“For me, as a woman of colour from a working class background, all of these ideas resonate with me,” she tells ELLE Australia.

The story of Dracula is already well known to the masses—but you haven’t known it like this. New vampire horror film, The Invitation has taken Dracula’s narrative and transformed it into a masterclass of drama, jump-scares and a confronting reflection of society itself.

Leading the film is Game Of Thrones star, Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays Evie, an American woman who is introduced to her long lost relatives in the UK at a family wedding, only to find that their host, Walter (Thomas Doherty), is not everything he seems—he’s a vampire.

“I got shut in a coffin,” Emmanuel tells ELLE over a Zoom interview ahead of the films release. There’s a sense of revulsion in the way she says it as she recalls the moment her character was shut into the wooden box after realising what her relatives are.

“Whether you think that is real or not, getting shut in a box is horrible. Don’t do it! Don’t do it when you’re alive!” She pleads with a laugh.

Emmanuel’s character and her background is central to one of the key themes from the film. After losing her mother, Evie is excited to connect with previously unknown relatives—a rich British family of great privilege who invite her to the estate for a wedding.

When she gets there, it becomes clear how unfairly separated she is from this world of privileged, white upper-class aristocracy.

“This movie talks about power and the structures of power,” Emmanuel tells us. “We see this family at the top who are white, rich and aristocratic, and the people who are being exploited and brutalised and harmed are usually women, and women of colour and poor women. All of these thing are crashing together in the story and that’s always going to be relevant.

“We’re still fighting and trying to dismantle those structures all the time, and so for me, as a woman of colour from a working-class background, all of these ideas resonate with me—it’s something I’m always talking about and advocating for and trying to dismantle.”

The Invitation director, Australian filmmaker Jessica M. Thompson added that this patriarchal theme was one of the biggest things she wanted to incorporate into the movie

“I’ve always been drawn to horror, and within that, entertainment always comes first—but when there’s a message buried beneath, I always bring that to my film making,” she tells ELLE Australia in a separate interview.

“To me [ The Invitation] is a film about smashing the patriarchy—we’ve got one of the oldest villains of all time representing that, and I feel that women of colour have been disenfranchised the most by the powers that be—so I was really adamant about making Evie a woman of colour.”

She continues, “Nathalie was at the top of my list and carries that and shines in this film. There is that commentary on the white powers that be, and the men and women that support those hierarchical systems, but then there’s this woman of colour who is basically sticking it to the man.”

For Emmanuel, filming a horror movie shouldn’t have been that different to her previous work on the likes of Game Of Thrones—a show perhaps best known for its gory, albeit gripping action scenes.

But even after six seasons on the iconic series, which tested her in different ways, some gruelling elements of film still surprise her—the aforementioned coffin scene was just one part.

“My character [in The Invitation] is in a state of trauma for most of the film, so doing that all day every day is just really tough—it definitely takes it toll performance-wise,” Emmanuel explains.

“But in terms of shooting the horror, there’s always lots of banter and fun—but getting shut in a box was as horrible as you think it would be!” [Source]