Back in 2008, writer-director Bryan Bertino made a splash with his debut horror movie, The Strangers, a grim home-invasion thriller loosely inspired by real crimes. The indie film has since become a cult hit, earning a sequel (with Bertino writing and producing) and a reboot/relaunch series Bertino wasn’t involved with. Instead, he continued making his own independent features: 2014’s Mockingbird, 2016’s The Monster, 2020’s The Dark and the Wicked, and the new Vicious, starring Dakota Fanning as Polly, a self-hating young woman whose life is upended when a stranger (Andor’s Kathryn Hunter) gives her a mysterious box that ties them both to a malevolent force.
Speaking after Vicious’ world premiere at the 2025 Fantastic Fest, Bertino told Polygon that the most important thing he learned from writing and directing The Strangers was that his career was going to be a perpetual war on behalf of his own creative vision.
“It’s always been a battle for me, because I’m trying to do certain things — I’m not saying they’re better or worse than what other people are doing, but I have a voice,” he said. “Having to fight for it… I learned it with The Strangers, and continue to learn it. Strangers is something I’m always going to be grateful for, but it also was an early hint at what was to come, in terms of fighting battles in order to get my movies in front of audience members in their purest form.”
That includes Vicious, which came from his own experiences — Polly’s struggles with a monstrous, evil entity that wants her to humiliate and mutilate herself reflect Bertino’s struggles with anxiety and panic attacks.
But it also came out of Bertino’s musical mindset. When he talks about movies, musical metaphors come up again and again. He says Vicious was intended to overwhelm viewers with “a wall of sound like Phil Spector.” He says his favorite found-footage movies play like “a punk rock album“ because they break the rules of their media and convey a lot of emotion with fewer tools than other movies use. He compares Vicious to similar stories (most notably, the 1986 Twilight Zone episode “Button, Button,” also about a stranger with a mysterious magical box) by saying they’re “a little bit like songs that had the same words in the title, but are just completely different.” And he explains his filmmaking tastes in terms of his favorite musical artists.
“I like character stories, and I always have,” he says. “Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Gillian Welch, Bruce Springsteen — they tell beautiful stories in a few words. As a filmmaker, I’ve always used fear to connect two characters. The Strangers was about a couple just as much as it was about a home invasion.”
In Vicious, that’s reflected in Bertino’s determination to build the story around Polly’s personal relationships with her mother, sister, and niece. “The movies that resonate the most to me when I’m trying to do something supernatural is stuff that feels as grounded as possible, and tries to put the audience in the space,” he says. “’Cause you don’t have to believe in ghosts or evil boxes. But if I can, for an hour and 40 minutes, make you think What would happen if this did happen? then you can end up falling into its world.”
But he says his tastes in horror don’t always line up with what the major movie studios want, which is why he’s had to fight to keep his voice “pure,” and make movies independently.
“I think studios in general have a feeling of what audience they want more than what audiences want,” he says. “And I don’t think that the processes always make sense on how the two should meet. That’s what’s exciting to me about coming to Fantastic Fest, and the most exciting thing about horror in general. It’s a genre that will always be pushed forward by independent filmmaking. There aren’t really any other genres like that. Somebody right now is making a $50,000 horror movie that’s going to blow people away and change the arc of where the studios go for the next five years. And that’s why I love this job.”
Vicious is now streaming on Paramount Plus and available for purchase on digital platforms.
