VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Hannah John-Kamen On What Really Scares Her, Thriller ‘Unwelcome’

The Irish thriller Unwelcome follows the story of an expecting couple, Jamie (Douglas Booth) and Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) when they move to rural Ireland in hopes of a quiet life. Since their new houses needed repairs, the couple hire the Whelan family who bring their superstitions and violent tendencies with them.

In an exclusive interview with uInterview, John-Kamen discussed the scariest scenes for her to shoot.

“I mean where does it end, the kind of horror, I mean,” she began. “It’s just horror on some horror, it’s just like such a layer aspects but I think the most scariest thing that I felt really connected to was – it wasn’t even just the physical kind of you know, the physical fear of having your home invaded or the Whelan’s or the Red Caps even, it was actually the idea of losing my mind and feeling that loneliness and that madness, I guess and that kind of distrust in yourself and your own psyche. I think that scene where me and Jamie are in the woods and I’m trying to explain to him what happened and he kind of has this very big moment and then it kind of makes me feel very mad and like I’m going you know crazy. It’s just this kind of exhausting pain and it’s exhausting confusion of what is happening to my brain because I’m about to be a mother and the last thing I can lose when I’m about to have a child is my mind, you know, and I think that was actually the scariest part for me to play.”

John-Kamen went on to talk about what she admires in her character when faced with these horrors.

“It’s such a beautiful journey of my character,” John-Kamen continued. “It starts off with this kind of, you know, the fear and the unknown and you see the physical changes of me being very heavily pregnant and that’s all it takes, but also what we come to face in the movie and having that and fighting past that, it’s like actually kind of becomes this warrior and I see it’s just this kind of fighting Mama bear, fight for survival modes. Like, you know, nothing’s coming in between her and her baby and I think that is kind of incredible like, mom extra strength that comes out of her. I think it’s kind of like when you hear those stories of the mom pushing the car up with this superhuman strength because the kid was trapped under and that’s the kind of strength that she finds in this in this in this movie.”

Unwelcome will be released in theaters on March 10 and VOD on March 14.