Victorian Psycho Trailer and Poster Unveiled
Bleecker Street has released the official trailer and poster for Victorian Psycho, the upcoming horror thriller directed by Zachary Wigon. Opening in theaters on September 25, 2026, the film has been rated R for strong bloody violence and brief sexual material.
In the Year of our Lord 1858, an unusual governess named Winifred Notty arrives at the gothic manor known as Ensor House. Winifred’s responsibilities include teaching the children table manners and educating them about their family history – all whilst hiding her own psychopathic tendencies.
But as staff members begin disappearing, the estate’s owners start to wonder if there is something amiss with their new governess…
Victorian Psycho invites us into the mind of a psychopath – trapped in a world she cannot control, living on the border between insurrection and madness. The film stars Maika Monroe, Jason Isaacs, Ruth Wilson, and Thomasin McKenzie.
According to Bleecker Street, Victorian Psycho was born out of a question: why are so many of the great literary psychopaths men? And, when they are women, what changes in their depiction? Do they become softer, crueler, more monstrous, victimized? “I was interested in the gender play,” says author Virginia Feito.
Her first novel, Mrs March, a 21st-century invocation of Patricia Highsmith, was a wire-taut gothic thriller about an Upper East Side housewife sent into disarray. But she was interested in placing her second protagonist, this female psychopath, in the Victorian era, a period she discovered to be brimming with unfathomable violence.
There, she came across women and children living without rights or agency, stifled and abused without a drop of consequence. “I was grasping with, like, ‘Is it relevant to be angry about this now?’” she says. “But it was making me really angry.”
Victorian Psycho, its title an allusion to Bret Easton Ellis’s seminal novel American Psycho, adapted for the screen in 2000 by Mary Harron, became a place for Feito to channel that anger. At the time, Feito had been working with director Zachary Wigon on the development of an original film, and they had, in her words, “developed this great working relationship. I trusted his creative opinion implicitly.”
So, she sent him the very first draft of her book – purely for feedback (“I don’t know… compliment me!” she jokes) – only for Wigon to immediately pounce on the idea of an adaptation. “I just couldn’t shake it, you know?” the director says. “Every page was another outrage, another sense of madness and fury.
“And, in the days that followed, I just kept thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the more interested I became in this intellectual idea of: in an insane society, who’s truly crazy? The crazy people or the sane ones? Movies, when they’re compelling, tend to be built on paradoxes. And that was a paradox that was really interesting to me.”
Feito began translating page to screen and finding ways to visualize the inner workings of Winifred’s dangerous mind. As Wigon says, “Virginia has this incredible ability to blend a comic, observational, sort of mordant wit with a very real sense of losing one’s sanity. That’s a very rare quality for a writer to have.”
Victorian Psycho would become Wigon’s third feature film, after The Heart Machine (2014), about a man on the trail of a potential internet catfish, and Sanctuary (2022), in which a dominatrix and her client battle for superiority. All three take a keen interest in gendered dynamics within unexpected spaces.
