When you’re in a visibly queer relationship, you ask yourself dozens of questions, almost without noticing, before reaching for your partner’s hand in public: Where am I? How safe do I feel here? And who might be watching us?
It’s that last question that haunted screenwriter Alyson Richards after she and her wife stayed at a remote cabin in the woods. So naturally, she wrote a movie about it — with a few embellishments, of course.
The Retreat, available on demand across platforms on May 21, is a lesbian-themed slasher thriller about a couple, Renee (Tommie-Amber Pirie) and Valerie (Sarah Allen), who go on a weekend vacation at a critical point in their relationship. Valerie wants commitment and definition that Renee can’t quite seem to give her.
But instead of processing their feelings by having a three-hour conversation with an awkward pee break in the middle (as partnered queer women have done since time immemorial), Renee and Valerie find themselves in a fight for their own survival. After arriving at the retreat to find their hosts missing, the women realize they’re not just being watched, but hunted.
Under the direction of Richards’ longtime collaborator Pat Mills — who made his debut in 2014 with Guidance, a dark comedy about a closeted gay former child star — the film explores both the physical and psychological violence of homophobia while delivering plenty of chills.
The Retreat is queer horror in its fullest sense, just as eager to show us two women talking about their love for each other as it is to show us blood spurting out of an ax wound. In advance of the film’s VOD release, Richards spoke with them. about the origin of the premise, and about why so many LGBTQ+ people are horror fans.
The conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
My wife and I are scared to go camping alone, so the movie really resonated with us. Then I heard the idea for this movie came from an experience you had with your wife. Is that true?
For sure. The idea came when my wife and I went and stayed at this remote cabin in the middle of nowhere. It was this really beautiful guest house, and it was very serene, but we never saw our hosts. Every time we’d leave and go for walks, we would come back and it was clear that somebody had been there. There’d be fresh towels or little notes for us. So I found it incredibly creepy, because I was like, “We’re not seeing anybody, but clearly somebody’s tracking what we’re doing. And do they like us? Do they hate us?”
I think as women, particularly as queer women, there’s that fear of not knowing how vulnerable you are in those situations. My active imagination took over from there and started coming up with the worst-case scenario of what they could be up to.
There’s a striking moment early in the film where we see that Renee has a go-to lie to explain her relationship with Valerie when they meet a stranger — something like “I’m her aunt.” A lot of queer couples negotiate that when they travel: How “gay” do I want to be in this convenience store?
I think queer couples completely understand that concept, and I think straight couples have no idea it’s even a thing. You’re kind of constantly gauging [how safe you are], and that’s why, traditionally, there were safe queer spaces like gay bars where you would go and you felt really comfortable. Things have become more and more accepting, but you never quite know how safe a space is and there’s still that constant negotiation of trying to figure out the comfort zone. Even for my wife and I, if we’re on a hike in the middle of the woods and somebody happens to be coming, we will 100% stop holding hands because you just don’t know if there’s a safety concern.
I really wanted to put that kind of moment in the movie. And it is a bit of a negotiation, because — especially if a couple is in [the emotional place] where Renee and Valerie are at early in the movie, it can also feel like one of them is not acknowledging the relationship. Whereas I think for Renee, it’s more like, “Why would we tell this random person at the gas station anything about us?”
Speaking of their relationship, how did you decide to set the film at this inflection point for Valerie and Renee, in which the former wants to define things but the latter is still uncertain?
Recently, I started seeing a lot of movies that had a “crazy lesbian” as the killer and that was the big twist. So my idea was really to try to not do that, and to show real people, and have grounded queer characters instead. It was really important to me that they were three-dimensional and that they also felt like a real couple. In movies, often it’s either they’re a perfect couple, which doesn’t really make you want to invest in them, or they’re falling in love. But I didn’t think that either of those really quite made the most sense for this movie, so I kind of liked the idea of their relationship being tested. If you can get through this weekend, it’s going to be smooth sailing from that point on!
I love how violent the movie is. It’s gory, bloody, graphic, and has some great practical effects. Tell me about making LGBTQ+ horror that’s not afraid to be so visceral.
This is the third feature that [director] Pat Mills and I have made together and he is gay as well. We’re also horror fans. It’s almost like the most subversive thing about this movie is just the fact that the main characters are gay. For the rest of it, we really wanted to make an entertaining thriller and that was what we set out to do, so it kind of needs a bit of gore. It needs the scares.
But it was also really important that we not glorify any of the violence against the queer characters. So if you notice, any of the stuff that happens to any of the queer characters is implied. You never really see it. It’s always offscreen. But then, taking inspiration from movies like [the 2017 French action thriller] Revenge, we go big for the moments when they’re up against the antagonists.
Why do you think that intersection of queerness and horror is so rich? Why are so many queer people horror fans, and why is horror such a great genre in which to explore queer themes?
As a genre fan myself, I feel like if you go to a horror festival or if you go to a horror convention, it’s like a bunch of weirdos, outsiders, and underdogs. Horror has a lot of people who are very accepting, so I feel like the queer audience naturally is drawn to it, because there’s space in that space. Horror traditionally has allowed for a lot of play. It's also a genre that hasn't typically and traditionally required huge budgets, so I think it’s also a place that outside voices have been able to access. You see more play in genre movies than you do in studio tent-poles.
In a lot of horror movies, queer characters are almost guaranteed to die. It’s the old “bury your gays” trope. How refreshing was it to make a movie in which the protagonists are queer and the viewers are primed to expect at least one of them to survive?
That was really important to me: They’re both going to live and they’re not going to turn on each other. Those were basically my two rules of engagement. That was the one note that I wouldn’t take, because a lot of people were like, “What if one of them is actually…” I was like, “No. They will not. They will not turn on each other.” Because we’ve seen that so often, right? Or they die.
I love that they get to go through this experience together and rely on each other. Oftentimes among queer women, we talk a lot about the boundaries between codepdence, interdependence, and independence. Do you think this movie, by giving them this ordeal to survive together, explores that dynamic?
That’s a really great question. I don’t know about the codependency part of it, but I will say that one of the things that I tried to do with them is have them both bring a lot of value to the table, so it’s not heavily weighted with one of them constantly saving the day and knowing how to do everything. I tried to write it so that they each brought their different skill sets to the relationship and to the scenario. They’re well-balanced — or at least that was the goal.
It feels like by the end, they’re both encouraging each other to be their best selves in a sense.
Yeah. Despite the circumstances...
The Retreat is available on VOD on May 21.
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