“Late Night With The Devil”. Not really a movie movie, but the eyes have it…

Late Night With The Devil poster

I don’t normally post reviews on here, but I saw a preview of Late Night With The Devil earlier this week. It opens in UK and US cinemas today and it opens up a whole can of interesting worms. 

I guess the elevator pitch was something along the lines of The Exorcist meets The Blair Witch Project on a late-night US chat show – although ads are plugging it as Rosemary’s Baby meets Network.

The plotline is: In 1977 a live television broadcast goes horribly wrong, unleashing evil into living rooms across the United States.

The title Late Night With The Devil explains the plot.

The idea is that you are watching a real videotape of a real late night TV chat show – Night Owls – which was broadcast live on Halloween Night, 31st October 1977. The transmitted sequences are in colour and the duration of the ad-breaks are filled with black & white documentary-like footage of what ‘actually’ went on off-screen (again in real time).

The Night Owls TV show you are watching throughout the film was supposedly in ‘also-ran’ competition with the Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

It is a good idea but I’m not really sure it is a movie movie, by which I mean it is not opened-up… 

Apart from an introductory set-up putting it into the context of the 1970s – and the ending – it is set entirely within a TV studio and takes place in real time.

So wide-screen spectacular vistas and big-scale it ain’t got: it’s more suited to be a TV movie than a movie movie. In theory that is bad. But this is more than counter balanced by the fact everything happens in real time (except for the intro and the ending).

What you see is “actually happening” and “actually unfolding” as you watch it. A real time plotline is almost always going to be more involving. The ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ which you need to watch the artificiality of normal screen plots and performances is less difficult because you appear to be watching reality unfold second-by-second as it happens.

Ironically, this – in my humble opinion – buggers up the end because, as I mentioned, the movie happens in real time EXCEPT for the introductory set-up and the ending. 

And we can’t, of course, talk about the ending.

Still, the rest of the ride is vivid and mind-grabbing.

The central talk show host is played by David Dastmalchian, who is very charismatic in a slightly creepy way.

David Dastmalchian in The Dark Knight

I mainly know his face as a bit-part policemen with piercing, haunted eyes in The Dark Knight Batman movie.

His face and eyes are once seen never forgotten.

He was also in The Suicide Squad, Bladerunner 2049 and the first Dune movie. 

Oh and Oppenheimer, but let’s only concentrate on watchable films.

David Dastmalchian’s performance in Late Night With The Devil is easily underestimated. It’s subtle, not showy, so it ain’t gonna get an Oscar. But it could lead on to much bigger parts for him. He pretty-much carries the film, although the central ‘devil child’ (Ingrid Torelli) has mesmerisingly staring eyes to rival his.

Ingrid Torelli and David Dastmalchian both have it…

The eyes have it.

Should you see it? Yes.

Should you see it on TV? Yes.

Should you see it in the cinema? Strangely, yes. 

I’m glad I saw it on the big screen.

Bye Bye Baby: Hello thrills and comedy and two new British movie talents…

Recently, for the third year, I sat through (most of) the annual London Film School graduates’ short film screenings.

This year, I saw the best film I have seen in those three years – Bye Bye Baby. It was a joy.

Jessie (left) and Maria in London’s Soho…

So I had a chat with its writer/director – Jessie Barnett – and its co-writer Maria Pawlikowska, who also played the part of Jemima, a pill-popping housewife, in Bye Bye Baby.

Embarrassingly, one of the few films I missed at the screenings was the one Maria had directed – So Far So Good.

I have since seen it.

I was equally impressed.

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An appeal for a “coming-of-age bloodbath” on Kickstarter

JOHN: Jessie, I stumbled online on a wonderfully enjoyable Kickstarter appeal for Everyone Wants to Kill Me which was going to be your graduation film. It was billed as “A coming-of-age bloodbath”.

JESSIE: Yes, we changed the idea.

MARIA: Everyone Wants to Kill Me was before my time, but we started working on that script together. Then we gave up because it was such a big number and there were about a hundred extras for this idea.

JESSIE: It became Strawberry Fields after that.

MARIA: …a virgin sacrifice movie.

JOHN: So Bye Bye Love started as a slasher movie, then became a virgin sacrifice movie and then ended as… How do I describe Bye Bye Baby without giving away what happens towards the end? “The heroine goes a bit looney and there’s blood involved”?

JESSIE: She has a quarter-life crisis, I would call it.

JOHN: At the beginning of the film, there is a caption saying it is based on…

JESSIE & MARIA (TOGETHER): …real insecurities.

JESSIE: I’m from North London. The North London bubble. It’s a very high-pressure community. Competitive. Get married young.

MARIA: Keep up with the Joneses.

Bye Bye Baby – billed as “A Killer Party”…

JESSIE: Yes. Keeping up. And I was going through this phase during Covid where I was single and depressed and unemployed and a lot of my best friends were getting married. I was only 24 and they were 24 too and I’d have to constantly go to these stupid ‘bridal showers’ and ‘baby showers’.

JOHN: What’s a bridal shower?

JESSIE: You don’t know? It’s a global thing. They do it in the UK a lot.

JOHN: I’m very old. We didn’t have them in the 19th Century.

JESSIE: I had to leave one because I had a panic attack and I had to go to Maria’s flat and I told her: “I don’t know why I’m reacting like this. It is so ridiculous. But I’m reacting so badly to all of this and I feel so angry.”

JOHN: Ah! I can see the Bye Bye Baby link.

JESSIE: I had been brought up a certain way.

JOHN: What way?

JESSIE: Once you get to 25, then you marry, have a family. I didn’t want that. I had a panic because I felt all my friends didn’t understand me. My friends from the world I had grown up in. I felt they didn’t take me seriously. They are all amazing people and I love them now. But it was just one of those moments: They don’t care what I care about. And it looks like I’m doing something wrong because I don’t want to co-operate. That’s what I felt.

JOHN: Why were they not treating you seriously? Because you were in the Arts and they weren’t?

JESSIE: It was all in my head. You just feel like you’re behind. They’re all getting married and doing all the things we’ve been told are the right way to live your life… I felt a bit lost.

MARIA: That’s how I felt too.

JOHN: But your family is already arty-farty so they must understand you.

MARIA: Well, my dad is a film director, but he is embarrassed about it. Mortified that he’s not a doctor or that I’m not a doctor. It seemed like every day I was told: “How nice it would be if you ended up being a doctor…”

I was supposed to be a doctor.

JESSIE: I guess we wrote the original script sort-of as a joke to let off steam then thought: No! There’s something in this!

JOHN: There’s humour in the film. You have the same sense of humour? 

JESSIE: Yes.

JOHN: Dark humour?

MARIA: Yes.

JOHN: Maria, your own film So Far So Good is a gangstery thing, so it’s necessarily dark.

MARIA: Very dark. It’s funny, but it’s not a comedy. There are some moments.

JOHN: And, Jessie, you’re doing comedy and violence too.

JESSIE: Yes, definitely. I want to definitely focus on that. Definitely, moving forward. Especially comedy.

JOHN: Would you do a comedy-comedy movie?

JESSIE: Maybe. But usually comedy with something else.

JOHN: Are you interested in doing comedy with horror and violence? Or horror and violence with comedy?

JESSIE: Both.

MARIA: Obviously both.

JOHN: And you are interested in…?

MARIA: I’m interested in… I think my stuff is less funny than Jessie’s. I’ve done three and none of them are (pure) comedy.

JESSIE: And a very different type of comedy, I’d say. More nuanced. It’s not in-your-face.

MARIA: Very different from Bye Bye Baby, which was just pushing as far as it would go.

JOHN: Pushing in which way?

JESSIE & MARIA (TOGETHER): To the extreme.

“…with Bye Bye Baby, we did get away with a lot…”

MARIA: Just because you have a good joke doesn’t mean it should go in. Often, joke-joke-joke-joke doesn’t actually amount to a good film. In my stuff, there’s always something else going on, so you have to be very careful with the jokes. Whereas, with Bye Bye Baby, we did get away with a lot.

JESSIE: Yes! Though we did cut a lot of jokes… and we cut out a lot of horror.

“There was much more horror involved…”

There was much more horror involved.

There was this whole scene with the girl who gets her head smashed with a bottle… She wakes up and then there’s this last fight and Rosie finds the e-cigarette and stabs her in the throat with it… Blood everywhere…

And then the woman who owns the home comes back; that was going to be another murder. There was a quick strangle; a quick break-neck.

JOHN: Neither of your films are pure comedy. What’s the quotable synopsis of So Far So Good?

MARIA: It’s about a Bulgarian girl who is hired to honeytrap a juror during a trial and she starts to fall for him and is unsure of what to do. I love film noir and I love femmes fatales and always wanted to do a story from the perspective of a femme fatale. 

There’s a lot of absurdity and humour that comes from this clash of worlds. This very English, sweet software developer who is honeytrapped by this exotic bird.

JOHN: You both always wanted to go into the film industry?

MARIA: Well, I didn’t want to go into the film industry. I was a theatre nut. I was the same as Jessie; a musical theatre freak. I just wanted to go to Jacques Lecoq in Paris and I wanted to sing. I had my band. 

JOHN (TO JESSIE): You were a musical theatre freak?

JESSIE: Very much so. I actually went to the Sylvia Young Theatre School. I wanted to be ‘in the West End’ as a performer but, y’know…

JOHN: Family background in showbiz?

JESSIE: No. I guess my uncle was once an actor.

JOHN: You guess?

JESSIE: He was, but it didn’t go anywhere. He almost made it in New York and then it just got too much, the acting industry.

JOHN: The people?

JESSIE: The people. The environment.

JOHN: Why did you both go to a film school, not just try to get jobs straight into the industry and work your way up?

MARIA: I was already working in the film industry before. I did English Literature at university and then I was working in film for a couple of years as the development executive for a producer. Then I made my first short A Little Death. 

I was born into it. My dad is a film maker: a writer-director. So I tried NOT to make films.

JOHN: Your university was…?

MARIA: Cambridge.

JOHN: You said that with a tinge of embarrassment.

MARIA: Because it’s very embarrassing. I did English and did all the theatre stuff and I was really into it and film happened kind of by accident.

JOHN: You didn’t go into Theatre because…?

MARIA: The thing that I found really difficult about theatre, especially here, is that you really seem to have to have ‘permission’ to do stuff. You can’t just walk into a room and put-on a play. With a film, you can literally just go out and make a film.

JOHN: Can you?

MARIA: If you shoot it on an iPhone.

JOHN: With theatre, surely you can just rent an upstairs room in a pub and put on a play?

MARIA: I suppose. But I think theatre is very cliquey. You need to be in the ‘in crowd’. I just felt alienated from that whole world. At university, obviously, there were a lot of cliques and, let’s say, children of big names. It all felt like a mini-real-world.

JOHN: Were you in The Footlights at Cambridge?

MARIA: I was a Footlights princess.

JOHN: Yer wot?

MARIA: There’s a Footlights panto every year. People take it very seriously. I remember causing a bit of a stir: Who the fuck gave THIS girl a lead roll? 

JOHN: Which panto? 

MARIA: The Princess and The Pea. I was the princess.

JOHN: Who was the pea?

MARIA: It was just a pea.

Cambridge Footlights’ production of The Princess and The Pea

JOHN: So you had a family background in film and, after university, you were IN the film industry… So why the hell did you decide you had to go to a film school?

MARIA: You really have to LEARN how to make films. 

JESSIE: And I felt I needed to learn a lot too. I’d worked on adverts and event videos before film school. I was working as a video editor and just decided I really wanted to make films and I thought: Now’s the time to do it while I’m still young.

MARIA: I’d done costume and running and production assisting and whatnot.

JESSIE: And I felt I needed to learn a lot.

JOHN: Now that’s in the past. You, Jessie, have started Jessie B Films… Is that both of you?

JESSIE: Currently yes.

MARIA: We want to start a company that’s just the two of us, but we need to come up with a name ASAP.

JOHN: ASAP Films. There you are. 10%. Are you actively working on scripts together again?

MARIA: I’ve got this film that I’m obsessed with. There are funny elements, but it’s not a comedy. It’s a horror romance set in Mexico.

JOHN: You should get finance for that. They love a bit of blood in Mexico.

MARIA: Jessie has also come up with this idea for a very morbid rock musical. We are constantly concocting.

JESSIE: Always, always.

MARIA: She needs to write songs. She’s a real songwriter. She wrote all the songs in Bye Bye Baby (except the title song).

JESSIE: They were meant to be trashy pop songs. Not the score. 

MARIA: No. The pop songs that play diegetically in the scenes.

JOHN: Die-a-wot? I should have gone to film school. I feel emasculated.

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Jessie Barnett’s current director’s showreel is on Vimeo: 

“A Ghost Waits”: How singer Tom Waits inspired a romcom (?) horror movie…

This is not my blog. It is a syndicated piece sent out by a PR company to plug the world premiere of new movie A Ghost Waits at the Arrow Video Frightfest event in Glasgow next month. I have not seen the movie, but the interview is interesting…

It is an interview (slightly edited by me) with first-time director Adam Stovall, who describes himself on Twitter: “I direct audio books. I write things. I really like hot wings and Kentucky basketball.”

The film’s blurb reads: “Jack’s job is to fix up the house. Spectral agent Muriel’s eternal task is to haunt it. They should be enemies, but they become fascinated by one another and eventually smitten, leading them to question everything about their work, lives and decisions. But as duty calls for both, something’s got to give for them to have the time together they so desperately want.”

The PR billing for this interview piece is: “Director Adam Stovall reflects on getting through depression,  creating paranormal romance and the influence of Tom Waits…”

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You have an interesting CV – from comedy theatre and film journalism to writing for the Hollywood Reporter and 2nd Assistant Directing. Was all this a game plan to becoming a fully-fledged director?

Adam Stovall: “Movies meant more to me…”

I’ve known since I was a little kid sitting in the basement watching the network TV premiere of Back To The Future while holding my Back To The Future storybook and waiting for them to premiere the first footage from Back To The Future 2 during a commercial break that movies meant more to me than they did to those around me. And that’s not a low bar – my dad worked as a projectionist all through his college years, and my mom takes my aunt to see at least one movie a week. I remember seeing Pulp Fiction in the autumn of 1994 and suddenly realizing that a) cinema was far more elastic than I had previously thought, and b) it helped the world make sense in a way nothing else could. That was when I knew this was my path.

But I grew up in Northern Kentucky, which felt like the furthest you could possibly get from Hollywood. I spent my 20s trying to do anything else and be happy, to no avail. Towards the end of my 20s, I was mired in a severe depression, getting wine drunk and writing scripts on the weekends. Then, my dog died, and it put into stark relief just how alone I was. So I sold as much of my stuff as I could and moved the rest to L.A. so I could pursue film.

Quickly I had the thought that I’d feel pretty stupid if I moved 2,000 miles and just sat in my room, so I started volunteering in the Creative Screenwriting screening series. After eight months of that, I wrote for a magazine, which closed down, then a friend asked me to work on his movie. I was not supposed to be the 2nd Assistant Director, but they ended up with a budget far smaller than they thought they’d get so, as people left the production for higher-paying gigs, I kept getting promoted. It was an incredible experience and the best education I could have asked for in terms of no-budget filmmaking. It clarified for me where money needed to go, and where money went out of habit.

So yeah, that’s a game plan…

Did the story of A Ghost Waits come as a sudden flash; were you inspired by the likes of Ghost and Beetlejuice?

Playstation video game P.T. was one inspiration for the film

The idea for A Ghost Waits came from a video game and a web comic. I am not a gamer, but I was visiting some friends and they told me I needed to play a game called P.T. which was designed by Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima. It’s a first person puzzle game where you have to walk through an L-shaped hallway in a haunted house, doing specific things in time in order to open the door at the end of the hallway, which then puts you back at the beginning of the hallway.

At some point, it occurred to me that there might be a movie in someone like me having to deal with a haunted house. While I was working on that, I saw a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic where a man asks a woman what she thinks is the most American film. She answers, “Ghostbusters,” and he asks why. She explains that people get demonstrable proof of an afterlife, but the whole thing is about growing a small business and navigating government bureaucracy. I thought, “That’s hilarious and also I want to see that movie.” So I wrote it!

How long was the development process and where did you obtain financing?

Development on A Ghost Waits moved irresponsibly fast, haha. I had the idea in November 2015 and we shot in August 2016. Normally I have all the time in the world to write, since nobody cares about a spec script being written by a no-name, so the process of writing with so many eyes on me was equally exciting and daunting. Fun fact: I usually name characters and title the piece late in the process, but I wasn’t able to do that here since we needed to create documents for casting and whatnot. So I went home, opened up my Tom Waits discography and named every character after a Tom Waits song. And then named the movie after him, because he is one of my creative north stars…

(Actor) MacLeod Andrews and I had spent the previous year trying to get another movie made, but just weren’t able to raise enough money. One of the investors we met in that time remained very excited to make something so, when I had the idea for A Ghost Waits, he immediately said he’d invest half the production budget. My mom had told me to let her know when we had a firm budget number so, once we had half the budget, she invested the other half. That covered principal photography and then MacLeod and I put in our own money to cover pickups and post-production.

How do you describe the movie? A supernatural comedy? A paranormal romance? What?

I’ve been referring to it as a haunted house love story, but paranormal romance is good – maybe I’ll start using that!

Was the choice to shoot in black-and-white more an artistic or budgetary consideration?

A bit of both, to be honest. I love the B&W aesthetic, so it was always a possibility in my mind. I mentioned my idea to my Unit Production Manager during prep while we were on a location scout and she told me not to do that. We shot in colour with the intention of staying that way, but we also shot with two different cameras – the Blackmagic Ursa Mini and the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema – which yielded slightly different looks. I drove myself crazy trying to match the images in colour-correction and, one day, MacLeod said, “Have you thought about just making it B&W?” Because MacLeod is the best person ever. Once we used a B&W LUT (a colour-grading file) on it, it felt right, tonally and aesthetically. Would we have gone with B&W even if we had more money? Who knows! Just another possibility for the pile…

When did you first meet MacLeod Andrews? Did you write the part of Jack with him in mind?

MacLeod and I met on the set of a film called Split, a bowling rom-com, which filmed in Louisville, Kentucky. I met the filmmaker on a panel, and he asked if I’d be down to come work on his movie. MacLeod is a native of Louisville, and had worked with one of the producers on the film before. We instantly hit it off and I was struck by his obvious talent and charisma, so I sent him a script I’d recently written. He dug it and we decided we wanted to work together.

I absolutely wrote the part of Jack for MacLeod. To the extent that, if he’d said no, the movie would not exist. Fortunately, our brains function on similarly weird frequencies, so we’re usually intrigued and excited by similar ideas.

What about Natalie Walker? How did you come to cast her as Muriel?

I’d been following Natalie on Twitter for a while and was impressed by her humour and brilliance. I had a feeling that casting her in a role that demanded she sublimate her energy would yield a similar result as when Robin Williams was asked to do the same for dramatic roles. I emailed and told her about the project and offered to send over the script so she could check it out and see if it interested her. She responded that she was very interested, so we talked and she did a self-tape, which was perfect. We hopped on FaceTime and I offered her the role.

The chemistry between MacLeod and Natalie is wonderful. Was that instant or did it need nurturing?

Instant! We never even had a table read, much less any rehearsals, so the first time they met was on set. Since we had such a small crew, I was always doing a multitude of jobs, which limited how much time I was able to spend with them. A lot of their dynamic is due to the work they did on their own.

Where did you film and for how long?

We filmed in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Lakeside Park, Kentucky. Principal photography was 12 days in August 2016 and then we did the first set of pickups over four days in April 2017 and the last set over a week in February 2018.

Glasgow: Friday 6th March, 8.40pm

What does having the World Premiere at FrightFest Glasgow mean to you?

Cesar A. Cruz once said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” At my lowest, movies have made me feel less alone, and I wanted to make something that could do that for someone else. We made a small, personal, weird film, and it means the absolute world to know it means something to others and is finding its place in the world.

Finally, what’s next for you?

We’re working with a couple producers on two films, which we’re obviously hoping to make soon. One is an existential horror drama, and the other is a coming-of-age comedy-drama. In the meantime, just writing a few things and hoping for the best.

Comedian Julian Clary and tell-all hack McG linked via sexploitation horror film

I get sent loads of PR bumph (I feel you can never get too much) including the generic PR interviews that are sent out to one-and-all in the media to plug upcoming events. Indeed, I wrote one myself a few months ago to plug a comedian’s UK tour.

The idea is that local papers etc may run the full PR interview as if they themselves had conducted it. Or edit or cannibalise it for quotes, facts and photos.

I never use these PR interviews myself.

Why bother? If I’m interested, I will chat to the person myself.

However here – below – is the exception.

PR man Greg Day is plugging the fact that the Horror Channel in the UK will be screening cult director Pete Walker’s 1976 horror and sexploitation movie Schizo this Saturday. And today Greg sent me his PR interview with the film’s screenwriter David McGillivray who has occasionally turned up in my blog before – notably in 2016 to plug his would-be notorious gay sex film Trouser Bar.

David McG is publishing his inevitably scandalous, tell-all autobiography Little Did You Know in a month’s time and I have already arranged to chat to him the day after its press launch.

But I won’t be asking him about Schizo… So here, as a teaser, in its full glory, is the PR Q&A for Schizo:

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SCHIZO – “When the left hand doesn’t know who the right hand is killing!!”

Q: SCHIZO is unusual in your body of work with director Pete Walker because the concept and narrative were not of your choosing. How much of a problem was that for you?

A: Huge. I thought the script that we re-worked was terribly old-fashioned and this led to big arguments with Walker that ended our relationship.

Q: You often play a cameo in the movies you’ve written – You’re ‘Man at Séance’ in SCHIZO. Any particular reason?

A: I liked to write myself parts so that I could observe Walker at work. He was an extremely talented exploitation director who influenced the remainder of my career.

Q: SCHIZO exhibits many Hitchcockian references and Pete Walker cites Hitch as a hero. Is he for you too?

A: Yes, of course. Psycho is one of my favourite horror films.

Q: You’ve written many films for many people in so many genres, but what’s your own personal favourite?

A: My first film for Pete Walker, House of Whipcord. It was very exciting because it was the kind of film I’d dreamed of writing.

Svengali – The Rocky Horror that got away

Q: Just prior to SCHIZO you wrote a pop opera in the Rocky Horror vein for Pete Walker titled SVENGALI based on George du Maurier’s Gothic melodrama. Do you regret that project being shelved?

A: No, it would have been a disaster. Walker realised this and cancelled it almost before I’d typed the final page of the script.

Q: Your autobiography Little Did You Know is published in June. Rumour says it’s not your typical memoir though, so what’s it all about?

A: I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say that after its publication I will never work again.

Q: Your love/hate relationship with Pete Walker is common knowledge. Are there any more scandalous revelations about that in the book?

A: Oh yes…

Julian Clary – Never knowingly understated

Q: You write a lot of the material for a comedian. How did that business relationship begin and is this the nearest you can get to the Golden Era of the British sexploitation film you so brilliantly essayed in your book Doing Rude Things? 

A: Writing smut for Julian Clary is my day job. I enjoy it immensely. I have written for him for something like 37 years. In Julian’s latest show, which tours the UK before playing the London Palladium on 8th June, unsuspecting audience members are subjected to so-called ‘Heterosexual Aversion Therapy’. If you sit in the front row, you deserve all you get.

Q: You’ve announced your next film project is The Wrong People based on the novel by Robin Maugham. So you have no intention of retiring from the film industry just yet?

A: I love movies. I am fresh from a meeting with a director who bravely has chosen to take on this project. But, in all likelihood, it is so controversial that probably it will finish both our careers. If Little Did You Know hasn’t finished mine already.

Q: Finally, SCHIZO receives its Horror Channel premiere on Sat April 27^th. Will you be watching?

A: I’m pleased Horror Channel viewers will get the chance to see it, but will I be watching? Certainly not. I can’t bear to see my own work, which is all dreadful.

David McGillivray – the soon-to-be-autobiographer – never a man to mince his words

Short horror films and an international festival – probably not for chickens…

Tonight, Sunday 17th March, BBC4 is screening a selection of short films in the UK under the umbrella title Born Digital: First Cuts.

I saw a preview of all the films earlier this week and Janitor of Lunacy by London-based Japanese director Umi Ishihara is well worth watching. What on earth it is about is another matter. It runs 12 minutes.

Coincidentally producer, director and actress Amanda Fleming’s company De Profundis has started a new international festival for short films – specifically horror films. The first – free – one-day festival is being held in Manchester in two weekends’ time.

I asked her: “Why?”

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Amanda Fleming with halo at Soho Theatre Bar in London

AMANDA: Well, since I make short films and my direct theatre pieces tend to have a lot of horror.

JOHN: Why are you plugging other people’s films?

AMANDA: There are a lot of films that don’t get seen and a lot of film festivals that are particularly picky about how much money is spent on the film. I want to showcase talented up-and-coming film makers, so I thought it would be good to have a forum and to actually make a creative day of it.

It’s also a platform to meet some of the international people who have been entered into the festival – there will be Q&As.

We’ve had 75 submissions, 30 of them from abroad. Some of them were not the right genre of horror. Some were more psychological thriller rather than horror. Not quite the genre we were looking for. Maybe on the next one we will add in extra categories.

JOHN: There is a very nice dividing line between psychological thriller and horror.

AMANDA: We labelled it a ‘horror’ film festival. I was interested to see what came in.

JOHN: How do you decide something is a psychological thriller but not a real horror film?

AMANDA: Psychological tends be twists and turns – like somebody who thinks she’s hearing something and thinks it’s ghosts, but it’s just her own insanity or a stalker or whatever. The type of horror we were looking for was supernatural/Gothic, a little bit of zombie, a little bit of vampire.

JOHN: Val Lewton films in particular were all about the things you don’t see being more frightening than the things you do see. Were there films submitted that were on the borderline of your definition?

AMANDA: There was one. It won’t fit in this first festival but it was so good I am going to put in the next one. The festival is going to be twice a year. The first one is one day. Six hours. This first festival will be a small start-up one to see how it goes, then we will move to a slightly bigger venue in October or November this year.

JOHN: And this film which ‘doesn’t fit’ would be in the second festival in October or November?

AMANDA: Yes. I’m going to add an extra specific type of category so it will fit in. 

JOHN: What’s that?

AMANDA: Comedy horror. This film’s amazing. It’s called Fowl Fury.

JOHN: Fowl?

AMANDA: Yes, so you know where it’s going to go, right?

JOHN: Why is it not horror?

AMANDA: Too funny. We are looking for more horror-horror. But I might even put it in this first festival as a token laugh moment. The trouble is we already have so many worth screening.

JOHN: They are all short films?

AMANDA: The films run between 2 minutes and 20 minutes.

JOHN: Two minutes is a scene, not a film.

AMANDA: But the 2-minute one is so good… to the point I have actually emailed them and said: I can see this becoming a major production. We are interested in talent and potential.

JOHN: You should have a Phlegming Award for Horror.

AMANDA: If we could afford it, we would, but we are just starting up. We are just awarding certificates for Best UK Film and Best International Film for this first one.

JOHN: And we will have to wait until October or November to see Fowl Fury…?

AMANDA: Probably… But, if we can fit the chicken one in this time, we will.

Julian Richards: horror, Brookside and Carrie Reborn for the Z Generation?

Julian Richards is an interesting Welshman.

Part film director and part film sales businessman through his company Jinga Films. He has made two horror films this year.

I was invited (not by him) to see his movie Daddy’s Girl at the recent Raindance festival in London. When I saw it, I had reservations about it.

So I was interested to see his even newer movie Reborn, the pitch for which is: “A stillborn baby girl is abducted by a morgue attendant and brought back to life by electrokinetic power. On her sixteenth birthday she escapes captivity and sets out to find her birth mother leaving a trail of destruction behind her.”

The poster pitch is: CARRIE FOR THE Z GENERATION.

Yesterday, Reborn had its North American premiere at the Another Hole in the Head festival in San Francisco.

So I had a chat with Julian Richards.

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JOHN: Daddy’s Girl… The first half or so was torture porn, which I disliked, then the female central character looks in a mirror and the whole film changes – it turns on a sixpence – and becomes totally different.

JULIAN: Well… Daddy’s Girl was an interesting journey… I first came across the script 12 years ago and to get to make it 12 years later was a bit of a challenge. There were several characters in a story and the big twist at the end is you discover they are all the same character. When we got to make it, after 12 years, the first thing the producer said to me was: We were not going to do that.

He was right, because, under the circumstances, we would have needed an enormous amount of control with the casting, which we didn’t have working in Tbilisi in Georgia and on the budget we had. We had a deadline to start shooting which was four weeks away and, even shifting the story in a different direction, the whole casting and crewing experience was a… a game of musical chairs. It really was.

Daddy’s Girl starts as ‘torture porn’, ends somewhere different

JOHN: It’s set in the US. Why shoot in Georgia – the Eastern European country not the US state?

JULIAN: Because there was a tax incentive to shoot there and, in terms of labour costs, it’s probably the cheapest place in Europe at the moment

JOHN: The producers were Indians based in Dubai.

JULIAN: Yes. They had been shooting Bollywood films in Georgia and now they wanted to make horror films.

JOHN: So, in the original, the central girl had multiple personalities who were on screen as different people?

JULIAN: When all the characters in the story were her, it was part of her fractured view of the world. And her mother as well. There was a lot more of her almost being haunted. Haunted by the suicide of her mother. It was supernatural but actually more psychological.

JOHN: We can’t really talk about the very end of the film. But it ends up in a totally different place from where you might assume it would from the beginning.

JULIAN: That was actually the producer’s idea. And it was what we needed because, if you take out all of those elements – about all the characters being the same character – she becomes two separate characters and so I think the end worked for what we needed to do with that kind of film.

Reborn poster: Carrie for the Z Generation

JOHN: We can’t really talk about the end of Reborn either because of the multiple twists. But I think you have some sort of writer’s gene in you, as well as director’s. The end of Reborn is a writer’s ending. And, earlier in your career, you wrote something for Stephen Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.

JULIAN: When I graduated from film school, I went to LA for a year and my first job was writing a screenplay for Amblin, based on a novel Chris Westwood, a friend of mine, had written: Calling All Monsters. It was very much an In The Mouth of Madness kind of story, about an author haunted by his own creations. But, when Amblin turned into Dreamworks, new people came in, looked at all the old projects and it got caught in turnaround and never happened.

JOHN: So then you came back to the UK to…

JULIAN: …direct on the TV series Brookside and to get my first movie Darklands off the ground.

Darklands was screened at a film festival in Korea and (movie producer/director) Roger Corman was on the jury. He released The Wicker Man in the US and he came up to me after Darklands was screened and said: “I’d like to release Darklands in the US.” 

“I was jumping for joy. Corman was a god.”

So I was jumping for joy. Corman was a god to me. I introduced him to the producer of the film, but they couldn’t work out a deal so it never got released there. The producer’s company went bust and it took me 16 years to get the rights back. I eventually got it released in the US a couple of years ago.

JOHN: You seem to be attracted to horror. You directed the body-under-the-patio plot on Brookside. So you brought horror into TV soaps?

JULIAN: No. That was just the timing. I was there when they happened to be doing the body under the patio, the lesbian kiss and the plague that wiped out half the cast. I did episodes in each of those storylines. 

JOHN: What is the attraction of horror? Just that it sells? Why are you not making RomCom movies? They sell. 

JULIAN: I’m not driven to horror by money. It was a boyhood fascination and passion I had. I started making films on super 8 when I was 13.

JOHN: What was the 13-year-old you’s first film?

JULIAN: The Curse of Cormac, based on a graphic story strip in a House of Hammer magazine.

JOHN: You used to read House of Hammer?

JULIAN: I did. And Monster Mag and Fangoria magazine.

JOHN: So an early fascination with horror.

JULIAN: Yes. Stephen King’s book Danse Macabre was very interesting: defining the key ingredients of horror as suspense, surprise and gross-out. If you are going to make a successful horror film, it is going to have all those three ingredients.

JOHN: Reborn is difficult to categorise. It is not in one little box.

“You are sympathetic with the monster. Tess appealed to me.”

JULIAN: What attracted me was it was a classic horror story. I love monster movies where you are sympathetic with the monster and Tess (the ‘reborn’ daughter) appealed to me. When I read the story, I was torn between whether it was Tess’ story or Lena’s (her mother) and I decided the story was actually Lena’s. Tess is an anti-hero. Lena’s objective is to get back into her career as an actress and that’s how I came up with the ending.

JOHN: Which we can’t talk about.

JULIAN: No… But, from a meta point of view, I wanted it to have a new, contemporary twist at the end. Let’s have fun with it.

JOHN: You are involved in an upcoming anthology film called Deathcember.

JULIAN: Yes. It’s based round the idea of an advent calendar and every time you open up a window, that opens up a new story. The German producers have chosen 24 directors and I am one of them.

JOHN: How long is your section?

JULIAN: Five minutes. We will probably be shooting it in February/March next year, ready for the Sitges festival in September.

JOHN: And you are possibly making Rabies.

JULIAN: I am in talks with the Israeli producers about possibly shooting that in Wales. Based on my experience of shooting Reborn in Tbilisi, Georgia, as America, I could probably shoot in Wales for the US too. A tree is a tree. As long as the cars and costumes look American, then it feels American.

JOHN: There must be a more personal film you really want to make.

JULIAN: I would love to make a film in Brazil.

JOHN: Your wife is Brazilian.

JULIAN: Yes. I have this idea which is basically Elite Squad meets Cannibal Holocaust – about a crack force of urban cops who fight the cartels. It’s political theatre… My idea is that they are sent into the jungle to fight the indigenous… It is illogical to take urban fighters to the jungle, but the politicians do it to make a statement. They take them out of the favelas of Rio and put them into the jungle of Manaus.

JOHN: Sounds like a thriller.

JULIAN: It’s action and it’s political. They will fight tribes that have had little contact with humanity and maybe they will be cannibals and all kinds of things as well. I am taking it down the horror route.

JOHN: You want to do something serious but mask it with genre elements?

JULIAN: A little bit of both. I always like to do that. I did that with Darklands with Welsh nationalism.

… TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW …

Amanda Fleming on concussion and stitches and the serial killer Countess

Amanda: Originally, we were going to talk about The Countess

So I arranged to chat via Skype with my namesake but non-relation actress Amanda Fleming in Manchester. She has not been heard of in this blog since May 2015.

We were going to talk about her play The Countess, which we last talked about in February 2015.

But we got sidetracked…

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JOHN: So, your vampire Countess woman…

AMANDA: She wasn’t a vampire; she was a serial killer.

JOHN: Well, she was Countess Dracula, in the Hammer horror film.

AMANDA: Yes. Ingrid Pitt. She’s still alive, isn’t she?

JOHN: Of course; she is one of the undead.

AMANDA: No, Ingrid Pitt… Well, the… I… Oh… Someone here wants to say hello… (A WHITE CAT APPEARS ON SKYPE AND SNIFFS THE SCREEN)… I have two cats now. This is Misty.

JOHN: Hello Misty. Lovely pink ears. Not the cat, of course. You.

AMANDA: Pink ears. But no earlobes.

JOHN: You or the cat?

AMANDA: Me… Look.

JOHN: No earlobes.You must be Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

AMANDA: What?

JOHN: From the James Bond films… You have no earlobes.

AMANDA: The Plantagenets didn’t have earlobes.

JOHN: You are a Plantagenet?

AMANDA: According to ancestry.com I am.

JOHN: Related to whom? Not Richard III, I hope.

AMANDA: Edward I… Longshanks.

JOHN: The Hammer of the Scots? I am Scottish. I am shocked and saddened.

AMANDA: Well, I have my Celtic side. My bloodline from about 1500 upwards is a bastardisation of the Tudors and the Plantagenets and then they married into Irish aristocracy from Wexford.

Forget the Planagenets and James Bond – clock the pink ears

JOHN: Accidents of birth.

AMANDA: I had an accident.

JOHN: You had an accident?

AMANDA: I had an accident. A window fell on me on 5th May this year. I finished work and went to the theatre pub where we were doing a show to do a bit of work on the synopsis. I was sitting in the beer garden, typing away on my laptop computer. I had had literally two sips out of a glass of Chardoney and I heard this crack and the edge of a pane of glass from an upstairs window hit me on the head.

JOHN: The pane or the frame?

AMANDA: The whole section of the middle part of the glass.

JOHN: It hit you flat or the edge hit you?

AMANDA: The edge. Luckily it was not two floors above me or I would have had time to look up and I would have been a goner. It was excruciating pain. I didn’t even know it had cut all down my face. The shock.

Apparently there was an improvisation performance going on upstairs and there was only a very thin wood panelling covering the window and blacking out the room and a guy bumped into the wood panelling. That loosened the centre part of the window which broke loose and fell down on me – about this size.

JOHN: Bloody hell! That’s about what? Two feet wide?

AMANDA: The circular centre with a jagged edge broke loose and fell and just thank God the jagged edge didn’t hit me or I would be dead. It hit the corner of my skull and slit down off the side of my face and that is why I have a big gash there.

JOHN: It was mostly impact damage?

AMANDA: Yes. It smashed on the floor. The police who came said: “Amanda, you’re very lucky. It would have been a lot worse if it had smashed on your head.”

You know when you bang your head sometimes? You come up too quickly and you hit your head on something? Imagine that, but five times more painful. I thought a piece of metal had hit me on the head. I didn’t realise it was glass. I got up and went: “Oh! What was… Aaaargghh!” and then it all went Boooofff! – There was blood everywhere.

The guys in the beer garden were going: “Shit!! Shit!!!” and all running round.

Amanda Fleming’s head cut – in May 2018

I had no idea of the extent of it. There was a 9 cm gash and I had to have two lots of stitches. I had them under, because it had cut an artery – That was why were was so much blood. Apparently I had lost half my body weight in blood by the time I got to the hospital.

It was a surreal experience, because I was talking and trying to crack jokes, but I could hear my voice slurring.

JOHN: Because of the impact; because of the concussion.

AMANDA: Yeah. I tried to do yoga breathing to keep myself calm, because I could feel myself… you know… the adrenaline. I was telling everyone else: “It’s OK! It’s OK, yes…” Crack a joke, crack a joke, crack a joke. But, inside, I was thinking: KEEP ALERT! KEEP ALERT! KEEP ALERT!

JOHN: You were trying to crack jokes?

AMANDA: I think it’s just a kind of survival instinct thing with me. To not think about what is actually happening.

By the time I got in, the surgeon realised the secondary artery – not the main carotid artery – the one next to it that goes down – had been sliced and that was why I had lost so much blood. So he had to do two lots of stitches: one lot to secure underneath and then on the top of the head as well.

There was a lot of work I had to cancel. I had about £2,500 of work booked in for the next six weeks and I had to cancel it all.

For the first couple of weeks afterwards, I was just numb everywhere. Now, near where the scar is, it’s like a weird kind of tingling. And, if I touch the right side of my head here, I feel it on the left side. It’s the weirdest thing ever.

JOHN: I was hit by a truck in 1991 and the back of my head hit the corner – the edge – of a low brick wall as I fell – My brain wasn’t even remotely right for about nine months with concussion coming and going. You must have had problems with the concussion.

AMANDA: It was weird. I had never had concussion before. I have noticed some of my words I have to think about a bit more now. And, when I’m typing fast, some of the letters go wrong… not all of them… just like, for example, if I mean to type WEAR it sometimes comes out as WAER.

As directed and produced by Amanda – The Countess in Salford, Manchester

JOHN: It hasn’t affected your acting?

AMANDA: Well, I think I’m going to go fully into directing now. It has changed my life – the way I look at my life now. Definitely.

JOHN: You look up a lot more?

AMANDA: Don’t even get me started on that… That’s still an anxiety I’m trying to get over… When I see scaffolding ahead of me, I have to cross the road.

JOHN: But it’s changed your life more fundamentally?

AMANDA: Yes. I used to over-think things all the time. Things I could not really do anything about. It would frustrate me and get me angry and make me bitter about things. But, since this happened – even though lots of negative stuff came with it – the sensations and shooting pains and things – on a personal level, it has made me realise that, right now I should be doing everything to enjoy myself and do what I love rather than worrying about what could have been or what people think or whatever.

JOHN: And why has that happened? Because you could have been killed?

AMANDA: That’s it, yes.

JOHN: Why have you decided not to act?

AMANDA: I haven’t decided I’m not going to act – if something comes up in films or commercials or voice-over or whatever, I will still do it, but I’m not going to act in theatre any more: I’m going to direct theatre and I’m getting a strong passion for film-making and directing.

JOHN: Why?

AMANDA: I think because I have more scope and creativity there. When you’re an actor, you only have a specific area where you can create. Having been in acting for like 30 years, I can bring my actor’s side to directing. You are in charge of your own creativity.

JOHN: Anyway, we are supposed to be talking about your Countess woman thing.

The Countess was a success in Todmorden’s Gothic church

AMANDA: I wanted to make it historical but with a supernatural twist. We put it on for three performances at Todmorden, because they have an amazing Gothic church there. Ideally, we would like to tour round the country in those types of venues. We did two performances in Manchester last month, because people who saw it in Todmorden told people in Manchester and there was a demand… It sold out in Manchester.

We cant afford to stage it in Edinburgh, but we are trying to get the funding together to take it to the festivals at what they call The Three Bs – Brighton, Buxton and Bath. But we would like to tour it round rural venues like barns and village halls.

JOHN: Or castles?

AMANDA: We’d like to! We are going to get a video – a 60 second ‘taster’ – and press pack together.

JOHN: Sounds like it has movie potential, too.

AMANDA: Yes. Or maybe an amazing Gothic opera.

JOHN: And it’s the Countess Dracula woman?

AMANDA: Well, she wasn’t a vampire, though some sources say she was somehow distantly related to Vlad the Impaler.

JOHN: Blood relatives.

AMANDA: Maybe. Might not be true. 

JOHN: But she was for real.

AMANDA: Yes. Countess Elizabeth Báthory. She was a Hungarian aristocrat in the 1500s who murdered at least 650 people – 90% women plus some men – probably more than 650, but those were only the bodies they found. 

JOHN: 650 is going it some… Was there a ‘trigger’?

AMANDA: She started by knocking off peasant girls and bathing in their blood. She didn’t want to grow old. Blood is kind of soft and moisturising – it’s the plasma in it. She must have thought: Ooooh! It makes yer skin go really soft! That was the trigger.

The Countess – by Amanda Fleming – “Historical but with a supernatural twist”

Actress Jacqueline Pearce RIP: from convent to Hammer horror to Blake’s 7

Actress Jacqueline Pearce’s death was announced yesterday. So it goes. Aged 74, she died at her home in Lancashire, a couple of weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

She was possibly best known for playing the part of Servalan, the villainess in BBC TV sci-fi series Blake’s 7.

I chatted to her in December 1980 at her then home in London, before shooting started on what turned out to be the final, fourth, series of Blake’s 7. The interview was published in April 1981 in Starburst magazine. This is Part 1 of that interview…

Jacqueline Pearce at home in London in 1980, holding her Starburst Award for Best Actress

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Jacqueline Pearce was born in Woking and grew up in Byfleet, Surrey. Her father was an interior decorator and her family background is East End. At the age of six or seven, she started having elocution lessons to get rid of a “slight Cockney accent” and she was educated at the Marist Convent in Byfleet.

It was there that a lay preacher (ie not a nun) encouraged her acting talent. But young Jacqueline’s time at convent school was not altogether happy. She says she hated the rules and couldn’t abide the discipline. She could never understand why the nuns said she should walk upstairs when to run would have been much quicker. Now, she says, “Every time I go on as Servalan and I’ve got one of those dresses that’s slit down to the waist and up to the hips, I look in the mirror and say: “Up yours, Reverend Mother!”

At the age of sixteen, she was almost expelled for performing outspoken dialogue from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at a local drama festival. The nuns thought it was “wicked and shocking” but Jacqueline won first prize and a cup to put on the convent mantelpiece, so she was forgiven. When she eventually did leave the convent, in 1961, she won a scholarship to RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London) despite strong initial opposition from the nuns and her family.

Newly-married ‘Jacky’ Pearce and Drewe Henley appeared in Granada TV’s Watch Me, I’m a Bird

She spent two years at RADA with fellow students Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Ian McShane, Simon Ward and David Warner. During that time, she also met young actor Drewe Henley at a local coffee bar and they married.

Her first acting role on screen was with Drewe Henley, Ian McShane and John Hurt in the 1964 Granada TV play Watch Me, I’m a Bird. In the same year, she also appeared in the feature film Genghis Khan: “I was given as a present by Eli Wallach to Stephen Boyd. Not a word was said and I flew all the way to Yugoslavia for it.”

In 1965, she played Ian McShane’s girlfriend in the John Mills movie Sky West and Crooked. She also appeared in the Morecambe & Wise movie The Magnificent Two and the Jerry Lewis fiasco Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (both 1967). But her best-remembered movie roles were in Hammer horror pictures. 

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The Plague of the Zombies: “It was very strange walking in to make-up the next day and seeing my head on a shelf.”

JOHN: You starred in The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies and, on both of them, you worked with make-up man Roy Ashton.

JACQUELINE: Yes, for The Plague of the Zombies, he made a plaster thing of my face and head for a sequence where my head was chopped off. It was dreadful.

I had to stop halfway through because, at that time, I was very claustrophobic. Suddenly I was having this plaster of Paris all over me with just slight holes left for the nose and it’s very, very heavy and, at one point, I just said, “I can’t take it any more! You’ve got to take it off!” and then we had to start all over again. It was very unpleasant. I suppose it must have taken about half an hour for it to set. It’s – oohh – it’s dreadful.

I was married then and had my husband literally holding my hand and getting me through it. It’s clammy and then it gets hard and it gets so heavy and you know you can’t pull it off, so – oohh – not fun. I got more and more frightened. And it was very strange walking in to make-up the next day and seeing my head on a shelf. That was a little disturbing.

JOHN: You tested for Hammer, did you?

JACQUELINE: I went along for an interview and had a chat with the director (John Gilling) and he said: “I’d like you to play the parts because you have such a wonderful face for films.”… So he cast me (LAUGHS) as a zombie and a reptile.

Jacqueline Pearce starred as The Reptile: “I hissed a lot.”

JOHN: How did you act the part of a snake in The Reptile?

JACQUELINE: I hissed a lot. I think that was about it.

JOHN: Your movement was quite good too.

JACQUELINE: I know the bit you’re referring to. (LAUGHS) There was a bit where I was shifting under the blankets, which everyone seemed to enjoy a lot – I was shedding my skin.

JOHN: It’s a difficult part. You are cast as a snake. How are you going to act it?

JACQUELINE: Well, she was half-snake, half-woman.

JOHN: Like Servalan.

JACQUELINE: Do you think Servalan’s a snake?

JOHN: She’s a villainess.

JACQUELINE: But she’s got great style. I adore Servalan.

JOHN: How did you get the part in Blake’s 7?

JACQUELINE: I was working in Vienna at the English Speaking Theatre. I got a phone call from my agent saying that this series I’d never heard of was being made and would I be interested in playing a part. So I said: “Sure.”

It meant I started rehearsals the day I got back from Vienna. I got off the plane and went to the BBC. My hair was short at the time and they said: “Please, will you keep it like that?”

Jacqueline Pearce as Servalan in Blake’s 7 – “Short, dark and sinister”?

JOHN: I thought maybe you had cut and dyed your hair specially for the part – short, dark and sinister.

JACQUELINE: No. Most people love it. They find it compulsive and want to stroke it – Feel free – It’s simply because I’m no good at doing hair. I can’t put rollers in. I had lovely long thick hair that used to blow into my face all the time – When I put my head down, I couldn’t see.

JOHN: What did you know about the character when you started?

JACQUELINE: Nothing. Except that I knew she was the Supreme Commander. What we all did, really, was make our own personalities. When it came to costume-fitting, they said, “We’ll fit you up in trousers, a safari jacket and jackboots,” and I said, “No! If you’re going to do that with this haircut, you might as well have a man. I think you should go totally opposite.”

If she is a woman who has this kind of power, then make her so feminine, so pretty, you don’t know what she’s going to do next. So, when she is sitting there looking wonderful, saying Kill him! it’s such a shock. It’s the contrasts.

JOHN: How did you build up the character? A female Adolf Hitler?

JACQUELINE: No. I don’t think she is, actually. I think she is a very caring human being. No-one would believe that. (PAUSE) No, lots of people do – It’s surprising.

JOHN: Surely she’s nasty. She wants to get our heroes and do horrible things to them.

JACQUELINE: Yes, but if she were a man doing those things, everyone would accept it. I remember there was one episode (The Harvest of Kairos, in series 3) about a sort of precious jewel called kairopan and they said: “We can’t afford to get ALL the kairopan and all the men,” so Servalan said, “Well, get rid of the men – Kill the men.”

It was logical. One had to go. She wanted the kairopan, so the men had to go because they were less important. The scriptwriter put in that line and then wrote Laugh cruelly. Rubbish! She doesn’t get a kick out of killing people at all. She does what she feels she has to do. I’m not saying that makes her the girl next door.

JOHN: Has she changed?

JACQUELINE: She changed a lot in the third series. The miscarriage episode. It started there, where her personal feelings, her woman-ness, started to come through. I remember I did a personal appearance, opening (an event) Computers For The Home, and I was surrounded by some of the top brains in the country, who were all really avid Blake’s 7 fans. They rushed home from their computers on Monday nights to watch it. One of them said that he watched the scene where I had the miscarriage and found it shocking because it was so totally unexpected. 

Jacqueline Pearce and Paul Darrow laugh, filming Blake’s 7

From then on, I tried to show the female side of her as much as possible. She does like men; she’s crazy about Avon (played by Paul Darrow) – that’s why she always lets him go. Otherwise it makes no sense to have this intelligent woman chasing these people around in a spaceship, catching them, then letting them go. I had to find a motivation – which was Avon.

JOHN: Is that the only change you’ve made? – She’s more feminine.

JACQUELINE: That’s a huge change to have made.

JOHN: Any resistance from the BBC?

JACQUELINE: For the first two series, I played her the way they wanted, which was as a substitute man. And she’s not; she’s 100% female. So I tried to get more of that over.

JOHN: Do you think the audience appreciates that?

JACQUELINE: I think they do, judging from the fan letters I get. Everyone responds to her in a very positive way. Some people, particularly women, love her – I think Women’s Lib love her. I think to men she’s a challenge.

JOHN: What sort of letters do you get?

JACQUELINE: I get lovely letters. There was one letter that made me laugh so much. A man wrote and asked if he could have a full-length photograph of me with no clothes on and hastened to add that this was not for any sexual purposes! (LAUGHS)

… CONTINUES AND CONCLUDED HERE …

North Korea, Manchester’s Living Dead and the influence of House of Hammer

Some things make you feel old.

So I received this e-mail. It read:

It’s not great, but you won’t sleep through it…

Wow, you’re still alive! I remember reading your stuff in the House of Hammer magazine when I was 11 or 12 years old. In fact, I was thinking about you when I watched The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue on YouTube a wee while ago. What did you write about it in your review? Something along the lines of: “The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is no great horror film… But you certainly won’t sleep through it”?!

I used to write feature articles and occasionally reviews for film magazines, including House of Hammer, which was oddly published by Marvel Comics UK and had a wider horror scope than just movies by Hammer Films. It later transformed into House of Horror.

The e-mail I received was from an Ian Smith. He added: “Did you write a feature about David Cronenberg and his first four movies (Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Shivers and Rabid) in House of Hammer — somewhere around issues 13 – 16?  If so, you also acquainted me with the World of Cronenberg for the first time — another feather in your cap! I seem to remember Mark Gatiss fondly waving a copy of House of Hammer on a BBC documentary he did about British horror movies.”

The Blood and Porridge website

So I thought Ian Smith might be worth talking to because, born in Northern Ireland and brought up both there and in Scotland, he currently lives in Sri Lanka and spent time in England, Switzerland, Japan, Ethiopia, India, Libya, Tunisia and, he says, “a part of the Korean peninsula that isn’t visited very often”. His website is titled Blood and Porridge.

So I talked to him via Skype in Sri Lanka, shortly after he had come back from a month working in Burma. He works as a teacher-trainer for people wanting to teach English as a foreign language.

When he finds the time, he writes short stories – horror, science fiction, fantasy and, he says, “even ‘mainstream’ ones set in humdrum wee Scottish and Irish towns and villages”. He has also published non-fiction on topics ranging from travel to Scottish amateur league football teams, from linguistic relativity to vampire movies. He has written under the pseudonyms Steve Cashell, Rab Foster, Eoin Henderson, Paul MacAlister, Jim Mountfield and, he says, “occasionally, under my own boring name”.

“So,” I said to him, “a part of the Korean peninsula that isn’t visited very often?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I spent two years working in North Korea with the British Council.”

“Which years?” I asked.

North Korea: People’s Paradise with a hint of a nuclear bomb

“2005-2007. That’s when they became a nuclear power. I remember I was with the British Ambassador that night and he was looking quite rattled and I told him: Well, you’ve joined that exclusive club. There can’t be many ambassadors who were in a country that suddenly went nuclear. It did not cheer him up.”

“Where were the bugs?” I asked. “The first time I was in North Korea we went, for some reason, to the Indian ambassador’s residence and he started off by just pointing silently to the radiogram, which was where the main bug was.”

“The only thing I noticed,” said Ian, “was that, when I picked up my telephone I would sometimes hear clicking noises. There was obviously someone listening in. I had freedom to go pretty much anywhere in Pyongyang, though occasionally I would spot someone behind me who was obviously keeping an eye on me.”

“Did you get out of Pyongyang much?” I asked.

“Just a little bit. I was generally restricted to the city but there are a couple of places you can go to which are on the official tourist trail. You can go about 30 miles down the road to the beach; and there’s a couple of mountains you can go to. Most of the time I was in Pyongyang and then they’d fly me over to Beijing every couple of months for a break.”

“Much-needed,” I suggested.

“Well,” said Ian, “I have to say I didn’t actually mind the job too much. I got on quite well with the North Korean people: they had a very nice, dark sense of humour.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised anyone risked showing any sense of humour in the People’s Paradise.

Ian Smith: a very well-travelled man

“They were very British, actually,” said Ian. “Always slagging each other off. I guess you probably need it in that environment. I enjoyed working there. You just had to not think too much about the wider picture.”

“What were you doing there?” I asked.

“I was training-up some teachers of English – giving them some training on the job.”

“Who is getting taught English in North Korea?” I asked.

“It’s quite a big thing,” said Ian. “At the time, Kim Jong-il had said he wanted everyone to speak English because it was the international language for business. Even in the more secluded countries, they now realise there’s a need for it.”

“It sounds dangerous,” I said. “North Koreans would actually be able to talk to foreigners.”

“Well, it’s a two-edged sword,” agreed Ian.

“What did you think when you were told you were going to North Korea?”

“I saw it advertised and applied. I had been in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for three years.”

“So anywhere was better?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t say that, but I felt it was definitely time for a bit of a change.”

“You read House of Hammer when you were about 11 or 12,” I said. “I always imagined I was writing for 16 or 17 year olds.”

Unusually cheerful-looking House of Hammer

“Well,” said Ian.”you couldn’t get into the cinema to see these films and your parents wouldn’t let you stay up late to see them on TV, so it was a kind of forbidden fruit thing. Someone said: The scariest horror films are the ones you are too young to get in to see. You just imagine them being much worse than they actually are.”

“And now you write yourself,” I said.

“I do a bit of writing. I write a lot of horror stories. I usually get two or three published each year. Sometimes hard copies, sometimes internet magazines. I’m not going to make any money out of it. It’s all moved online, but the problem is you get paid less now, if at all.”

“Why did you want to be a writer?”

“It’s just something that seemed obvious to me. Even when I was a kid, I was writing stuff in exercise jotters.”

“And now it’s all gone electronic,” I said.

“I think with a lot of those horror and fantasy writers from the 1970s and 1980s – their actual book market dried up and a lot of them started doing stuff on the internet and self-published – Tanith Lee, who died a few weeks ago published dozens and dozens of books in the last decade or so, but all electronic. Her fanbase would download it.”

“Your next story?” I asked.

One of the online markets for Ian’s work

“The Groove. It should be appearing soon in a Kindle magazine called Hellfire Crossroads.  It’s a traditional revenge-from-beyond-the-grave story like the ones that used to be in those horror comics all those years ago. In it, the guy who has died is a sort of John Peel music obsessive who has this horrible, bitchy wife. The guy has left these requests for music to be played at his funeral but she ignores them and plays Angels by Robbie Williams. I just thought that, if something was guaranteed to bring me back from the grave in a fit of revenge, it would be that.”

“A sort of Hammer Horrory idea,” I said.

“I was reading,” said Ian, “an interview with the director Julian Richards, who made a film called Darklands in the late 1990s, which kick-started the new movement in British horror movies and he said, when he was a kid, the first film he did was on super-8 and he basically found the story in House of Hammer because they used to do these horror stories at the back – Van Helsing’s Terror Tales – he spent three years turning that into a film. So, in a way, House of Hammer was quite influential.”

“I guess every little helps,” I said.

Nigel Kneale on Quatermass and BBC TV production techniques in the 1950s

The great Nigel Kneale, interviewed about his career in 1990

In 1979, I interviewed Nigel Kneale, creator of the iconic and highly influential Quatermass stories.

A couple of days ago, I posted my original 1979 introduction.

This is the first half of the interview.

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Rudolph Cartier was your producer on all three Quatermass serials in the 1950s and on the 1954 BBC TV production of 1984. How did you meet him?

Well he moved into the BBC at the same time I did. I realised he was a man who never took No for an answer – which is a great thing. All he needed to know was that it was practically impossible and he would immediately go off and do it. There was certainly no other director-producer who would ever have got those Quatermass things on the road.

The Quatermass Experiment monster in Westminster Cathedral (a glove puppet)

In those days, television was live…

Yes. You had to have film inserts, of course, if you had an exterior scene, like someone walking through a park. The studio we shot that first Quatermass (The Quatermass Experiment) in was that old one at Alexandra Palace, where the cameras were literally the oldest electronic cameras in the world. They were the ones that were put into commission in 1936.

How did Quatermass start?

It was really an accident. They had a gap in the schedule and somebody said Oh! You must write something! So I wrote it (a six-part serial) as far as I could and it was being transmitted before I’d actually written the end of it. It was not a rave success. I dug up old notices recently and they’re quite funny because they say: This dreary programme started last night – it’s scientifically incorrect… and so on. Now, of course, it’s been transmuted into having been a great success.

Outrage was expressed in the House of Commons about the BBC’s version of 1984 with Peter Cushing & Donald Pleasance

You did 1984 after that.

I suppose they felt that, if we’d done one, we could do another. Technically, that was a very difficult one indeed – to get it into a studio live. (The rats scene was on film.) In a two-hour show like 1984, you would pre-film perhaps a quarter of an hour and the rest would be live, which was very heavy going.

The play caused a furore (in particular because of the horrific scene with the rats). Questions in the House of Commons.

Yes! It was a question of lying low after that one. Nothing like it had ever hit television before. They tended to use three-act stage plays and you got little intervals between the acts. Very well done and beautifully acted, but a little bit sedate. What you didn’t get was a purely television-type narrative, where you intercut in the middle of scenes: the thing that you do in any film script. That was new. And, I suppose, if one started writing in those terms, immediately the thing had far more impact.

You were interested in that technique.

I suppose I’d have liked to write films but, at that time, it was all locked up firmly in a closed shop. I could no more have got a (union) card to write film scripts than to fly. So I stuck to television.

You didn’t script the feature film version of the Quatermass Experiment?

No. There was the usual hurried deal by Hammer Pictures with some American people and they insisted on having an American actor and an American adaptor. So this chap came over who worked out some nonsense which turned my poor old Quatermass into a screaming, shouting person – probably like the last film producer he had worked for. It had no control over it at all. I still see that thing turn up and I hate it.

The cut feature film version of Quatermass II

But you did co-script the movie of Quatermass II.

Well, there were some changes to the script – cuts – so it came out like it did.

Why the cuts?

The TV version was six half-hour episodes and they all over-ran by anything up to ten minutes. There was no way the BBC could stop us – except by taking us off the air – because we were live. We knew this and took a chance.

When you tried to compress those six episodes into a 90-minute film version, a lot had to go and too much went and the substitutions were not very clever. The characters are so cardboard you literally have to strain yourself to tell one from the other. It seems to me to be a lesson in how not to do it.

Special effects man applies titanium tetrachloride to make an actor smoke in the Quatermass II film

Quatermass II was about the evils of science…

No – not science. I’m not a bit anti-science, only occasionally some scientists. After all, old Quatermass himself is one: perhaps a bit more sensitive to his responsibilities than some. In the new serial (transmitted by Thames TV in 1979 simply as Quatermass), his main ally (Dr Joseph Kapp)  is also a research scientist. Even Kapp’s wife is a qualified archaeologist. The whole of the fourth Quatermass is about a last-ditch use of logic and dwindling technological resources, pitted against suicidal mysticism.

Quatermass II was about the evil of secrecy. It was a time when mysterious establishments were popping up: great radar establishments and nuclear establishments like Harwell and Porton Down for germ warfare. All the Quatermass things have been very much tied to their time.

Quatermass and The Pit was written at a time (1958) when there was a lot of building going on. So I thought, well, you dig down to an enormous depth and find a spaceship. Immediate recognition.

The BBC TV’s Quatermass and The Pit terrified me as a child

It absolutely terrified me when I saw it as a kid on television.

Well, we always really aimed at an adult audience for these things. And we hoped that the kiddies would be in bed. It was made very clear that this was not for children. I don’t mind frightening adults. They can take it. But not small children, simply because they haven’t the resources of fact in them to sort out what’s real and what’s unreal.

If a little six-year-old is confronted with some nightmare situation, that little creature is at the mercy of all your special effects, because he hasn’t really been in the world long enough to know what is real. And if he sees some dreadful thing – an apparition appearing out of the floor – he’s not to know that it’s been made by Jack Kine and Bernard Wilkie (of BBC Visual Effects). He thinks it may really happen to him and it may happen in his bedroom tonight. That’s not a thing to play with.

Do you find that Quatermass is an albatross around your neck?

Well, a little bit. It’s like an actor being in a series: you get stuck with the image. But I think the worst thing is what people expect things to be – the word ‘horror’. The Quatermasses were never meant to be ‘horror’ stories. There’s more humour than horror in them, I hope – certainly that applies to this new one.

Beasts – with (in middle) a non-beast

I liked your Beasts stories for ATV.

I liked them very much indeed.

There weren’t actually any beasts in them.

No! That was the trick! That you would never SEE a beast.

The series had very ordinary settings: a supermarket, a living room.

I always feel that the most interesting ‘strange’ thing has to have an ordinary setting. Once you have Dracula’s castle, it’s totally dead: you’ve just brought in a huge, tatty, cobweb-hung cliché. Whereas, if it just happens in somebody’s house, in a room like this, in my living room, then it can be very upsetting indeed.

Thames TV production of 1979 Quatermass serial aka The Quatermass Conclusion

There was a psychological strangeness in your play The Road.

Oh, it’s a favourite of mine. It’s only a little play, but it’s interesting. It’s set in the 18th century, but with a group of people doing what they imagine to be a scientific investigation – trying to bring rational minds to bear in The Age of Reason on what appears to be a haunting in a wood. Terrible noises are heard, which are extremely upsetting.

What they’re actually hearing is a motorway in our time on which a huge traffic jam has occurred, caused by people trying to escape from thermonuclear war. It ends with a nuclear blast which has actually blown itself back in time to the 18th century and produced a kind of back-reflection, a ripple. So these people have no conception of what they are hearing… The terrified voices on the motorway, people trying to escape… It’s all completely recognisable to us: it’s all in our terms. But they don’t know what it means.

… CONTINUED HERE …