The Woman in the Yard: Inside a Blumhouse Ghost Story Shattering Every Stereotype

It’s broad daylight. A towering woman dressed in all black, her face covered in an ominous black veil, stands in the yard of a farmhouse. Acres upon acres of land sit empty in the distance. This is the first clip we are shown on the studio’s monitors of Blumhouse Productions’ new horror The Woman in the Yard when we visited the Athens, Georgia set last year. 

Those chilling few seconds of footage set the tone for the tour. It was also, intriguingly, the closest we came to meeting the titular character of the movie (at least in costume). While the presence of the literal Woman in the Yard lurks over every creative choice of the film production, likewise remained the desire to keep the press in the dark. Fortunately, producer Stephanie Allain (Dear White People, Hustle & Flow) stepped up as a tour guide into that mystery.

Allain filled us in on the basics: The film follows Ramona, played by Danielle Deadwyler (Station Eleven, Till) a woman stricken with intense emotional distress following the death of her husband from a car crash that also left her seriously injured. Ramona is left to care for her two children (Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahiha) in a remote farmhouse. Then a mysterious woman veiled in all black (Okwui Okpokwasili) appears sitting in a chair in the front yard. 

The who, what, how of this woman appearing in the front yard will be revealed in due time. The ‘why’ of this project stems from the longstanding relationship Allain has with Blumhouse mastermind Jason Blum.

After first teaming up on The Exorcist: Believer, which Allain executive produced, she turned down six different scripts sent her way via Blumhouse. Yet when she received the treatment for The Woman in the Yard and saw Deadwyler attached to the project, she jumped at the opportunity. After a brief pause due to the labor strikes of 2023, the movie revved into gear as director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax, Orphan) agreed to direct a script written by Sam Stefanek. For a producer who has worked with first and second-time directors for much of her career, Allain raved about how Collet-Serra is advanced in his “technological and storytelling talents” coming off big budget blockbusters like Jungle Cruise and Black Adam, and now is back to a more intimate picture that harkens back to his horror roots.

“It makes my job so much easier when all the departments are firing at the highest level. I don’t do horror. I don’t do slashers. I don’t do violence against women. My [production company] is about dispelling stereotypes that have been tropes since Birth of a Nation.”  

Allain had to stop there before we asked too much about the tightly kept plot, or why she broke her no horror rule. She quickly diverts our attention instead to a behind-the-scenes tour. We stopped in a spooky farmhouse attic. We watched the monitors as Collet-Serra, in his return to the genre after a detour into the action world, worked with his actors to craft a pivotal, bone-chilling scene. We noticed the artwork around the farmhouse set. It turned out that Deadwyler, the film’s lead, was also the artist of these pieces. 

She says her art digs into “the darkness of  life” and the timing of her recent art shows coincided with their development of the script and her character. 

“The thematic interest that I have as a personal artist, delving into motherhood, the types of transformative practices that are influential in my work, leaned well into the [character] of Ramona. And then we kind of just flowed with it. Sometimes things come to just congruence,” Deadwyler says. 

Another aspect of the project that helped Deadwyler sink deeper into the role was the trust factor she’s built with Collet-Serra. It’s her second collaboration with Collet-Serra after essentially working back to back following Netflix’s Christmas actioner Carry-On last year.

“I trust [Collet-Serra]. He knows what I could do. I call him the master of the dark,” Deadwyler says. “He gets happy and joyous about the most difficult things. We’ve got a rapport at this point. That’s cool and it’s beautiful to play with it,” she adds.  

Inhabiting the headspace of Ramona and accessing the character’s inner and outer trauma has been a process already happening for years.

“It’s a different kind of motherhood story, a different kind of family story,” she says. “Those are things that I think we inherently know. I have a child who’s a teenager, the same age as [Peyton’s character]. That work has been with me for years. The [problems] she is dealing with, those things are coalescing in a way that’s just like, ‘Oh, okay, I know this.’ I know this fully already. It’s just tapping into this grief-driven aspect of it. It made it much more visceral.” 

If we follow the tea leaves, Okpokwasili’s role evokes the visceral and psychological horror elements that drew the cast and creatives to this project. The performer and choreographer gave us one of the more charismatic interviews we’ve had in recent memory, made all the more impressive by the clearly strict orders to be coy and tight-lipped about the character. 

“She’s great. She’s very much like myself. She’s a bit of a mystery,” Okpokwasili says with a sinister laugh of her character. “I can’t tell you anything!” 

Eventually Okpokwasili cryptically teases, “She’s where she’s supposed to be. She is called to be where she needs to be, and she’s always there… What stood out to me was the grief. What is the extreme of grief, right? And also centering a Black family around a moment of devastation and a Black woman who’s at the helm of this family, who is not performing the way Black women are supposed to perform. They’re supposed to sort of handle every violence, every rupture, with an incredible amount of power and resourcefulness and resilience. And this woman has none of that. And so that was very compelling to me.” 

Okpokwasili’s take on the material is in conversation with Allain’s vision of the project, and how it can buck preconceived racial and gender norms. 

“People are always talking about Black women and how they are so strong. They have the weight of the world on their shoulders and they can persevere through anything. This movie undoes that stereotype. [Ramona] is a real person with some heavy shit going on. She’s very vulnerable and naked and trying to carry all that weight.” 

Allain might not have been seeking out a chance to produce alongside Blumhouse or enter the horror space. Now that she’s here seeing the production benefits of being inside of that tight-knit ecosystem, she hopes the polished final product will give audiences something deeper to take away.

“Genre is helpful,” she says, “People can go to genre thinking they get one thing, and get something else.” 

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