blackcoat

Perkins’ previous films, “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” and “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House,” were elegantly crafted, but this looks like a work of art.

The writer-director Osgood Perkins sets his atmospheric feature filmmaking debut, “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” at a mostly empty private Catholic girls’ academy, where a worldly senior played by Lucy Boynton reluctantly looks after a timid freshman played by Kiernan Shipka.

This fall, on the heels of juicy roles in FX’s Feud and indie chiller The Blackcoat’s Daughter, she stepped into the pointy shoes of Archie Comics’ teen witch Sabrina Spellman, in Netflix’s dark teen drama Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Plus that horror film, “The Blackcoat’s Daughter.”

Aguirre-Sacasa, who obviously knew of Shipka from “Mad Men” but who was also impressed with her work in the 2015 psychological horror film “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” says it’s been surreal to see Shipka make the role her own.