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Kate Dolan’s feature film debut You Are Not My Mother is a compelling take on the changeling folklore. The film shifts the legend’s typical focus from a paranoid parent to a concerned child, whose fear of her ever-changing mother grows day by day. Powered by strong performances from a talented cast and stark images that paint a bleak and dreary picture, the film stood out as one of my personal favorites from 2021’s Toronto International Film Festival (read my full review here).

I had the opportunity to sit down with Dolan to discuss her film and the folklore behind it.  

Kelly McNeely: Films like The Hole in the Ground and The Hallow also feature the changeling mythology of Irish folklore, but have more of a focus on the child being the changeling. I really love that You Are Not My Mother has the angle of the parent being the danger, rather than the protagonist. Can you talk a little bit about that decision, and where that idea came from? 

Kate Dolan: Yeah, definitely. I think, as you know, the traditional changeling mythology in Irish folklore is that the stories you hear more are that the baby gets swapped for something else. And that’s kind of always the thing. And it’s also in Scandinavian mythology as well, they have changelings and it’s usually babies. But there’s actually a lot of stories in real life – in the history of Ireland – of people hearing these stories about changelings and fairies and believing that their family members were something else. 

So there actually were a lot of accounts of adult humans who believed that their husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, who were adults were swapped with a doppelgänger – a changeling or something else, like a fairy. And particularly, there’s one story of a woman called Bridget Clary in 1895 which really caught my attention, which is about this woman who – apparently now they think she just had the flu – but her husband thought she was a changeling and he burned her in a fire in their house. She was murdered, and he was arrested. But he said that he believed she was changeling, which just really intrigued me because it was kind of just that ambiguous idea of like, did he really think that? Or was what else was going on there? 

And just kind of that ambiguity of what’s real and what’s not real, and the unknown of it all. So that just kind of really intrigued me. So yeah, it was something that I hadn’t really seen before, and I wanted to tell a story about mental illness and family, and somebody coming of age in a family where that’s happening. And that kind of mythology just felt like the right way to tell that story. And because there were these parallels with mental illness and folklore and people believing their relatives who probably were mentally ill were changelings, and that kind of thing. So it just felt like kind of the right way to tell the story.

Kelly McNeely: I really love again, with Angela’s depression, and there’s sort of a relationship between Char and Angela, that sense of duty and responsibility that comes in a parent-child relationship. And it’s interesting that that’s kind of flipped between Char and Angela, on where the duty and responsibility lies. Can you talk a little bit about that as well? 

Kate Dolan: Yeah, definitely, I think what we wanted to do was tell a story about trauma and family and how that kind of comes back on a family. Events that have happened in the past always kind of come back to haunt you. And particularly as a generation coming of age, it’s kind of a time when Char is at an age where she starts to find things out about her family. And I think we all kind of reached that age where you’ve stopped being a child, and you’re not quite an adult, but you’re, you’re kind of given a lot more responsibility in terms of emotional responsibility, and other kinds of more domestic responsibility, that kind of stuff. 

So just trying to kind of capture a moment in that – particularly as somebody’s coming of age – where you have a parent who’s mentally or physically ill, and you kind of have become a caretaker, because there’s nobody else to do that for them. And the weight of that burden and that kind of responsibility, and how scary that can be and how isolated. So that was something we just really wanted to capture.

And then yeah, I suppose there’s kind of a passing of the baton – from the grandmother to Char – over the course of the film that then by the end Char is kind of almost a protector of the family. She kind of has an obligation to be there for the next time something scary happens, you know what I mean? It was very much about that and just kind of trying to capture that.

Kelly McNeely: I noticed that there’s a bit of an ongoing theme of horses in the imagery, is there a particular reason for that?

Kate Dolan: In Irish folklore, we have this other world that’s populated by Aos sí, which are basically the faeries – for want of a better word – but it’s not like they’re like Tinkerbell fairy kind of faeries. It’s hard to use the word fairies to zoom in and capture them, because basically there’s loads of different classifications of them. The Banshee is technically part of Aos sí as well. So she is a faery from that faery race, and then there’s one creature – a kind of character within that folklore – called a Puca, which basically mostly manifests as a black horse that will cross your path when you’re traveling home, or you’re trying to get home, and it’s like a bad omen, basically. If you allow it to hypnotize you and draw you in, it will bring you to the other world and take you and away from the world you live in now. It can manifest as a horse, or a black hare, or its own kind of manifestation, which isn’t very much described, but it’s meant to be very frightening. 

So we wanted to include that, but also the film’s obviously a very Dublin film, like North Dublin, where I’m from. And even though it’s near the city, there’s a lot of housing estates where people will have horses kind of tied up in the greens. And so it was kind of part of the landscape of Dublin as well, but it felt like the folklore kind of bleeding into the everyday. 

Kelly McNeely: Clearly there’s an interest in folklore and the fae, is that something that has always been of interest to you, or did that come out of doing research for this film? 

Kate Dolan: Oh, yeah, I’ve always really been really interested in it. You know, I think – as an Irish person – you’re kind of always told the stories from when you’re a kid. So you have a vast knowledge of the various myths and legends and the other world and all those kinds of characters populated from a young age. So you always know, and it’s often told to you as if it’s true. My grandmother had a faery ring in her back garden – which is mushrooms in a ring, which kind of happens naturally – and me and my cousin were picking them one day, and she was like “You can’t do that! That’s a faery ring, the faeries will come after you if you do that.” And that’s like a gateway to their world, and it’s all told to you as if it’s real. And then as I got older, I was like, I’ve researched more and read about the real world impact of the folklore, and learning stories like what people believed and why they thought that, and the more pagan – actual pagan – rituals and traditions that were almost more like a religion then, I suppose. And that was all really fascinating. So the film allowed me to explore it more in depth than I had, but I definitely had it always kind of in the forefront of my mind.

Kelly McNeely: And are there any other folklore stories that you would like to dig into a little bit for a future film? 

Kate Dolan: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many. The Banshee is a very iconic character. But I think she’s not really evil, I think you can’t really make her an antagonist because she just is an omen of death. So you just hear her screaming and that means somebody in your household is going to die that night. And so yeah, I’d love to kind of tackle the Banshee at some point, but it’s difficult to crack. But there’s also a legend call that called the Children of Lir, which is basically about this king who marries a new queen, and she doesn’t like his children. And she turns them into swans, and they’re trapped as swans on the lake for hundreds of years. The king is devastated and heartbroken, and eventually, they get turned back, but it’s kind of a really strange and unusual legend of Ireland, and one that’s very visually iconic as well. So there’s so many. I’ll have to make lots of movies.

Kelly McNeely: What got you interested in becoming a filmmaker? What inspired you to take that step?

Kate Dolan: Um, I don’t know. It’s just something that’s always been in my DNA. I grew up with my mum. She was a single mother and we lived with my grandmother for a while when I was a kid, and they both – my grandmother and my mother – were very into film, and they loved watching movies. My grandmother had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the kinds of old Hollywood movie stars and stuff. 

We would always just be watching movies all the time. And I think it just kind of sparked something in me, that I just loved the medium and that way of storytelling. And then unfortunately – to my mother’s despair – she kind of planted the seed, and then I wouldn’t let it go and just kind of kept this dream alive. And now she’s seeing it’s kind of paying off, but for a while, she was like, why won’t you just do medicine or law or something? [laughs]

Kelly McNeely: Is your mum a horror fan as well? 

Kate Dolan: No, not really. But she’s not squeamish. It’s funny. She just wouldn’t seek out to watch it now. She wouldn’t really like watching horror movies, she’s scared of them. But you know, she has kind of a weird taste. I think her favorite movie is Blade Runner. So she’s not meek and mild, she does like kind of the more weird stuff, but horror movies, straight-up horror, she doesn’t really love them because she gets too scared. But she did like You Are Not My Mother. So I have the mother’s tick of approval. That’s like, that’s like 50%, I don’t care what the critics say after that. [laughs]

Kelly McNeely: What got you interested in horror? 

Kate Dolan: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s one of those things I always asked myself and I tried to trace it back to something. But I think I just had an innate love of anything weird and spooky. Do you know what I mean? Like, I loved Halloween as a kid, I would be counting the days to Halloween, more than Christmas. And I loved anything scary. I read all the Goosebumps books,  and then I graduated to Stephen King. I don’t know where it came from, I just loved it. And you know, obviously still now I’m such a massive horror fan and anything kind of in the horror space, whether it be novels, film, TV, whatever it is, I kind of consume as much as I can. 

Kelly McNeely: What’s next for you? If there’s anything you could talk about? 

Kate Dolan: Yeah, I have two projects in development in Ireland, one of them is the script is almost finished. So, um, possibly either of them could go next. They’re both horror projects as well, horror feature films. You never know, you kind of have to have lots of pots on the boil as a horror filmmaker in general, but I always kind of have loads of things just kind of cooking, and you have to see what will pop up next, but I think the horror space for sure for the foreseeable future, so I’m not venturing into any kind of rom-coms, or anything like that.

Kelly McNeely: You mentioned that you consume a lot of the genre. Do you have anything that you’ve read or watched lately that you just absolutely loved? 

Kate Dolan: Yeah, I really loved Midnight Mass. I’m of Irish Catholic upbringing, so it kind of hammered home in a deeper kind of PTSD kind of way. I was like, oh, going to mass, horrible! [laughs]

But I was reading Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig on my flight over here, and I thought that was really cool. It’s a really interesting book, really kind of surreal, and a lot of fun. I really want to go see X. I might go see that tonight in the cinema. I love Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and people are saying it’s kind of like an unofficial Texas Chainsaw movie.

Kelly McNeely: And this is a very cliche question. But what’s your favorite scary movie? 

Kate Dolan: The Exorcist was like, probably the film that scared me the most when I saw it, because of the Irish Catholic guilt, probably, as well as like being afraid you’re gonna get possessed by a devil or something. But I love kind of campy horror, like Scream and Scream 2. I would rewatch Scream over and over and over again, because it’s kind of like a comfort movie. Some films I love but you’re like, I can’t watch that right now. But I think the Scream movies, I can watch anytime and I’ll be in the mood for it.

You Are Not My Mother is available now in theaters and VOD. You can check out the trailer below!