“AHS: 1984” star Gus Kenworthy returns to horror in “The Sacrifice Game” trailer

Devil-worshipping killers invade an all-girls boarding school in terror tale from The Ranger director Jenn Wexler.

The Christmas movie gets a Satanic twist in The Sacrifice Game.

EW can exclusively reveal the trailer for the new horror tale from director Jenn Wexler (watch above). As Wexler explains, the film "takes place in 1971, and it's about two girls who are stuck at their boarding school over Christmas, and a gang of killers comes to the school intent on summoning a demon."

The quartet of murderers are played by Olivia Scott Welch, Derek Johns, Laurent Pitre, and Mena Massoud, who is best known for portraying the title role in 2019's live-action Aladdin.

"We think of him as this sweet charming guy, this Disney hero," says Wexler of the actor. "I thought it would be so fun to play with those expectations, and to twist them, and to make him really evil. Mena was so excited to go on that journey."

The two girls at the boarding school are played by Madison Baines and newcomer Georgia Acken. Wexler cast Chloë Levine as a teacher and American Horror Story: 1984 star Gus Kenworthy as her handyman boyfriend. The director explains that she saw Kenworthy "in American Horror Story, but he also happens to be an Olympic medalist in skiing, and he's an LGBTQ icon. We had a meeting, and we really vibed, and I felt like he embodied this Prince Charming character."

Wexler shot the film in the spring of 2022 outside Montreal at Oka Abbey, which the director says she "fell in love with on our location scout. I was like this is the Blackvale School for Girls. Within that abbey, there's a lot of different aesthetics already, so we got to build on top of what was already there. It was a one-location movie with lots of locations within that location."

The abbey did have one disappointing aspect, however. Wexler says the building "is now mostly used for weddings and other film shoots. In the basement there were these like, prison cells and when we first went down there people were like, What is this? And then we came to learn it was prison cells put in for another shoot."

The Sacrifice Game is Wexler's second horror movie after 2018's Levine-starring The Ranger. The director started thinking about the project a decade ago while working at Glass Eye Pix, the film company founded by director and indie horror legend Larry Fessenden (Habit, the upcoming werewolf movie Blackout).

"I was really inspired by Larry, really inspired by the movies they were making," says Wexler, who cowrote The Sacrifice Game with her real-life partner Sean Redlitz. "I was doing marketing and social media for Glass Eye but I was like, oh, if I ever got the opportunity to make a movie what would be my dream movie? I wanted it to take place at a boarding school, because I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and I went to public high school, and the boarding school aesthetic always seemed romantic and mysterious to me. I thought it would be really fun to clash that setting with these Mansonesque cult killers because I read Helter Skelter as a teenager."

Wexler wrote the first draft of the movie's screenplay back in 2013 but then shelved the project when she realized she needed to "learn how to make movies first. After producing several movies for Glass Eye, I decided to make The Ranger as my first feature because I realized that would be way easier to achieve than The Sacrifice Game. Then I dove back into the script for The Sacrifice Game and also brought my now-husband on for the ride cowriting it with me."

The Sacrifice Game has been well-received on the genre festival circuit since the film received its world premiere at Montreal's Fantasia Festival in July. Wexler says that the "coolest thing" for her is "when people come up to me and are like, this is the kind of movie I wish I had when I was a teenager. Because that's why I wanted to make it. When I was 13-years-old, I would have loved a movie like this."

The Sacrifice Game will stream on Shudder from Dec. 8. Exclusively watch the film's trailer at the top of this post.

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