Kate Siegel says she never wanted to direct. Not in the polite “oh, maybe someday” way—she flat out said no. Twice. “I was very tired,” she recalls. The offer came from the V/H/S team through her manager. Siegel pictured the workload, the pressure, the fact she lives with an “incredible director” (Mike Flanagan) and decided, no thanks. But then Flanagan crashed the conversation. “He runs in the room and goes, ‘Absolutely yes you do this. You will just kick the butt of this. You will kick it up and down the street.’” Which is how she ended up behind the camera for V/H/S/Beyond, her first directing gig—and, as it turns out, the start of a new obsession.
“I spun the big tanker ship of my acting career like a pirate,” she says, grinning. “Zoom zoom zoom—what else can I direct? What else can I do? What other stories can I tell?”
If the V/H/S franchise is known for giving filmmakers freedom, Siegel gave herself rules. “I believe art thrives with strong boundaries. The tighter the space you create, the hotter the energy gets.” She locked in on sci-fi and body horror, made found footage a deliberate choice instead of a budgetary crutch. “It’s like saying you’re drawing with crayons because you can’t afford oil pastels. If you’re using crayons, make a crayon drawing.”
To get the right grainy, magnetic-tape look, she shot the film on high-end Alexa cameras, edited it, then dumped the final cut to an actual VHS tape and re-digitized it. “I own the VHS tape of my VHS,” she says, with the kind of satisfaction usually reserved for a rare vinyl pressing.
Her story bends the usual alien-invasion tropes. “The alien isn’t the dangerous thing—she’s the monster. The alien’s basically a DoorDash driver sent to pick up one extra spider and an octopus, and when he opens his trunk it’s full of ants. That’s disgusting. That’s the horror.” The ants, in this case, are nanobots. Everyone’s doing their best—alien, human, nanobot—and it still ends in disaster.
If you’re wondering what kind of director Siegel wants to be from here, she’s already drawn the map. “It’s a Bermuda Triangle—Guillermo del Toro, Terrence Malick, Ridley Scott. Weird, feminist, for adults.” Weird means she’s willing to flirt with the avant-garde. Feminist means she’s centering female stories. For adults means “I want it dealing with intense issues. People behaving like people. The adult feminist sci-fi of Ridley Scott. The avant-garde fantasy of Malick. The human issues through fantasy lens of del Toro.”
And yet she’s also working on something for kids—sort of. Dark Corners is a YouTube series of horror shorts with a pumpkin-based scare rating system and a script from Stephen King himself. “Let’s teach them the art of the jump scare,” she says. One of the episodes, Dimples, came from her daughter’s recurring nightmare about a monkey with rusty knives. Together, they wrote a story where the girl defeats the monkey, then recorded it as a family—Siegel as the mom, her daughter as the lead, her son in a cameo. “It cured her nightmare. That’s the point of horror for kids. It helps them be braver.”
Her next on-screen turn is in the horror-comedy Damned If You Do, about a group of teens who sold their souls to the devil. “It’s in that sweet spot where there’s gore and laughs and high-octane fun.” She got the comedy bug playing Camille in The Fall of the House of Usher, and now she wants more. “I can drop a little quip at a dinner party, but translating that to film is a different muscle. I’m still learning.”
Then there’s The Life of Chuck, another Flanagan-directed Stephen King adaptation, this one about time and the paradox of being both insignificant and the most important person in the universe. “It’s beautiful,” she says, clearly pleased that Flanagan is earning recognition from film circles beyond horror.
Her pace is exhausting just to hear about, but Siegel’s not slowing down. “Like and subscribe to my life,” she jokes. Honestly, people probably would. Especially if it came with a VHS release.
Watch the full interview above.
