Lulu Wilson

The gaze that carries the trauma

Lulu Wilson doesn't scream like the other girls of her generation. In 2016, she played Doris Zander in Ouija: Origin of Evil and showed a stillness that unsettled the adults on set. Mike Flanagan saw in her an innate ability to hold long takes without blinking.

Horror was her first workplace.

Many child actors end up as mere visual props. But she went from demonic possession to psychological trauma with unusual technical coolness. In 2017, her role in Annabelle: Creation confirmed that her name was a life insurance policy for the box office of the fantasy genre.

Reuniting with Flanagan in 2018 for The Haunting of Hill House changed her professional profile. She played the younger version of Shirley Crain in a complex narrative structure. The series was a massive hit on Netflix, and Wilson stood out for her ability to mimic the gestures of the adult actors.

That same year she appeared in Castle Falls. It's a dense HBO production in which she shared the screen with Amy Adams. She didn't need many lines of dialogue to convey a anguish that jumped off the screen (a signature of hers by now).

Blood and a Fox Mask

In 2020, she played a young Gloria Steinem in The Glorias. It was a biographical project directed by Julie Taymor that allowed her to step away from ghosts for a while. But the real change of pace didn't come from historical drama but from explicit violence.

Her move into action came with Becky in 2020. It's a movie where her character kills neo-Nazis with sharpened pencils and plenty of pent-up rage. Critics compared the film's tone to a gory version of the survival classics of the 1990s.

It worked because Wilson wasn't trying to be likable.

The character returned in 2023 in The Wrath of Becky. In this sequel, the production increased the budget and the scale of the physical violence. But the most notable thing was that she took on executive producing duties at just seventeen years old.

Having control over the creative process at that age is an anomaly in the Hollywood studio system. And she used it to shape a character who breaks away from the usual stereotypes of the female victim. Because Becky doesn't need anyone to rescue her from the woods.

In 2024, she joined the cast of The Life of Chuck. It's an adaptation of a story by Stephen King, shot in Alabama under the direction of Mike Flanagan. The film's budget was set at around 15 million dollars.