BritFlicks is pleased to host a guest article from ‘BINDING EVA’ writer/director Conscian Morgan ahead of the film’s World Premiere at Tubi FrightFest 2026.
Screening on Discovery Screen 1 on Saturday 29 August at 8:45pm, ‘BINDING EVA’ is a supernatural thriller set in the Forest of Dean, following a smuggler on the run after a deal goes wrong.
Rather than a standard making-of piece, Morgan looks at one of the film’s key emotional ideas: love in horror, and why the genre is such fertile ground for doomed relationships, sacrifice and tragic attachment.
🎞️ Watch the trailer
One of my favourite films of all time is Meet Joe Black, a three-hour
romantic drama about Death falling in love with a woman.
This might come as a strange confession from someone premiering his
debut feature at FrightFest this month, but bear with me…
I have a weakness for impossible and tragic love stories, not
necessarily romantic ones.
Then there's Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, which follows a man
trying to defeat death for a woman he loves. And Interstellar, which
maps a father and daughter's love stretched across space and time.
If I had to be exact, I'd say that I'm drawn to stories that put love
under pressure, and for me, the horror genre is best placed to test a
relationship to its absurd breaking point.
That said, some excellent horrors don't rely on love as their backbone.
UFO Abduction (1989) scared the crap out of me as a child. It was the
first time I had come across a found-footage film like that. Way
before The Blair Witch Project. You could argue that the family under
siege gave it some heart, but that never felt like the point to me.
For me, the point was to frighten the viewer by blurring the line
between fiction and reality through its vérité, home-video style, and
it did that superbly.
Then there is The Thing, where paranoia and total gross-out are the
order of the day. I remember watching and thinking that it was almost
a whodunnit. It certainly borrows the machinery of that genre, spliced
with the darkest, most macabre body horror.
And I suppose that's where my list ends.
Every other horror I reach for, I end up finding a bleeding heart
buried somewhere inside the story.
Paranormal Activity has the same vérité approach, except it worked so
well because it documented Katie and Micah's relationship falling
apart night by night.
Even the torture horror Martyrs (the original!) failed my test. It was
recommended to me by my brother around 2010, and I'd heard almost
nothing about this small French horror film. After watching, I
honestly felt as though I had watched a snuff film. I think the
torture works because of the transcendental ideas behind it. But at
its heart, Anna is drawn into the horror because she cannot abandon
her friend, Lucie.
So, I suppose what I'm saying is that horror can totally work without
love, but tragic love is what horror does best. Few genres let you
push attachment, sacrifice and responsibility to their absurd breaking
points, and the audience happily sits through it.
My short film Immure (which you can watch on ALTER) lands where I
wanted it to and probably embodies what I'm trying to say, on a small
scale. Without giving too much away: it follows two neighbours, Eugene
and Mary, both trapped in difficult home lives and finding a little
hope in one another.
Finally, I'd say that horror is the perfect place to explore doomed
love because a sense of foreboding is built into the genre. Horror
gives you that ticket for free. You know that something is going to go
wrong!
This is what so many Greek tragedies were built around. Audiences
often knew the myth before entering the theatre, so the tension came
from watching the hero move towards the ending.
Romeo and Juliet announce in the opening lines that THEY WILL DIE, yet
some part of me still hoped that the young couple might manage to work
it out. Part of the audience always hopes to be wrong.
And that is the idea I carry into Binding Eva, my debut feature: a
supernatural thriller that follows a smuggler on the run after a deal
goes wrong. He takes a mother and her young daughter hostage and
forces them to guide him through the Forest of Dean, but the forest
has other plans…
It has its world premiere at FrightFest on Saturday 29 August.
Hopefully see you there.
