‘Heretic’: Read The Screenplay For Scott Beck & Bryan Woods’ Horror Movie That Lets Hugh Grant Scare The Bejesus Out Of A Pair Of Missionaries

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay continues with Heretic, A24‘s psychological horror film from the A Quiet Place duo of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.

Hugh Grant takes a jackhammer to his reputation for playing an absolute charmer by embodying the fiendish Mr. Reed, a homeowner who at first glance seems to happy to talk about the good Lord with a pair of devout missionaries named Sister Barnes (Yellowjackets‘ Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East of The Fabelmans) from the Church of Latter Day Saints.

“People think we’re weird,” admits Sister Paxton. “That South Park musical kind of makes fun of us.”

But the two young missionaries are then forced to prove their faith by becoming ensnared in his deadly game of cat-and-mouse with Reed. Deadline’s Damon Wise describes the movie as “a genuinely different kind of horror, one that uses conventions from all across the genre — from the old dark house movie to the straight-up slasher flick — and puts them in the service of a playful script that makes some seriously subversive comments about the world today.”

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The movie kicks off by actually evoking the feeling of a fairy tale. “Here’s even the image of Paxton and Barnes walking up to the house, and I can identify that it does have a fairytale quality,” Beck told Deadline last month, before the script landed a Spirit Awards nomination and Grant scored acting noms from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards. “I think there’s also a degree at which, because we’re dealing in religious discourse, so much of holy stories are parables. They have relationships to fairytales. You could even argue that many of them are fairytales because there is a story that you can’t necessarily prove happened, but there can be lessons that can be extracted from there. And I think that’s how we see Heretic, to a certain degree: The depictions of the story, even the reality of Mormon missionaries going door to door, we’re telling a story about that. We’re not telling a factual tale, necessarily.”

Beck and Woods directed Heretic from their own script after breaking out writing the original screenplay for A Quiet Place, sharing writing credits with John Krasinski on the 2018 action thriller that grossed $341 million worldwide and spawned a sequel. That script, also adept at blending genre elements, earned WGA and Critics Choice nominations. Their writing credits since include Sony’s 65 starring Adam Driver and 20th Century Studios’ The Boogeyman based on the Stephen King short story (and also starring Thatcher).

The writing-producing duo also produced Heretic alongside Julia Glausi, Stacey Sher and Jeanette Volturno. It made its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and hit theaters in early November.

Check out the Heretic script below.