Emerald Fennell describes upcoming movie ‘Saltburn’ as a “vampire film”
British director Emerald Fennell has discussed her highly-anticipated new film, Saltburn, dubbing it “a vampire film”.
While there are no real vampires in Fennell’s early 2000s tale, she suggests that there’s a vampiric quality present in the way that Barry Keoghan’s Oliver latches onto his wealthy new friend, Jacob Elordi’s Felix, whom he meets at Oxford University.
The movie follows Oliver as he finds himself immersed in the foreign world of aristocracy on a trip to Felix’s posh country house. Fennell explained at Los Angeles’ Academy Museum after a screening, “This could easily have been set in Hollywood.”
She continued, “Oliver suffers from something that I think that we all suffer from to some degree. But in this town, maybe more than ever, which is wanting to be something, wanting to be someone.”
Saltburn highlights Oliver’s struggle to fit in with his peers, with Fennell describing how he has “worked his whole life to get to this place, to get to Oxford, this place that he’s fantasised about that he thinks will unlock this door.” Yet, “All of the stuff he thought that was worthwhile, it’s all a trick.”
The director also revealed that the movie is about “the fetishisation of beauty”, explaining that “when you are making something very stylised […] you want it to be beautiful.”
Watch the trailer below.
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