Maika Monroe was broke in New York and couldn’t afford a flight home when she learned she’d booked Adam Wingard’s The Guest. She was already a fan of the director.
That job would put her on the set where the script for It Follows reached her, connecting the 2 films that made 2014 her breakout year in horror.
In The Guest, Monroe played Anna Peterson. Wingard’s film reached festival audiences just ahead of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, where she played Jay Height. While making The Guest, she sent an audition tape for Mitchell’s movie, drawn to his work and the character rather than any plan to build a horror career.
“I wasn’t thinking that I was two horrors back to back, I was thinking these were characters that I want to play,” Monroe said in a 2015 interview. She remembered The Guest as the lighter, funnier experience; It Follows demanded a heavier performance.
Her history with horror already stretched back years. As a child, she loved The Shining, Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
She also credits a low-budget horror production with getting her interested in acting at about 13: her dance company supplied background dancers, her mother drove her to Los Angeles, and the director eventually wrote her into the script.
By It Follows, those childhood movies were becoming tools for her own performances. Mitchell had the cast watch Halloween and The Shining before filming. Monroe drew on Jamie Lee Curtis for Jay, especially the strength of a woman fighting to survive.
She had little sense of what It Follows would become. It premiered at Cannes, and in a November 4, 2026 interview, she said, “That movie changed my life.” Watcher in 2022 and Longlegs in 2024 later gave her more leading roles built around fear, suspicion and danger.
Her next horror role puts her on the other side of that danger. In Victorian Psycho, opening in US theaters November 13, she plays Winifred Notty, a psychopathic governess.
Monroe drew inspiration from Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a performance she’d loved before she knew acting could be her career. Describing the experience, she said, “It’s the best, being the killer.”
