A Student’s Skin-Grafting Experiment Turns Sinister in Sasha Rainbow’s Body Horror Debut -- Watch the Trailer for "Grafted"!
New Zealand Filmmaker Sasha Rainbow Delivers a Dark Body Horror Tale About Beauty, Obsession, and Self-Destruction!
If we have the power to make ourselves beautiful, the question becomes: what makes a person beautiful? Is it merely the looks? Perhaps we should be asking ourselves a deeper question—why do we feel the need to change in the first place? In the new horror thriller Grafted, the pursuit of beauty becomes so overwhelming that it transforms into something more violently insatiable.
With the surprise success of Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, it seems the concept of beauty and the toxic process of maintaining it has become the soupe du jour of the recent body horror wave led by female directors. In this case, it's Sasha Rainbow, an award-winning New Zealand-born filmmaker. And like her body horror contemporaries, such as Fargeat and Titane's Julia Ducournau, Rainbow comes straight out of the box with a bold visual style and a go-for-broke aesthetic, fully embracing the gory side of the horror genre.
In Grafted, newcomer Joyena Sun stars as Wei, a socially awkward and extremely shy Chinese academic student who has just transferred to New Zealand to study medical research at a prestigious university. Marked since birth by a genetic facial scar, Wei is determined to continue her late father's groundbreaking research on a revolutionary skin grafting procedure that could cure her facial deformity. Socially bullied by her outgoing cousin Angela and her "mean girl" friends, Wei is pressured into experimenting on herself. The results are both horrifying and successful. The question is, can she achieve her idea of beauty without hurting the people around her? Or will her experiments spiral into something increasingly dark and unhinged? We’re betting on the latter.
Co-starring Jess Hong, Eden Hart, Jared Turner, Sepi To’a, and Xiao Hu, Grafted is slated to debut on the horror streaming platform Shudder starting on Fri., January 24th.
Grafted is both written and directed by Sasha Rainbow, marking her feature film debut. Rainbow previously made the award-winning documentary short Kamali and is also known for helming the 2017 music video Life's What You Make It by British alternative rock band Placebo.