This story was originally published on The Spinoff.
There’s a crumbling empty McMansion somewhere in Coatesville that became the “beating heart” of new local body horror Grafted, director Sasha Rainbow tells me. “When you walked in there, it had this creepy feeling, like nobody had lived in it for years,” she says over Zoom. “Everything looked all garish and new – creams and whites and silky fabrics – but then there’d be mould and spider webs, and it smelled like damp. It was a really haunting kind of feeling.”
That house, with its barely concealed decay beneath the veneer of aspiration, represents much of what Grafted is all about. Following the story of Wei (Joyena Sun), a Chinese science student who wins a scholarship to study in New Zealand, the film explores what happens when someone will do whatever it takes to fit in. Born with a facial deformity, Wei lets her late father’s grafting experiments get quite literally under her skin, and bloody body horror ensues.
