Is ‘Watcher’ Star Maika Monroe the Scream Queen of a Generation?

Shot in Bucharest and immersed in ice-cold blues and grays, Chloe Okuno’s new stalker thriller, Watcher, is the sort of film that can chill you to the bone even on a warm, sunny day. In Maika Monroe’s case, the shivers were quite literal.

“Every day, oh my gosh,” the instantly recognizable platinum-blonde actress told The Daily Beast during a recent interview. “Freezing!”

Thanks to memorable turns in films like The Guest and the influential indie horror It Follows, Monroe has emerged as something of a modern-day scream queen. It’s a distinction Monroe relishes, even if she’s wary of being typecast—and understandably so. With her unique look—a modern twist on Old Hollywood glam that feels reminiscent of late ’90s, early aughts Gwen Stefani—and independent, lone-wolf energy, Monroe commands the screen no matter what sort of hell her characters are in.

A fish-out-of-water tale with bleakly realistic stakes, Watcher, out June 3, finds the star playing Julia—a New Yorker who relocates to Bucharest with her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), who grew up there as a boy. Julia’s excited about the move at first, but her Romanian holiday soon morphs into Carrie Bradshaw’s Parisian nightmare on steroids.

It’s not just the language barrier that increasingly unnerves our New York expat. (Although Julia does not love relying on her husband to translate for her, especially as the stress of all the changes strain their relationship.) More unnerving is the constant feeling that she’s being watched—not just by random passersby who clock her as an outsider, but also by an extraordinarily creepy neighbor (Burn Gorman).

Monroe praised the film—Okuno’s feature debut after short films including “Slut” and “The Dotcoms”—for its realistic bent and “Hitchcockian vibes.”

“It felt very grounded in a feeling that I have felt before and I’m sure a lot of women have felt before,” Monroe said. In fact, the premise reminded her of a recurring nightmare from her childhood: “In the bedroom that I grew up in, there was this window,” she said, “and I always envisioned this shadowy man watching me.”

Watcher has drawn comparisons to numerous Hitchcock films as well as Stanley Donen’s Charade and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. All of those films featured in Monroe’s movie marathon ahead of shooting—along with Rosemary’s Baby.

But the experience that most shaped Monroe’s performance came from her real life. As a teenager, she moved to the Dominican Republic to pursue professional kiteboarding—an experience that was both formative and, initially at least, somewhat isolating.

“My dad taught me how to kiteboard when I was about 13, and I sort of fell in love with it,” Monroe said. “I had spent time in the Dominican Republic, and it’s one of the best places to kite with really consistent winds.”

“I kind of said to my parents, ‘I want to take a year off and not go to college and try to do this professionally,’” she continued. “Which is crazy; it just feels like a different life at this point.”

As thrilling as it was to strike out on her own, building a new life while also learning a new language was not easy. Most difficult, Monroe recalled, was being unable to hold deep, meaningful conversations with anyone in her immediate surroundings for the first couple months.

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“As I get older, it’s interesting thinking of these moments that kind of really shaped who I am as a person,” Monroe said. “And I think Dominican Republic was a huge part of that. I don’t know if I would be who I am if I didn’t have that.”

Another, more immediate real-life inspiration for Monroe’s performance of insulated anxiety: she, like her character, felt pretty out of place in Romania. The language, which she hadn’t heard much in the U.S., was difficult to pick up, and COVID restrictions meant most of her time was spent either at her hotel or filming on soundstages—“just feeling really far away from anything familiar.”

“That really put me in the right headspace, I’d say,” Monroe added with a laugh.

Watcher is less than subtle about its central idea—that women, too often, are put on display but never to be believed. Julia constantly feels like an accessory to her husband in conversations that more often than not contain some thinly veiled (or bald, unconcealed) chauvinism. As she becomes more convinced she’s being stalked, a rift grows between her and Francis, whose reluctance to believe her approaches outright hostility. Julia’s experience calls to mind murder victims like Gracie Spinks and Shana Grice, whose stalkers killed them after their loved ones believe police failed to take the women’s complaints seriously.

“I feel like one of the most heartbreaking things in this movie is having this person that you would consider the closest person to you not believing you and not really wanting to understand what it is that you’re going through,” Monroe said. “It makes you start questioning yourself and your own sanity.”

As with any horror film, some days of filming were physically and spiritually challenging—especially, Monroe said, as they shot the film’s sudden, show-stopping ending. (No spoilers here, but we’ll just say it involved a lot of screaming, a lot of hyperventilating, and of course, buckets and buckets of blood.) But Okuno is a supportive collaborator with precise notes and a strong aesthetic vision, Monroe said, which created an environment in which she felt safe to, as the old cliché goes, “go there.”

At this point, Monroe has established herself as one of this generation’s foremost horror actresses. The release of It Follows, in particular, prompted a flurry of reviews and profiles proclaiming her our newest scream queen. There’s a certain sheen to the term, used to describe a wide variety of characters over the years from Fay Wray’s “yell-every-time-they-say-yell” damsels to consummate final girls Jamie Lee Curtis and Neve Campbell.

Monroe appreciates the term’s role in horror history, but like many performers she’s also wary of being typecast. Horror is “maybe one of the hardest genres, and I feel like I grow immensely,” she said. “But there’s also a part of me that—yeah, I don’t want to be pigeonholed.”

For now, Monroe has several projects on the horizon—all of which, she said, come with “very different vibes.” Among them: the sci-fi thriller Significant Others, with White Lotus’ Jake Lacy, and the upcoming Nick Cassavetes thriller God Is a Bullet, co-starring Game of Thrones favorite Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, which will also reunite Monroe with her Watcher husband, Glusman.

“You never know how they’ll turn out,” Monroe said with a game laugh. “We will see!”

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