A group of people going into the woods has a very specific connotation in horror. They’re often teenagers/young adults who end up dying gruesomely after engaging in “sinful” acts or “reckless” behaviour. But in your film, we have multi-dimensional and emotionally mature grown women characters escaping their daily life – not to party or partake in a friend group activity – but to explicitly deal with their respective trauma. Was it a conscious choice to kind of go against clichés and tropes with these well-rounded, diverse feminine characters?

It’s true that in horror, a weekend in the woods is never a good thing for the characters, and often kills them or drives them crazy…but in reality, people spend time in nature to stay sane.  

Before writing Dark Nature, I actually did a short documentary about a group of men and women preparing for their first vision quest. They work under the guidance of an incredible woman, Doreen Spence, who is a Cree Elder in Treaty 7 territory, and who was also a nurse for many decades. Through my own experience on the land, and through working with Doreen and other Elders, I wholeheartedly believe we need to slow down and be in nature in order to understand ourselves and the world. So it was fun to play with the contrast of this in Dark Nature; the women are all there to do some real inner work, but things don’t go as planned. For me, this is a comment on reality; we can do our best to improve ourselves and address our wounds, but that doesn’t guarantee anyone safety. The world will keep on dishing out the horrors whether we’re in therapy or not. There’s an irony in that which I appreciate. I also wanted to play with the idea of the “final girl”, and speak to what I know about friendship, which is that it’s our friends who keep us alive in adulthood.