Corin Hardy never believed in ghosts until he started working on The Nun.
When he first signed on to direct the smash-hit spin-off of The Conjuring, he did so not because of any belief in the supernatural but because it offered a unique opportunity to make an authentically Gothic horror movie.
“It’s a story with a lot of mystery. I’m always looking for something I can get lost in and this felt like something I could do that with," he explains.
But filming on location in Romania, or ‘Dracula country’ as Hardy calls it brought the filmmaker face-to-face with something, even now, he struggles to rationalise.
“I’m a pretty sceptical person,” Hardy explains.
“I love creating supernatural stories but up until The Nun I hadn’t had any kind of tangible encounter with anything that would make me believe in it.”
That all changed during filming in an old military fortress in Mogoșoaia. A fortress with a dark history of its own.
As Hardy set about filming the scene where Irene first encounters the nun, walking down a long corridor in a sequence that provides the film’s first major scare, something happened.
“We were shooting in this 200-foot-long corridor in this old military fortress that’s a bunker-like a labyrinth where they used to store weapons.
"It involved a fairly complex camera setup and required me to set up my monitors in a small room just off that corridor.”
“It was pitch black and there was only one door that led into this room. When I first went in to watch the filming, I saw a couple of men in the darkness at the back.
"I assumed they were Romanian sound crew trying to stay out of the way while we did the scene.”
“When I finally got it right, I exhaled and punched the air. I then turned around to see if these guys had seen the shot but there was no one in the room.”
“There was no way they could have come in and out of the room without me seeing.
"It was a strange feeling. I couldn’t explain it and the more I thought about it the more I became convinced: this is a ghost.”
“Because I had so much to do that day, I just had to get on but later on in during a break in filming I was telling everyone else about it.
"It was only then, later on, in trying to explain it, to others that I began to think ‘what the hell happened?’”
“That definitely made me question things.”
That wasn’t the last of the spooky goings-on for Hardy and The Nun though.
“When I did press in Mexico City, they screened the film in a 400-year-old convent in the hills above the city. A real nun actually came to see it,” he said.
“After watching the film, she approached me and asked me to hold out a finger. She placed a ring on it. It was a Roman Catholic rosary ring.
"I still wear it now. She told me she was giving me the ring because it was going to protect me from evil.”
While these experiences haven’t put Hardy off horror films, they have given him an appreciation of what makes religion such a compelling ingredient for filmmakers.
“It comes down to beliefs and the suspension of beliefs. When you’re dealing with religion you are playing with something that’s deep into the unknown.”
“Horror is most effective when you are dealing with the fear of the unknown. As human beings we’re most afraid of the unknown and religion is exactly that, whatever your religion, no one knows.”
The Nun is out on DVD, Blu-Ray and Digital Download now.
