There were a lot of elements that attracted Radha Mitchell to Dreamkatcher, a new horror film from director Kerry Harris (Grip and Electric) and writer Dan V. Shea (Tick(k)) that hits VOD next week.

Mitchell plays a child psychologist who goes away on a trip with her new husband (Henry Thomas) and step-son (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong). Soon after their arrival, the boy begins having nightmares and after stealing an artifact from a nearby neighbor, those nightmares become a reality.

Mitchell is no stranger to work in the genre. She previously appeared in films like Silent Hill and Pitch Black, and she says she loves working on horror films.

“Getting paid to scream is brilliant,” she told iHorror as we settled in for a recent interview. “You kind of want to be the victim because you get to do the screaming, but then you also kind of want to be the bad guy which I haven’t had enough opportunity to do. To be subject to the power is one thing, to wield the power is another kind of experience too. To get paid to scream? It’s an unusual thing but I highly recommend it.”

For Dreamkatcher, the setting in upstate New York was attractive. Several of her friends were working on the project, as well. And genre icon Lin Shaye had signed onto the film and Mitchell had wanted to work with her for years.

And then, there was the writing.

“There were all those sober conversations between a woman and a kid,” Mitchell said. “Normally, the kids are so sweet or over-sentimentalized or something but this is kind of restrained and I kind of like that. That slow build to the uncertainty of what is going on. And then the direction it takes on later in the story is great. It sort of changes a lot so I liked all that dynamic.”

What she did not realize was just how isolating the shoot would actually be.

Dreamkatcher was shot in Bovina, New York, a small hamlet. Cell service was sparse, and the actress had found a house to stay in during the shoot next to a great green hillside. She sat alone in the house with just her thoughts and a horror script.

After four days had passed, she was ready to leave that isolation behind, and while she ended up moving into a large house with four other people from the film, she admits that the time in isolation was invaluable.

“It put me in the right frame of mind,” she explained. “It was good to have that time with the script and think about dreams and nightmares and the psychology of nightmares. And then after four days, I was like, get me out of this house! I cannot stay here or I’ll lose my mind!”

It was another house, the film’s primary filming location, that would play heavily into Mitchell’s experience on the film, however.

Renovated and restored by a couple from Brooklyn, the rustic farmhouse was a gorgeous fit for Dreamkatcher with its odd angles and off-kilter windows.

“It was a great space to hang out in,” Mitchell said. “If you go up those stairs, they’re old. It’s designed for this type of story. The kids bedroom, the ceiling felt so low and you have to crawl up these little stairs to get there. There’s a lot of character in the space. It’s both kind of rustic and welcoming but at the same time there’s something creepy to it.”

The intimate space created an environment wholly conducive to creating the film. Working together in a confined space for an extended period of time let them really feel as though they lived there. It also allowed her to really get to know her co-stars and watch their process and what each brought to the table.

The film’s primary shooting location in Bovina, NY (Photo via YouTube screengrab)

Whether it was Henry Thomas singing and entertaining everyone as they got ready in the morning or Lin Shaye’s focus and the professionalism she brought to every scene, Mitchell says everyone on the film was completely invested in making the film the best experience possible.

She was especially knocked out by her young scene partner, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong, however.

“Little Finlay, was a real character,” she said. “He would order a cup of coffee in the morning, read the newspaper. He’s so politically astute. His mom is a lawyer and his dad, I forget what he does. It was an interesting family and he was so self-assured.”

In addition to acting in the film, both Mitchell and Shaye served as executive producers on the film, and she says it was great to have input and to be in the room where discussions about the film’s direction were taking place.

“It’s dangerous letting actors be producers, right?” she said with a laugh. “Because actors all have opinions. What we were doing, a lot of us, was crafting the script. The script was really great, but Lin had a lot of ideas about the mythology of the actual dreamcatcher and I was more concerned about the trajectory of where the story was going.”

Shaye was also able to enlist the considerable talents of composer and character actor Joseph Bishara to not only compose the score for the film but to also take on a pivotal role.

Bishara is well known for his scoring abilities having composed music for everything from The Conjuring franchise to the Insidious franchise as well as Dark Skies and The Vatican Tapes. His score in Dreamkatcher sound like a Bishara score, and yet, it feels like it comes from a different place entirely.

It felt like the perfect finishing touch to the film, and the actress couldn’t agree more.

“The score! Thank God for the score,” Mitchell said. “It was a really great addition to the film. Everyone who has seen it loves the score. It was an opportunity for him to really experiment.”

As the interview came to its inevitable conclusion, our talk turned to future projects. With so many things on hold at the moment as the world at large deal with the fallout of Covid-19, what’s next for a working actor?

“I honestly have no idea,” she said. “There are a lot of writers writing right now, and I feel like there will be a lot of great projects that come out of this period. I have a couple of completed projects but I’m not sure how they’ll be distributed. There’s a really sweet film about a lung transplant but in that story there are these two lives and how they intersect. There’s a movie calling Run, Hide, Fight that we shot in Dallas. It’ll be somewhat controversial. It’s about a high school shooting and a girl fighting to survive. I’m looking forward to people seeing that. And then there’s another film that I shot last year in Oklahoma and that one I can’t really talk about, yet. It’s very left of center.”

Check out the trailer below and look for Dreamkatcher on VOD on April 28, 2020!