Written and directed by Ogodinife Okpue, supernatural horror, A Song From The Dark tells the story of a woman who, after the death of her husband, hires Ashionye, a reluctant spirit hunter, to expel a spirit that is tormenting her family. However, unknown to Ashionye, the family has a dark secret that they have sworn to keep hidden at all costs.
We sat down with Vanessa Vanderpuye who plays Ashionye to find out more about the horror movie and the importance of learning about African spirtualism.
How did you first get involved with A Song From The Dark?
The director, Ogo (Ogodinife Okpue) contacted me to see if this was something that I was interested in. But as a Christian, I was always mindful of spiritual films, and that was something that I was a bit afraid of.
So we had a few meetings, and he spoke to me about being inspired by his grandma. His grandma was someone who was quite spiritual in the African community in the village that she came from and a lot of people would go to her for advice. She was someone that, if she saw you or if she met you, could have visions or premonitions about the future or about your spirit or about maybe someone coming for you. She would really help people in the community and they really respected her. He got the idea based on her.
So for me, letting me know that I was constantly speaking a prayer to the spirit, as opposed to ever inviting the spirit in, brought me some sort of peace that I wasn’t inviting any unknown spirits into my body after the take.
What do you look for when choosing a new project? The script, the director, the character…?
Obviously, if Steven Spielberg came to me, I don’t care what the script is [haha] but definitely it does depend on the script, on the character, on the nuances, and the moral of the story. What aspects are we trying to depict? What story are we trying to tell and what are we trying to teach people?
It just needs to challenge me in some shape or form, which is why I love Ashionye. That’s something I’ve never done before. I’m of Ghanaian heritage, so even learning Yoruba, to actually speak the dialect properly was even challenging. To understand what I was saying in its true form. Even smoking! I’m not a smoker, so some of those things I cringe at, but I can tell that I got better as the shoot progressed because I’m smoking real cigarettes. [Ogo] was like, ‘I can give you a fake one’ but I was like ‘no, we’re going to do this. I’ll just try not to choke!’
How would you describe Ashionye and the journey she goes on in the movie?
Her father had the gift of being a spirit hunter, but he didn’t use his gifts wisely. We don’t really know what happened in the past but he was cursed and ultimately died. Then we find her in England several years later, and she’s obtained some sort of Spirit Guidance. And then, ultimately, she ends up reconnecting with her family through curses that were put upon them, and she has to try and seek those spirits out.
You can see that she’s battling with it because she’s like ‘should I even be helping them? They never helped me. They abandoned me’. There are so many things going against her spirit, but she goes through a journey of self-discovery, and self-love. She just has to challenge those inner traumas, those childhood traumas that she hadn’t tackled. She has to face all of them at once. But ultimately, she goes through a positive self-discovery journey and seems to be a better person for it, and then uses her spiritual gift more wisely.

You’ve mentioned some very dark themes in A Song From The Dark, like childhood trauma, grief and betrayal – what do you think it is about horror movies that give them an effective platform to explore such heavy themes?
Sometimes it can offer you a unique platform to explore serious subject matters and that allows us to confront those childhood traumas, or those traumas that we experience as adults and just life in general.
Like any other genre, it depends on how you hone into those subject matter. Horror can heighten it to a different level. It offers a different texture and nuance to it. There’s a moral to this story – that you can overcome [trauma]. You can still choose wisely. You can still choose the right path in life, to be a better person. Maybe to be more spiritual. Maybe to just listen to your gut when it comes to certain things because it is a God-given gift that we all have. It’s such an important life lesson.
You have some pretty harrowing scenes in the movie – how do you go about preparing for scenes like that?
You have to channel into those emotions that are going to take you there. My father passed away when I was younger, so I had to use a lot of method acting, as well as using my own life experiences to hone into those without harming myself in the process, and putting myself through that trauma.
When I was in those scenes, I just locked myself in a room and was by myself to just stay in character the majority of the time. It helped that we were in the middle of nowhere in Shropshire for about four or five days for those scenes. And we did mainly night shoots and it was very cold, so that all added to the fierceness, and of me being scared.
I feel like a lot of us had to stay in those characters because it was quite intense to go in and out of those characters. Then we finished, and we had a big wrap party! We played R&B, we did karaoke, and we just had the ball of a time. We just really let loose.
What do you want for audiences to take away from the movie?
I would love for them to dive into learning and research about African spiritualism because I feel like that’s not something that we see a lot here.
As a Ghanaian, it’s not foreign to hear stories like that, that our grandparents or great-grandparents have [spiritual] gifts. There’s always someone in the village that they know. So it’s just understanding that and knowing that is part of our culture. So just researching that and understanding the African mythology and spiritualism of things – I think a lot of people won’t be too scared to share more of those stories or watch more of those stories.
What’s next for you?
I did a project in Brooklyn recently called ‘Oso’s Vantage’, which is like Succession and Insecure. It’s about a Nigerian guy in the finance world trying to make it in Brooklyn and just navigating life, relationships, and love. I play a lawyer from England and we end up meeting at this mixer at Harvard.
So we did a pilot, which was actually really good, and it’s received a lot of accolades so far. So fingers crossed that does transpire into a series and then everyone can hopefully watch it soon. But it’s just back to the grind of auditioning, really. I’m just waiting for Stephen to call me…
A Song From The Dark is available now on Amazon Prime
Main image credit: Kirk Newmann