Sydney Sweeney reveals her big request for end of Immaculate: 'I just wanted to be drenched in blood'

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Immaculate.

As both producer and star of Immaculate, Sydney Sweeney had a lot of ideas for the film, but she had just one major request.

"My big thing was, by the end of the movie, I just wanted to be drenched in blood," she tells Entertainment Weekly, citing Ready or Not and Carrie as examples of inspiration. "I love those moments where, at the end of the film, you have the female badass that just went through the wringer and takes it all at the end."

And go through the wringer she does: By film's end, Sweeney's virgin nun Cecilia learns that her body has been used against her will to give birth to what a mad scientist priest is hoping will be some sort of clone of Jesus Christ, and the only way to escape it all is to go on a bloody killing spree — during labor, no less.

If this sounds extreme, that's because it is — but the film is not all blood and gore. In fact, there are some comedic moments — what's funnier than a nun casually dropping an f-bomb? — and the horror elements themselves don't all fall into one neat category.

Sweeney and director Michael Mohan, who previously worked together on the 2021 film The Voyeurs and 2018 TV series Everything Sucks!, specifically sought to find a "great balance between moments of levity and moments that we really wanted to go for it," says Sweeney. "I am a big fan of all types of horror genres, and I really wanted something that had a bit of a mixture of everything," she says. "I love jump scares, so I pushed for a lot of jump scares in the movie. Mike likes a lot of psychological thrillers, so a lot of the longer, more thrilling psychological shots were from him. So it was just a mixture of all of our favorite loves from horror films, and then creatively what's fun and interesting and exciting and pushes the boundaries to do."

One horror element that viewers won't find in Immaculate, though, is a supernatural antagonist. The evil entity here is purely of the human variety, which is why, even though she first auditioned for the role 10 years ago, the script "stuck with" Sweeney all this time.

"I love horror films and I've been looking to do them, but scripts that I've been getting were a lot of just, like, getting chased by this supernatural creature, or it just didn't feel grounded in a psychological space," she explains. "I always kept thinking about Immaculate, going back to it, because the scariest parts of this film were reality and mankind. And I loved the fact that what she was trying to escape and run from was actually growing inside her."

Immaculate, which also stars Álvaro Morte, Simona Tabasco, Benedetta Porcaroli, Giorgio Colangeli, and Dora Romano, is in theaters now.

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