“I love horror movies!” Maika Monroe screams from the floor of her living room. It’s Friday night, Halloween, and she sits cross-legged in front of a camel-colored couch, patterned with Western motifs of horses and cowboys—perhaps a nod to her Santa Barbara roots. She’s warm and sweet—a stark contrast for someone whose appearance on-screen generally yields the supreme feeling of pure dread.

On All Hallows’ Eve, instead of dressing up and heading out, the reigning scream queen is keeping it simple: dinner with her dad. She’s spent the past few months on the road, where she’s been filming, promoting, and living out of suitcases. “It’s very lonely, this job. I think a lot of people don’t realize that, but you [often] have to relocate to a new city, with a bunch of new people, in a place that you don’t know. It’s hard. It’s really hard.”

Monroe has lived dozens of lives on screen, each one dusted with its own shade of solitude. It Follows. Longlegs. Watcher. Across much of her filmography, she plays the melancholic, anxiety-ridden final girl. The one who screams “haunted” long before the actual chaos begins. Off-screen, though, Monroe brings a different kind of energy to the horror archetype. She doesn’t brood like Lily-Rose Depp, or carry Jenna Ortega’s quiet intensity, or the cutesy morbidity of Mia Goth—her fellow scream queens. Meeting Monroe, a beam of California sunlight, made me curious about her attraction to the darkness. “It’s a great question! What am I doin?” she laughs, half-teasing, half-self-aware.

“For whatever reason, I think I’m more drawn to these dark stories and roles because I find them more intriguing,” she admits. From the traumatized detective to the cursed girl to the babysitter you should never hire, Monroe has made a career out of women who habitually can’t decide if they’re in danger, or if they are the danger. “I read a lot of scripts, and usually the most interesting ones, to me, are in the horror space,” Monroe shared. “I find they have the most interesting characters and the most interesting stories. In this genre, you can really push the boundaries.”

And indeed, it is an interesting moment to be a part of the horror genre. Movies like The Substance, Weapons, and Monroe’s own Longlegs have crawled into the mainstream the same way the little girl from The Ring crawled out of her TV. Over the past decade, the genre’s box-office share has nearly doubled, a shift put in motion about the time Monroe broke out in It Follows (2015). “That movie came out around the same time as The Witch and The Babadook. It felt like this renaissance of the genre, which was so cool to be a part of and to witness,” she shared. “We were starting to use the genre in a new way and to tell stories with more depth. I think some of my favorite movies that have come out in the past couple years are horror. It’s incredible to watch.”

Of course, I couldn’t let this topic go without asking what movies she had been watching lately. “I loved Bring Her Back. But, ohhhh. It took a couple of times to get through that,” she noted, referring to the film about two orphaned siblings placed in the care of a grieving foster mother whose love turns monstrous, by Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian duo behind the 2022 viral nightmare Talk to Me. We both agree that Bring Her Back was brilliant, and almost unbearable to endure.

“I did just do this film that had amazing costumes. It was really exceptional, working on something with costumes like that,” Monroe said, referencing 100 Nights of Hero, the queer fantasy drama she stars in with Emma Corrin and Charli xcx. The trailer plays like a fever dream of lace and moonlight, as if Edgar Allan Poe had studied with the Pre-Raphaelites and decided to be a set designer instead. Coming to theaters this December, it’s a shift for the kinds of roles that we typically see Monroe play as she moves into her romance era.

Coming out next year, Monroe will star in Reminders of Him, the third film adaptation from bestselling romance author Colleen Hoover. “I was really looking to do something totally different.” She shared that Hoover was on set every day, unlike her previous adaptations, which kept the film closely aligned with the writer’s original vision. “I met Colleen… and she’s a magical human. I am completely in love with her. She adapted the script and was a producer on it, so I think fans of the book will be very happy.” While it’s a bit of a departure for her to star in the romance genre, Monroe never strays too far from the shadows. “There’s a lot of darkness to her [Monroe’s character]. A lot of tragedy and sadness. It felt like something that I could step into.”

There are some things you can never outrun, and for Monroe, horror is one of them. “I really do love horror!” she grins. “I always have. I feel like it makes you feel something visceral that you don’t feel on a daily basis. Or, at least I hope you don’t feel on a daily basis,” she laughed. Even in her latest film, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Monroe pushes back against her usual victim roles, playing a villain who’s almost impossible not to empathize with. “I loved being on the other side. There’s something really quite satisfying about it. I’m usually the one who’s running away.” She went on, “I really felt for her. And, when you get to the end of the movie and learn what she’s been through, you see that she was dealt such a shitty hand. She didn’t have anyone to help her through it. If I put myself in those shoes, where would I be without the people around me? I don’t know, I just had such a soft spot for her, even though she does some really fucked up things.”

Soon Monroe will return to the film that solidified it all, reprising her role as Jay in the sequel to It Follows, entitled They Follow, slated to go into production starting in early 2026. “That movie really changed my life in so many ways. And still to this day, the director David Robert Mitchell is one of my favorite people I’ve ever worked with. So being able to step back into that space, it’s a dream. It’s an absolute dream. I think the script is really good. I think it’s unexpected, but yet gives that same kind of energy and space as the first one. I’m so excited.”

I ask what kind of worlds Monroe still dreams of stepping into. Monroe doesn’t hesitate to answer: “I love Yorgos Lanthimos. I’ve loved him forever, and I think he just does such an incredible job of making you feel really uncomfortable and pushes the boundaries of things within these beautiful worlds. He is one of a kind and really, really special.”

But for now, Monroe is focused on taking a breath. “Doing nothing is so nice. It’s really hard for me to do that. But I’m working on it. I think it’s really important to stop sometimes and not feel the need to keep doing things. Especially in this industry. In this job. There are so many weird and really challenging parts of it. It’s important to take a step back.”

Even so, you sense that no matter how long she steps away, that unmistakable magnetism will pull her back—and drag audiences right into the dark with her. No matter how uncomfortable or terrified she makes us, we always walk out with the same thought: God, that was scary. I can’t wait for the sequel.

Photographer: Kaio Cesar

Stylist: Malcolm Smith

Writer: Shaquille Heath

Hair: Cherilyn Rachelle

Makeup: Shelby Smith

Flaunt Film: Jordan Moran & Maxwell Klaiber

DP: Andrés Aragón

Flaunt Film Editor: A.T. Etzweiler

Photo Assistant: Gabriella Miranda

Production Assistant: Sophie Saunders

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