first person in my family to even consider doing such things. And, actually, my parents thought it was kind of crazy. In other families that would be like, of course, or whatever, but my family was like, are you sure? I mean, shouldn’t you just get a job?
So, I went to university. But I thought I needed to get a job and study English and be a teacher or something. And I studied English and Irish at first, with that idea in mind. Get a real job, you know. But then I had a film module, that was just one of those little throwaway ones that you can do for credits, and I really loved it so much, and I really didn’t love the other stuff nearly as much. So, before my first year was finished, I decided to just abandon everything and go all in with film. And that’s what I did. And yeah, I guess it worked out for me. But my parents were already thinking college was crazy enough, and now this film idea is even worse.
JI: Yeah, I teach at a community college and I’m always surprised when I have students who tell me their parents really didn’t want them to go to college. It seems like a such a strain to get to the next step when you don’t have that encouragement.
AC: Yeah, when you don’t have the networks and the contacts and all that.
JI: Yeah, absolutely. Well, then, I’m just going to skip forward and mention that at the UCSC event where we met, the audience was totally captivated by your new film, Fréwaka. We found it atmospheric, haunting, and it struck me as a modern feminist tale that resonated with the timeless atmosphere of folk horror. How did the idea come to you? Were there any particular influences you were thinking of when you were writing it?
AC: Well, I think that influences in terms of other films are definitely there, and I think they’re largely subconscious for me. I mean, The Wicker Man is always going to be something that’s very obvious when you’re talking about folk horror. But outside of that I’ve had people say, oh, you know Neil Jordan, The Company of Wolves, or whatever. And I said, you know, I really love that film, and I can see now that it’s there in some way. But I was more thinking about what should an Irish language horror film be for me as a filmmaker? So, I had written an Irish language film for another director a few years ago, and the producer said, Hey, Aislinn, you’ve got Irish. Why don’t you write an Irish language horror film? And I didn’t say yes. It never occurred to me before, and I didn’t say yes right away, because I didn’t want it to be gimmicky, or just do it for no reason. I didn’t want to just try to take some English language script and translate it. So, I thought about it for a while. Everything came out of me thinking, why would I? What am I? Why am I doing this in Irish? And what am I saying about Irishness, about Irish people? Where are we now? What are we still carrying around with us? What do we need to get rid of?
I’m offering no big answer for where we go from here, but I’m acknowledging that we’ve got incredible inherited cultural trauma from our ancestors even hundreds of years ago. We’ve got baggage upon baggage. We lost a large percentage of our population around the time of the famine, through starvation or emigration, largely to America. And we had the influence of Catholic Church, we had civil wars, we had Magdalene laundries. So, the film is me exploring that stuff that is still so pressing. That’s where we are, even though the public face of the Irish is very friendly, and as we say, a good crack. You know, we like a Guinness, and a bit of song, and a joke, and all that. But actually, I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I can fairly confidently say that privately there’s a lot of pain in families. And that there’s a habit of burying things, not dealing with them, just keeping a strong upper lip and moving forward. Even in the language, it’s kind of ingrained. So, in Irish, if you say I am sad, you say ‘tá brón orm,’ and it means there is sadness on me. It’s like feelings are an external force. So, they can be like Ripley and the alien, you know, on her face. If you don’t acknowledge it, it’ll pass. It’s not you. It’s external. And I think that’s just a demonstration of cognitive dissonance that’s inflicted quite a lot of pain. And it doesn’t help us to deal with anything.
JI: Yeah, I love that in Fréwaka, because the historical pain and references are literally underground. And the characters are very brave, dealing with it with this kind of flinty humor, but you can see the pain in their stances and fleeting expressions.
AC: Yeah. So, for me, it’s a really Irish film. And that’s what I was thinking of rather than making a certain type of film, or in terms of references. I was more interested in talking to the DP about images. So, I remember I was talking about Bergman’s Persona, for example, which isn’t a horror film at all. And I didn’t have in the top part of my brain films that were direct references. But I think they’re in there. It’s just that I wasn’t necessarily consciously channeling them.
JI: Oh, Persona, that connection just gave me galaxy brain. The relationship between Shoo and Peig really resonates with this intense melding of Persona’s two woman protagonists, the kind of transference you see between women when they recognize each other.
So, if I’m not mistaken, you’re one of very few Northern Irish women filmmakers. And Fréwaka is discussed as the first Irish language horror film. Did your unique position make it difficult to get the film made? How did it come about?
AC: Well, I’ve talked about this before in other areas. But there’s something about firsts. You get it all the time as a woman in film, where people will say something is the first of something, and then it’s almost like the memory gets wiped constantly. So, for example, Lexi Alexander did The Punisher for Marvel, and then, a few years ago, everyone was talking about Eternals as the first Marvel film by a woman. I was like, well, Lexi actually did this ten years ago. And so, I think there’s a bit of that memory holing that happens. And there was another Irish language film that came out in 2010, I think, called Na Cloighne, which means “The Heads,” and everyone’s forgotten about it. It won an IFTA. IFTAs are the Irish Oscars (Irish Film and Television Academy). So, because these things get forgotten, I’m always wary about firsts. It’s always something that’s put on me externally, and at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter to me. I want the film to be judged for what it is rather than for people to say, oh, I should watch this because it’s the first this, that, or the other. It was similar with my first film, The Devil’s Doorway (2018). But, in general, I don’t think Fréwaka is the first Irish language horror movie. But I also don’t think that really matters very much.
And the second part of your question was, about whether it was difficult to get made? Actually no, because the thing that we have that you don’t have in Hollywood is public financing for stuff like this. So, in pretty much all of Europe, we have bodies that are set up for things like film or different forms of art. And this film was financed by something called Cine4. TG4 is our Irish language, broadcasting network, and they had a scheme called Cine4, and they made The Quiet Girl which was nominated for an Oscar a couple of years ago. So Fréwaka was largely financed by that. So here, you don’t have the same sort of structure as they have in Hollywood where either you’re a studio film or it’s independent. And in Hollywood the money’s coming from all these different pockets and a lot of finance. So, you’re one of the lucky few here to get that finance, but once you have it, that’s it. And in fact, they often don’t let you take more from anywhere else. There’s a tremendous freedom to that, and I think I do feel sorry for my peers in the States where it’s gotten a lot harder in many ways, without that public support. So, in that sense, once we applied for it, once we got the financing, it was pretty straightforward.
JI: That’s great to hear. Yet another reason to get out of the US. Shifting gears, I wanted to discuss the two main characters in your film: Peig, an older, rural Irish speaking woman, who is confined to her home, and Shoo, a younger urban, bilingual woman who’s come to Peig’s home as a health care worker. I’m really interested in the relationship between these two women. Fréwaka refreshingly diverges from films like Midsommar, where the young woman who explores the alternate world of folk horror is depicted as a complete outsider, and it that sense, exoticizes a “foreign” culture. Here, instead, Shoo has a complex and entangled relationship to the liminal space she enters. What made you choose this dichotomous pair as the centers of the film?
AC: So, it’s kind of like Ireland. We’re in this moment where there’s a lot of attention on Ireland, and there’s a lot of stuff happening in different art forms, and we have some really great leftist actors like Saoirse Ronan, Andrew Mezcal, Paul Mescal, and Cillian Murphy. And the Irish in general are known, at the moment, for being progressive. We’re not making all the same mistakes that seem to be happening everywhere else. There have been a few uprisings of the right in Ireland, but it’s not nearly as bad as it is in the UK or as it is in America or parts of Europe. So, Irish people are very proud of this, that we’re very progressive and properly liberal, and we’ve got an empathetic society. And Shoo represents this. She’s modern, she’s progressive. She lives in Dublin, a big metropolitan city. And she’s in an unconventional relationship with a same-sex partner, Mila, who is a Ukrainian immigrant. She’s all these very modern things.
And then she’s sent to what in her head is going to be the very traditional rural old Ireland where there’s Catholicism and there’s paganism and a lot of staid old ways. But actually, when she gets to meet Peig, it turns out that they have way more in common than that, and they share more than they don’t. And I think those moments are really meaningful. I kind of see the film as being like a Platonic love story, you know, like an intergenerational friendship that develops and that’s really sweet. And they discover each other through little humorous moments. Peig will say something that’s quite funny and sort of dry, and Shoo will kind of go, yeah, okay. So gradually Peig is revealed. All these layers are taken off, and she’s not the stuffy, traditional person that Shoo thought she was going to be.
JI: Yeah, I love that it’s often this dry humor and this kind of toughness that bonds them. I think Shoo admires Peig for being so ornery.
AC: She does. A lot of people in Ireland say that it’s the Irish mommy who holds everything together, and we all know if there’s a funeral, if there’s anything that needs doing, it’ll be the women in the family who pull everything together and tell everybody what to do. So, they’re not shy and retiring. This, and also Peig’s great sense of humor, reflects the Irish women that I know. And I was talking about this recently in terms of the overused term, “strong female characters.” Very often it’s used to mean role models, you know, people who are badasses, who kick the ass of the villain, or whatever. But Peig and Shoo are actually quite weird. They’re sort of twisty people, but they’re human. They’re human and layered, and kind of what I want to see on the screen.
JI: Yes, they are much more interesting than the generic “strong female lead,” which can be so sanitizing. I also thought that Fréwaka is so smart in addressing women’s reproductive labor, my obsession. There’s a point in the film where Peig says that the monsters tend to attack at events like weddings, funerals, and births. And my first thought was, yes, that makes sense, those are moments of transition. But then Peig goes on to say these the spirits are attracted by women’s labor during these moments, which is interesting in terms of buried truths, because women’s labor tends to be invisible and naturalized.
My next question was to note that part of Fréwaka’s compelling mystery for a global audience is its immersion in Irish language and folk culture. From my California perspective, you struck a beautiful balance of grounding your film in a specific culture while bringing an international audience in. Were you navigating this when you were working on the film in any particular way?
AC: I really was because I’m very conscious of horror and its potential to be populist and to reach a lot of people. And that’s what you want. If you make a movie, you want a lot of people to see it. So that’s the point. And actually, it was a funny one, because usually if you’re working with producers or studios, they are super focused on the audience, because of the structure of finance. It’s a cultural product, that’s the concern of the financers. But in this case, they were really concerned that the language was impeccable; like, they’re really over that like a rash, you know, and to make sure that the language is curated properly. But they weren’t so concerned with other aspects, especially not with horror. They were basically saying, we’ve never done horror. They had no idea what’s going on, in terms of horror. And in some instances, I had to argue for stuff that would connect to popular audiences. And I knew that horror fans are really hungry for content, very loyal. We weren’t going to turn our backs on that. Whereas the people that were in charge of the money weren’t focused on that as much. So, I had to make sure that we kept in things that were horror tropey. So, you know, you’ve got the haunted basement scene, and you’ve got the haunted house as well. And for me it’s about tethering to something familiar, because so much of it is unfamiliar to people from other cultures, and I don’t want it to be completely alienating. I don’t want to feel too foreign and niche. I wanted to keep it hooked to the genre, for a horror audience in the world. But that was really just me. Nobody else cared about that.
JI: Your efforts really paid off for this horror fan. The film nailed gothic and folk horror tropes, but I didn’t feel like you were holding back on cultural specificity. I like when films treat me like a smart person, and Fréwaka did that.
AC: I make films for the people who are thinking about it, and who are thoughtful.
JI: Thank you for that! My next question is one we talked about at the conference a bit. I’m interested in the ambiguous role of monsters in horror films, both as threats and as repressed truths. There has been a lot of interesting work in horror scholarship that has been done on complicating the monster, such as Robin Wood’s notion that the monster represents everything normalcy oppresses and represses or Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “monster theory” that sees monsters as figures of liminality and category refusal or Barbara Creed’s recent revisions of her views of the monstrous feminine that looks at contemporary woman-driven horror as focusing on a figure in revolt. Do you have thoughts on Fréwaka’s “monster” as a vision of psychological and historical repression and/or revolt? Or in general, how would you describe the monster in Fréwaka? What role does it have in the narrative?
AC: Yeah, so in Ireland we have something called Na Sídhe which in other cultures would be translated as fairies. But with fairies I think Tinker Bell. People think of cute, sweet little things, and Irish fairies are not like that at all. They’re malevolent, almost demonic. They want us to suffer. That is the pervasive thing in the Irish fairy tales. They want to create suffering and pain for the Irish people. And having been raised very much steeped in these stories, I’ve been thinking about this since childhood. Like, what is their problem? Why do they want to put us through all of this? And my take on it is that it’s like we created a colonized people because we’re in this mess. They were here before us and then we landed here somehow. I don’t think that’s even explained. But we drove them underground. We drove them into the otherworld, the mythical place, and they’re pissed off, and they want us to suffer. So, it’s like we, as a colonized people, created this race of colonized people to express what we couldn’t. We could express through art and stories how we were feeling via them, and it has a kind of masochistic self-harming element to it which is extremely Irish as well. It’s like we’re putting on a hair shirt or making a rod to beat our own backs. I think that’s where they come from, and that’s the embodiment of them that I have.
But they also represent bureaucracy. In Fréwaka, when Peig discusses women’s work, she also mentions bureaucracy. I’m really interested in the insidious role of paperwork. I’m thinking of the foundation of the Irish state and after the Easter rising, the early part of last century, and how instantly women were written into the constitution. Women were written back into their home, back into the kitchen, written into essentially servitude, domestic servitude as mothers with no other ambition, and that this was enshrined in our actual constitution. So, I think bureaucracy has been a way that women have been held down in Ireland, not least most recently, with the whole abortion debate. So now, there’s technically access to abortion. But there isn’t really in practice. It’s still extremely hard for women to get abortions because of the bureaucratic process that’s involved. Nobody wants to actually carry the can for the responsibility of having signed off on one. So, I see the Na Sídhe as also being bureaucratic. And there’s these arbitrary rules, and you dare not break these rules because your bed will be full of thorns for the rest of your life, or that kind of thing.
JI: That makes so much sense. I love that the Na Sídhe disguises itself as an inspector from Shoo’s employer. She’s so mischievous, cold, and funny. The actor’s got great comic timing and I love the distorted way she’s filmed.
My next question is about the title. I would imagine that you have encountered some pressure to translate Fréwaka. Can you say a little about why you chose to keep the title in Irish, and what it means?
AC: Yeah. So, the title Fréwaka in Irish that is spelled ‘f r e a m h a c h a.’ So it’s a complicated Irish word, and if you speak Irish, you know that it is pronounced to sound like Fréwaka whereas anyone in any other country would be like, what the hell, how am I supposed to say that?
We did change it for international sales. And, of course, this is not a concern of Cine 4, the principal funders, because they’re making Irish language content. But when we got Shudder on board, and international sales, that’s not going to really work. But I didn’t want to just translate it directly, because the English word “roots” is just kind of weak and weedy, doesn’t really have the heft of the Irish word. It’s a classic translation thing where something means the same thing but it doesn’t, really. So, in Irish the word carries all this weight of roots that are thick and heavy and intertwined, and they’re deep in the ground, and you have to get your spade and really dig them out, and it’s a lot of work, and you’re not going to be able to plant anything. They come with all of that. It’s kind of like the metaphor of inherited generational trauma, all of the baggage, and the weight that you have to unpack and take out. I didn’t want to just go with the English. So, the compromise was the spelling as it is now, which is Fréwaka, which in Irish is insane. I do get Irish people who speak Irish saying to me, what’s going on with the W. And the K? We don’t even have those in Irish language.
JI: Interesting, I didn’t realize the title was a compromise! My next question is about the gothic, rural house that figures heavily in Fréwaka as Peig and Shoo encounter their demons. It was one of my favorite “characters.” Can you say a bit about how you decided on this location, and how it influenced the film?
AC: I wanted to have a place that looked really lived in and didn’t just look like you just got your set dresser in. And you know the way you can see that. Sometimes you want the dust and the weight and the clutter of the texture of someone actually living there for decades. And I also wanted a house that hadn’t been used before, and Ireland’s a small place, and we only have so many of those big old houses. So, I knew that was going to be hard. You see a lot of the same houses used over and over again. There’s a place called Loftus Hall, which is in practically every Irish film ever made. So that was my mission. Find somewhere that nobody’s ever been in before. But it ended up being the first place we looked at. We were supposed to be on completely the other side of the country for locations, but the producer said someone has told me about this house. It’s down at the border. Let’s go and see it. And I was like, that’s actually where I’m from. But he didn’t know that. So, we went down there to look at it, and as soon as I saw it —it’s in the middle of the forest on the Irish border— I was like I’ve been here before. I was there at a party there when I was like 20. My brother was in a band, and they were hired to play for the guy who owns the house. It’s owned by this elderly man, in his nineties, and his son who’s in his fifties, and they lived there the whole time we were shooting. But it had everything I needed, because it had never been shot in before, and I think it had never been shot in before because of its position on the Irish border. Until after the Good Friday agreement, nobody was shooting there. It was too dangerous. But now, of course, it’s totally fine. And then it also had all of the clutter and just the heft of the stuff and the weight and the dust, like stacks of magazines, old newspapers from 1957, this kind of thing. So, while we did do our own set dressing, we didn’t do it everywhere, and there were some spaces that we barely touched – the kitchen, for example. All we did was hang herbs in the window. We didn’t do anything else, all of the spices and the cups, and that’s just what our kitchen looks like. And the attic space at the end. We put a couple of things in there like a taxidermy, and a rock, a horse, a couple of things like that, and the mirrors. That’s part of the story. But everything else was just that’s what they have. It was just their stacks of things. So, it was so ideal, because creating that sense of history would be actually really expensive from a production, design point of view. Dust is not that easy to create, you know. So yeah, it was perfect. It wouldn’t have been the same anywhere else.
JI: Yes, there was so much to look at, but nothing seemed overly curated or precious. I’m wondering about whether you’ve had a chance to watch Fréwaka with many audiences? Were there any reactions that particularly pleased or surprised you?
AC: I was trying yesterday, and I can’t even count how many times I’ve watched it with audiences because I’ve been doing the film festival circuit since August last year. Fréwaka opened at Locarno, in Switzerland, which is a really big deal in Europe, but Americans have never heard of it. But it’s a big one here, and since then I’ve been everywhere. I did a screening last night, actually, and I’ve got another. The film’s coming out next week, so I’ve got like three left. But I’m going to Transylvania and I’m going to Estonia. I’ve been all across the world at this point. I must have done fifty screenings, and they’ve been really phenomenal. I mean, the first one that I did was terrifying. Because you never know if people are going to connect at all. At that point, you’re so close to it you feel like people might think it’s just totally crazy. But it’s always been really warmly received, actually beyond my expectation. And strangely, particularly in the States. But everywhere, there’s a lot of young people that are super into it. I’m talking like 19 to 25-year-olds, even a bit younger, sometimes, coming up to me in groups and being like, Oh, my God! We love this film. I was not expecting that. I think that’s really nice, actually that it’s reaching them. I’ve been surprised, actually, at how warm and universal it’s turned out to be, because if you’re doing film festival, you’ll get some people who are like, I hated this whatever. But I haven’t had that at all. I haven’t had any negative experiences. It’s potentially so niche, but it’s somehow reaching people.
JI: I’m not surprised. I can see how young people would connect with a story of a young hip urban person exploring this mysterious haunted space and discovering themselves in that encounter. I saw lot of my own situation in it, not only with women’s issues and intergenerational issues, but also in Shoo’s relationship to precarious labor, which is so universal to people nowadays.
Finally, do you want to say anything about current film projects you are working on and how they are or aren’t related to the themes in Fréwaka?
AC: I don’t really ever think of the previous film when I’m working on a new one. For one thing I’m always juggling several different projects at various stages, because that’s the reality particularly in independent film. You just never know which project is going to get financed first. I have certain interests that come up again, but it’s not always in an intentional way. Certain motifs and themes recur – doors, Catholicism, inter-generational friendships, motherhood, child sacrifice, dark revelations about malevolent systems underpinning the world, eye damage.
Clare (Monnelly, who plays Shoo) sent me a review recently that said “find someone who loves you as much as Aislinn Clarke loves a pair of bleeding eyes” and I had to laugh because I do love a bit of eye damage! As a child I remember watching horror films and being so frustrated with some final girl who keeps running up the stairs and screaming uselessly instead of doing something. I remember me and my sister discussing what we would do if being attacked and we decided we would always go for the eyes. This is even creepier if you picture us as we were, non twins always dressed like twins, sharing an attic bedroom and speaking in code and made up languages. Maybe my next film should be about us. Spoiler: we always go for the eyes.
RELATED: Our review of Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway.
Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and an editor of Horror Studies and Blind Field Journal. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (2022) from Common Notions Press and The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books. Her book What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is forthcoming from Die Die Books.
