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Women Of Horror: Sarah Michelle Gellar

Sarah Michelle Gellar is no stranger to the strange. Seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and two rounds of the The Grudge will attest to that. She says she loves to freak people out. What's more, she says, "I love to be scared."

When it came time to select her next project, Gellar wanted to stick with the supernatural thriller genre, but it had to be different. Really different. It had to have a certain something about her character that would set moviegoers on edge. So she accepted director Asif Kapadia's The Return, and with it, the challenge of playing a masochist.

"She's a cutter," says Gellar of her character Joanna Mills. "She does violent things to her body, and that's sort of an interesting concept all in itself."

Joanna is a Midwestern saleswoman who becomes so dulled by her home and work life that she develops a yearning to feel anything, be it pain or pleasure.

"The idea is that you cut yourself because you feel so cut off from everything that you want to be able to feel something," Gellar explains. "First comes pain, and you've wanted so long to feel that pain. But then there's a euphoria that comes from that, the endorphins, the blood. Just the whole concept of it. It's such a pleasure-pain principle."

A contributing factor in Joanna's psychological deterioration is her recent lucid dreams; dreams so disturbing, she begins to wonder if they could in fact be someone else's. She believes she might be living a parallel life with someone else, and that someone else might be dead. This vexatious facet drew Gellar's interest.

"One of the things that I think [Asif and I] were both fascinated with is sort of the underlying Buddhist themes of life, which is life is cyclical," says Gellar. "You come and you live your life. Then you come back and you fix things from the past. And about how you need to finish what is supposed to be your life before you can really, truly sort of transcend to what is essentially the next life."

Screenwriter Adam Sussman explains, "I wanted to write something about the dead reconnecting with the living. Nothing was really clicking until I came across scientifically documented cases of very young children who had spontaneous memories of things and people and places that they could never possibly have known about. After doing more research, and reading about the memories and stories that these children were accessing, I found that usually there was violence involved; a life had been cut short -- and there was a reason for the return."

Acting on intuition, Joanna travels to a quiet town in Texas, a place she feels an unexplainable connection to.

"She basically is drawn to this town for no reason," says Gellar. "And she starts to have all these memories and these feelings about a place that she's never been. I think everyone's been in a place in their life where you've sort of felt that moment of d

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