One-time Bond girl Stephanie Sigman, who in Annabelle: Creation plays a nun looking after a group of female orphans, asked for the set to be blessed before she would touch the creepy doll at the centre of the horror film.
"I asked for a blessing for the set. I think it helped because nothing weird happened, apart from in the movie itself. I did it because I heard they did it in The Conjuring movies every time, so I wanted them to bless the set before I had to touch the doll," says Sigman, 30, referring to the 2013 and 2016 horror films.
She sheepishly admits she was much more easily spooked on set than her young co-stars.
"I didn't want to touch the doll, but I had to in some scenes. And so I basically told the producers, 'I'm not touching that thing, so you're going to have to get a hand double if you don't get a priest (to come).'
"So we got a priest, and it's the same priest that blesses The Conjuring set. And the first thing he said was, 'Evil doesn't like to be exposed.' And I'm, like, 'Oh s**t, what does that mean?' That's super scary.
"But in a way, I felt safer. Because I felt like I had somebody taking care of me - like God was looking after us in a way." She was talking to The Straits Times and other press in Los Angeles recently.
In the United States, the market for horror movies in recent years has often skewed towards the young and female, with teenage girls and younger women dominating the audience for such films.
The genre also does particularly well with Hispanic and Latino moviegoers, who make up 17 per cent of the population, but account for as much as half of the box-office takings for scary movies.
The casting of the creepy-doll tale Annabelle: Creation, which opens in Singapore tomorrow, thus ticks a lot of the boxes for commercial success. Its lead is beautiful Mexican actress and rising star Sigman, 30, while the young ensemble cast is led by newcomers Talitha Bateman, 15, and Lulu Wilson, 11.
Sigman is Sister Charlotte, a nun looking after young female orphans taken in by a couple, played by Anthony LaPaglia and Mirando Otto.
But the girls must share their new home with a sinister doll, Annabelle, which belonged to the couple's long-deceased daughter.
Director David Sandberg, who also made Lights Out (2016), is well aware that female and Hispanic viewers love a good scare.
"That's something I learnt by myself. I used to work in a video store, where I saw firsthand how popular horror movies are with females.
"And also by making short films and putting them on YouTube, I can see which countries they're popular in, and they're very popular in Latin America and Spain. I guess it has to do with them liking the supernatural and all that.
"So that's something I knew from the start and that's why this movie was such a great thing to do with an almost all-female cast."
He insists there was no concerted move to cast "a Mexican actress (as Sister Charlotte), but I'm glad it worked out that way because it's a popular genre in those countries".
This is the first horror movie for Sigman, who was born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and an American father.
She was a Bond girl in Spectre (2015), played the lead in the acclaimed Mexican crime movie Miss Bala (2011) and appeared in crime series The Bridge (2013 to 2014) and Narcos (2015 to present).
Sigman says making Annabelle: Creation was "creepy", but "a great experience".
"I could explore a lot of things about myself that I didn't know were there, like the nurturing part of me, because of the mother figure I had to be for the kids in the movie."
Alison de Souza
