Solus
Lulu, a young girl who is enslaved to a house of the underworld, is forced to lure souls to feed to the house. Only when she delivers the most valuable soul will she be released into the underworld to rescue her father from eternal punishment.
Written, Produced, and Directed by Rachel Monique Taylor
Director's Statement
The Victorian era has always fascinated me: the dresses, the customs, the language, and the stories. Since as long as I can remember, I have devoured any book available that was written in that time period, specifically from the abundance of ghost stories that emerged. I have always seen Victorian ghost stories as not only thrilling and spooky but also beautiful and incredibly revealing of humanity’s deepest desires and fears.
When I sat down to write Solus, I knew I wanted to make a film about oppression. I wanted to create that sense of the daily grind while struggling under oppression’s grip, making all attempts of escape seem impossible. People often become shadows of their previous selves with all sense of hope being devoured by the cloud lingering above, and that was the world I wanted to explore. With this theme in mind, I kept going back to the Victorian era, and the story easily grounded itself there with a slightly different spin on it. The house sprung from the ground with peeling wallpaper, creaking floors, and an atmospheric silence to set the scene for Lulu’s imprisonment. It was here her story began.
It was my greatest joy to make this film, and I hope watching it is as much fun as it was to make. There’s never a shortage of inspiration in the Victorian world, especially when it involves the supernatural.
– Rachel Monique Taylor
