A while back, director Dan 'Daniel' Turner and I went out in London for several pints of ale. Although we'd previously worked on a number of projects together, that evening was intended purely as a social catch-up. A quackery session.
Somewhere around the middle of this session, Dan told me about an idea he'd had for a horror film. He casually presented it to me in the form of five words. Just five.
I was immediately hooked. We spent the rest of the night talking about nothing else. It became an obsession - the kind of idea that simply had to become a film. It couldn't not. In coming weeks, it grew and grew, in a flurry of e-mails, texts and Twitter DMs.
This film is about to be made. Currently untitled, it starts shooting next week. Dan's directing. Dean Fisher at Scanner Rhodes, who previously handled the likes of City Rats, is producing. I'm the writer and executive producer.
We're setting out to hit the viewer hard. To scare, disturb, jolt and generally terrorise them.
I don't believe I could possibly be more excited. You'd never know from my ice-cool demeanour, but I've been shrieking like a gibbon throughout this entire post.
Good day to you.
Showing posts with label horror movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror movies. Show all posts
Reports Of My Blog-Death...
... have been non-existent. Nevertheless, I can't help but notice it's been a while since I blogged. Nothing wrong with that, I'm saying - if you don't have anything you fancy blogging about, don't blog. Good philosophy, no?
Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know that I'm plenty active on there, tweeting like some kind of coked-up chaffinch. There's no doubt that Twitter has dented blogging's alluring, in favour of daily, hourly micro-blogs - and, to a large extent, led much of the blog-based writing community to up-sticks and communicate there instead. I'm not concerned about that - as long as there's a community, and as long as people are also sitting down at actual physical pub tables to talk about the stuff they can't talk about online (or, at least, shouldn't) I'm not too bothered about the online platform.
That said, I do love Twitter. I'd try and persuade the unconvinced, but Lucy Vee has done a perfectly good job of that in her detailed blog-post The Twit's Guide To Twitter. All I will say, is that Twitter is tailor-made for writers working from home. A whole community, live on your screen, ready to offer whatever you want it to offer. Networking, fun, advice, information, friendship, outrage, displacement activities a-go-go. You can also start your own lists of Twitterers. So far, I've made just the one - a list of Scriptwriters, which can be found and followed here. There are 82 scripters on it right now - want to be included? Tweet me.
So. What else have I been doing? Well, Doctor Who returns to our screens on April 3, when fantastic new episode The Eleventh Hour kickstarts the show's first full series in two years. There's a great new Doctor in the shape of Matt Smith (doubters, believe!) and an equally excellent new companion Amy Pond (played by the ludicrously hot Karen Gillan). As a result, I've failed to resist the undoubted allure of more journalistic work than usual, conducting a set-visit for Doctor Who Magazine and several interviews, including two big ones (who could they possibly be with?) for the next issue, out April 1.
That's not to say I've neglected my own fiction. Hell, no. I wrote a new horror feature in two gloriously driven weeks, and look forward to returning to that for a second draft. It's a dark and unpleasant piece of work, but explores a theme which fascinates me. Aside from that, I've mainly been pitching. Storylines, ideas, this 'n' that. One of those has become a commission, which I'm really pleased and excited about... although in the time-honoured blog tradition, I can't talk about it yet.
Over in comedy sketchville, work has continued on the fourth series of Radio 4's Recorded For Training Purposes, which has been, and continues to be, bagloads of fun and a proper learning experience.
Ghost Writer, my 24-minute film shot by the splendid TAPS organisation, is edited and almost ready to be shown to the world via some medium or other - most likely the net. Once that happens, I'll blog about the shoot. Also the edit, because unlike in TV-World, I was given the chance to give my own notes on the first edit, in conjunction with director Guy Slater.
Generally speaking, this year, one new thought keeps coming back to me: what you want to write is more important than the medium for which you write it. Since my Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat novel was published in 2005, I've penned Doctor Who and Bernice Summerfield short stories for Big Finish hardback collections, but haven't given much further thought to prose. I'm starting to feel differently now. If you can do both script and prose, then why not do both? I don't think it necessarily means sacrificing focus. Beyond those, as well, I'm starting to turn my attention to comic strips which are another very viable and fun option for a genre-leaning writer like me.
So. Tough times for everyone from the work-hungry writer to the beleaguered BBC itself. Yet plenty of sandpits in which to play. Buckets and spades at the ready? Let's dive in.
Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know that I'm plenty active on there, tweeting like some kind of coked-up chaffinch. There's no doubt that Twitter has dented blogging's alluring, in favour of daily, hourly micro-blogs - and, to a large extent, led much of the blog-based writing community to up-sticks and communicate there instead. I'm not concerned about that - as long as there's a community, and as long as people are also sitting down at actual physical pub tables to talk about the stuff they can't talk about online (or, at least, shouldn't) I'm not too bothered about the online platform.
That said, I do love Twitter. I'd try and persuade the unconvinced, but Lucy Vee has done a perfectly good job of that in her detailed blog-post The Twit's Guide To Twitter. All I will say, is that Twitter is tailor-made for writers working from home. A whole community, live on your screen, ready to offer whatever you want it to offer. Networking, fun, advice, information, friendship, outrage, displacement activities a-go-go. You can also start your own lists of Twitterers. So far, I've made just the one - a list of Scriptwriters, which can be found and followed here. There are 82 scripters on it right now - want to be included? Tweet me.
So. What else have I been doing? Well, Doctor Who returns to our screens on April 3, when fantastic new episode The Eleventh Hour kickstarts the show's first full series in two years. There's a great new Doctor in the shape of Matt Smith (doubters, believe!) and an equally excellent new companion Amy Pond (played by the ludicrously hot Karen Gillan). As a result, I've failed to resist the undoubted allure of more journalistic work than usual, conducting a set-visit for Doctor Who Magazine and several interviews, including two big ones (who could they possibly be with?) for the next issue, out April 1.
That's not to say I've neglected my own fiction. Hell, no. I wrote a new horror feature in two gloriously driven weeks, and look forward to returning to that for a second draft. It's a dark and unpleasant piece of work, but explores a theme which fascinates me. Aside from that, I've mainly been pitching. Storylines, ideas, this 'n' that. One of those has become a commission, which I'm really pleased and excited about... although in the time-honoured blog tradition, I can't talk about it yet.
Over in comedy sketchville, work has continued on the fourth series of Radio 4's Recorded For Training Purposes, which has been, and continues to be, bagloads of fun and a proper learning experience.
Ghost Writer, my 24-minute film shot by the splendid TAPS organisation, is edited and almost ready to be shown to the world via some medium or other - most likely the net. Once that happens, I'll blog about the shoot. Also the edit, because unlike in TV-World, I was given the chance to give my own notes on the first edit, in conjunction with director Guy Slater.
Generally speaking, this year, one new thought keeps coming back to me: what you want to write is more important than the medium for which you write it. Since my Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat novel was published in 2005, I've penned Doctor Who and Bernice Summerfield short stories for Big Finish hardback collections, but haven't given much further thought to prose. I'm starting to feel differently now. If you can do both script and prose, then why not do both? I don't think it necessarily means sacrificing focus. Beyond those, as well, I'm starting to turn my attention to comic strips which are another very viable and fun option for a genre-leaning writer like me.
So. Tough times for everyone from the work-hungry writer to the beleaguered BBC itself. Yet plenty of sandpits in which to play. Buckets and spades at the ready? Let's dive in.
Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat
As it's lucky lucky Friday The 13th, and the remake of Friday The 13th hits cinemas today, it's surely a fine excuse for me to gaze wistfully back at my own small contribution to Friday The 13th history. In October 2005, Black Flame published my first novel, Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat, which was a moment of considerable joy. I've always loved the Friday The 13th movies in all their gory glory, so to write a novel officially licensed and sanctioned by New Line was quite literally a dream come true. In fact, I probably still haven't absorbed it today.The previous year, at an SFX convention, I met the lovely Rebecca 'Bex' Levene for the first time. A fair few Doctor Who fans may recognise her name, as she edited the Virgin Who books for a while. Anyway, Bex tipped me off that Black Flame had acquired the license for various horror franchises, including A Nightmare On Elm Street, Final Destination and... Friday The 13th. I immediately grabbed the poor girl's shoulders and forcefully shook her until she gave me the information I demanded.
Then I made contact with Jay Slater, then senior commissioning editor at Black Flame, who would become a very good friend. He was also a fellow film journalist, so we hit it off nicely. He suggested that I come up with six ideas for a Friday The 13th novel, only amounting to a paragraph each at this stage. So I did that, and came back to him. He picked one, and gave me the go-ahead to write a page outline. After that, I wrote a chapter-by-chapter breakdown (which would later change a fair deal) and a sample chapter. These were then sent to New Line for approval. I sweated for a couple of months before the green light finally flickered on. Hooray. It felt like an achievement for a guy whose only previous published fiction had been the short story Home in Cherry TCK's collection Deadly Strangers, and some other shorts for magazines like Forum, which tended to... uh... focus on people having sex. I was particularly proud, back then, of In Space, No-One Can Hear You Cream.Ahem. Anyway, the green light. That's when the real work began. The novel had to be 95,000 words. Which sounds a lot. And by God, it is. As much as I absolutely loved writing Hate-Kill-Repeat, I think that three-month process cemented my resolve to focus on scripts. What a slog. Not that scripting's a walk in the park, but at least you can feasibly write the rough first draft of a movie script in a week...
H-K-R's protagonist (or Final Girl, to use slasher movie parlance) was Halo Harlan, a pregnant trailer-trash girl with a no-good boyfriend, who naturally ends up running for her life from Jason Voorhees and going through seven shades of hell. Thrown into the mix were two FBI agents and a pair of serial killers. The latter duo, Norwood and Penelope Thawn, were especially good fun to write, being outwardly charming and cultured, but secretly hardline, hypocritical moral crusaders on a misguided mission to join forces with Jason Voorhees and cleanse the world of sin.
I consciously placed HKR on the existing F13th movie timeline, to please fans, myself included. It took place after my favourite sequel Friday The 13th VII: The New Blood, and rather ignored the fun-but-not-so-great follow-up Friday The 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. The title Hate-Kill-Repeat came from seeing a DVD sleeve for some low-budget monster movie which carried a tagline something like 'Mate. Feed. Destroy'. It was no doubt also influenced by Slipknot's early album Mate Feed Kill Repeat - guess I just started thinking about what Jason's equivalent routine would be. The 'Hate' part was important to me, as I was keen to keep Jason emotional (specifically, shot through with negative emotion), rather than some lumbering zombie. Kane Hodder's portrayal of Jason (from The New Blood to Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday) was for me by far the best, imbuing him with a real sense of livid rage. I haven't seen the new movie yet, but I hope new-guy Derek Mears delivers some of that.I'm still very proud of HKR. I'm loathe to actually read it now, sadly, because I'm sure I'd notice plenty of clunky prose or scene choices which I'd write differently, even given its pulpy tone. Still, it certainly delivers on rapid-fire pacing, gore and body count (didn't take me long to lose count of the dead), and includes a big twist which I still love, along with a fan-pleasing, continuity-tying climax. Perhaps the biggest reward is that the majority of fans online seemed to really like it. It received generally good reviews on Amazon, and appeared to be thought of as one of the Friday series' better novels. Sadly, and somewhat inexplicably I have to say, the Friday novel line ended after five entries.
When I wrote the novel, I was already obsessed with screenwriting. While it was a great experience, it also cemented my resolve to make it in Scriptsville. Thankfully, the urge to write a novel hasn't returned, especially as my watchword for 2009 is "focus". Much less confusing when you know which medium you want to work in.
Here's hoping that the new Friday The 13th film will jump-start the franchise all over again. Jason Voorhees must not die. And you can't keep a good maniac down.
2005 interview with me about Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat
PDF of Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat's first chapter
Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat on Amazon UK
Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat on Amazon US
Official site of the Friday The 13th remake
Danny Stack on Friday The 13th superstition
My guide to 10 Great Slasher Movies
My interview with Adam Marcus, director of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday
My interview with Sean Cunningham, director of the original Friday The 13th
My interview with Harry Manfredini, who scored most of the Friday films
His Name Is Bruce
Now, then. Bend me over a barrel of rum and call me Mary, if this isn't an exciting picture. I'm doing a passable impression of Napoleon right next to, for those who don't know, one of the foremost horror icons of our time. This is Mr Bruce Campbell - best known as the star of the Evil Dead movies, as well as the well-received Bubba Ho-Tep and a whole splendid slew of low-budgeters like Maniac Cop, Maniac Cop 2, The Man With The Screaming Brain and Alien Apocalypse. He also stars in the successful US TV show Burn Notice, which is currently taking up much of his time.
The occasion, last night, was the London press launch of his latest film My Name Is Bruce. Campbell directed and produced it in his home state of Oregon. If you've heard about Jean-Claude Van Damme's new meta-movie JCVD, then you might be forgiven for thinking they're similar. And they are, in the sense that each movie sees each star appearing as themselves and facing 'real-life' danger. Here's the difference: whereas My Name Is Bruce employs fun and humour, JCVD employs self-indulgence and tedium (disclaimer: a fair number of people seem to have enjoyed the wretched JCVD, so as always this is subjective. Your statutory rights are a mystery).
Campbell plays an Extras-style distorted version of the real Bruce, being a washed-up, womanising alcoholic Z-movie star who lives in a caravan while making Cave Alien 2. The local town of Gold Lick finds its meagre population dwindling further when an evil Chinese spirit (looking for all the world like a live-action Scooby Doo monster) starts chopping off hands, heads and generally reducing people's quality of life. The folk of Gold Lick misguidedly recruit Campbell to sort it all out, believing him to be a genuine monster-masher. He goes along with it all, thinking it's all a big hoot... then finds himself facing the homicidal, oriental fiend. Or as he memorably describes it as one point, "the one-ton wun-tun".Despite ladling on some knockabout gore, it's a seriously funny piece of work, with a script (by Battlestar Galactica/Smallville's Mark Verheiden) ripping the piss out of Campbell, the fans, Hollywood and indie films. All affectionately, of course, as Campbell's love of the cheesy Z-flick comes plainly shining through. Fun, fun, fun. It also features some nice cameos from Evil Dead alumni, including Sam Raimi's brother Ted and Ellen Sandweiss.
Unsurprisingly, given Campbell's legendarily laidback and friendly nature, he turned out to be a pretension-free zone in person, chatting away, being funny and even giving me a pointer as to where to send one of my feature scripts. He told me that My Name Is Bruce took two years to make - in between shoots, he would go off and do other things. "Here's my rule of thumb," he said. "If you have a set release date on a film, then you ain't indie."My Name Is Bruce gets a limited UK theatrical run from February 13. A loaded two-disc DVD set
then emerges through Anchor Bay Entertainment UK on March 2.
Ah, Sweet Nostalgia
This weekend, for various reasons, I'm mostly attempting to rationalise my extensive video collection. I'm making a big list of it all, and identifying titles I own twice (or more), which can then go up on eBay.
I have a longstanding love affair with what's known as the 'pre-cert' video tape, which is short for 'pre-certificate'. The terms refers to any tape released before the Video Recordings Act of 1984, which enforced the crazy notion that the films on Britain's video store shelves really ought to be certificated and controlled by a central censorship body. Until then, the world of video had been an untamed, maverick paradise (sorry, did I say 'paradise'? I meant 'shamefully immoral den of sin'), which clearly would not do for any right-thinking Daily Mail reader.
So when the new laws came in, literally thousands of titles vanished from UK shelves - in some cases forever, because smaller distributors couldn't afford the fee to have their films certificated. Almost overnight, a collector's market was formed. Tapes which had been commonplace were now forbidden gold.
Pre-1984, back when I was two years old (ahem, cough), I vividly remember going into my local library, which had a video rental department. I gazed up at the horror section and saw this very title blazing back down at me...
Don't Go In The House. On the cover: a woman reduced to a burnt husk, hanging from the ceiling, as someone in what looks like a bee-keeper's outfit reaches for her.
And look at the tag-line. Back then, films had killer tag-lines: "In a steel room built for revenge, they die burning... in chains". You've gotta love that ellipsis. As if dying burning isn't enough... imagine being in chains too. That would really put a crimp on the whole experience.
My jaw slackened. I'd never be allowed to watch a film like that. Not that my parents are puritans, you understand - they're very cool. But I was young, and Don't Go In The House wouldn't be entering our battleship-sized VCR any time soon. So right now, I had to be content with those lurid video sleeves. And I could always touch, imagine...
My trembling hand reached up for this horrendous charnel house of a motion picture. I studied the front cover up close, marvelling at its horrific squalor. Then turned it over and saw...
Dear mother of God - it's a woman with her hair on fire! Those hair straighteners really can be a caution. I then absorbed the blurb on the back - oh, the blurb you used to get on videos. Blurb-reading Blu-Ray buyers don't know they're born. The blurb here begins: "Danny Kohler is sick. Very sick." No kidding.
A couple of years after I gazed with unrequited bloodlust at that forbidden video box, its contents became even more out of bounds. The video nasties furore began (read an article I wrote about that here - originally printed in an SFX magazine horror special) and Don't Go In The House was no longer allowed to be seen by anyone in the UK. An over-reaction which struck freedom-loving film fans as sick. Very sick. Yet, like the Video Recordings Act which followed, it made these banned flicks all the more juicy. All the more must-see. All the more collectable. Some of them have still yet to resurface on these shores... included, I believe, Don't Go In The House.
So decades on, I take writer/director Joseph Ellison's film down from my very own shelf and love the very sight of it so much, that I have to write a whole blog-post about it. Even though I really don't have time, and most people won't be vaguely interested. You've got to have passions in life - even if it's for utterly ludicrous, low-budget obscurities like this. I've long since bought Don't Go In The House on Region 1 DVD, but the iconic video nasty will remain on my shelf. Forever a foundation block of my life.
* * *
Want to feel afraid in your own home? My 10,000-word short story A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home can help. Presented as a letter to YOU which is delivered to YOUR house, this grave warning from the previous resident tells you things you really don't want to hear. A Sincere Warning... can be purchased as a low-cost ebook or as a uniquely personalised physical letter which is mailed to your home address! Full details at ScaryLetter.com
My horror novella Beast In The Basement is a dark, twisted tale of obsession,
revenge, censorship, blame culture and parental responsibility. In a big house in
the countryside, an increasingly unstable author toils over a new hotly-anticipated novel
which will close the best-selling trilogy of Jade Nexus books. A violent incident
tips him into a downward spiral with horrific consequences. Read it before
someone spoilers you! Beast is available for Kindle (which can be read
on most devices) at Amazon UK, Amazon US and
more. More details
here.
My Amazon-acclaimed non-fiction ebook How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy
Osbourne And Everyone Else is out now on Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon Germany,
among others. You can also buy it direct from me, in a Triple Pack of all three
major file-types (PDF, ePub, Kindle), via PayPal. Full details here, you splendid individual.
I have a longstanding love affair with what's known as the 'pre-cert' video tape, which is short for 'pre-certificate'. The terms refers to any tape released before the Video Recordings Act of 1984, which enforced the crazy notion that the films on Britain's video store shelves really ought to be certificated and controlled by a central censorship body. Until then, the world of video had been an untamed, maverick paradise (sorry, did I say 'paradise'? I meant 'shamefully immoral den of sin'), which clearly would not do for any right-thinking Daily Mail reader.
So when the new laws came in, literally thousands of titles vanished from UK shelves - in some cases forever, because smaller distributors couldn't afford the fee to have their films certificated. Almost overnight, a collector's market was formed. Tapes which had been commonplace were now forbidden gold.
Pre-1984, back when I was two years old (ahem, cough), I vividly remember going into my local library, which had a video rental department. I gazed up at the horror section and saw this very title blazing back down at me...
Don't Go In The House. On the cover: a woman reduced to a burnt husk, hanging from the ceiling, as someone in what looks like a bee-keeper's outfit reaches for her.
And look at the tag-line. Back then, films had killer tag-lines: "In a steel room built for revenge, they die burning... in chains". You've gotta love that ellipsis. As if dying burning isn't enough... imagine being in chains too. That would really put a crimp on the whole experience.
My jaw slackened. I'd never be allowed to watch a film like that. Not that my parents are puritans, you understand - they're very cool. But I was young, and Don't Go In The House wouldn't be entering our battleship-sized VCR any time soon. So right now, I had to be content with those lurid video sleeves. And I could always touch, imagine...
My trembling hand reached up for this horrendous charnel house of a motion picture. I studied the front cover up close, marvelling at its horrific squalor. Then turned it over and saw...
Dear mother of God - it's a woman with her hair on fire! Those hair straighteners really can be a caution. I then absorbed the blurb on the back - oh, the blurb you used to get on videos. Blurb-reading Blu-Ray buyers don't know they're born. The blurb here begins: "Danny Kohler is sick. Very sick." No kidding.
A couple of years after I gazed with unrequited bloodlust at that forbidden video box, its contents became even more out of bounds. The video nasties furore began (read an article I wrote about that here - originally printed in an SFX magazine horror special) and Don't Go In The House was no longer allowed to be seen by anyone in the UK. An over-reaction which struck freedom-loving film fans as sick. Very sick. Yet, like the Video Recordings Act which followed, it made these banned flicks all the more juicy. All the more must-see. All the more collectable. Some of them have still yet to resurface on these shores... included, I believe, Don't Go In The House.
So decades on, I take writer/director Joseph Ellison's film down from my very own shelf and love the very sight of it so much, that I have to write a whole blog-post about it. Even though I really don't have time, and most people won't be vaguely interested. You've got to have passions in life - even if it's for utterly ludicrous, low-budget obscurities like this. I've long since bought Don't Go In The House on Region 1 DVD, but the iconic video nasty will remain on my shelf. Forever a foundation block of my life.
* * *
Want to feel afraid in your own home? My 10,000-word short story A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home can help. Presented as a letter to YOU which is delivered to YOUR house, this grave warning from the previous resident tells you things you really don't want to hear. A Sincere Warning... can be purchased as a low-cost ebook or as a uniquely personalised physical letter which is mailed to your home address! Full details at ScaryLetter.com
Apparitions: Frighteningly Good
A new TV drama series materialises at 9pm tonight, without too much in the way of media fanfare. But perhaps that's for the best. Apparitions is the kind of thing that people will enjoy discovering. Unless, of course, they're sensitive types, in which case they'll probably be horrified and fire off scandalised e-tirades to The Daily Mail.Back in August, you may recall I was impressed by Ben Stephenson's appearance on an Edinburgh TV Festival panel about risk in TV drama. Back then, the man who would shortly afterwards become Controller, Drama Commissioning, no doubt wished he had a promo-reel of Apparitions to show the assembled cynics, in order to stop their bleating about the Beeb playing everything safe. Because Apparitions is quite a remarkable thing for BBC One to air.
Don't worry, no spoilers, but let's just say that certain elements of Apparitions are not so much near the knuckle, as the knuckle itself, in yo' face. There are inevitably, for a series starring Martin Shaw as an exorcist, strong elements of The Exorcist and Exorcist III at play here (along with a hint of The Exorcist: The Fifth, naturellement), along with echoes of the way in which Russell T Davies handled evil in The Second Coming. But as writer/director Joe Ahearne (he who yelled "Cut! on great Doctor Who episodes like Dalek, Bad Wolf and The Parting Of The Ways - and how nice to see a TV drama largely delivered by a one-man powerhouse) has said, this is not so much a crazy gorefest as a psychological piece. Having seen tonight's first episode, I loved the way it combined the subtler, creepier approach with some real nastiness and a fearless approach to taboo subjects.
Apparitions rides a new wave of TV horror drama. This bodes well for me, and any other writer who feels most comfortable when some kind of darkness/intensity is involved. E4's Dead Set may have been a combination of two arguably outdated elements (28 Days Later-esque shaky-cam zombies and Big Brother parodies), but its mere existence was the best thing about it, transcending such quibbles. November 23 also sees the start of Survivors (pictured above), a remake of Dalek creator Terry Nation's 70s series, which also packs quite the punch and really makes me want to go for that flu jab I've been putting off. Long may the new TV Horror Wave Of Doom continue. Certainly long enough for me to wade in and play.
BBC Apparitions press pack, including interviews with Martin Shaw and Joe Ahearne
BBC Survivors press pack, including quotes from creator Adrian Hodges
San Sebastian: The Aftermath
It´s been a great six days at the San Sebastian Horror & Fantasy Film Festival. I´m feeling somewhat tattered and torn, which is only to be expected, but I already can´t wait for next year. There´s a hell of a lot to enjoy in San Sebastian. Without even taking the festival into account, it´s a truly beautiful city.
Its Old Town quarter is a playground for boozy, smoky indulgence, where you can play the exquisite bingo-pinball machines...
And enjoy some great ´pintxos´, which are basically posh Basque tapas...
My favourite film of the fest was Martyrs (pictured below), a phenomenal killer-blow from French director Pascal Laugier, which has been caused tidal waves in the horrorsphere. I finally caught up with it at a 10am press screening, and despite having been warned it was a rough watch, I didn´t quite expect it to be that brutal, bleak and disturbing. Despite all the grim horror, though, it turned out to hinge on some really interesting ideas. I loved it. Well, ´love´ isn´t quite the right word, but it was great. Strongly recommended to hardcore horror fans. How can you not want to watch a film which made one viewer pass out during the Sitges Film Festival?
One of the great things about being a journalist (or at least one, these days, when it suits me), is being able to watch a film like Martyrs, then discuss it with the director, mere hours later. Pascal (pictured below) turned out to be a perfectly lovely and not at all psychopathic gentleman, who admitted that he hadn´t considered my interpretation of the film´s conclusion. Shame, really, as my interpretation was my one sliver of hope...
In a few hours, I´m flying back to London, eager to eat some healthy food, shun booze and kick the cigar habit I´ve reacquired during my stay...
All these toxins do very strange things to the mind. Yesterday, I launched into a booze-and-nicotine-fuelled frenzy and did this to the nearest child:
Regretted it afterwards, obviously. But the kid´s parents were very understanding and decided not to press charges.
Frightfest & The Horror Of Censorship
I've now lost count of the number of annual Frightfest events I've attended. I'm not always quite as hardcore as The Moran, who goes for the whole damn five-day shebang every year with his good lady Jodie, but I always want to stick my head in and watch a few films. This year, the excellent Edinburgh TV Festival kept me away from the event for most of the Bank Holiday Weekend, but me and my young lady managed to see a couple of horrific delights.Well, I say delights... but they weren't, particularly. The thing with Frightfest is, it's a superb event with bags of atmosphere and added value, but can only reflect the best of what's going on in horror around any given August. And things being reflected were the very nub and gist of Mirrors, the latest film from Alexandre Aja. Like many, I was looking forward to this one. I loved Switchblade Romance (originally Haute Tension in its native France) which Aja co-wrote and directed, then the man's gutsy remake of The Hills Have Eyes. The recent P2 bore Aja's name as executive producer, and was merely okay - a good slashery effort with obvious flaws in the departments of pace and especially repetition.
Mirrors sees Aja back as co-writer and director, so excitement was high as the film began. And it's ludicrous. Okay, let's get this straight, because Aja deserves the clarification: the idea is sound and potentially quite scary, with the titular shiny surfaces harbouring demonic forces which can turn your own reflection against you. The problem is the script. Especially towards the end, when presumably the script's redrafting ran out of time, there were lines and moments which had the Frightfest audience hooting with laughter. I really felt for star Kiefer Sutherland, who was acting his boots off, attempting to imbue the foolish dialogue with conviction, but being saddled with lines like "Don't make me threaten you!" and, best of all, "You've gotta be careful of the water. It creates reflections!", which was still being quoted in a nearby Wagamama, half an hour after the end credits rolled. Mirrors isn't without merit, with some nice moments, but I'm really starting to suspect that Aja should perhaps focus on direction, which is where he truly excels.
The other film I caught was The Disappeared, a British ghost story. Directed by Johnny Kevorkian, who spent several years developing it with producer Neil Murphy, it stars Harry Treadaway as Matthew, a council estate teen traumatised by the disappearance of his younger brother Tom. When Tom apparently starts communicating with Matthew via TV and a ghetto blaster, Matthew starts to doubt his sanity - especially as he's just got out of mental care. He also starts to doubt his own father, who seems to have a real anger management problem.
An undoubtedly classy piece of work, well directed, The Disappeared unfolded its mystery a little too slowly for me. Treadaway is very good in the lead role, even if the subsequent onstage Q&A session confirmed that 'council estate' is indeed not his natural accent. The Disappeared's main problem, though, comes with its twists: I could see them coming from so far away, they may as well have been riding in day-glo hot-air balloons. It reminded me that twists are dangerous affairs: make them too obvious, and present them as a big hey-got-you-there deal (one twist ends the film) and the audience will feel gravely under-estimated.As Frightfest always likes to give you extra, in a Halifax bank stylee, each film was preceded by some fun stuff. Charlie Brooker bounded onstage to swear a fair deal and present clips from his forthcoming E4 drama, Dead Set, which combines Big Brother with zombies. I'm so over the current post-28 Days Later zombie rash that you wouldn't believe it, and Dead Set sadly seems to be working within similar parameters, right down to the annoying use of jerky-cam when the undead bastards attack. Still, it's great to see a six-part horror serial on TV, and perhaps the magic of Brooker can exhume the maggot-riddled zombie sub-genre.
We were also shown a clip or two from Lesbian Vampire Killers, which clearly could never live up to its title, no matter how good it is. The clips suggested a fairly decent spoof comedy-horror job, boosted by the appearances of Gavin & Stacey stars James Corden and Mathew Horne.
The next day, I went to a press screening of The Strangers, a Frightfest inclusion which I'd missed. Despite sitting next to an overgrown child who insisted on chewing and slurping over his pen throughout much of the film, I really enjoyed it.
As the prominent UK TV trailers have suggested, it's a real white-knuckler which manages to genuinely give you the creeps on several occasions. At heart a '70s exploitation movie like The Last House On The Left, right down to its opening 'true story' screen-captions, read in a sinister voice, it centres on a couple (Scott Speedman, Liv Tyler) whose crisis quickly elevates from 'relationship drama' to 'we're about to be horribly murdered'. Three masked freaks turn up at a house where they're spending the night, knocking on the door, murmuring ominously and generally messing them about. Then the intimidation and intrusion gets worse and worse...
The Strangers is a little like a more commercially-minded Funny Games, even if it's not quite as consistent in pitch. Somewhere around the two-thirds mark, the taut tension simply can't be sustained, and characters start doing rather silly things. There's also a pretty major plothole involving a 911 call. The climax, though, is a brilliantly unflinching piece of work, despite having attracted criticism from the lily-livered.One Frightfest film I'd already seen is Time Crimes, a Spanish gem which, as it title suggests, concerns time-travel. Very complicated, mind-bending time travel which might give even Steven Moffat a migraine. I forget the exact plot set-up as I saw it last October, but suffice to say that the central character ends up tied up in timey-wimey knots, meeting various versions of himself. Truly ingenious, mad stuff which will hopefully gain a distributor over here.
These days, it's generally held to be true that films don't suffer from censorship nearly as much as they used to. By and large, this is the case and is something to be celebrated, compared to the dark days when moralistic, Daily Mail-fuelled witch-hunts led to so-called video nasties being confiscated from rental shops and people being prosecuted for peddling motion pictures (see my feature on video nasties here).
Films do, however, still get snipped from time to time - or even banned outright. A US serial killer film called Murder Set Pieces, for instance, was quite recently refused a certificate by the BBFC. Admittedly, it's an unusually nasty piece of work and seriously grim, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if you prefer your brain unscarred. Still, Murder Set Pieces is a perfectly well-made, toiled-over piece of 35mm fiction by director Nick Palumbo and I support its right to exist and be seen by consenting adults. Nevertheless, the BBFC have decreed that you're not allowed to legally watch it in the UK. Wrong, wrong, wrong. While the BBFC is full of perfectly sensible, nice folk who in some cases are genuine horror fans, it's important to realise that we're not quite out of the woods just yet when it comes to our celluloid-centric liberty.If you're curious about what else falls under the censor's machete these days, I thoroughly recommend the magazine Is It Uncut?, not to be confused with the unappealing music monthly. A glossy, professionally printed mag, it runs plenty of detailed horror/SF/action movie reviews and painstakingly lists BBFC cuts to films (mainly, it has to be confessed, porn). The current issue features the blood-splattered heroine from Frontiers (another fine film, incidentally) on its cover, and is available from Midnight Media, who also publish Slash Hits, an excellent run of slasher movie encyclopaedias. Lovely.
"To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it" - Michel de Montaigne
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it" - Mark Twain
Frightfest Update: You can see The Amazing Trousers, one of the shorts shown at Frightfest, on YouTube here. Starring Kris Marshall, it's quite the rib-tickler.
Three Things I've Been Dying To Tell You All Damn Week
THING ONEScriptwriter magazine, that august UK organ dedicated to our favourite pasttime (okay, our second favourite pasttime), is going online! As of July 1, 2008, it will migrate to TwelvePoint.com, where it will continue to deliver its established diet of stylish articles, as well as a whole lot more interactivity and value. I met up with its editor Julian Friedmann the other day and was excited to hear his aims of "making TwelvePoint the world's biggest writing portal." I shall babble more about this as the time draws near, but for now, hit the TwelvePoint website for all the details. Then come back and read the Other Two Things I've Been Dying To Tell You All Week.
THING TWOI recently saw an excellent horror film named Inside - or L'Interieur in its native France. I don't believe it has secured a UK release yet, but it's well worth keeping an eye out for, provided you're not (a) squeamish about nasty gore; or (b) pregnant. Starring Beatrice Dalle, it's a brilliantly classy, scary and damn vicious story about a pregnant mother whose home is invaded on Christmas Eve. I loved it.
THING THREE
Running low on displacement activities and stress-easing devices? Enjoy popping bubble-wrap? In that case, you may well enjoy Puchi Puchi - a Japanese creation which simulates bubble-wrap you can pop forever... or as long as you have a tiny battery installed. As you squeeze the device, it makes the sound of a bubble being popped, and once in a while makes a ludicrous random noise. I'd say it simulates about 80% of the joy of bubble-wrap destruction, which is good enough for me. It's certainly perfect for nervously fiddling about with while reading script notes. Have a great Saturday, you ridiculously special person.
How Not To Write, Direct & Act Horror
This clip from the wonderful Troll 2 just about sums it up:
Hunt down this film at all costs: I had the pleasure of viewing it with company on Saturday night, and I haven't laughed so much in quite a while. It is gloriously bad. On the other hand, if you can't be bothered to locate it, here's a ten-minute montage of the most preposterous moments:
Hunt down this film at all costs: I had the pleasure of viewing it with company on Saturday night, and I haven't laughed so much in quite a while. It is gloriously bad. On the other hand, if you can't be bothered to locate it, here's a ten-minute montage of the most preposterous moments:
Slashing & Thrashing
There are two online side projects of mine which I haven't mentioned before: one old, one new.
The old one is Slasherama, my horror movie website. Started it in 2002 and have updated it less and less often over the years, but it's still full of fun and has even carried paid advertising over the last year or two. Nice.
The new one is Thrasherama, my blog about thrash metal. In case you're unfamiliar with thrash, it's regular metal's younger, faster, nastier brother, as exemplified by the likes of Slayer, Razor, Destruction, Kreator and other acts with gnarly-sounding names. Handy hint: if you listen to thrash metal while screenwriting, it makes you type faster. And write more violent scenes.
What I'd like now, is suggestions for my next online venture's name. Two criteria: it has to start with something rhyming with 'Slash'. And end in 'erama'. Obviously.
The old one is Slasherama, my horror movie website. Started it in 2002 and have updated it less and less often over the years, but it's still full of fun and has even carried paid advertising over the last year or two. Nice.
The new one is Thrasherama, my blog about thrash metal. In case you're unfamiliar with thrash, it's regular metal's younger, faster, nastier brother, as exemplified by the likes of Slayer, Razor, Destruction, Kreator and other acts with gnarly-sounding names. Handy hint: if you listen to thrash metal while screenwriting, it makes you type faster. And write more violent scenes.
What I'd like now, is suggestions for my next online venture's name. Two criteria: it has to start with something rhyming with 'Slash'. And end in 'erama'. Obviously.
I Want To Write Until My Fingers Become Bloody Stumps
Did you miss me? Did you? Sure y'did. Unless, of course, you were at the Cheltenham Screenwriters' Festival and became steadily sick of the sight of me over the full exhausting four-day shebang.
It was a grand event - worth the expense, time and effort, to say the very least - and presented so much Stuff that it'll probably keep me in blogging material for weeks, like some kind of Christmas turkey which gets made into sandwiches and the like. It's left my brain spinning and buzzing. I'm flitting from one screenplay idea to another, in an attempt to work out which script should hit the Red Planet Prize competition, which should hit Hammer Films and which should hit Film4. Help! My neural pathways are all congested. Hopefully I can soon work out what to write for who, and when.
Right now, though, I'm off to enjoy some alleged 'torture porn' with Hostel Part II. Then attending a carnival in Newark-On-Trent. Lovely.
It was a grand event - worth the expense, time and effort, to say the very least - and presented so much Stuff that it'll probably keep me in blogging material for weeks, like some kind of Christmas turkey which gets made into sandwiches and the like. It's left my brain spinning and buzzing. I'm flitting from one screenplay idea to another, in an attempt to work out which script should hit the Red Planet Prize competition, which should hit Hammer Films and which should hit Film4. Help! My neural pathways are all congested. Hopefully I can soon work out what to write for who, and when.
Right now, though, I'm off to enjoy some alleged 'torture porn' with Hostel Part II. Then attending a carnival in Newark-On-Trent. Lovely.
Resurrecting The Ghost
The last couple of posts over at Pillock's Pad have got me thinking about ghost stories in cinema.
It's interesting how few genuinely scary ghost stories there have been since The Blair Witch Project. The genre has somehow become funnelled into one of two categories...
(1) The Japanese 'chiller'. Has its roots embedded in 1998's Ringu, but adds up to nothing more than an exercise in box-ticking. Girl with long black hair, walking and/or crawling erratically? Check. Terrible events in her past? Check. She's been wronged and is now back for more? Oh yes. She's eventually presented in a sympathetic light and thus becomes way less scary? Yes yes yes.
(2) The Grown-Up 'chiller'. Centres on a couple who have usually either lost a child, want to adopt one or already have a child who starts acting strangely. Robert De Niro generally appears, clearly with one eye on funding his new garden conservatory.
Neither are, to my way of thinking, healthy trends. Hopefully the recent critical drubbing dealt to The Grudge 2 and its diminished Box Office returns in comparison with its predecessor, will put paid to Ringu-inspired flotsam, while the similar fates of Movies About Grieving Couples should snuff out that subgenre too.
It's time for the return of movies which haunt you, shortly after you turn off the bedside lamp. Doesn't happen very often. Here are a couple of more obscure scary flicks which might inspire/scare the Christ out of you: Whistle And I'll Come To You (1968) and Session 9 (2001). The former 42-minute TV movie (adapted from an M.R. James short story) barely shows you much at all, but manages to create a sense of toe-curling supernatural dread. Then Session 9 ably demonstrates how the scariest thing of all can be the human mind's collapse. Both are available on Region 2 DVD and I strongly recommend them.
While I agree less is more when it comes to spook-fests, I only mean this in a certain sense. One thing's for sure: the less you know about the Ghostly Antagonist(s), the better. Furthermore, I'm a big fan of Proper Evil. As soon as the GA is revealed to be 'basically all right, but terribly wronged', my eyes glaze over and I reach for the 'stop' button. Characters shouldn't be black-and-white in general drama, but when it comes to scary fiction, what's wrong with a bit of out-and-out malevolence, hmm?
I disagree, though, with the generally-accepted notion that ghost movies can't be scary and gory. Don't see why this should be the case - and it's something I attempted to disprove with my own Panik screenplay. If it ever gets transformed into a motion picture, we'll see if it succeeds in this task.
I'm due a rewatch of The Blair Witch Project, come to think of it. Just need to find someone to watch it with... *trembles*
It's interesting how few genuinely scary ghost stories there have been since The Blair Witch Project. The genre has somehow become funnelled into one of two categories...
(1) The Japanese 'chiller'. Has its roots embedded in 1998's Ringu, but adds up to nothing more than an exercise in box-ticking. Girl with long black hair, walking and/or crawling erratically? Check. Terrible events in her past? Check. She's been wronged and is now back for more? Oh yes. She's eventually presented in a sympathetic light and thus becomes way less scary? Yes yes yes.
(2) The Grown-Up 'chiller'. Centres on a couple who have usually either lost a child, want to adopt one or already have a child who starts acting strangely. Robert De Niro generally appears, clearly with one eye on funding his new garden conservatory.
Neither are, to my way of thinking, healthy trends. Hopefully the recent critical drubbing dealt to The Grudge 2 and its diminished Box Office returns in comparison with its predecessor, will put paid to Ringu-inspired flotsam, while the similar fates of Movies About Grieving Couples should snuff out that subgenre too.
It's time for the return of movies which haunt you, shortly after you turn off the bedside lamp. Doesn't happen very often. Here are a couple of more obscure scary flicks which might inspire/scare the Christ out of you: Whistle And I'll Come To You (1968) and Session 9 (2001). The former 42-minute TV movie (adapted from an M.R. James short story) barely shows you much at all, but manages to create a sense of toe-curling supernatural dread. Then Session 9 ably demonstrates how the scariest thing of all can be the human mind's collapse. Both are available on Region 2 DVD and I strongly recommend them.
While I agree less is more when it comes to spook-fests, I only mean this in a certain sense. One thing's for sure: the less you know about the Ghostly Antagonist(s), the better. Furthermore, I'm a big fan of Proper Evil. As soon as the GA is revealed to be 'basically all right, but terribly wronged', my eyes glaze over and I reach for the 'stop' button. Characters shouldn't be black-and-white in general drama, but when it comes to scary fiction, what's wrong with a bit of out-and-out malevolence, hmm?
I disagree, though, with the generally-accepted notion that ghost movies can't be scary and gory. Don't see why this should be the case - and it's something I attempted to disprove with my own Panik screenplay. If it ever gets transformed into a motion picture, we'll see if it succeeds in this task.
I'm due a rewatch of The Blair Witch Project, come to think of it. Just need to find someone to watch it with... *trembles*
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