Reuniting on screen for the first time since the icy corridors of Westeros, Sophie Turner and Kit Harington are stepping into far darker, muddier territory with the 2025 gothic horror film The Dreadful. While much of the early buzz has focused on the pair playing lovers after a decade of sibling-coded Game of Thrones history, Turner has revealed that the true creative challenge lay elsewhere—inside an 18-day shoot shaped by war, exhaustion, and a 60-year-old Japanese horror masterpiece.
Set during England’s War of the Roses, The Dreadful follows Anne (Turner), a young woman trapped in a brutal survival pact with her domineering mother-in-law, Morwen (played by Marcia Gay Harden). As both star and producer, Turner was deeply involved in defining the film’s suffocating tone. To do that, she turned not to modern horror, but to Onibaba, directed by Kaneto Shindō.
Turner described Onibaba as her primary emotional and philosophical blueprint. The 1964 classic, set in a war-ravaged medieval Japan, depicts peasants driven to murder soldiers simply to survive—stripping them of armor to sell for food. That same logic of desperation governs The Dreadful. “It’s not about monsters,” Turner explained in recent interviews. “It’s about what scarcity does to people.”
What fascinated Turner most was Onibaba’s spiritual undercurrent. At its core is a Shin Buddhist parable: a cursed mask, jealousy, and the slow erosion of humanity when survival becomes the only moral compass. Turner studied those shifting power dynamics carefully, using them to navigate Anne’s evolving relationship with Morwen—where love, resentment, dependence, and fear blur into something almost feral.
The parallels didn’t stop at theme. Directed by Natasha Kermani, The Dreadful was shot in just 18 days under punishing conditions in the English countryside. Endless mud, cold rain, and physical exhaustion weren’t inconveniences—they were tools. Turner leaned into the fatigue, mirroring the “animalistic desperation” she saw in Onibaba, where bodies are pushed to their limit long before souls finally break.
Harington’s role as Jago, a man from Anne’s past whose return ignites the film’s psychological collapse, marks a deliberate move away from heroic archetypes. Turner personally sent him the script, and despite initial hesitation, both actors were drawn to its unflinching look at human degradation during wartime. Turner later joked on Late Night with Seth Meyers that filming romantic scenes with Harington felt so wrong they both “retched” afterward—but the discomfort ultimately served the story.
Distributed by Lionsgate and True Brit Entertainment, The Dreadful is slated for release on February 20, 2026. Early anticipation suggests it may transcend fandom curiosity to stand as a serious entry in modern folk horror. By anchoring the film in the legacy of Onibaba, Turner helped craft a story where terror doesn’t arrive from the supernatural—but from what people become when survival is all that’s left.