The Ethel Cain Inde Navarrette interview published in Dazed‘s autumn 2026 issue begins, as so many genuine friendships do, in extreme heat and mild delirium. In the first week of July, during Paris’s second major heatwave of the summer, the two women met for the first time at Dior’s AW26 couture show in the gardens of the Musée Rodin, sun pressing down on guests clutching electric fans, fabric sticking to skin. Hours later, Cain posted a picture of Navarrette on her Instagram Stories. Fans of both, who had reason to suspect they might find each other, duly lost their minds.
The affinity, as the piece makes clear, was not accidental. When Navarrette’s horror film Obsession opened in cinemas in May, Cain was so gripped by it that she returned five times during its opening week, before seeking Navarrette out on Instagram to say so directly. ‘You are mindblowing,’ she wrote under one of her posts. Navarrette, who had coincidentally been listening to Cain’s music to prepare for the role, replied: ‘um i luv u. just in case u were wondering.’
Anyone who has spent time inside either woman’s work will understand the pull. Ethel Cain is the musical persona of 28-year-old Hayden Anhedönia, whose 2022 debut album Preacher’s Daughter constructed an entire southern gothic mythology around a fictional alter ego: the daughter of a preacher in the American deep south, who escapes an abusive religious upbringing only to be abducted, exploited, murdered, and cannibalised by a lover. This was followed by 2025’s Perverts, a 90-minute sprawl of drone and dark ambient, and later that same year by Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, a doomed teenage love story. These are not albums in any conventional sense; they are cosmologies, dense with lore, cinematic in their ambitions. Cain has long wanted to move into filmmaking, and the architecture of her records shows it.
Navarrette, meanwhile, stars as Nikki in Obsession, directed by Curry Barker. Her character is a woman whose co-worker uses a magical trinket called a ‘One Wish Willow’ to make her fall in love with him, with brutal consequences. What the role demanded, and what Navarrette delivered, was the transformation of a potentially cartoonish ‘psycho girlfriend’ into something genuinely unsettling: expressions stretching and snapping between comic neediness and abject terror. It was, as Cain recognised immediately, a portrait of a woman undone by desire, propelled towards violence, and trapped inside a fate she never chose, which is to say, a recognisable inhabitant of the same territory Cain has been mapping for years.
The scale of the film’s commercial success gives that territory a remarkably wide audience. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Obsession has crossed $200 million globally, making it Focus Features’ biggest film of all time. This is especially arresting given that Barker shot the film independently in just 20 days on a budget of $750,000, with a cast of unknowns, before it was picked up for wider distribution. Before Obsession, Barker was best known for a found-footage horror short called The Chair, a film called Milk & Serial that he posted to YouTube for free, and a sketch comedy channel. The critics have been similarly converted: NBC News reports the film currently holds a 95% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 94% audience Popcornmeter score.
The Dazed conversation takes place over Zoom a few days after the Dior show, Cain calling in from Florida, her surroundings (dark fabric on the walls, spectral framed drawings, a vintage television) precisely as gothic as one might hope. What follows is less a conventional interview than an extended exchange between two people who share the same preoccupations: the watched self, dissociation, the strange flatness of feeling real emotion when emotion has become professional material. Both confess to Googling their own symptoms; both describe what it is to watch yourself cry and immediately find it unconvincing.
Cain reveals that the first seed of the Ethel Cain character came from a handmade linen prairie dress she bought on Etsy: ‘It had these heavy linen ties to snatch your waist, so you’re locked in like a straitjacket. That’s where Ethel Cain was born.’ Navarrette, for her part, describes playing video games during the shoot as ‘almost like a different level of dissociation’, a way of overstimulating the brain so that it could not think. Director Curry Barker, Navarrette says, was the only person on set who knew that the pain she was releasing was real.
Asked whether their two characters (Nikki and the protagonist of Preacher’s Daughter) would have been friends, Cain is immediate: ‘It’s like the two craziest bitches you know telling each other, “Exactly.”‘ Navarrette’s response: ‘And then the whole town’s burning.’ The autumn 2026 issue of Dazed, containing the full conversation, goes on sale internationally on 10 September.
