Williams is coming to Melbourne for Monster Fest, and will speak about her new film Julia in a Q&A with director and fellow middle initial enthusiast Matthew A. Brown, who will be participating in Monster Fest’s series of master classes they’ve dubbed The Monster Fest Academy of Horror and Mayhem, which join the usual chock-a-block bill of video nasties. “We just got off of our US based premiere at Screamfest in LA,” she tells me. “I’ve been doing a lot of interviews…we’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback.”
The film is being touted as the most challenging film in this year’s Monster Fest program, and Williams plays the title role. “She begins the film as a very shy, meek girl working at a small medical place in Brooklyn. She has kind of a dark past where she was abused by her father and she’s never really been able to go on dates with men. Finally this guy from her work asks her out and she’s like amazed because he’s really hot and she’s never been on a date before. She meets him at his apartment…she’s really naïve. Basically he and his friends are planning to drug her and gang rape her. So she sets out for revenge after it happens.”
The plot has more than a few echoes of revenge classics I Spit On Your Grave and Last House On The Left, but Williams reckons this is something else. “We’ve been getting a lot of those similar films mentioned in reviews,” she says. “It sounds a lot like this movie or that movie. The thing is, it is a rape revenge film, it is about that, but it’s on a whole other level than these other films. When I read this script I didn’t consider it a rape revenge film, it’s so much more than that.”
That’s because Julia’s story doesn’t exactly follow the established pattern. “She’s not quite sure how to go about doing it,” states Williams. “She meets this woman at a bar, a lesbian bar. She finds out about this very unorthodox form of therapy. You can’t go after your attackers, you have to do it to other men. She really just awakens to this evil vengeance. She goes on a journey within herself internally which is manifested externally through the work of this therapy that she does, taking it out on random men on the street.”
Williams is perhaps best known to date as the middle section of The Human Centipede. “As disgusting as the concept was I thought it was a great opportunity for me as an actress to convey emotion with just my eyes,” Williams recalls. “A lot of the camera angles were just our eyes. It wasn’t like ‘oh that girl in The Human Centipede, she’s great’, it was like about the film, it’s so disgusting, it’s this, it’s that. I was surprised it got so much notoriety. Even if people haven’t seen it, they know about it. It’s definitely launched my career in film, which I’m extremely grateful for, but there are certain roles I haven’t gotten because of it.”
Although she appreciates the kick-start that the horror genre has given her career, Williams is keen to expand her horizons. “I’d like to be a part of more mainstream films, with strong female leads. I’m keen to work with other actors and directors in different genres, but I do love horror, especially fantasy Del Toro type films. I really just want to be a part of good movies, with a good script, with a talented director behind it.”
BY JOSH FERGEUS
