Sophie Turner and Kit Harington’s Forbidden Romance

Natasha Kermani’s movie started with a darkish imaginative and prescient she couldn’t shake.

“I couldn’t let go of this idea of two women living in a very desolate, barbaric landscape,” she says. “I felt like that was a relationship I didn’t see a lot, and one I wanted to explore. We see a lot of mothers and daughters, but we don’t see a lot of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, two women of two different generations who have been thrust into coexistence.”

From there, the thought of “The Dreadful” was born. The movie, headed to theaters today by way of Lionsgate, is a dramatic horror story set during the War of the Roses, at the tail end of the Dark Ages. Sophie Turner stars as Anne, who resides together with her mother-in-law, Morwen (a fiery Marcia Gay Harden), while her husband is at battle. But when her childhood good friend (Kit Harington) tells her that her husband has died, they develop nearer and evil begins lurking.

While Kermani, who wrote and directed the movie, is upfront about her love of style movies, she says she is always cautious to verify the scares work in service of the characters.

“I don’t think anything I do is a horror conceit first,” she says. “Everything I do is based on relationship and a character’s journey from Point A to Point B. The horror needs to express that journey. The horror needs to be a color in our palette that we’re using to tell this character’s story. Often these characters are experiencing fear, so it’s always the question of, ‘What is this character afraid of?’”

Beyond conventional scares, “The Dreadful” amps up the eerie environment and discomfort. One meta component comes from the casting of Turner and Harington as lovers, which feels a bit unsuitable given that their “Game of Thrones” characters are raised as siblings. Even Turner admitted it felt odd. But Kermani says it’s a contented accident that audiences are coming in with that subtext.

“These characters were always childhood friends,” she says. “One of the themes of the film is growing up, so she has these memories of this character as a child and their childhood together. Now here they are as adults, reevaluating their relationship. They’re not related in our film, but there is a bit of a love triangle, so there is a forbidden fruit feeling in our film. I think it’s interesting that it worked out that way.”

Kermani went on to reward Turner’s performance as uniquely intuitive, in a position to attract even more from her character past the script.

“One of the things she latched onto was the character’s spirituality and inner strength,” she says. “I think that was something I didn’t necessarily see up front. I thought maybe this character would feel more childlike, a bit of a blank slate that evolves. But what Sophie brought that I loved so much, and I’m so glad she did, is that you can actually see that strength and steeliness in her from the first time she appears onscreen. She has these instincts and intuition for the characters that she is able to string through in a very consistent way.”

“The Dreadful” is a melting pot of influences, including a reimagining of the people story that impressed the traditional Japanese horror movie “Onibaba.” Yet even as the stakes rise and the scares come alongside, Kermani says it’s a small-scale story at coronary heart.

“That core relationship between the two women, specifically the older generation and a younger generation, and the struggle between them as it starts to fray and to fall apart, and the one character is trying to move away, and the other one is trying to hold onto her, felt to me like an interesting sandbox to play in,” she says. “Everything else — the mythology, the fantastical elements, the period — really came out of exploring that core relationship.”

Watch the trailer for “The Dreadful” below.