Lucky's Brea Grant on Upgrading the Final Girl to the Final Woman

Heroes and Dexter star Brea Grant's latest movie, Lucky, centers on a successful self-help author [...]

Heroes and Dexter star Brea Grant's latest movie, Lucky, centers on a successful self-help author who finds herself stalked by an unstoppable, unkillable slasher in the vein of Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. The masked, wordless killer appears early in the movie, and May (Grant) wakes up, gets some household items to defend herself with, and follows her husband Ted (Dhruv Singh) down the stairs. After they have dispatched the killer, Ted drops a bomb on May: this guy shows up every night to try and kill her, and Ted usually just sends him on his way without waking her.

Heroes and Dexter star Brea Grant's latest movie, Lucky, centers on a successful self-help author who finds herself stalked by an unstoppable, unkillable slasher in the vein of Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. The masked, wordless killer appears early in the movie, and May (Grant) wakes up, gets some household items to defend herself with, and follows her husband Ted (Dhruv Singh) down the stairs. After they have dispatched the killer, Ted drops a bomb on May: this guy shows up every night to try and kill her, and Ted usually just sends him on his way without waking her.

It's a strange setup -- think Groundhog Day meets Halloween -- but it works as a creepy story that also gives Grant (who wrote the movie) a chance to comment on the nature of slasher movies, and toxic masculinity in general. And Grant originally didn't even plan on starring in the thing.

"I wrote it thinking I might direct it, because I'm doing a lot more directing now," Grant explained. "But when I took it to Epic Pictures, they had just done Imitation Girl with Natasha Kermani, and they were like, 'We want her to direct and you to star.' And she called me, and she said the same thing, and I had to wrap my brain around it because May, as a character, I just saw as so different from me, and a bit more of an adult than I am in a lot of ways."

As the movie progressed, May went from someone who was confused and scared to someone who, win or lose, was determined to get in there and fight the monster stalking her. That meant lots of fighting and lots of blood.

Grant explained, "The idea was that May learned how to handle this situation. So we kept calling her not the final girl; she was the final woman. She made decisions like an adult woman would, where she learned to fight back. She prepared in the way that a woman like this would, who is a professional writer and business woman, who writes books about being prepared. So, of course, she would take her own advice."

Some of that preparedness came in the form of some very practical and somewhat understated things. In the beginning of the film, May and her husband Ted have some scenes together where they are having the kind of casually-intimate conversations a married couple has. Lounging around the house with Ted, May is wearing pajamas and bare feet.

By the second or third time the killer comes, May is in socks, and almost immediately thereafter, she had shoes.

"There was a moment pretty early on that Natasha was like, 'You should be in shoes for the rest of the movie,' and I was like, 'Oh, you're right!' Things like that, we were like, 'Oh, she would sleep in shoes now. She wouldn't be in pajamas anymore because this is a woman who wouldn't take this lightly. She would go into it with a plan.'"

Lucky releases tomorrow, August 3rd, on VOD, Digital and DVD.

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