Some directors sneak into horror through the side door. Axelle Carolyn walked in through the press entrance, notebook in hand, spent years interviewing the people who make the films she loved — and then picked up a camera and started making her own. Axelle Carolyn is a Belgian filmmaker who came up through horror journalism to write and direct Soulmate, create Tales of Halloween, and direct The Manor. Two features, one beloved anthology, two non-fiction books and a directing run through nearly every major horror series on television: that is not a side door. That is a career.
Quick Specs
- Born: c. 1979, Brussels, Belgium
- Occupation: Film director, screenwriter, author; former actress and horror journalist
- Known for: Soulmate, Tales of Halloween (creator), The Manor
- Based in: Los Angeles, by way of London
A fan first: Brussels, law school and the horror press
Carolyn grew up in Brussels, in Belgium, attending an all-girls Catholic school — and sneaking horror magazines into it, because some educations matter more than others. Her parents had a plan for her, and the plan was respectable: she studied law, international law and politics at university, at their insistence, before film finally won. If you want to understand her later work, that detour matters. She did not arrive in horror as a tourist. She arrived as a lifer who had taken the long way round.
Her way in was journalism. Carolyn built her name writing set reports and reviews for horror and genre outlets, covering shoots from the inside — among them the first two Hostel films, The Hills Have Eyes and its sequel, and Dark Floors. Set reporting is an education no film school sells: you watch directors solve problems in real time, in the mud, on the clock. She was taking notes the whole time.
The writing became books. Her first, It Lives Again! Horror Movies in the New Millennium, is a survey of where horror cinema went in the 2000s — and a good enough one to take the Silver Award in the Performing Arts category at ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year awards. Sources disagree on the year. Most give 2008, and the book was announced in June 2008, while one biographical listing gives 2009. Her second book, The FrightFest Guide to Ghost Movies (2018), is an analysis of the 200 most significant ghost stories on film — a subject she would keep returning to with a camera. She also placed short fiction in anthologies including Dark Delicacies III and The Mammoth Book of Body Horror. Journalist, critic, author: by the time she directed anything, she had already spent years thinking hard about how horror works.
In front of the camera
Before the directing, there was acting — briefly, and mostly small. Her most notable role came in Neil Marshall’s Centurion (2010), where she played the Pict warrior Aeron alongside Michael Fassbender and Olga Kurylenko — a striking turn in a film built on mud, blood and pursuit. Beyond that, listings credit her with a handful of small parts in the years before (a party guest in Beneath Still Waters in 2005, appearances in Doomsday in 2008) — a modest on-screen résumé. Acting was never the destination. It was another classroom.
2011: the shorts
Carolyn directed three short films in 2011, and the two best documented announce her theme immediately. The Last Post starred Jean Marsh; The Halloween Kid was narrated by Derek Jacobi. Both are stories of people finding comfort in the supernatural — of ghosts not as threats but as company. (A third short from that year, Hooked, is named by a single biographical listing, so we flag it rather than build on it.) Hold onto that idea — the ghost as solace — because it is the seed her first feature grew from.
Soulmate: a ghost story about grief
Soulmate is Carolyn’s feature debut as writer-director: a quiet British ghost story, and one of the saddest horror films of its decade. It premiered on the festival circuit in 2013 — Sitges, and FrightFest’s Halloween event in the UK, running 103 minutes — before its general release in 2014, which is why you will see both years attached to it. Both are right; they are just answering different questions.
The story: Audrey, recently widowed and guilt-ridden after her husband’s death in a car crash — and after a failed suicide attempt of her own — retreats to a rented cottage in the Welsh countryside to be alone with it. The cottage has a previous owner, Douglas Talbot, dead thirty years. Audrey is the first person who can see him. What follows is not a haunting so much as a companionship: two people, one living and one not, bonding over shared grief. The catch, when it comes, is the saddest one available — as Audrey heals and decides to leave, Douglas, who died by suicide and whose pain has not faded, may not be able to let her go. Even the credits carry a small mystery: the FrightFest programme lists the film as produced by Neil Marshall, while another contemporary account credits producer Claire Otway.
The film divided opinion in the way honest films do — part horror, part drama, part gothic romance — and was generally well received. It also brought Carolyn a Best Director award at Rome’s FantaFestival, a win carried by two separate biographies of her. Two further honours are reported — Best Screenplay at France’s La Samain du Fantastique festival and Best Actress for her lead at FantasPorto. She was 34 when the film premiered. For a debut, Soulmate is remarkably sure of what it is: a horror film that believes the scariest thing in the room is loneliness.
Tales of Halloween: the anthology she built
If Soulmate is Carolyn the minimalist, Tales of Halloween is Carolyn the ringmaster. She created the anthology in 2014, co-produced it with Epic Pictures, and wrote and directed her own segment; the film was released in 2015, closing that year’s FrightFest. Ten segments, one suburb, one Halloween night — and the whole thing exists because she willed it into being.
Her segment, “Grim Grinning Ghost”, is the anthology’s quiet chill. At a Halloween party, a mother tells the story of Mary Bailey — a girl mocked all her life for her disfigured appearance, whose ghost rises every Halloween and takes the eyes of anyone who turns around to look at her. Her daughter Lynn laughs it off, drives home, and breaks down on the way. Walking the rest of the way, she hears footsteps behind her. And laughter. Remembering the story, she refuses — absolutely refuses — to turn around. She makes it home. And finds Mary Bailey sitting beside her. It is a campfire tale told with total control, and it plays the room every time. The anthology went on to win both a Saturn Award and a Rondo Award. Carolyn was 36 on its release — a journalist who had become, in five years, one of the people other journalists wrote about.
The Manor: getting old is the haunting
Her second feature as writer-director, The Manor, arrived on 8 October 2021, released on Amazon Prime Video as part of the Welcome to the Blumhouse series, produced by Amazon Studios, Blumhouse and Sandy King, and starring Barbara Hershey. Carolyn was 42. After a mild stroke, Hershey’s Judith Albright moves into Golden Sun Manor, an assisted-living facility — and becomes convinced that something is preying on the residents at night. Nobody believes her. Of course nobody believes her: that is rather the point.
Carolyn has been plain about where the film came from: her own fears, and watching loved ones moved into nursing homes and stripped of their independence. The Manor is a gothic creature feature wearing its real subject on the outside — aging, and how casually society warehouses the people living it. The horror is not that Judith sees a creature. The horror is that seeing it changes nothing about how she is treated.
Spoilers follow for The Manor’s ending. The truth inside Golden Sun Manor is a pact, not a haunting: Roland — a fellow resident who becomes Judith’s friend, not her husband, whatever some plot summaries claim — along with Trish and Ruth, are witches bound to a Celtic oak, a Tree of Life, sacrificing fellow residents’ remaining years to stay young, regaining their youth between midnight and dawn. Judith swaps her hair for Roland’s, so that when Roland performs the ritual, he sacrifices himself to the tree creature and dies. Offered the choice — burn the tree, or join them — Judith, urged on by her grandson Josh, who does not want to lose her, accepts. The film ends with Judith young again, celebrating her 70th birthday anew, dancing beneath the oak, marked with the same sigil as the others. No cheap curse, no easy exorcism — an old tree, an old bargain, and a woman who decides that being dismissed is the one fate she will not accept.
The television years
Features made her name; television made her a fixture. Carolyn first entered TV on the writing side, in the writers’ room of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in 2018, co-writing the episode “Chapter Nine: The Returned Man”. Then the directing calls started, and they have not really stopped.
For Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, she directed episode 8, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” — the series’ gothic heart, a period ghost story nested inside the modern one. She shot it in 2019; the series was released in 2020. If you were picking one episode of television that shows what Carolyn does — patience, period atmosphere, grief as a haunting — this is the one.
The run kept going. For Shudder’s Creepshow she directed “Dead and Breakfast” (Season 2, Episode 2, aired 8 April 2021) and “Stranger Sings” (Season 3, Episode 4). For American Horror Story’s tenth season, Double Feature, she directed the season finale, “The Future Perfect” (aired 20 October 2021) — she spoke in an interview that same month about having just finished shooting it. That season’s fourth episode, “Blood Buffet”, is also reportedly credited to her. For Flanagan’s The Midnight Club (2022), she directed episodes 6, “Witch”, and 7, “Anya”, both released on 7 October 2022. And one listing’s filmography credits her with two episodes of AMC’s Mayfair Witches (2023); she is also named as director of episode 3, “Second Line”. Taken together, it is one of the strongest episodic résumés in modern horror TV — Bly Manor, Creepshow, American Horror Story, The Midnight Club. Producers keep handing her the gothic episodes. There is a reason.
Personal life
Carolyn was married to British filmmaker Neil Marshall from 2007 to 2016 — past tense, whatever older profiles still say. She lives in Los Angeles, having moved from London; she reportedly shares the house with a dog named Anubis, which, if true, is the most on-brand pet name in horror.
Where she stands
Axelle Carolyn’s career refuses the usual shape. Journalist to author to actress to director; microbudget ghost story to anthology ringmaster to Blumhouse feature to the most trusted pair of hands in horror television. Through all of it, the subject has stayed constant: grief, loneliness, and the comfort — and the danger — of the dead who will not leave, and the living who cannot let them. She spent her twenties studying how horror works. She has spent everything since proving she understood the lessons. For more of the directors who define the genre, browse our Horror Directors index.