Peter Strickland on his “killer dress” movie, In Fabric

‘I just wanted to explore clothing,” says Peter Strickland, simply. The Hungarian-based British filmmaker behind singular cult oddities Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy is referring to the starting point of his new film, In Fabric, a mesmerising, sensual, fetishistic horror movie about a cursed red dress that does nasty things to anyone unlucky enough to try it on.

Set in suburban London, circa 1993, and featuring a coven-like department store, a hellish vision of the January sales and a cast that includes Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires and Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, it’s also the sort of richly textured film that defies immediate explanation or easy categorisation.

When I half-jokingly toss around references to John Carpenter’s killer car movie Christine, Dario Argento’s witchy ballet wig-out Suspiria and vintage British sitcom Are You Being Served?, for instance, Strickland is nice enough not to dismiss me out of hand before launching into a sincere description of his love of objects in the cinema of Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, artist filmmakers the Quay brothers and influential Soviet director Sergei Parajanov. “There’s a power to objects,” he says. “Objects can make you cry, can turn you on, can disgust you and obviously we have very strong reactions to clothing and I wanted to explore that.”

In the film, which tells two stories linked by the aforementioned demonic dress, his characters are both mesmerised and repelled by clothing. As they come into contact with the garment — described in the catalogue for the film’s fictional department store as “a chiffon, silk and satin ambassadorial function dress” — it has the power to amplify or diminish the characters’ confidence in ways that are instantly relatable, even in a strangely heightened world where said dress also leaves necrotic lesions on the skin, has a tendency to levitate when no one is looking and will destroy any washing machine it comes into contact with. It’s surreal, disturbing and comic all at once.

But In Fabric is not just touching on ideas about high street fashion and body dysmorphia. Strickland’s imagination was fired by a fascination with the clothes of dead people and what the bodily fluids and smells that routinely stain secondhand clothing tell us about their previous owners. “You think, ‘Oh my god, who was that person? What were they up to?’” he says. “Secondhand shops are like museums full of dead people’s clothes. But even new clothes — especially the cheaper clothes — you know there’s a lot of human suffering gone into them.” Not that he’s trying to ram a hypocritical anti-consumerist message down our throats. “The dress is a random force, not a judgmental force,” he elaborates. “That’s scary to me. If the characters were being targeted because they were consumerist then there’s a logic to that and it stops being scary.”

Though it’s been clear to anyone paying attention to Strickland’s career since he emerged in 2006 with his self-funded debut Katalin Varga (a strange revenge drama set in Transylvania), In Fabric confirms that he’s cut from a very different cloth from his British peers. Having maintained his independence far away from the distractions and ludicrous rents of London by making Hungary his base, he makes films like no one else. Indeed, his closest contemporary is probably Anna Biller, the cult American director of The Love Witch, whose subversive, meticulously detailed movies he loves. (Judging from Biller’s Twitter account, the respect is mutual.) They’re filmmakers who seem to thrive on pastiching movies of a bygone era, yet look a little closer and they’re really using their aesthetic kinks to respond to the world around them in more sensual ways.

“You can probably tell I don’t have much interest in plot,” laughs Strickland. “The important thing for me is just space: finding a world that I love and characters I love and just exploring that.”

He’s created a doozy of a space with In Fabric’s demented department store. Named Dentley & Sopley, it’s populated with lugubrious, slightly demonic-looking sales staff (headed up by the Strickland regular Fatma Mohamed) who speak in syntactically complex euphemisms and do kinky things with mannequins after dark. He based the shop (not the mannequin molestation) on childhood memories of his local department store in Reading — an independent, family owned clothing emporium called Jacksons that opened in 1875 and occupied a corner block in the centre of town until it closed in 2013. The sort of place that used pneumatic pipes to send cash around the store, it was a shop where the staff prided themselves on being “outfitters of distinction” and treating their customer as VIPs by attending to their every need.

“It was like a theatre,” recalls Strickland. “It was a performance with the staff. It was another world. As a kid, you just see things so differently. You see the mannequins as interchangeable with the staff. You see the mannequins as guards in the window. The dumbwaiter, is that leading to a secret sweatshop? I wanted to be true to that.

“It’s a sort of celebration of the high street,” he adds. “It’s dying out, isn’t it? I miss that interaction. A good independent shop can be wonderful to walk into.”

Having done his share of retail jobs during his protracted post-art-school attempts to launch his film career, he insists that none of the dialogue in the film is all that far removed from reality. “Even the bank managers,” he says, referring to a pair of characters played by Julian Barrett and Steve Oram, “their quibbles can be quite absurd, but I can definitely give you examples of quibbles like that in work. It was done in that classic British passive-aggressive mode that’s unique to, well, what’s left of our country anyway.“

If there’s a note of despondency in that last statement, that’s down to his horror at the slow car crash of Brexit. “I don’t know where I’ll be after Brexit,” he sighs. “I’m an immigrant in Hungary. If this country is harsh on immigrants it will be reciprocal across Europe. All of us will be told to f*** off back to the UK. It’s beyond depressing.”

In Fabric is in cinemas and on demand from 28 June.