Martin Scorsese’s Gothic Horror Movie ‘What Happens at Night’ Adds Charli xcx: Everything We Know
Martin Scorsese is making a horror movie, and it keeps getting stranger in the best way. On Thursday, Oct. 22, Variety reported that Charli xcx has a cameo in What Happens at Night , the director's gothic psychological horror film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. Nobody is saying who she plays. That's fitting, because almost everything about this movie has been kept behind a frosted hotel window.
The pop star is the headline, but the real story is bigger: an 83-year-old filmmaker who has spent decades championing old ghost movies is finally making one of his own, with two of the biggest stars alive, for Apple. Below is everything confirmed so far, the book it's based on, who's involved, how Scorsese's earlier genre films performed, and what it all could mean for prestige horror heading into 2027.
Watch the Trailer? Not Yet
There's no trailer, teaser or official still to embed yet. Apple hasn't dated the film or released any footage, so beware of anything on YouTube claiming to be a "first look"; right now those are fan-made. When Apple drops the real thing, we'll have it here.
The Details: What's Confirmed
- Title: What Happens at Night
- Director: Martin Scorsese, producing through his Sikelia Productions
- Screenplay: Patrick Marber, adapting Peter Cameron's 2020 novel
- Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio (credited as The Man) and Jennifer Lawrence (The Woman)
- Also starring: Mads Mikkelsen as faith healer Brother Emmanuel, plus Patricia Clarkson, Jared Harris, Welker White, Ilinca Manolache and Gabriel Spahiu
- Cameo: Charli xcx, role undisclosed
- Producers: Scorsese, DiCaprio, Lawrence and Daniel Lupi
- Behind the camera: cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, both longtime Scorsese collaborators
- Studios: Apple Original Films with StudioCanal
- Release date: not announced
The setup, per the studio-side logline and the novel: a married American couple travels to a small, snowbound European town to adopt a baby. The harder they fight to bring the child home, the less they seem to understand about themselves. Every outlet covering the casting, from TheWrap to iHorror, describes it the same way: a gothic psychological horror feature. That's not marketing spin layered on later. It's been the pitch since day one.
The Book: A Ghost Story Set in a Half-Empty Hotel
Peter Cameron's novel came out from Catapult in August 2020, a 320-page book that slipped out in the middle of the pandemic and quietly built a following. Publishers Weekly called it a dreamlike, eerie fable, while noting its dialogue can feel stiff and formal. That stiffness might be a feature in Scorsese's hands.
The couple are unnamed New Yorkers whose marriage has gone cold. The wife is seriously ill with cancer. They check into the Grand Imperial Hotel in Borgarfjaroasysla, a fictional far-northern city where winter swallows the daylight, and the adoption keeps stalling. In the hotel they fall in with a lounge singer named Livia Pinheiro-Rima, who lies compulsively but seems to care for them, and with Brother Emmanuel, a local healer who offers the wife something doctors can't. That's the Mikkelsen role, and casting the man who played Hannibal Lecter as a figure of mysterious hope is a choice that tells you exactly how unsettling this is meant to feel.
Cameron isn't new to the screen. His 2002 novel The City of Your Final Destination became a 2009 James Ivory film, and his 2007 young adult novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You was also adapted (per his bibliography). But nothing he's written has been given a production remotely this large.
Who's Behind It
Photo: Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese and Cameron Diaz promoting Gangs of New York , via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
-.jpg){kind=link}
Martin Scorsese
This is Scorsese's first narrative feature since Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), which earned 10 Academy Award nominations. It's also the clearest horror swing of his career. He's flirted with the genre before: Cape Fear (1991) is a full-blooded thriller with a monster at its center, and Shutter Island (2010) is a gothic asylum mystery that plays like a haunted-house movie. But he's never made a film built around a ghost story.
He's certainly done the homework. In October 2009 he published a list of the 11 scariest films he knew for The Daily Beast (collected by Open Culture), and it reads like a syllabus for exactly this kind of movie: The Haunting , The Innocents , The Uninvited , Dead of Night , Isle of the Dead , The Changeling , The Entity , Night of the Demon , The Shining , The Exorcist and Psycho. Most of those are about atmosphere, doubt and what you don't see. Lately he's been backing genre work from the producer's chair too: he produced Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love with Lawrence, and iHorror notes he recently came aboard Eva Green's TIFF horror film Trees Are Watching as an executive producer.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence
This is DiCaprio's seventh feature with Scorsese; the September 2025 announcement in Variety counted six over two decades. It's Scorsese's first time directing Lawrence, though the two stars already shared the screen in Adam McKay's Don't Look Up (2021). DiCaprio has said Scorsese had him rewatch Hitchcock's Vertigo as a reference point, which is a big clue to the tone: obsession, identity slipping, and a romance that might be a trap.
Lawrence's own history with horror is complicated. Darren Aronofsky's mother! (2017) opened to roughly $7.5 million and earned an F CinemaScore from audiences despite a 68% Rotten Tomatoes score, as AP reported at the time. It's since become a cult object. Die My Love , a postpartum descent with horror edges, sold to Mubi for $24 million out of Cannes, per Variety. She clearly likes making audiences uncomfortable.
Photo: Mads Mikkelsen via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
.jpg){kind=link}
The supporting cast
Mikkelsen brings three seasons of NBC's Hannibal to the faith-healer role. Jared Harris led AMC's The Terror , one of the best horror series of the last decade, so he knows frozen dread better than anyone. Patricia Clarkson adds serious prestige weight, and Welker White is a Scorsese regular going back to Goodfellas , with later roles in The Wolf of Wall Street , The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Charli xcx
The cameo looks like a returned favor. As The A.V. Club points out, Charli put Scorsese on the cover of her album Music, Fashion, Film this summer as the face of "film." She's also been building a real horror résumé. She played Gabby in Daniel Goldhaber's Faces of Death remake, which IFC and Shudder released April 10, and she's starring in and producing an untitled Takashi Miike horror film set in Kyoto with Milly Alcock. Our guess, and it's only a guess: the novel's hotel lounge singer is the obvious spot for a pop star, but a cameo-sized part probably means something smaller and weirder.
The Backstory: How We Got Here
- 2020: Catapult publishes Cameron's novel.
- 2023: StudioCanal acquires the rights, with Scorsese attached to produce and Patrick Marber (an Oscar nominee for Notes on a Scandal ) writing.
- Sept. 18, 2025: Deadline and Variety report Scorsese will direct DiCaprio and Lawrence, with Apple in talks to finance alongside StudioCanal. Apple had already backed Killers of the Flower Moon and released Lawrence's Causeway.
- December 2025 to May 2026: Mikkelsen, Clarkson, Harris, White, Manolache and Spahiu join, according to the trade reports collected on the film's Wikipedia page.
- Early 2026: Cameras roll in the Czech Republic, with support from the Czech Audiovisual Fund, followed by additional filming reported in Switzerland in April.
- March 2026: Jeff Sneider reportedly revealed that Paul Thomas Anderson did an uncredited script pass at DiCaprio's request. Neither Apple nor the filmmakers have confirmed it.
- Late May 2026: Puck reportedly said the film had moved into post-production.
- Oct. 22, 2026: Variety reports the Charli xcx cameo.
By the Numbers: Scorsese's Genre Track Record
The closest comparison to What Happens at Night is Shutter Island , another DiCaprio-led gothic puzzle about a man who can't trust his own mind. According to Box Office Mojo, it opened to $41.1 million domestically, finished with $128 million in North America and grossed about $295 million worldwide on an $80 million budget. That's a smash by any standard, in February no less.
Go back further and Cape Fear cost $35 million, opened to $10.3 million and reached $182.3 million worldwide, per The Numbers, which made it one of Scorsese's biggest hits up to that point. When Scorsese leans into fear, audiences have historically shown up.
The caution flag is Apple. Killers of the Flower Moon reportedly cost around $200 million, and even with Paramount handling a 3,000-plus-screen theatrical release it had crossed only about $102 million worldwide after two weekends, according to MacTech. Looper argued at the time that Apple treats theaters as a prestige stop on the way to streaming. On the other end of the scale, Charli's Faces of Death made about $2.6 million against a $7.4 million budget, and reviewers were split, with a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes. Star power and festival buzz don't automatically sell horror tickets.
What This Really Means
For horror fans, the significance is simple: the most respected living American director is making a ghost story, and he's making it in the classical mode he's spent his life preaching about. Read that list of his favorite scary films again. The Haunting and The Innocents are movies where you're never quite sure the ghosts are real. A snowbound hotel, a dying wife, a faith healer and a marriage built on things left unsaid is exactly that kind of material. Expect a slow burn closer to The Others than to The Conjuring.
It's also part of a clear trend. Prestige filmmakers keep crossing into the genre: we've been tracking Ari Aster's secretive Scapegoat at A24 and Ti West's dark Dickens take, Ebenezer , with Johnny Depp. Horror has become the place where serious directors get to be strange. A Scorsese ghost story gives that whole wave a seal of approval that's hard to argue with.
The Charli xcx cameo matters more than it looks, too. Apple needs a way to sell an austere, wintry adult film to people under 40, and a surprise appearance from one of the biggest pop stars of the moment does that for free. It also continues Charli's genuinely interesting run of horror choices, from Goldhaber to Miike to Scorsese.
What's at stake? If this works, it's the kind of film that ends up on lists like Scorsese's own 2009 one, a ghost story people revisit for decades. If it doesn't, it risks being remembered as a beautiful, chilly art piece that Apple premiered at a festival and quietly moved to streaming. Given Shutter Island 's numbers, the safer bet is on the first outcome, as long as Apple actually puts it in theaters.
What We Still Don't Know
- The release date. Apple hasn't dated it. With post-production reportedly underway since late May, a 2027 festival premiere is plausible, but nothing is confirmed.
- Charli xcx's role. Still under wraps.
- Who plays the lounge singer. The book's most memorable character hasn't been publicly matched to a cast member.
- Theatrical plans. How wide Apple goes, and with which distribution partner, is unknown.
- The rating and runtime. Not announced. Scorsese's last two features ran well past three hours.
Bottom Line
Charli xcx joining a Scorsese movie is a fun headline. Scorsese making a snowbound ghost story with DiCaprio, Lawrence and Mads Mikkelsen as a faith healer is the real news, and it's one of the most exciting horror projects on the calendar, even without a date. Now we wait for a trailer.
Your turn: could Scorsese make a truly scary movie, or will this be more art-house chill than real horror? Tell us in the comments.
Related on The Horror Feed
Header photo: Jennifer Lawrence via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
Recent STories
