Boarding School Memories

Poe attended the Peddie School in Hightstown, N.J., and the most basic understanding of the film begins with her experience there. It was one she didn’t think much about until she attended college and realized that the environment she had just come from bred a specific set of routines. “It felt like you had your own rules about how you would behave and what you would wear and what you would say and do when you were on campus,” she said. “And then all of those things don’t matter the second you enter the real world.” In an attempt to capture how it feels when a mix of hormonal teenagers are thrown into an idyllic environment with seemingly absolute freedom, Poe created Haldwell, the fictional elite Pennsylvania boarding school the film’s characters attend.

‘The Secret History,’ by Donna Tartt

During production, Poe constantly listened to the audiobook version of “The Secret History.” Donna Tartt’s sinister 1992 novel about five friends at a small college in the Northeast begins with a murder and quickly unravels into a story about a cultlike group of people. Poe is obsessed with the book, because its dark mood and the characters’ commitment to the rules of their group (even if it requires criminal activity) gave her permission to explore the full range of her own characters. “I felt inspired to let them go to heavy places. I know which of these characters can kill if they need to,” she said. “‘The Secret History’ taught me you have to know how dirty someone is willing to get in order to really understand them.”