Elle Fanning, Bella Heathcote, and Abbey Lee star as ruthless models in the most talked-about film to come out of Cannes. Along with The Neon Demon‘s notorious director, Nicolas Winding Refn, they discuss the mutual attraction between horror and fashion.

What’s it feel like you walk into a room, it’s like in the middle of winter, and you’re the sun?” About halfway through Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, real-life model Abbey Lee poses this question to Elle Fanning: A relative mainstay from the cutthroat underbelly of the Los Angeles modeling world, Abbey Lee’s Sarah is clearly threatened by Fanning’s Jesse, a nubile new recruit. After only one casting, the younger model is receiving the Aphrodite treatment from the fashion industry. In response to Sarah’s desperation, Jesse musters a mimetic reply, more menacing than confident: “It’s everything.” With this line, the hoary twenty-something is eviscerated by her teenage replacement. It’s these impassive moments -hollowed out and flattened, save for their hyperstylized cruelty- in which Refn’s new opus strikes its most cutting tone.

The Danish director is a notorious outsider. In fact, The Neon Demon is his first film properly produced within the Hollywood studio system. His last two directing credits, Drive and Only God Forgives, fashioned heartthrob Ryan Gosling as a Byronic hero railing against glowing, grisly visions of L.A. and Bangkok, respectively. His latest effort delves even further into the shadows of the former hub, and from the seedy buzz of neon to the fizz of flash bulbs, there are plenty of lights guiding the way. At its core, though, the movie is pitch black. While watching Demon, one wonders if its auteur even likes this city; or if his is a fascination born from disgust. “I don’t like Los Angeles,” Refn tells me over the phone from Copenhagen, “I love Los Angeles. And I don’t drive a car, so I’ve really got to love it.”

Maybe his love of genres cooked up in Hollywood comes across more unequivocally. While Drive was hailed as a neo-noir, Demon has been called a psychological thriller, and even “horror.” “I’ve always wanted to do a teenage horror movie,” Refn says, “but possibly without the horror. I think there’s a 16-year-old girl in every man. I’d always wanted to fantasize what it’d be like to be a beautiful girl. Innocence and virginity is a great analysis of genre. And then moving into the big city, it’s always very frightening, especially when it’s L.A., because L.A. is such a mysterious place. It’s like the moon in some ways; it’s unearthly.” What’s perhaps unique to Refn’s latest vision is the vacuum he’s created around these feelings. Unlike many similarly themed films, plot plays a smaller role than atmosphere. “Italian music from the ’70s” and the 1961 film Night Tide, about a murderess convinced she is a mermaid, were inspirations.

The axiom of Refn’s Demon world is that the most beautiful girl of all is Jesse, a 16-year-old orphan taught to pose as 19, navigating treacherous waters unaccompanied. I met 18-year-old Fanning on a cold day in May at a brunch spot in the West Village that had come recommended by her friend Sofia Coppola (who directed Fanning in her 2010 film, Somewhere). In an embroidered bomber jacket, fishnets, and a Prada backpack the size of an iPhone 6 Plus, she was sweetly composed and surprisingly grown-up, while exuding the effortless, trendy sparkle of the recent high school graduate that she is. It’s hard to imagine that her own assimilation into Hollywood at such a young age was anything as sordid as her character’s.

“I was born in Georgia. My sister [Dakota Fanning) started first, so she went out with my mom to test it out,” the younger Fanning sister recalls. “Me and my dad stayed behind. Then my sister got all this stuff and was doing movies and we were like, I guess we have to move to L.A. We just stayed. That’s my home. | mean, I was so young. I’m a California girl.” Elle famously played the younger version of her sister in 2001’s I Am Sam, at two. For her role in that film, Dakota became the youngest actor to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award, at eight. Elle has now been nominated for just about every Young, Teen, or Breakout award out there, and with Demon, she’s won high praise for her performance from even those critics who can’t stomach the film itself.

This story appears in the pages of V102:

Photography Steven Klein

Fashion Patti Wilson

Text Kevin McGarry