Victorian Psycho arrives in theaters a few weeks past Halloween, but it’s worth extending your spooky season streak to check it out. Maika Monroe stars as a governess named Winifred Notty who arrives at her new gig in a posh country mansion with a sinister past trailing close behind.

It doesn’t take long for Winifred’s true nature to begin poking through, and in Zachary Wigon’s film—adapted for the screen by Virginia Feito, who wrote the 2025 novel of the same name—we take an immersive plunge into Winifred’s high-key madness. Ahead of Victorian Psycho’s release, io9 got a chance to talk to Wigon and Monroe about their new horror film.

One of its most striking aspects is the sound design, from Winifred’s ever-present voice-over to the way the jittery music cues interact with the visuals. Wigon explained his approach to creating the audio experience of Victorian Psycho.

“Sound design has the potential to be much more expressionistically conveying the interiors of psychology and of mood than anything that you can do in-picture,” Wigon said. “So with the sound design here, there were really no rules. There were certain motifs that I wanted to have to convey that Winifred is feeling her darkness rising up within her or feeling like her grip with reality is fraying a little bit. There’s a kind of chime-y sound that plays in certain moments when she feels connected to her darkness, and there’s also a kind of staticky sound that we do in moments where you can sort of feel reality slipping away.

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