The Morrigan is easily one of the year’s biggest surprises. Writer/director Colum Eastwood pulls on the lore surrounding The Morrigan, a figure in Irish mythology, most often associated with war and fate. He found himself drawn to her power and “how multifaceted she is,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands. “She’s not a simple ‘good’ or ‘evil’ figure. She’s contradictory, powerful, unsettling, and difficult to pin down, which makes her feel much more alive to me than a lot of mythological characters. She’s a war goddess, but also a sovereignty figure, and those different aspects give her a real moral and symbolic complexity. She can be protective, even allied to certain people, but also utterly devastating. I found that ambiguity really compelling.”
Eastwood was also intrigued about how stories around The Morrigan differ so wildly, depending on who’s telling the story. “These myths were originally oral, then later filtered through Christian monks, so what survives is already layered with reinterpretation and distortion,” he explains. “That gave me freedom in the film to imagine what it might mean to bring a figure like The Morrigan into the modern world. In our version, she isn’t simply a villain—she’s confronting a world she finds corrupt, unjust, and out of balance. That made her feel not just mythic, but relevant.”
In the film, Eastwood draws parallels between The Morrigan and the treatment of women in the workplace, particularly in research. While writing the script during the #MeToo movement, he asked himself “what a figure like The Morrigan would make of the world we’re living in now,” he considers, “particularly the abuse of power and the systems that protect it. For me, the horror works as a kind of reckoning. The Morrigan comes from a pre-Christian, older order, and in the film, she’s responding to the injustice and exploitation our female characters are experiencing.”
Horror is innately political and frequently deals in horror that does “more than just frightening you—when it’s also saying something about the pressures people live under,” he says. “Fiona is trying to survive and succeed in a male-dominated professional world, and in the process, she’s forced into impossible compromises, including around her role as a mother. That felt very human to me. The horror amplifies those pressures: it externalises the violence, silencing, and sacrifice that women are often expected to absorb quietly. In that sense, The Morrigan isn’t just a monster in the story—she’s also a response to a world that has gone badly out of balance.”
Set in Northern Ireland, The Morrigan features some of the best scares 2026 has to offer. Below, Colum Eastwood discusses the challenges of filming, riffing on The Exorcist, and cultivating his shot list.
With the film’s vast setting, what unique challenges did shooting in Northern Ireland present?
Shooting in Northern Ireland brought both real challenges and real advantages. Obviously, it’s home for me, so I already knew a lot of strong locations and I was keen to feature as much of the landscape as possible. Northern Ireland has a very particular atmosphere and texture, and I wanted the film to feel rooted in that.
The main challenge was practical: travel. The more you move between locations, the more time you lose from the shooting day, which is one of the reasons so many films end up concentrating action in a single place. I was determined to get the scale and variety of the setting into the film, even if that meant sacrificing some shooting time to travel. So it was always a trade-off between ambition and efficiency. Even the house we used for the interiors, with that incredible staircase, was outside our normal driving range and cost me time, so choices like that definitely had an impact on the schedule.
The Morrigan’s face pops up in the film in the same way Pazuzu’s does in The Exorcist. Did you specifically want to reference the classic horror film in that way?
Yes, absolutely. Nice catch. I was very influenced by those subliminal flashes in The Exorcist—especially from the banned trailer, which I’ve always found incredibly unsettling. There’s something so powerful about an image appearing almost beneath the level of conscious recognition, where it feels less like a conventional scare and more like something invasive.
For us, those flashes weren’t just a stylistic reference—they were part of the story. I wanted them to feel like subliminal intrusions, as if The Morrigan is beginning to colonise the character’s psyche and work her way into their mind. It’s the sense of something getting under your skin before you fully understand what you’re seeing, which felt right for the kind of possession and psychological contamination the film is dealing with.
You have a knack for subtle scares, i.e., figures appearing in the background or far away, instead of traditional jump scares. Was that an approach you knew you wanted from the start?
For me, story always comes first, and the scares grow out of that rather than the other way around. From the start, I wanted the film to have a slightly more mainstream, almost 1980’s genre feel – something that embraced the pleasure of horror and atmosphere, but was still grounded in character and tension. So the approach to scares was always going to come from the tone and the rules of the world we were building.
I do like jump scares, but I think they’re often most effective in ghost stories, where an apparition can appear and disappear at will, almost to toy with the character. In The Morrigan, the supernatural operates by much stricter physical rules. She can only be in one place at a time, apart from the more subliminal imagery, so the fear comes less from sudden shocks and more from presence, dread, and the feeling that something is there just beyond your focus. That naturally led to more subtle background and spatial scares. I still tried to use the occasional jolt where it felt right, but only if it served the tension and didn’t undermine the story.
There’s a great use of space in the film, from the house in the third act to the tunnels. Was putting together a shot list pretty difficult?
Putting together the initial shot list was actually one of the easiest, and most enjoyable, parts of the process. The real challenge comes later, when you’re dealing with the realities of production. In our case, we built the tunnels and some of the rooms, and those spaces were obviously limited in size, so a lot of the job became about working around the physical constraints of the environment. The same was true on real locations, where I was often trying to frame out elements that didn’t belong in the world of the film.
I tend to shot-list very extensively, alongside storyboards, but the constant reality on set is time. Very quickly, it becomes less about achieving every planned shot and more about asking which shots are essential, and how each setup can do more work. Often, you find yourself compressing the shot list, combining ideas, and trying to make individual shots carry more dramatic and visual weight than originally intended.
When you were on set, did you have to change much about your vision?
Yes, definitely. A lot of that comes down to the practical realities of filmmaking. Once you know the locations you’re actually working with, the shape of the schedule, and the resources you really have, the film inevitably starts to shift. We were dealing with a lot of night work on this film, which is demanding on both cast and crew, and when you add weather into the mix, especially rain in Ireland, you have to be ready to adapt quickly. There wasn’t much fat in the schedule or the budget to begin with, so every day required a certain amount of creativity and problem-solving. The overall vision of the film stayed consistent, but on a scene-by-scene level I often had to adjust and respond to what was possible in the moment.
What is your favorite shot or sequence in the film?
I really love the scene where Lily approaches the casket, and also the sequence where Malachy stalks The Morrigan in the roof space. Both of those moments feel very close to the original intention I had for them on the page. I love the combination of lighting, tension and score in those scenes – they create the sense of dread and reverence I wanted, where the supernatural feels both frightening and strangely intimate. Those are probably the moments in the film where I most feel the atmosphere we were aiming for fully came together.
The Morrigan is out now on VOD.
