Bryan Alexander

USA TODAY

Emilia Clarke has faced down her share of deadly screen foes as Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys and Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones.

It's a different story when the British actress is placed in a beautiful but moody Italian castle, including one creepy room featuring a real hawk, for the supernatural thriller Voice from the Stone. Even Clarke got a little freaked out.

"That hawk never stopped making me scream,” says Clarke, 30. “Oh, man, the castle we filmed in was scary. I don't believe in ghosts but if there was anything to make me question that, it was shooting there at night.”

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Clarke survived the haunting ordeal of making the movie, which reveals its first trailer at usatoday.com before arriving in theaters (it's simultaneously available via video on demand and digital HD) April 28.

The story marks director Eric Howell’s four-year journey to bring what he calls an “Hitchcockian fairy tale,” based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Silvio Raffo, to the screen. Howell's prospects for getting his first feature off the ground were boosted significantly by bringing aboard Clarke, the Game of Thrones standout who propelled the love story in last year's romantic hitMe Before You.

Clarke says the script “stole her heart” and she jumped to play Verena, a young nurse who specializes in helping children deal with trauma in 1950s Tuscany. Verena is hired to work with a young boy named Jakob (Edward Dring), who is so distraught by the sudden death of his mother, a renowned pianist, that he has stopped speaking.

This is no Mary Poppins: Verena has to work with Jakob’s increasingly erratic behavior and belief that his deceased mother is speaking to him from the castle walls. Verena tries to flee the disintegrating situation, but her love for Jakob and her romantic relationship with his father Klaus (Marton Csokas) pull her back.

The house’s hold on Verena is “mixed in with all of the loneliness she has felt in her life as a nurse who is always moving from one family to another," says Clarke. "It seems that happiness is only a family away.”

Shooting in the town of Siena in beautiful Tuscany and in another castle located in the Italian province of Viterbo, just outside Rome, made for idyllic settings.

“It was heaven on earth, for sure. It felt like I was on vacation every day,” says Clarke. “And, hello, two-hour lunches.”

Howell had his moment of reckoning when setting up Voice from the Stone's first shot in the beautiful light of a stunning 15th-century castle.

“You’ve spent all the time getting all the pieces together for the movie," says Howell. "You’re picking the wardrobe, the hair, finding the perfect location, waiting for the light. And you turn the camera on as Emilia Clarke steps into the frame and you gasp. We realized in that moment we had something truly magical.”