How I Survived My Darkest Days - Since emerging from that bleak period in her life, Witt, a classically trained pianist, has focused on movies and music.

Two and a half years after losing her parents and battling breast cancer, the star of the new horror movie Longlegs is embracing the positive

- By Jack Smart

Most actors might dream about scenes in a movie after they’ve started filming it, but Alicia Witt, star of the new horror film Longlegs, is not most actors. “I realized after I read the script, that I had dreamed a scene from the movie,” says Witt, 48. “It ended up being precisely the way we filmed it.” Of course, considering Osgood Perkins’s thriller is the story of a satanic serial killer (played by a terrifying Nicolas Cage) getting into the head of an FBI agent (Maika Monroe) whose mysterious mother (Witt) may hold a piece of the puzzle, her prophetic dream may have more accurately been a nightmare. But while Witt often gravitates toward lighter fare—including the 1995-98 TV sitcom Cybill (on which she played Cybill Shepherd’s daughter), the 2002 Sandra Bullock-Hugh Grant rom-com Two Weeks Notice and eight Hallmark Christmas films—the actress, who made her movie debut at age 8 in David Lynch’s original 1984 adaptation of the novel Dune, says she relishes the “catharsis” of the “darker place,” adding, “There’s great light in experiencing dark and coming out the other side of it.”

But while Witt often gravitates toward lighter fare—including the 1995-98 TV sitcom