Maddie Evans, best known for her role as Dyana in HBO’s House of the Dragon, will headline a new British horror feature rooted in one of England’s most infamous historical episodes. Evans has been cast in Pendle 1612, a docu-horror film inspired by the Pendle Witch Trials, joining newcomer Ella Moss and Shetland actress Gemma Laurie.
Twin filmmakers Liam and Kyle Bashford wrote and will direct the project, drawing on their own upbringing in Lancashire, where the trials took place. In 1612, accusations of witchcraft swept through the region and led to the hanging of ten people convicted in the case, one of the most notorious in English legal history.
Rather than dramatize those events directly, the Bashfords have built a contemporary mystery around them. Evans plays Amy, opposite Moss as Hannah and Laurie as Meg — three young women whose documentary investigation into the disappearance of Amy’s older sister pulls them into the landscape surrounding Pendle Hill, the site long associated with the trials.
“Growing up in Lancashire, the story of the Pendle Witches has always been around us,” Liam Bashford said, describing the pull of the region’s landscape and history as central to the project’s atmosphere. Principal photography begins in late September, filming on location in Pendle. Eleven Eleven Pictures is producing.
The casting marks a sharp turn for Evans, whose career so far has ranged from voicing a hedgehog character in DreamWorks’ animated series Rhyme Time Town to playing a young Britney Spears in a BBC documentary drama. Her part in House of the Dragon was relatively small in the show’s first season but drew renewed attention when it resurfaced in the second. Pendle 1612 gives her a lead role in a genre feature for the first time, anchoring a cast built around two relative newcomers to film.
The Bashford brothers are also serving as executive producers on Una Notte, a short film backed by Harris Dickinson’s production company Devisio Pictures, adding to a busy slate for the pair as they move into their first feature.
