[Editorial] Interview with Barbara Crampton about Jakob’s Wife

I sat down with Barbara Crampton to chat about female friendship, vampirism as life after death, and sexuality on screen. 

Marisa Mercurio: You’ve played a lot of different roles in horror from a mad scientist in From Beyond to a matriarch in You’re Next to a villain in the most recent season of Creepshow. What was different about playing a vampire? Did you draw inspiration from any particular sources? 

Barbara Crampton: I wanted to do this movie because it was really a female-centric film, although initially when I read the film, it was more from the perspective of Jakob and it was skewed a little differently. He was taking care of somebody who was bitten by a vampire and what would that do? The metaphor was taking care of somebody who had a terminal illness. When I came on board, we decided to change the aspect of it and make it more from a Anne’s point of view and make it a movie about a woman coming into her own and having more self awareness, and also putting an emphasis on the relationship of Jakob and Anne because they’ve been married for a long time. And for so long we didn’t know how we were going to end the movie. Would she biteJakob and turn him into a vampire? Would she kill her husband and go off with the Master vampire? Would she kill the Master and continue on with Jakob? Or would she just leave them both? And until you see the movie, you don’t really know what happens, but that was a question that was really at the forefront of our minds all the time through all the different rewrites. And I really wanted to do this movie because I think those questions about a vampire—what does that mean? Where does it take you? We use the vampires as a metaphor for finding yourself and your awareness as a person. Those questions are eternal. They’re as eternal as a vampire. Who are you? What do you want? What are you going to do to get it? What is meaningful to you? We felt like telling this story through the guise of a vampire lens hadn’t really ever been done before. We’ve seen a lot of vampire stories, but we wanted to tell this vampire story in a different way. 

Really what attracted me to the project was telling this story from a woman’s point of view and also because I really liked the writing and I liked what it had to say. I knew it was a good role for me. I’ve produced a couple other movies with the focus on other people and other characters and this was a movie I wanted to do for myself.

MM: Speaking of injecting the feminism within the film and really focusing on the female characters, I want to ask you about Bonnie Aarons playing the Master. I think it’s fairly unique to have a woman in that kind of a role. I was not thinking about it, but I suppose just assuming the Master would be a man.

BC: Me too!

MM: But then when it turned out to be a woman, I was so excited. And I thought, “Well, of course!” That makes so much sense given the feminist politics of the movie. 

BC: And who is going to give you that license to follow yourself? Is a man going to give you that? It’s usually your women friends that talk to you. If you think about the Master as being the inner voice of Anne herself, or her new best friend—who are the people you seek out as confidante as a woman when you’re having issues in your life? It’s more often than not my girlfriends. I’m very close to my husband and of course he’s my ultimate confidante, but so often when I’m grappling with issues of identity, I talk to my girlfriends. But, I was assuming it was a man too because it was written as a man. And then we changed the dynamic of Anne and Jakob in the movie, and made it more of Anne’s story. 

It wasn’t until Travis Stevens came on as the director and he did his director’s pass on the script before we shot the film. He gave us the draft, [producer] Bob Portal and I, he gave us the draft and I’m reading it and I realize that he had changed the gender of the vampire. And I'm like you and I went, “Of course, that makes sense!” Of course that’s who it should be. It should be the woman that is giving you that license to be the person that you always wanted to be. And we talked about it early on. Travis said to me, “Who do you see in this role if we do get a female vampire?” And there was a couple people I had in my mind, but the person at the top of the list was Bonnie Aarons. I also feel like Bonnie is an iconic presence in horror with playing “the nun” and in The Conjuring movies, but when I saw her in the movie The Nun, it wasn’t really about the nun. It wasn’t really about her. It was about the other characters, which is fine; that’s the story they wanted to tell. But there’s so many males that are iconic in the horror genre like Freddy and Jason and Chucky. Although I think Don Mancini gave Jennifer Tilly a really great platform to be a woman in that franchise, I haven’t seen the same in a lot of other horror. And I thought, “Well, gee, they had an opportunity to really do something with Bonnie Aarons’s character as the nun.” And I felt like she was underutilized or maybe that just wasn’t the story they wanted to tell. But I thought that we need to see more of Bonnie Aarons. She’s amazing.

MM: She’s great.  

BC: She’s got an amazing face. Her presence is so engaging. I know her and she’s a friend of mine. We’ve been friends for a number of years. And I really wanted to give her a role that I thought was suitable for her talents and would showcase her in a way that people haven’t seen her before. So when I brought her up to Travis and Bob, everybody was in agreement. They said, “Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. Let’s talk to Bonnie first to see if she wants to do it.”

MM: She’s phenomenal in it. And that relationship that Anne has to the Master is so fascinating and ambivalent and in some different ways—it’s this tug and pull between them because there’s that antagonism but there;s also that compulsion that she has towards the Master. I was really excited to see, in addition to the really fun scenes that Anne has discovering her new self, also there’s these sexually-charged scenes that are really exciting. I think that despite the fact that a lot of vampire movies deal with questions of gender and sexuality, you don’t often see someone like Anne or someone who is in Anne’s stage of life directly rediscovering her sexuality. What was that important for you as an actor and producer to include in the film?

BC: It really was. I know a lot of people shy away from nudity and sexuality in movies lately, especially where we are right now with the Time’s Up movement and Me Too. And rightfully so. And I think in times past, women have been showcased in a very exploitative way. I think storytelling has come a long way for all of us since the ‘80s and even movies that I was in—although I never felt that I was exploited in a certain sense without a strong character—but I do feel like there are some other women that I know that are in the genre that I definitely know who were exploited in a physical sense. 

I do think that sexuality and nudity is an important part of life. It’s something we experience every day, all of us. We have such an odd relationship with it, so if we can change the conversation and make sure we use it in ways that illuminate the situation, rather than use it to sell tickets or exploit women or men, then I think it’s an important aspect to showcase. In Jakob’s Wife it was important to me to have this one brief lovemaking scene where we both see the characters at their most raw and intimate, and they’re vulnerable with one another. So I didn’t really have an issue with it at all. I thought it was an important aspect to showcase.

MM: I found it very refreshing.

BC: An older couple too.

MM: In so many different ways. As you said, it’s been absent from a lot of films lately, but also given the Me Too movement, figuring it and presenting it in a different way is also really important.

BC: I wrote an article about in the next issue for Fangoria. I have a column in the magazine and I wrote about nudity in horror films and what I think of that, so you’ll hear more of my thoughts on that. I’m really glad that—and people are balking at it a little bit—but we have what’s called intimacy coordinators now, which everyone’s been hearing about in film and television. We have an advocate on the set when that’s happening so that everybody feels comfortable and is on the same page. We have direct communication about it. I haven’t used one of those or been asked if I wanted one.

On Jakob’s Wife, I was a producer so we just did it ourselves, but I think that’s great. I think it’s really good. We have that protection now and that aid is for everyone to have better communication about nudity and sexuality on screen. I think it’s amazing. I’m really happy about that. Hopefully the conversations will keep getting better and more illuminating, and we’ll be able to show this aspect on screen that is going to further the conversation about the movie at hand and the story at hand. I felt like that’s what we did in our film. It was important to me to get that right.

Jakob’s Wife is now available to stream on Shudder and Shudder UK. You can read Marisa’s full review of Jakob’s Wife too!

RELATED ARTICLES

---

---

EXPLORE

---

MORE ARTICLES

---

---