Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan on ‘Bone Lake’ and erotic horror’s overdue comeback: “I’ve been so ready for this, and I’m here for it”
A recurring complaint about modern horror movies is that they’re not as sexy as they used to be, something director Mercedes Bryce Morgan seeks to change with her latest feature, Bone Lake.
The filmmaker’s latest follows Maddie Hasson’s Sage and Maro Pigossi’s Diego, who’ve booked a lavish rental home for a romantic weekend getaway. Unfortunately, the arrival of Andra Nechita’s Cin and Alex Roe’s Will throws a spanner in the works in more ways than one, with the double booking becoming the least of their concerns.
The enigmatic and alluring interlopers into Sage and Diego’s alone time aren’t who they appear to be, drawing the couple into a dark, dangerous, steamy, and potentially deadly web of sex, lies, deceit, double-crossing, and manipulation, with Bone Lake a slow-burning mystery that weaves its way through multiple genres before exploding in a third-act cacophony of chaos.
To say too much about the plot risks giving away spoilers, but when Far Out informed Morgan, in the nicest and most complimentary fashion, that she’d made a very strange film, she wore it as a badge of honour: “That’s the highest form of compliment to me,” the filmmaker admitted. “So I’ll take it.”
After winning rave reviews following its premiere at Fantastic Fest in September 2024, Bone Lake has had to wait a while before being released, but with the twisting and twisted hybrid of horror and thriller finally reaching cinemas on October 3rd, 2025, Morgan can’t wait for audiences to see it on the big screen.
“I feel this movie is best viewed in theatres,” she offered. “So we wanted to wait to give it the time that it should be given with the right people, and so I’m really excited that we have this going with Bleecker Street. I think you could watch this at home, but being able to watch people watch it with other audiences and just really gasp at the weird parts and yell to their friends and have audible reactions is what I always want out of a movie.”
The marketing campaign has done a stellar job of reflective Bone Lake‘s sensibilities, with the posters carrying provocative taglines like ‘Get Ready for a Killer Climax’, ‘You Better Have a Safe Word’, and ‘What’s Your Body Count?’, not to mention some risque imagery that conjures up the sex and violence, both figuratively and literally, that Morgan wanted to bring to the fore.
“We really wanted to say to people what sets our movie apart, and bringing back this erotic thriller is something we’re excited about,” the director shared. “The song in our trailer is ‘Sex and Violence’, and we do deliver with our movie. So we hope people enjoy that.”
Bone Lake is exactly the movie Morgan would go and see as a viewer, which is precisely why she was so drawn to the project. What first enticed her was “that it’s an erotic thriller, but it’s also a horror movie, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously.” Beyond that, “it’s meant to be funny and fun, and that’s what I really want out of a movie.”
As much entertainment as it provides, Bone Lake is nothing if not sinister. In fact, Roe’s Will lays his cards on the table at the very beginning when he ominously intones that “everywhere you go, everyone is playing a game,” but his intentions don’t become crystal clear until later on, and Morgan was always keen to pepper the narrative with those types of breadcrumbs that the grand finale would pay off.
“I like to respect audiences being able to pick up on clues and put things together,” she agreed. “And that’s what we wanted to do with this, and it definitely turns into a game for our protagonists.” It’s also a game for the audience, who might think they know where things are heading, until they don’t.
“I think what’s great is that it takes a premise we all know, you know, it’s nothing new seeing people being double-booked in an Airbnb, but where we take it is in a really different direction. I wanted to keep people on their toes, never knowing what’s going to happen, and the response we’ve gotten has been that. So it’s been really exciting.”
Mercedes Bryce Morgan
The quartet of main characters are all archetypal to a certain degree, and several of the setups to certain scenes will feel very familiar to horror fans, but Morgan wanted to lure those watching Bone Lake into a false sense of security before heading off in directions that become increasingly impossible to predict.
Long before the shit hits the blood-soaked fan, the entire first act of Bone Lake could pass itself off as the opening scenes of a standard romantic comedy. For Morgan, it was important to ground the characters and let the audience get to know them, with inspiration for the film’s introductory exchanges coming from some unlikely sources.
“We’ve gotten the thought that it’s kind of like this European drama in a way, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a big reference for me,” the filmmaker shared. Obviously, it’s a lot bolder, bloodier, and more erotically charged than either of those points of inspiration, with Morgan wanting to “have you slowly seep into that with these characters, and then we deliver fully in the horror genre.”
Bone Lake opens with a bang, offering a hint of the carnage that’s to come, before pulling back and spending plenty of time with its four leads. As far as Morgan is concerned, despite the first sequence offering “a hint at what we’re going to go towards later with how extreme it is,” it was essential that the film “make you care about the characters and then really give people what they signed up for in the end.”
If what they signed up for was hedonism, heartbreak, ecstasy, agony, and a batshit insane final act, Bone Lake gives them all of that, and more. As the story progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to even hazard a guess as to where things might be heading, and that includes a rug-pulling revelation, with Morgan walking the tightrope between refusing to insult the audience’s intelligence, giving them everything they wanted, and making something entirely reflective of her own sensibilities.
“I say that I like to make movies for audiences, and I think about myself in their position,” she reasoned. “I don’t want to make something where, ‘OK, only I like it’. I want to make something that gets everyone there. And I say that a good plot twist is something that maybe people either guess right as it’s happening, or the really smart audience members understand 30 seconds before it’s happening.”
“And if you guess too early? Not good,” Morgan elaborated. “But for us, we’ll see how the smart audience members that go, ‘OK, who is doing this? Why are they doing this? And how did this all go down?’ and getting the last elements right at the point it’s happening is what I wanted from people, and we’ve seen that.”
As for the twist in Bone Lake? It’s sure to get people talking, whether the audience has been able to see it coming or not. “Yeah, I mean, let them talk,” Morgan smiled. “I like movies that shock me, and I’m always looking to be shocked, or else I go, ‘Why’d I get out of bed?’ So I hope to shock people.”
While juggling so many different genres and working on a tight schedule with a relatively low budget, the director underlined the importance of surrounding herself with people she’d worked with before, she trusts, and who understand her process, like Fixation star Hasson, Spoonful of Sugar cinematographer Nick Matthews, and the editor of both of her previous features, Anjoum Agrama.
“Those are my people,” she exclaimed. “And I say, especially with indie filmmaking, you need your people. You need your homies because you’re going into something really intense. It’s kind of like a marathon. Nick Matthews was also the DP of Saw X, but he and I also have a long collaboration, and so I couldn’t have trusted anyone else more.”
There was even a shoutout for Bone Lake‘s Steadicam operator, whom Morgan called “someone that I plan to continue working with for a long time,” and with good reason. During a night shoot in the pouring rain, they found themselves running back and forth repeatedly to capture the scene, which caused some adverse effects.
“We cut, and he goes, ‘One second’, and he leans over and pukes, and he goes, ‘All right, let’s keep going,'” she recalled. “And we’re like, ‘Do you need a minute?’ And he goes, ‘Nope, we gotta keep going. We gotta shoot this’. So that gives you an idea of the people working on this. That’s us in a nutshell.”
Matthews has mentioned A Clockwork Orange, Evil Dead II, and Funny Games as touchstones, while Morgan already invoked Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? However, there were two more key influences on the filmmaker when she was building the world of Bone Lake, but be warned; for those in the know, it might give a little bit too much away.
“I’d say The One I Love was a big reference for us, looking at how couples are pitted against each other and how that goes wrong.” In addition to Charlie McDowell’s Mark Duplass/Elisabeth Moss two-hander, Morgan noted how 1997’s jet-black comedy The House of Yes “was a big reference for me, because it’s something that is looking at something dramatic, but in this comedic way, as we see our characters unravel.”
Bone Lake definitely isn’t a comedy, but it does have plenty of funny moments. Avoiding a pitfall that too many modern horror movies have fallen into, though, it never enters self-aware or wink-wink territory, which led Morgan to pontificate on the current complexion of the genre and how it’s in a state of constant evolution.
“I think we went through this post-modern era where everything was so self-aware and referential, because anything that can be done has already been done, and people had a cynical view of it,” she suggested. “But I see us as in this meta-modern era right now, where we’re a mishmash of all these genres because we’ve seen everything under the sun. But at the same time, we also have this very genuine approach to it, because people want these genuine stories.”
It’s a cliche to say ‘they don’t make ’em like this anymore’, but Bone Lake does feel like a throwback to a time when horror wasn’t afraid to be sexy, sexualised, eroticised, and provocative. Morgan has her own theories on why that initially fell out of favour, as well as her reasons for helping to bring it back to the fore.
“I think everything’s a pendulum,” she mused. “I think we’ll have something really extreme in one direction, and instead of people pulling back a little bit, that usually swings the pendulum. We see that in politics, we see that in music, we see that in fashion, and I think with this too.”
“I’ve always loved the ‘sexy movies’ era, and I never wanted it to go away,” the filmmaker declared. “And so having the appetite for that is just people wanting that more. For example, earlier in my career, when I would make pitch decks for movies, I was told, ‘Take sex out of the pitch decks’. And I’d be like, ‘OK, that’s such a bummer, but fine’. And now I’m being told, ‘No, this is what people want, put it back in!’ I’ve been so ready for this, and so I’m here for it.”
After watching Bone Lake, it felt weird that the first thing to come to mind during the film’s final shot was The Graduate. On the other hand, after hearing about the myriad of unexpected, unlikely, and genre-spanning influences that drove Morgan’s creative vision, not only did it make a lot more sense, but it was 100% intentional on her part, too.
“No, that’s fantastic, that is absolutely a reference to it,” she confirmed. “That’s one of my favourite movies of all time, because I think it captures a feeling so perfectly, and we kind of do it in our own self-referential, comedic way. Yeah, definitely.”
Throughout her career in film, television, features, and shorts, Morgan has always leaned towards combining different genres to tell her own stories. With that in mind, her position as the director of the 2018 web series Stargate Origins stands out. Not only because it’s part of an established franchise, but because her most sci-fi-leaning credit outside of that was the self-explanatory 2020 short, Come Fuck My Robot.
“I think I did Stargate when I was 22 years old, I believe, and so it was something that got me started, but allowed me to do the stuff that I really want to do,” she reflected. “I love Stargate overall as a franchise, but the fact that this was like a lower-budget, digital series version of it allowed me, as this baby filmmaker, to go, ‘OK, great, now I get to make these bigger projects that are also genre in the way that I want to make them.'”
As mentioned, most of Morgan’s work has occupied the horror/thriller space, albeit with plenty of creative, artistic, and personal flourishes, which has been more by design than accident: “I’ve always been a person who’s not going to make your run-of-the-mill slice of life,” she conceded.
“I need things to be more intense and extreme, and I also love bringing a cinematic quality to things. So to be able to go, ‘OK, great, here’s our world’, but lift it and make it bigger is something that I’ve always loved, and so being able to have the stories that do that and the genre that supports it is something that’s always attracted me.”
Mercedes Bryce Morgan
Having worked in features, TV, web series, music videos, commercials, shorts, and brand campaigns already, Morgan has ticked plenty of filmmaking boxes. That said, she was raised on movies thanks to a childhood technological mishap, but she wouldn’t rule out a return to shorter-form storytelling in the future.
“I think a good story is a good story,” she said. “When I grew up, I didn’t have TV channels because our satellite dish blew down. I never put it back up again. So I grew up on, ‘OK, you have movies and that’s all you have’. So that was always my passion. But, TV is amazing right now, and I’m excited to also get into that, but never lose doing features.”
Morgan has named Terry Gilliam as a personal favourite in the past, and while it’s not recommended to emulate his habit of having repeated run-ins with studios and producers, she hopes to match his ability to tell original, inventive, and ambitious stories on a studio-level scale.
“Even though he doesn’t do horror, his movies are genre lifted, in a sense,” she opined of the Monty Python alum. “Also surreal, but also comedic. And they go to intense places, but the fact that they’re able to laugh at themselves is something that I want to do with my work.”
With surrealism on the brain and having dipped her toes into those waters already, Morgan revealed that it’s an arena she’s willing to wade into even deeper: “I’m a huge fan of surrealism, and so I think stepping into that even more. I think what’s great about horror is it lets you show things that aren’t there in our everyday life that we see all the time, but being able just even to take that a step further into the surreal is something that is my passion.”
As for what comes next once Bone Lake releases? Sadly, Morgan remains “sworn to secrecy,” but she did hint at a pair of upcoming projects. One is another horror film “that’s in the vein of comedic horror, a popcorn movie,” while the other is, naturally, “a surrealist dramedy.” That’s as much as she’s willing to divulge, but they both sound right up her street.
For someone more attuned with horror and surrealism, it might come as a surprise that if Morgan had the leeway to make anything she wanted with complete creative and budgetary freedom, she’d place her inner child and the forefront and craft the kind of spectacle-driven blockbuster she was raised on.
“I grew up loving The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean, these huge franchises that are still extremely creative in many ways,” she proffered. “And so, having my own version of that would be amazing. I don’t know what it is yet, but it’s the movies that you watch when you’re sick, and you watch all of them in the same day, that would be my dream.”
From Bone Lake to a blockbuster-sized saga worthy of binge-watching? Anything is possible in Hollywood, and the list of directors who began their careers in low-budget horror before ending up at the reins of a massive franchise is long enough to give any filmmaker, including Morgan, confidence that it’ll happen one day.
