When 26-year-old writer/director Nicolas Pesce’s debut feature The Eyes of My Mother premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it was met with the right ratio of excitement and revulsion to make a bona-fide horror hit. A minimalist black-and-white countryside yarn, the movie follows Francisca, who is tormented by the trauma of witnessing her mother’s brutal murder. Borderline Films—a production company formed by Pesce’s fellow N.Y.U. Tisch alums Antonio Campos, Sean Durkin, and Josh Mond—released The Eyes of My Mother earlier this month, along with Magnolia Films, to enthusiastic reviews. VF.com chatted with the compelling new auteur, currently filming his sophomore feature, about his art-house triumph.

Wow, that was one brutal flick! How did The Eyes of My Mother begin its life?

I was brought on to assistant edit James White [in 2014] where I was introduced to [director] Josh Mond and the rest of the Borderline Films guys, and we quickly became friends. When we were cutting James White, Josh and I would talk a lot about our moms, and I told him all about the weird things my mom and I would do when I was kid, like dissecting cow eyeballs on the kitchen table . . . my mom’s an eye doctor. So really I just took aspects of my family, combined with inspirations from the horror movies I grew up on—like The Night of the Hunter and Straight Jacket—put it into a script, and luckily the Borderline guys were very supportive of the project and felt like it was something different and exciting, and then helped me put it all together.

How did you go about casting these moody, dialogue-sparse roles with relative unknowns? Olivia Bond as Young Francisca was just terrific.

I knew most of the actors beforehand—mostly just friends of mine. For instance, Will Brill I have known since I was in high school, and Paul Nazak I had used in a lot of my student films and now has been in more of my work than any other actor. Kika Magalhaes, who plays Francisca, was someone I had done a music video with, and I thought there was something interesting about the way she carried herself. She brought a really interesting quality to her performance. I really wrote all the roles catering to these people. Our casting director, Stephanie Holbrook, found Olivia Bond. She came to the role with such a mature curiosity, always quick to ask a complicated question about her character. Even though she was so young she really understood the material despite its darkness, and she really brought a lot to the role.

Francisca is a brilliantly chilling villainous protagonist. What was that character’s genesis?

I’ve always been fascinated by characters who you’re unsure of how to feel about. For instance, Hannibal Lecter is incredibly charismatic, and you want to like him in spite of him doing horrible things. I wanted to have a character that at times you felt sorry for, and at times you were afraid of. But ultimately it was all about crafting an appropriately complicated character for the actions that she takes.

The whole film seems to deal in cycles of violence. What was the inspiration behind its overall structure?

Honestly, a lot of the structure came from Japanese horror films. That was the inspiration for the chapter breaks. What interested me about that was seeing how similar circumstances would affect people differently.

As a viewing experience, what isn’t shown is perhaps more terrifying than what is.