«I made a horror film but I’m afraid to see it»- Corriere.it

It took Emanuele Scaringi more than a year to convince Kasia Smutniak and accept the part of Marta in his horror film pantafaarriving in cinemas on March 30 with Fandango, which produced it with Rai Cinema, after the preview at the Turin Film Festival, but was unable, in any way, to convince its actress to see it.
She has never felt like a leading lady who hasn’t seen her film. But why?

“Simple. Horror movies scare me. Before filming, Emanuele had given me a list of titles to watch to get in the mood. The first was Babadook, now considered a classic. It took me a week to finish it, one piece at a time, and I haven’t even started the others».

It’s funny, she comes across as a brave guy, she also loves extreme sports.

“It’s different. My adventure with horror cinema stalled immediately, as a girl when I saw it at the cinema The Blair Witch Project. A traumatic experience, that’s when I realized it wasn’t for me. In any case, I thought that by making the film I would have exorcised this fear, driven by the director who said to me: you’ll see, you won’t have any trauma».

And instead?

«I am happy to have shot it, I really admire my co-star Greta Santi, who plays my daughter Nina and who is a fan of the genre. Obviously she saw it without problems and found it beautiful. I trust her, the script and filming were enough for me».

The Pantafa of the title is a creature present in the popular legends of various places not only in Italy (pantafica in the Marche and Abruzzo, fantasima in Tuscany and Umbria, carcaveja in Piedmont or kanashibari in the Far East). A spectral figure that, it is said, oppresses the chest of those who sleep, preventing them from breathing.
«The basis of the story is real, Scaringi and his co-screenwriters Tiziana Triana and Vanessa Picciarelli were based on studies on sleep apnea, the so-called hypnagogic paralysis that affects about 8% of the population. It is something real that is intertwined with popular legends, something we can identify with. Here she has a face, a name, she is embodied by a female figure, linked to a sense of suffocation. The heart of the story interests me even more, it is the theme of motherhood, which here does not escape the complexity and even the ambiguity of a role that tends to be clichéd. It seems to me that today, even less than in the past, it can be simplified».

She has two children. Can motherhood be scary today?

«What scares is the idea of ​​feeling inadequate as parents, not up to a role that society tends to associate with perfection. When you become a mother you must always be present, a super woman, young, beautiful, affable, never a failure, a flaw. A pressure that can become intolerable.

Does this happen to your Marta?

«Marta is a complex woman and the relationship with her being a mother is complicated. She feels the responsibility of the role, the social pressure and she takes refuge in a small mountain village also to escape the gaze of society. You experience a concentrate of contradictory sensations that genre cinema allows you to portray at its best. And so she addresses the issue in a more direct and sincere way ».

We will soon see her again in the Sky series «Domina» in the role of Livia Drusilla. How was it to find her?

“Beautiful. Apart from the joy of finding the same people on the set, I was very pleased to continue telling the story of this woman from the past. Maybe she really was the first feminist. We know very little about her, there are few traces about her, historians have told her story from a male point of view. Roman women are almost invisible.’

Speaking of roles, do you find that our cinema is offering more stimulating ones to actresses?

“I speak for myself. I select a lot, the time taken away from my family is precious. I’m looking for stories that I feel close to, that I’m interested in hearing and getting the public to know».

Are you thinking about directing?

“I’m not ruling it out, who knows.”

Apart from the horror movie, is there anything that scares you?

“If you had asked me this question a year ago, I might have answered with a joke. Now I have to tell the future. And indifference to our daily lives. For years we have experienced the reality of immigration as an emergency, and in the face of tragedies such as that of Cutro with children, women and men drowned, we seem insensitive. How we got addicted to war. You can’t close your eyes.”