From writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods comes Heretic, a harrowing descent into a subject many think about, but few openly discuss — religion, and how our faith can guide and sustain, but also entrap and derail when dogma and scripture are wielded by nefarious means. Beck and Woods unleash a Hannibal Lecter of the soul, who delights in quoting complex religious philosophy. “We thought it would be special to write something frightening where the scares emerge from the dialogue — through its words and ideas.”
The story of one man’s effort to preach the one true religion, Heretic weaponises the familiar charms of star Hugh Grant, resulting in one of his most indelible and delicious roles as the charming, compelling and ultimately diabolical Mr. Reed.
Heretic mixes elements of horror and psychological thriller as it casually unfolds into an intricate
cat-and-mouse game after two Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) ring his doorbell.
Crackling with rich dialogue and cerebral debate, it follows the young believers as they match wits with their host’s rarefied intellect. Forced to choose between belief and disbelief, they find themselves plunged into the darkest labyrinths of Reed’s mind.
“When you sit in a room and try to think of scary ideas for a movie, for us there’s nothing more terrifying than death,” says co-writer-director Bryan Woods. “All horror movies in one way or another are about death — it’s the thing we fear most in life, and we use religion to try and make sense of what happens
when we die so we can feel safe. But when we delve too deep into the subject, sometimes we’re left feeling less safe.”
“Heretic is about faith, self-determination, belief, caution, friendship, curiosity, and our innate desire as human beings to solve the great mysteries of our existence,” says producer Stacey Sher.
Two young missionaries are forced to prove their faith when they knock on the wrong door and are greeted by a diabolical Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), becoming ensnared in his deadly game of cat-and-mouse.
Scott Beck and Bryan Woods – A Dynamic Duo
Best friends since their childhood in Bettendorf, Iowa, writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods have developed a cinematic partnership over a decade resulting in some of the most visceral and terrifying works in memory, including A Quiet Place, their 2018 breakthrough smash as screenwriters.
Through their subsequent works as writer-directors, Beck and Woods mastered the fine art of terrorising audiences with everything from cosmic raptors (the futuristic adventure-thriller 65) to rural haunted houses (the slasher Haunt) to the scariest place of all — the human mind (The Boogeyman, based on Stephen King’s short story).
Woods and Beck exude a palpable love of the cinema — in addition to filmmaking, the duo recently opened an arthouse cinema in Davenport, Iowa, near where they were raised.
“We are best friends first and foremost, and we love movies — we’ve been making them together since we were children and we continue to write, direct and discuss movies every day together,” says Woods. “There’s always been this wonderful competitive collaboration when we work together, where we push each other to do better.”
Adds Beck: “It’s always about trying to surprise the other person. We write, direct and produce 100 per cent side-by-side, so there is a degree of letting each other be our first audience, which is exciting. Even before we begin writing something, we’re discussing a scene’s tenets and individual beats. Because we’ve known each other for so long, we’ve gone through personal and professional setbacks and failures. But it all funnels its way back into the work.”
With Heretic, a psychological thriller about Mormon missionaries who find themselves entrapped in the clutches of a different kind of screen monster — one who loves to talk, in words that become a coercive weapon — Beck and Woods were presented with a wholly new creative challenge: marrying deep religious conversation with the horror movie.
“For a long time, Scott and I have talked about doing a movie about religion and investigating religion. Big life questions have always surrounded us, and cults were a fascination from an early age,” says Woods. “We thought it would be cool to make something in the vein of Inherit the Wind, where religion intersects with science, or Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, melding religion with a science-fiction story.
The kernel of Heretic emerged when they were teenagers making short films in college. While location scouting in Iowa for a short film about Armageddon, they knocked on the door of a sweet elderly couple whose property was surrounded by a white-picket fence. Invited inside their quaint and pristine domain, the couple offered tea and conversation — and much more.”
“They were the most unassuming people imaginable, and we started telling them about our little movie about the end of the world in which a meteor arrives and destroys all life on Earth,” says Woods. “As they were sipping their tea and nodding along, they told us they knew the meteor was coming — in fact, it was
arriving in a couple of months and would wipe us out completely. We realised we were stuck in the house as this un-setting undertone crept into our conversation.”
Beck and Woods have long been drawn to topical horror movies like Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers — pop entertainment commenting on the Vietnam War and the Red Scare, respectively.
“These are genre movies and perennial favourites in our cinematic lexicon, addressing social concerns while uncovering deeper truths for the audience,” says Beck. “With Heretic, we wanted to provoke our audience into thinking about how religion fits into their lives, and how they’ve come to these conclusions.”
“We thought it would be special to write something frightening where the scares emerge from the dialogue — through its words and ideas,” Woods continues. “We hadn’t seen that before, and if we did our job effectively, the audience could bring their own ideas about religion to the movie — what we believe or don’t believe.”
They wrote an early draft of Heretic as a spec script, without a producer attached. But after getting stuck on the story’s multi-dimensional central character, Mr. Reed, who is awash in cerebral theories about religion, philosophy and the meaning of life and death, they put the script aside and set about writing
A Quiet Place.
“We put it on hold because we felt we needed to learn more about religion to catch up with Reed’s knowledge,” says Woods. “As we started writing this complex character, we realized that he’s a genius who knows more about the subject than we could ever know in our lifetime, or at least knew at the
time.”
By the time they came back to the project, they had read up on the major religions and experienced life events that could be infused into the script, including Woods’ marriage to a Mormon. Both filmmakers had grown up with religion, but it wasn’t until they sat down and engaged in dialogue with actual Mormon missionaries that they could muster up the confidence to complete the script.
“We have a ton of close friends from different faiths, from basic Christianity and Scientology to Mormonism, which we’ve become very close to and fascinated by,” says Woods. “We started getting this idea about two female missionaries who knock on the wrong door — and how that could be a platform
for a discussion on the major religions. How religion became a system of control also became very interesting to us.”
That system of control is manifested in the character of Mr. Reed, who at first glance is a kindly old man who wants to engage in discourse with his young visitors. But as the story unfolds, and Reed’s encyclopedic knowledge of the subject hits the missionaries by force, the girls realize they are trapped
inside something bigger than all of them.
After the success of A Quiet Place, which grossed nearly $400 million at the box office, Heretic made its way in completed form to Sher, who found it thought-provoking and spectacular in equal measure.
“What stood out for me was how terrifying Heretic was, and how meticulously researched,” says Sher. “The characters are extraordinary in their depth, but it’s also a lot of fun. This is a genre movie combining suspense and horror that’s also provocative and happens to be about something. The audience goes on a roller coaster ride, but they leave the theater thinking about some seriously heavy stuff.”
The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste
Heretic opens on a bawdy exchange between Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, young missionaries taking a break from ringing doorbells and baptizing converts in suburban Colorado. Sister Paxton (Chloe East) is naïve and just learning about the mysteries of Magnum condoms, while Barnes (Sophie Thatcher), a transplant from the streets of Philadelphia, has more hard knocks, nursing the wounds of her father’s death, and her own near-death experience.
In Paxton and Barnes, the filmmakers wanted to create smart yet searching characters in the mold of the missionaries they met when they were researching the script.
“Sometimes you could perceive this almost surface-level naivete in the missionaries we spent time with, which is easy to laugh at and color a certain way in the writing,” says Woods. “But we found them to be super smart and cool and even badass in their views on religion, society and culture. We wove that into our characters, because what we wanted most from Paxton and Barnes was for Reed to underestimate them.”
One gift to the production was the fact that both Thatcher and East had grown up in the Mormon church, both leaving the fold as teenagers to become actors.
Like the intricately wired and deceptively staid suburban home that comes to entrap Paxton and Barnes on their mission, their host Mr. Reed at first glance appears harmless, effusive and unassuming as he ushers his young visitors inside his sanctum on a rainy afternoon.
But as Heretic unfolds, and the Sisters become prisoners of Reed’s garrulous machinations, a different portrait of the man emerges. Isolated in his fortress of a home, immersed in simulation theory and Dante’s Inferno, Reed has barricaded himself inside the singular study of religion, and more specifically religious control.
“This is a very complex and curious mind at work, who is experimenting, investigating, simulating and trying to uncover the one true religion in the confines of his suburban home,” says Woods. “He’s going to extreme lengths to find that answer for himself.
“He’s inspired by some people I’ve known who for whatever reason have always found themselves a bit lonely and have compensated with attention-seeking pranks and magic tricks and provocative outspokenness in debate,” says Grant. “Reed was probably an academic and teacher, one who attracted
quite a following among his students — but who was at some point encouraged to leave the university by the authorities.”
As background for the role, Grant studied religious iconoclasts like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and researched serial killers and cult leaders to find out what motivated them to do evil.
Set in suburban Colorado, predominantly inside Mr. Reed’s house, Heretic filmed not on location, but in Vancouver, where production designer Phil Messina (The Sixth Sense, The Hunger Games) constructed multiple sets representing the successive interior rooms of the Reed home. With its tiny windows, locked
doors and deceptive corridors, this is every inch Reed’s world: a dark realm containing multitudes, not unlike his mind.
For a story so rife with dialogue and religious debate, the filmmakers did not want Heretic to feel like a stage play, and tapped Chung-hoon and Messina and to bring Reed’s sinister fortress to life as cinematically as possible. “We talked early on about making sure the house is a character in its own right — a fourth character that looms over the three principal characters,” says Woods. “The claustrophobia comes out of that.”
“We had to figure out the psychology of Reed early on to understand why his house appears the way it does, serving as a kind of weapon against his young visitors,” says Beck. “Reed is God-playing in a way, pulling these characters through each room so it feels like a gauntlet or a game, consistently evolving to worse and worse places. It became about marrying the character of Reed with the production design and finding a methodology behind it to show how his mind works.”
To shoot the tight corridors and uncanny, vertiginous spaces in the house, the filmmakers brought on veteran cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, best known for his acclaimed and starkly beautiful genre-bending films with director Park Chan-wook, including acrobatic fights and violent revenge in Oldboy, the gorgeous canvasses and tender sex scenes of The Handmaiden, and chiaroscuro bloodbaths in the Catholic-vampire-erotic-horror-film Thirst. His more recent English language work, the blockbuster Steven King adaptation IT and Edgar Wright’s Dark Mirror of 60s London, Last Night in Soho.
Scott Beck & Bryan Woods
Filmmakers Scott Beck & Bryan Woods burst onto the Hollywood scene with ’ A Quiet Place, based on their original screenplay. Beck & Woods’ script earned them the Saturn Award for Best Writing, alongside Best Original Screenplay nominations from the Writers Guild and the Critics Choice Awards, and was named one of the year’s ten best scripts by The Tracking Board Hit List. Variety went on to name Beck & Woods to their annual 10 Screenwriters to Watch list.
Most recently for Beck & Woods was Sony Pictures’ sci-fi thriller 65. The film is an original screenplay written by the duo, on which they also serve as directors and producers under their Beck/Woods banner. The project was a reunion for them and Sam Raimi who is also a producer of 65.
The duo also wrote the screenplay and served as Executive Producers on The Boogeyman, based on Stephen King’s iconic short story of the same name. The short story, first published in 1973 and later
released in King’s 1978 collection Night Shift, followed a man who’s recently lost all his children to a creature lurking in the closet.
Other credits for the filmmakers include 2019’s acclaimed thriller Haunt, which they wrote and directed for producer Eli Roth, Sierra/Affinity, Broken Road Productions, and Nickel City Pictures.
Beck & Woods are also co-owners of The Last Picture House, a specialty cinema and social lounge with 35mm capabilities. The movie theater is located in their hometown of Davenport, Iowa and opened in 2023. Beck & Woods are members of the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America.
