Recently Published

I have two pieces published in Issue 7 of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies: Between the Dust and the Devil: An Interview with Richard Stanley and a review of Marc Price's low-budget British zombie film Colin. Extracts below and please click on the titles to be directed to the full texts:

Between the Dust and the Devil: An Interview with Richard Stanley

Rose: Your films and documentaries tend to feature strong women – Jill in Hardware, Wendy in Dust Devil, Edelle in The White Darkness. There is also the female cowboy who reveals herself near the close of The Preacher Man promo. Why is this character prevalent in your work?

Stanley: My parents separated when I was four years old and I was raised by my mother and two older sisters. Accordingly women tend to dominate my life and work whereas guys tend to come off as schmucks and ne'er do wells. On a wider level you could say its representative of my undying faith in the restorative power of the Goddess over patriarchal order and the sort of repressive dogma espoused by the Holy Roman Church and the other monotheisms. The Goddess rules.

Rose: Can you tell us a little about your intentions for Jill’s role in Hardware.

Stanley: Jill descends from a long line of embattled heroines, a combination of the 'last girl' of the slasher era and the lead character from a Super 8 movie I started shooting when I was fifteen. I saw her as a sort of 'everywoman' - hence her name which is drawn from Jill's America – the main theme on Morricone's Once Upon A Time In The West album – outsider artist, lover, big sister, 21st century cyber warrior and post technological cave girl all rolled into one. She was initially intended not only as the heroine of Hardware but as a continuing character in her own right.

Colin

Working with low-budgets often forces filmmakers to rule out certain genres and narratives and instead forces them to work with a limited cast, a limited crew and equally limited locations and effects. While these parameters may seem restrictive, they can often work to the benefit of the film itself, making the writer and director focus their narrative and work creatively with what is available in order to achieve a film of quality. With this in mind, choosing to make a zombie film – a genre which is heavy on zombie extras, requiring varied locations which should, preferably, be empty of people, and a whole host of realistic and gory effects – initially seems an ill-fated endeavour. Yet Price’s debut film takes the genre and gives it new life by positioning the film from the titular zombie’s perspective. The premise is this: for an unspecified reason, the undead are returning to life and consuming the flesh of the living. Zombies roam the streets as survivors either barricade themselves within their homes or form large groups to hunt down and slaughter the undead hordes. While fighting a zombie in his home, Colin (Alastair Kirton) is bitten and soon dies. Returning from the dead, he joins the undead masses and stumbles along the streets looking for flesh, encountering other zombies, violent survivors and, eventually, his sister (Daisy Aitkens). As Colin’s undead life unfolds, fragments of his human life are revealed alongside the barbaric acts of the survivors, culminating in a film that subtly meditates on the emotional impact of death and subsequent mourning.

Recently Published

Studying the Devil's Backbone

Just before Christmas I received one of my Author Copies of my latest book, Studying the Devil's Backbone:

The Devil’s Backbone (2001) is a Gothic film written and directed by Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006). The story centers on a ghost that haunts an isolated orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. Studying The Devil's Backbone explores the narrative of the film in relation to central concerns, such as genre, theme, iconography, representation, and film language. Through these elements, the volume reads the film’s unique blend of literary Gothic, Western, and War film and the use of bombs, ghosts, and color as visual signifiers. It critiques the central characters and compares their representation of women, monsters, and political context against an examination of mise-en-scene, sound, and special effects. In addition, the author provides a critical biography of del Toro, an analysis of his auteurist traits, and an in-depth bibliography and filmography.

The book is available from the following outlets:

British Film Institute: BFI Filmstore, Columbia University Press, Amazon UK and Amazon.com - click on any of the names to be directed to the book's order page.

Recently Published

My article on the Horror Mockumentary has just been published in the December edition (Issue 30) of MediaMagazine: initially charting the rise of the sub genre, the text then goes on to provide in-depth textual analysis of films such as Cannibal Holocaust, The Blair Witch Project, Dairy of the Dead and Clovefield. The text concludes with an exploration of how the 'real' in these films is marketed to potential audiences.

To order a copy of this edition of the magazine or to subscribe to MediaMagazine, click here.

Recently Published

The Winter 2009 edition of Electric Sheep features my text The Law of the Gun, an essay on the Vigilante film in US cinema, featuring Death Wish, Dirty Harry and Escape from New York.

Notebook Extract

INT. KAHIKA PALMS MOTEL, ROOM No.2 – MID AFTERNOON

Otis turns Gloria around and whilst holding her neck he gently caresses her shoulder blade with the barrel of his gun. She is drawing short and panicked breaths, looking down at her husband. CUT. The side of his face and neck are splattered in congealing blood. He looks back up at her, helpless, knowing what is going to happen. He slowly drops his head and covers his face with his hat, unable to watch this humiliation. CUT. Otis continues to stroke Gloria’s body, trailing the barrel of the gun down her chest, between her breasts, pushing it beneath her bra. He whispers in her ear: “You like this don’t you. Say yes I do.” He pauses and then levers the cup of the bra off, exposing Gloria’s right breast. CUT. Otis grins. He continues to move the gun further down Gloria’s body, pressing himself against her as he pushes the gun into her panties and then between her legs. Gloria inhales sharply. Otis cocks the hammer of the gun and then begins to kiss Gloria, occasionally looking across at her husband.

“At the end of the day nothing really happens. It’s more just verbal abuse and mental intimidation but it’s so much worse than if he did anything”

Rob Zombie

Otis’s torturous act is carried out as a double performance and for a double audience. For Otis there is the dual pleasure of sexual arousal and the pleasure of humiliation. The gun – for Otis and the audience – is clearly a violent phallic symbol. As an extension of Otis is represents his power and authority whilst simultaneously allowing him the opportunity to indulge his perverse sexual needs. Pushing the gun between Gloria’s breasts, caressing her nipple with the barrel and then forcing it between her legs are all blatantly sexually aggressive actions, ones which simultaneously render her husband impotent and him as the powerful, dominant male.

The observers of this torture are both Gloria’s husband and friends and the audience themselves. Standing in front of the three hostages (and the camera), Otis carries out his humiliating actions. The characters watch as the audience watch, unable to move or act for fear of the consequences.

Although Zombie does not use any Point of View shot within this sequence (in fact, he rarely uses any POV shots throughout the entire film) he does force the audience into viewing the intimacy of the violation though using sustained close-up images. These are predominately of the sexual aggressive moments – a close up of the barrel pushing Gloria’s bra away to expose her breast, where the camera lingers on her erect nipple, all bleached out by the coarse sunlight filtering into the room and a further close-up of the gun being forced between her legs. So intense is this scene that these images take on the powerful connotations of the Point of View shot. Acting as a surrogate for this type of image, these close-ups highlight both the violation of Gloria and represent what her husband is seeing.

Given this, the torture itself becomes a double for just as Gloria must undergo the physical violation, her husband and friends must undergo a psychological torture: they can only sit and watch Gloria’s humiliation, bound by the knowledge that if they attempt to help her their actions will either get Gloria or themselves killed. Given Otis’s controlled sense of violence, it is likely that he would kill them both. This sense of character incapacitation finds itself reflected into the audience. Given the beginning of the film, the audience is aware that Otis is not just a psychopath but also a necrophile. The first time he is seen in the film is in ariel shot, lying in bed with both arms wrapped around the corpse of a naked cheerleader. His sadistic touching of Gloria can only lead to one conclusion – her rape and her death, with the order of these events remaining ambiguous. As the viewers gaze remains upon the lingering shots of Gloria’s exposed body the tension mounts as this inevitable conclusion draws near. This awful knowledge is in their eyes and that too is reflected in the eyes of Gloria’s husband. Seemingly aware of this, Zombie allows Otis further time to revel in the moment, making the scene a painful protraction for both the four innocent characters and the audience. And, just as they all think the inevitable is about to happen, Otis pushes Gloria away and tells the men they have work to do.

Beyond Hammer - Press Reviews and Recent Acquisitions

Since its publication in May 2009, Beyond Hammer has been reviewed in Sight & Sound, Empire, Filmstar, Total Film, SFX and Deathray: Kevin Stuart, in his review for Filmstar, states the book is "well-written and enlightening, managing to tread that difficult line between academic depth and easy readability" whilst in Total Film the book is described as "a genre primer that lucidly skin-peels four decades of scares and subtexts". Deathray's review comments that the chapter on Hellraiser is interesting, a comment reflected in the Stuart review. Other chapters singled out for commentary included The Descent, which Nigel Floyd, in his review for Sight & Sound states "Saving the best for last, however, the essay on Neil Marshall's The Descent is cogent and insightful".

Beyond Hammer has also been recently acquired by the BFI National Library and Harvard University.

Notebook Extract

Whilst writing the Reading the Apocalypse article for MediaMagazine, I looked through my notebooks and found a text regarding Jimmy T. Murakami's When the Wind Blows. Here is the notebook entry, in full:

In addition to The War Game and Threads, a further Cold War/ Post-apocalyptic narrative would emerge from Britain: based on the graphic novel by Raymond Briggs, When the Wind Blows is an animated film that recounts the effect of a nuclear strike on the UK from the perspective of an elderly couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs. Like its predecessors, the film depicts narrative events from an extremely realistic point of view - Jim and Hilda’s radiation sickness brings about both calming hallucination and terrible sickness, their lack of food and water steadily starving them until, eventually, both die in their sleep. The film’s sense of tragedy is compounded not just by the simple metaphor that Jim and Hilda represent but because of their very lack of knowledge of how to cope in the situation they are forced into. Throughout the film Jim and Hilda recount there experiences of the Second World War, describing it as a violent period but one in which the threat was known and one in which society pulled together as a unified whole to overcome this shared enemy. The war, for them, was in another country, far, far away. From these experiences emerges their unwavering faith in the government. As Jim and Hilda drink cups of tea, Jim assures his wife that everything will be alright and that he is sure the government is working effectively to bring everything back to normal. For all his faith, Jim fails to realise that there probably is not a government and that although they have survived the nuclear blast, they are now subjecting themselves to fallout and radiation poisoning. Whilst the film shifts towards its extremely bleak ending, there are moments of stark humour that contrast sharply with the stark reality the film depicts, culminating in a film that is as poignant as it is terrifying.

Recent Commissions

I recently completed a commissioned article for the February Fantasy themed edition of MediaMagazine: Reading the Apocalypse is an overview of British post-apocalyptic film and television, covering The War Game, Threads, and both versions of Survivors. In the original draft there was a section concerning 28 Days Later but this was, eventually, cut due to the required word count.

Never one to waste words, it is included here...

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)

While a nuclear assault destroys the physical landscape, a viral pandemic only destroys the populace, leaving in its deadly wake a litter of corpses but buildings, shops, and homes all still standing and untouched. Such a quality allows filmmakers to create desolate images of familiar locations, poignantly creating the horror of the consequences of a viral outbreak. The potential for these images to be so dramatic is validated by 28 Days Later: having woken from a comma, young bicycle courier Jimmy (Cillian Murphy) finds the British population virtually eradicated by the accidental release of the Rage Virus: stumbling outside, he finds a very familiar London totally devoid of people. There no corpses, just the empty streets, an overturned bus, and bank notes blowing in the wind. As he wanders through he streets, Jimmy passes familiar landmarks – Tower Bridge, the London Eye and Cenotaph – that are all rendered as if grave markers to the deceased population.

As Jimmy’s story of survival unfolds, the theme of family very quickly comes to the fore: being chased by a group of the Infected, Jimmy is saved by Selena and Mark. Taking him to their underground hideout, Jimmy is informed of the current national (if not global) situation. The three seem to form a family unit, but it is one cut very short when Selena thinks Mark might be infected and quickly – and rather brutally – kills him. From this act it would seem that the notion of the family has been totally voided by the pandemic but as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that the film is not just about surviving in a post-apocalyptic world but starting a new and better family in this new world. As a consequence, Jim’s personal narrative trajectory becomes the search for a father figure, which leads him into encounters with two ‘families’ – the normal domestic of past offered by Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns) and that of the future represented by a military outpost. Soon, Jim has to make his choice between the two and, in a violently cathartic conclusion, takes on the role of the Father himself to eradicate the threat presented to him and those he cares for. For a violent and pessimistic film, 28 Days Later ends on a perversely optimistic end: the three survivors – Jim, Selena and Hannah – are seemingly rescued as the Infected slowly die of starvation.

The film’s writer, novelist Alex Garland, has stated that the influences upon 28 Days Later ranged from the classic texts by Wells and Wyndham as well as more recent American cinema, particularly the zombie films of George A. Romero. Using the realist elements of these texts to guide him, Garland created the fictional Rage Virus – a seemingly genetically engineered disease - as a blood borne disease. With such a construct, the Rage Virus becomes an obvious metaphor for the nation’s fears of Ebola, SARS, Avian Flu as well as the sustained awareness of AIDS.

Current Commissions

October has been a very busy month, hence the complete lack of posts . I have been working hard on multiple projects, all now complete and with their respective editors awaiting publication:

I finished the final amendments on The Devil's Backbone Study Guide and signed off the final proofs. The book is now set for publication and should be with the printers this week.

The article on Horror Mockumentaries is now finished and ready for publication in the next edition of Media Magazine.

The text on Vigilante Cinema has now been completed. A few minor changes were made and is now ready for publication in the Winter edition of Electric Sheep.

The essay on Tim Burton's early shorts - Vincent and Frankenweenie - is due for publication in the next edition of Splice.

The interview with Colin director Marc Price has been conducted, transcribed and formatted ready for publication in a forthcoming edition of Offscreen.

And finally, the interview with Hardware and Dust Devil director Richard Stanley is due for publication in this month's edition of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies.

Personal Project Extract

I have, for the past year, being working on a personal project exploring traces and evidences of the Uncanny within the work of Guillermo del Toro. As personal research, this has fed directly into the writing of the forthcoming Study Guide on The Devil's Backbone as well as generating three potential texts for publication. What follows is a very rough draft from the conclusion of one of these essays, concerning the uncanny interrelationship between The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth.

"Inherently integrated into all these elements is the possibility of the uncanny. Because del Toro works consistently within the genres of horror and fantasy – genres that specifically attempt to generate the uncanny feelings of fear and dread – it is perhaps very easy to suggest that the uncanny is indeed a more subtle but overarching auteuristic trait. Yet such a conclusion seems arbitrary and clumsy. A more focussed analysis would, of course, prove this either way, but for the purposes of this conclusion it is worth noting that the uncanny elements embodied by Jacinto and Carmen reverberate throughout del Toro’s oeuvre: this is most explicitly seen in Pan’s Labyrinth, a sequel of sorts to The Devil’s Backbone: in many respects the two films are uncannily related because they double themselves (almost to the point of déjà vu, of being a copy of each other) and bear similarity in character. Carmen, from The Devil’s Backbone, not only has her name doubled in Pan’s Labyrinth but also her castrating quality is echoed in Pan’s Labyrinth's Mercedes as she also emerges from her narrative as an uncanny woman: victimised and then nearly tortured by antagonist Captain Vidal, Mercedes assaults him with a paring knife, not only repeatedly stabbing him but inserting it into his mouth and slicing open his cheek. This injury, like the one Carmen inflicted upon Jacinto, is not only a physical attack but also a castrating assault upon Vidal’s beauty and sense of masculinity. Throughout the film he is seen to be continually preening himself, forever looking clean, smart and in control. This appearance becomes a physical manifestation of his anger, violence, and power over the narrative’s other characters and so embodies a perversely ugly image of masculinity. Moments before Mercedes slices open his cheek, he verbalises this power by telling his officers to leave him and Mercedes alone. When questioned, Vidal spits out “For God sake, she is only a woman”. As he speaks, Mercedes draws her knife (a phallic weapon that mirrors Carmen’s equally phallic walking cane), ready to attack.

It seems logical that if Carmen is reflected in Mercedes, then Jacinto should be reflected in Vidal. As already stated, Vidal, like Jacinto, presents an image of masculinity that is, on the surface, attractive yet that very same masculinity is vile and thoroughly evil within that same person. Whilst Jacinto and Vidal share this quality, they also share a similar preoccupation with their past and in particular their childhoods: whilst Jacinto wants to destroy his past, Vidal is desperately trying to live up to his: throughout the film he is seen to be examing the watch his father held at the moment of his death. It preoccupies him, torments him, setting itself as a standard to be achieved. In his final moments, when faced by a group of armed Republicans, Vidal takes out his own pocket watch and crushes it, doubling his father’s actions at the moment of his own immanent death."

Current Commissions

I have just been commissioned to write a text for the next edition of Electric Sheep: I will be writing about US Vigilante films of the early 70's to the late 80's. The article will take a broad approach to the vigilante theme and so will include films such as Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver and First Blood.

My second book, Studying The Devil's Backbone, is with the copy editors, bringing it a step closer to publication.

Recently Viewed

The Zombie Diaries (Kevin Gates & Michael Bartlett, 2006)

“I just want to document everything” – Matt, cameraman, Diary One: The Outbreak.

Broken into three discreet sections, The Zombie Diaries is a collection of video diaries made by survivors of a viral pandemic. As indicated by the title cards within the film - Dairy One: The Outbreak, Diary Two: The Scavengers and Diary Three: The Survivors – the narrative chronicles the increasingly desperate situation the characters find themselves in: the first diary records the initial confusion over what is actually happening, events which are soon followed by the appearance of the first zombies. Lurching out of the darkness, they stumble towards the camera, groaning and drooling blood and spittle. The second diary, recorded one month after the first, depicts the efforts made by three people to survive what is now clearly an apocalyptic situation as food and fresh water supplies are running low and tempers fray as the amount of zombie steadily increases. The final diary depicts events well into the crisis and where the attempts to survive start to take quite a dramatic turn when the various small groups of survivors make contact with each other via short-wave radio.

The format of the video diary immediately provides a narrative structure and logical timeframe for the film and ensures a high level of intimacy between the characters and the viewer, a quality emphasised by characters repeatedly and aggressively covering the camera lens during arguments or scenes of explicit violence. The strategy of the hand-held camera brings a great sense of reality to the footage, a quality that is enhanced by the lack of composition and the sole use of diegetic sound. Because of this, the horror felt during the film is not actually generated by the zombies (although when they are seen, these reanimated corpses are particularly grotesque) but by the contrast between the normality of the locations and the increasingly volatile relationships between the characters. To this end, the film suggests that in situations in which we are positioned in direct threat our capacity to listen to others and work with others is our greatest strength for arguing and bickering (over such trivial matters as cigarettes and alcohol) leads only to more violence and more death.

As an interesting aside, The Zombie Diaries positions its antagonistic pandemic in contemporary real-world events: the opening voice-over is a montage of news reports chronicling the emergence of Avian Flu. Whilst the film does not overtly say this is the cause of the outbreak, it intimates its enough. As the characters discuss their situation, they speculate on what else could have caused the epidemic, with one suggesting “another terrorist threat”. The idea that the virus may have been released by terrorists is consolidated by another character who verbally equates the pandemic with the events of September 11 2001, saying that in the morning everything was normal but by the afternoon everything had changed because of one singular act. Whilst these comments position the narrative in relation to world-wide issues, the indication that the virus is related to the movement of livestock is reiterated by scenes in the third diary in which the group’s leader, who fears more than anything else contamination, insists that her fellow survivors wash their hands and feet in a bucket of disinfectant before entering the house. Such scenes of cleaning before entering a defined hygienic clearly recall the government imposed controls during the BSE crisis and so successfully aligns the fantastical narrative of the undead with the very real events that took place in the UK.

The success of the tension built within the film can be mostly attributed to the strong sense of realism that pervades the film: the dialogue is consistently naturalistic and, at times, feels as if it has been ad-libbed, a quality which only adds to the idea of recording events as they ‘happen’. The use of real locations as sets compounds this sense of realism. In addition to this the narrative itself is bound to reality. Instead of narrative events slipping into horror film cliché, it unfolds in a logical manner as the necessities of survival begin to dictate actions and events: after a few days of the country being in the grip of the pandemic the power goes out, forcing the contemporary citizens to revert to primitive means of sourcing light and warmth by making fire. This is then followed by the twin search for food and other survivors. Whilst at first food and water is abundant it soon begins to run out, necessitating excursions into the zombie infested shopping centres to loot supplies. And, as those supplies dwindle, rationing is enforced and life’s luxuries and addictions are voided in the face of the threat posed by the zombie hordes. Self defence becomes the optimum consideration. With only a few survivors possessing either a hand gun or hunting rifle, the breaking into shops and businesses becomes increasingly dangerous, and all the more so as one character points out “we’re running out of bullets”.

Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of The Zombie Diaries is the clarity by which it depicts a national catastrophe: although both the characters and audience are aware that the pandemic is successfully infecting the populace, the actual result of that is never actually seen. Instead, this horrific event is hinted at through fragments of news reports, fleeting images of vast empty landscapes and carefully composed shots of vacant suburban streets and car parks. The horror lies not what is seen but in what is not been seen.

Recently Published

Two of my essays have been published at the start of this month: the first is a critical analysis of the BBC Three serial Being Human, published in MediaMagazine (Issue 29) and the second is a comparative analysis of Requiem and The Exorcism of Emily Rose, published in Electric Sheep (Autumn 2009).

Electric Sheep can be purchased from the newsstands whilst MediaMagazine is available from their website: http://www.mediamagazine.org.uk/

Notebook Extract

Candyman

For sociology research student Helen the academic world is clearly dominated by men, a situation which her thesis seeks to undermine by proving the invalidity of existing texts concerning urban legends – all seemingly authored by men. This male domination extends into both her family life (her husband is a university professor) and into the illusionary world created by the supernatural element of the Candyman: the Gothic ‘other’ world created by his hypnotic presence lulls Helen into a hallucinatory state and so makes her an instrument of his murderous desires. She becomes, quite literally, an extension and/or physical embodiment of the antagonist’s desire for violent and murderous actions. In this respect Helen’s submission to the threatening male could be interpreted at a much more complex level, with the narrative itself potentially being in conflict: the male presence of the Candyman can be seen as means of repressing the Female Gothic narrative trajectory by forcing the female protagonist into a typical male narrative, making her a character driven not by emotion and understanding but by base instinct which results in externally aggressive actions.

Regardless of how this interpretation is perceived, at a basic narrative level Helen is forever trapped in a male dominated world, be that in the tangible world of the university or the hallucinatory one created by the Candyman. This oppression culminates into total domination and control, with Helen being simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the two men in her life. Although she loves her husband, Helen not only suspects him of having an affair with an undergraduate student but is also, unconsciously, jealous of his academic success. As she struggles to deal with these conflicting emotions, her (possible) hallucinations of the Candyman represent a projected externalisation of these anxieties: handsome, well spoken and rich, the Candyman offers Helen immortality if she will be his victim. With his calm voice and promises of power and dominion, Candyman is essential a seducer, a tempter whose own dominance is reinstated by the death of each of his victims.

Unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not, Helen seemingly slips into a state of madness and fully enters into the delusion world the supernatural element may or may not have created. As the film reaches its climax, Helen attempts to save the baby Candyman requires as a final sacrifice. Although she rescues the baby and kills the Candyman, Helen herself dies. But, given the Gothic intensity of the film, death is never the end and in the narrative's final twist, Helen returns from death and using her husband’s lover as Candyman used her, murders him.

Current Commissions

Currently working on the second draft of the Doctor Who essay for Cambridge Scholars Publishing and in the process of organising interviews with Splintered director Simeon Halligan and Marc Price, the director of Colin.

Beyond Hammer

More reviews of my first book Beyond Hammer have appeared on the newsstands: Empire awarded the book three out of five stars commenting that it was an "engaging" read for its target audience whilst Total Film also awarded the book three out of five stars, stating that it was "a genre primer that lucidly skin-peels four decades of scares and subtexts, from The Vampire Lovers to The Descent."

The Summer 2009 edition of Electric Sheep features my text I Robot. I Revolt, an essay on the popular sub-genre of homicidal technological revolt in Hollywood cinema, featuring Westworld, Blade Runner, The Stepford Wives and RoboCop.

Current Commissions

Now that the First Drafts of the Doctor Who chapters have been completed and sent to their respective editors, I have been working on the Second Draft of the Studying The Devil's Backbone book alongside viewing films for my next essay in MediaMagazine, a text chronicling the history of the Horror Mockumentary.

Beyond Hammer

A review of my first book, Beyond Hammer, has been published in the August 2009 edition of the magazine Filmstar: rated three and a half stars out of five, the reviewer states that the book is

"all well-written and enlightening, managing to tread that difficult line between academic depth and easy readability."

They also state that it is "good to see Shaun of the Dead being taken seriously... it does, after all, provide the essence of Blighty; a strange, funny, but, in the end, a messed-up patriarchy where everyone goes and hides down the pub and tries to pretend it's not happening."

Filmstar, August 2009. p.148

Current Commissions

The second Doctor Who text is now finished and with the publisher whilst my article on Requiem and The Exorcism of Emily Rose has now been signed off by the editor of Electric Sheep and will be published in the September 2009 edition.

Beyond Hammer

My first book, Beyond Hammer, has received its first customer review on Amazon: the reviewer gave the book 5 out of 5 stars and commented: "With the international success of recent British films such as 28 Days Later and The Descent, this academically-rigorous but highly readable book is a timely account of just how far the genre has progressed since Hammer's final film in 1976. An impressive debut."

The book was also ranked 24 (out of 100) on Amazon's best seller list for books on horror cinema.

Personal Project Extract

Rewriting Barbara: Night of the Living Dead (1990)

...In Romero’s revisions, the 1990’s Barbara begins the narrative in a similar manner to her 1969 counterpart but, instead of regressing into catatonia, she is becomes a positive force, an active, capable and strong person. The 1990’s Barbara becomes a continuation of the character Sarah from Day of the Dead (1985): as a scientist Sarah is written as someone who is fully aware of the situation, one who has a strong ethical stance and is driven to search for a practical solution to the undead threat. As an individual person, Romero writes her as a mature, sexual and capable woman. And, when the undead attack or bite, she proves herself to be an aggressive and effective survivor. The 1990’s Barbara demonstrates all of these qualities, consistently proving herself and consistently proving that for all the protective and macho posturing of Ben and Cooper, she is the most mature and masculine of them all.

Romero begins his remake in the same way as his original, with Johnny driving Barbara to the cemetery. As they drive through the desolate landscape, brother and sister bicker about their deceased mother. As the argument develops, Johnny accuses Barbara of being afraid of their mother. She immediately denies this but Johnny pursues the accusation by commenting that “She damn near drove you into a convent” and then “When was the last time you had a date?” Johnny’s implication of repression becomes all the more apparent when Barbara steps out of the car: bespectacled, she wears a blouse buttoned up to the collar over which she wears a pink knitted cardigan. Her heavy woollen skirt hangs below her knees.

As they approach their mother’s grave, Johnny continues his taunts until, inevitably, the first of the undead attacks, grabbing then clawing at Barbara. Both fall to the ground, Barbara’s glasses knocked from her face as they do so. As she tries to defend herself, Johnny attempts to pull the zombie off but his attempts are hampered by Barbara who, throughout the brief struggle, manages to both accidentally kick her brother’s face and stab his hand. As the struggle continues Barbara loses her cardigan, the top buttons of her blouse come undone and her shiny black shoes come off. The attack ends with Johnny managing to drag the undead person off his sister only to slip on one of her lost shoes and, as he falls, breaks his neck on a tombstone.

This opening sequence, although reasonably similar to the original, has great importance to the revised Barbara. Her life, up until this point, has clearly been dominated by her mother to the extent that her confidence and sexuality have been suffocated. During the opening struggle the clothes of her repression – the glasses, the cardigan, and the concealing blouse – are all stripped from her and her brother killed. Symbolically the dead have inadvertently undressed her of her repressed state.

Current Commissions

In the final stages of the First Draft of the Doctor Who chapter for The Science Fiction Foundation and have taken some time out from commissions to work on a long-term personal project concerning Guillermo del Toro...

Recently Viewed

The Midnight Meat Train (Ryuhei Kitamura, 2008)

The involvement of Clive Barker in any project – be that a novel, film, art work or console game – is often a sure sign of quality. Regardless of format, Barker’s distinctive vision of the world of the real, of fantasy and of horror consistently emerges and confirms him as one of the greatest creative minds of the genre. Imagine then the potential of a film adaptation of one of his ground breaking short stories from The Books of Blood – The Midnight Meat Train.

The title alone is enough to get the genre fanatic salivating. The imagery it conjures up – the dark, cold, and rickety corridors of a train slick with blood and littered with meat – is ideal material for an era of horror cinema preoccupied with Painography. Yet, even though the film has a reasonably small body count, the gore content of Midnight Meat Train is quite obtrusive: fast and bloody, the violence perpetrated by Mahogany seems strangely at odds with the rest of the narrative. Although the explicit nature of these events will slake the thirst of the average gore hound – as fingers are mashed, bodies butchered, limbs carved and brains are tenderised all in sickening close up – these scenes actually detract from the tension the film is trying so hard to generate. The potential horror of Mahogany lies in his menacing presence, the contradiction between his normal appearance and Everyman quality with his brooding nature and seemingly endless repressed rage. Watching him act out his fury in a frenzy of explicit violence only manages to dissipate whatever fear that surrounds him.

This is no Hellraiser nor was it ever intended to be but the shadow that film has cast is long and deep, making it difficult not to measure any film that is Barker related against it. Where the film does succeed is in its depiction of the contemporary city as a space of concealed horrors, the anonymous nature of city life and the immense claustrophobia of the tube trains. All are admirably constructed by director Kitamura and provide an interesting foil to the gouts of blood that are freely spilled. Yet, for all this, the film feels way too long and stretches Barker’s original material to the limit before the concluding payoff. Die hard Barker fans will not be overly disappointed given earlier filmic treatments of his work (Underworld and Rawhead Rex) nor will those who like blood and brains sprayed and splattered across the screen. But for those looking for the melancholy in Barkers work and manifestations of his immense imagination may be disappointed.

Current Commissions

Completed the Doctor Who chapter for the Cambridge Scholars commission and have now begun work on the Emily Rose short essay for Electric Sheep: the text will examine the real-life events behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose and discuss their depiction in this film and Requiem. Preliminary texts have also been drafted for the second Doctor Who chapter for The Science Fiction Foundation publication.

Notebook Extract

30 Days of Night

The sense of the vampire group functions as a family is reflected in the survivors and highlights their deficiency in the face of the Other: whereas the vampires are an organised collective and have trust in their leader, Marlow, the humans are disorganised and continually question their assumed leader, Eben. A further disparity occurs in the sense of relationships that occur within each group: the humans are survivors, familiar to each other only as friends and neighbours whilst the vampires, although from completely different families, are a family that is quite literally blood related through the contaminating bite of the vampire. As the film progresses, Marlow’s relationship with the dark haired female vampire suggests that they are, in some sense of the word, a couple. They respect each other, share victims and Marlow’s allows this ‘partner’ chance and opportunity to attack and kill before the others. In this state, they function as a normal couple, a further instance of difference that highlights the deficiency in the humans as this relationship is reflected in Eben and Stella: whereas the vampires suggest a healthy, mutual and equal relationship, Eben and Stella are clearly unhappy with each other to the extent that their relationship has collapsed and the pair have split up.

Interview Extract

Rendering Nature: An interview with Richard Bell, Background Artist on Watership Down

Based upon Richard Adams best-selling novel Watership Down (1972), Martin Rosen’s animated adaptation (1978) is a remarkable achievement. As James Clarke suggests, “Watership Down is a seminal moment in British animation, building on the tradition set by Halas and Bachelor with Animal Farm as well as, in more general terms, showing that classical animation could be produced in Britain.” (2004, p.103) Part of the film’s sustained popularity lies in its ambiguity towards the audience: although one expects a film about rabbits to be aimed at children, the narrative and animation combines to create an ‘adult’ world, one which projects brutal images of violence and bloodshed alongside a commentary on the value of the landscape and humanity’s inherent need to destroy it.

Production on the film began in 1975, with producer Rosen employing Disney veteran John Hubley as director. Hubley worked on the film for a year but his desire to move away from animated realism contrasted with Rosen’s idea that for Watership Down needed to be as realistic as possible. By the end of the first year, Hubley had left the production and Rosen took over as director. Regardless of this early departure, commentators have suggested that Hubley’s approach is evident in the mythical prologue that opens the narrative as well as in the final scenes where Hazel is confronted by the rabbit’s harbinger of death, The Black Rabbit of Inlé.

In effort to explore the depths of this production, I contacted Richard Bell, one of the film’s Background Artists. Working as an artist with a considerable interest in natural history, Bell seemed like the ideal choice in relation to the film’s inherently realistic depictions of nature.

How did you come to be involved in Watership Down?

A painter friend of mine who had graduated a year ahead of me at the Royal College had gone to see the Watership Down people. She didn’t want to do it but she referred them to me. So I went to an interview with John Hubley. That was about a year after I’d graduated from college. They liked my work.

Once you were offered the job, did you visit the real Watership Down?

When I heard I got the job, I said, right, what I would like to do is go and see the place for myself and so they paid for my expenses. (Richard reaches across the table and picks up a sketchbook. He briefly leafs through it and then shows me a drawing of the landscape near Sandleford Warren.) I thought this is the sort of thing I should be drawing because I know they [the rabbits] have to cross this stream. Of course in the film its more of a river than that – you have to add a bit of drama. I actually found a lad who had caught a rabbit down in the valley here and I kept that in a homemade rabbit hutch but I felt so sorry for it that I soon let it go back down in the valley. (Richard flips through his sketchbook and finds the pages he is looking for, the spread of line drawings of rabbits.) Those are my versions of the main characters from Watership Down. The problem with making the rabbits naturalistic is that it is difficult to tell the difference between them so they had to be humanised to some small extent: if Bigwig was a big rabbit then he really was big and if Fiver was a little rabbit he really was scrawny.

Can you tell me about your interview with Hubley?

John Hubley looked through my sketchbooks and he said “I can see how we could use that” and there was a picture of May blossom and he said “I’d like to use something like this so that it would just be cut to white like a sketchbook page and you would have my shaky pen and ink drawing of this May blossom and then the rabbit would come in below.

So the rabbit would enter from off-screen onto the sketchbook page in order to step into the imaginary world of the drawing…

Hubley obviously had this playful sort of way he would have liked to have done it but I suspect that he could see that Watership Down was part of that English tradition of natural history illustration and he could obviously see that I was part of it too. He took me on. A couple of my painter friends came for interviews but, although I was accepted, by the time it came to decided on my pals working on it things had changed a lot at Watership Down. It became a different film…. It’s quite remarkable what Martin Rosen did with it but there’s this kind of lost film there that was never made, a concept film that never got made.

Recently Published...

My first book, Beyond Hammer: British Horror Cinema since 1970 was published mid May this year by Auteur Publishing:

Though they are often critically neglected, British horror films make up a significant and steadily growing body of genre works within a nationally grounded cinema. Deeply rooted within the Gothic tradition, these post-Hammer Studio films place their antagonistic threats within contemporary Britain, allowing werewolves to roam the Moors and isolated islanders to practice Pagan sacrifice, hiding a family of cannibals behind the white tiled walls of the Underground, or unleashing a virulent plague that causes zombies to stumble through middle class suburbia. The juxtaposition between these unreal elements and the vivid Britishness of characters and locations has led to a collaborative body of work that examines the modern fears of contemporary Britain. Accessible to the general reader, Beyond Hammer provides new critical readings of classic, contemporary, and lesser known films of the post-Hammer British horror canon. Chronologically ordered, these chapters feature new and engaging readings of The Wicker Man, Death Line, An American Werewolf in London, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hellraiser, 28 Days Later, The Last Horror Movie, Shaun of the Dead, and The Descent.

The book is currently ranked 24 (out of 100) in the Amazon Best Sellers list for books on Horror Cinema.

To purchase Beyond Hammer: British Horror Cinema since 1970 please follow one of these links:

Amazon.co.uk

Columbia University Press

Play.com

Auteur Publishing

Current Commissions

Recently completed the Tim Burton essay for Splice and that has now been forwarded onto the editor. The second draft of the Alien 3 chapter is now finished and awaiting proof reading before being sent to the publisher. Have begun work on the Doctor Who chapter for the Cambridge Scholars publication.

Recently Viewed...

Resident Evil: Extinction (Russell Mulcahy, 2007)

Where as Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2002), with its countless zombies, skinned dogs, and mutating monsters was a reasonably acceptable adaptation of the console game, its sequel, Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Alexander Witt, 2004) was bad. Very bad. Too bad to discuss. So, as dictated by the Law of Diminishing Returns, the third film of the trilogy would be, by definition, appallingly bad. But surprisingly it’s not. In fact, it’s a guilty pleasure to watch Alice tool up with an array weapons and slice, dice, maim, shoot, decapitate and obliterate as many zombies as she possibly can within the ninety minute run time.


Although the film begins, cryptically, at the start of the original film, the plot soon gathers pace as the concept of the world devastated by the T-Virus outbreak is established and the band of hardy survivors of this New World are introduced: strong women with big guns are paralleled with equally strong men who have as equally big guns. And whilst this all seems perfunctionary for contemporary films of this type, it does lead to some cracking set pieces involving the search of an abandoned hotel, a Birds-esque assault by a mass of infected crows, and a multitude of zombie encounters. Whilst all this is going on above ground, below ground the Umbrella Corporation continues their insane biological experiments in an effort to reverse the effects of their virus. It is here that the quality of the film suffers as this sub plot is strongly reminiscent of Romero’s classic Day of the Dead: an increasingly mad scientist captures zombie specimens, puts them in a corral and then attempts to educate them. All of this is compounded by the fact that the Umbrella facility is basically a huge underground military complex that is not too dissimilar to the underground silo of Romero’s film.


Whilst all this does detract from the overall quality of the film’s sense of originality, it still delivers in spadefuls of action, suspense and gore, as well as in its imagery: Alice attempts to leave the Racoon City mansion are a sterile juxtaposition of cold clean whites and deep blood reds, the darkness of the abandoned hotel punctuated with pockets of gold light and the ariel images of the millions of zombies stumbling through the wastelands all add a classy visual depth to the film. Such a quality is unsurprising as director Russell Mulcahy called the shots on Razorback (1984), Highlander (1986) and The Shadow (1994).


In all, a good little film that certainly delivers as long as you don’t expect too much from the potential the franchise has to offer.

Notebook Extract

I always carry a notebook and pen with me. When travelling, waiting to meet someone or just sitting enjoying a cup of coffee, the notebook comes out and is used to jot down ideas, sentences, paragraphs and memos for possible commissions and personally instigated texts. What follows is a recent extract from my current notebook...

The Dark Half: King and Romero in Crisis

The Dark Half continues Stephen King's 'writer in crisis' concept as a means of exploring the act of authoring horror fiction: The Shinning and Misery (and to some extent Desperation) have as their protagonist a novelist who is trapped within a remote environment: Jack Torrance and his family are trapped within The Overlook Hotel whilst the severely crippled Paul Sheldon of Misery is held hostage by his 'Number One Fan', Annie Wilkes. As Torrance immerses himself deeper into insanity to sustain himself, so Sheldon uses his fear to write what turns out to be his best novel to date.

Of the two novels, The Dark Half bares the strongest resemblance to Misery: In both narratives the novelist kills off their best selling character (Sheldon's Misery Chastain and Beaumont's pseudonym George Stark) in order to write more 'serious' literary works. Their literary deaths are, however, short lived as each returns, in one form or another, to punish their creator. One cannot help but see these texts as King critiquing (and fearing) his own success - the paranoia of reprisal from the established audience (let alone a critical response) as well as the anxiety of how one is perceived as the creator of disturbing and violent acts: In Misery Sheldon writes for an audience of one, Annie Wilkes, yet as his 'Number One Fan' she is representative of all of Sheldon's fans (implying that readers of such fictions are as deranged as those within the novels) where as George Stark represents that dark secluded part of the writers personality that enables them to produce such horrific works of fiction.

As the threat to each writer increases, those around them are systematically killed and so implicate a sealing of the fate of the writer. Their only chance for survival ironically remains in their ability to write: Sheldon is aware that if he continues to write Wilkes will not kill him and so provides him with the opportunity to conceive of an escape plan where as Beaumont must confront his alter ego and write with him in order to prove that the dark and violent acts of the George Stark novels come from him and not his alter ego.

Within the novel King provides the reader with a multi layered text, one that is symbolically written in an almost schizophrenic style as it shifts from placid descriptions of the Beaumont's family life to the graphic descriptions of Stark's murders. As a novel of seemingly two halves one cannot help but continue to draw comparisons with the author himself, one who opted to publish some of his darker, more violent texts under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman.

Whilst King's critique is internalised and centred upon the self, Romero often presents an externalised analysis, using his characters and their isolated entrapment to deftly examine contemporary cultures decline into consumerist violence. Whilst doing this Romero, like King, makes use of images of extreme violence and gore to emphasise his point: the grotesquely decaying zombies of the Dead trilogy are the ultimate consumers, explicitly indulging in acts of mindless cannibalism.

Current Comissions

Final Draft of Alien 3 chapter nearly finished. It just needs few descriptive details adding for coherence and the film dialogue quotations checked. Tim Burton essay proof read and needs very few, very minor changes. Commissioned earlier this week to write a text for Electric Sheep for their forthcoming issue: a comparative text between Requiem and The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

Recently Published

The Spring 2009 edition of Electric Sheep features my DVD review of The Carnival of Souls.

Recently Viewed...

Mum and Dad (Steven Sheil, 2008)

Having missed the last bus home, Polish immigrant Lena accepts a co-workers offer to stay over. Once in their house, she is knocked unconscious, drugged and bound. Waking up to a literal house of horrors, Lena is held captive by a family of psychotics: Dad rules with kind words and a meat tenderiser whilst Mum cooks dinner and tortures the children. Labeled a Mummy's Girl, Lena is forced to undergo torture, humiliation and degrading tasks as she is forcefully integrated into the family unit.

One could criticise this film for borrowing heavily from Tobe Hooper's seminal The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and relocating it into the quiet and depressing suburban enclaves of Britain: Dad appears abruptly from behind Lena and knocks her unconscious with what may be a meat tenderiser, the family scavenging from the airport cargo holds and offices, Dad dressing up as a woman (or as Mum, make-up and all) as he prepares to have intercourse with one of his victims, the Christmas decorations made of flesh and bone, the hideous family secret that is kept upstairs (who is wheeled out for the climatic celebrations) and the film's violent conclusion are all shocking moments that recall Hooper's film. This is not to suggest that Sheil's film is not without its own original and horrific content: Lena witnesses and experiences a whole array of appalling moments, including torture by knitting needle, a grotesque masturbation sequence, sadistic sibling rivalry, possible cannibalism and the ever present threat of rape. Where the film succeeds is the plausibility of its abduction premise and its use of the Heathrow airport location - the constant drone of landing/taking off planes functions as a cruel reminder of Lena's origins, plight and her attempts to escape.

As a British film grounded in a British location, the film functions as a perverse Kitchen Sink drama in which the young children are in constant conflict with their elderly parents. Sheil constructs a thoroughly believable domestic setting and atmosphere which only adds to the horror and compounds Lena's increasingly desperate situation. More disturbingly, there are scenes which recall the Fred and Rose West case and function as a reminder to the viewer of the horrors that have taken place behind the close doors of suburbia.

Current Commissions...

Completed the First Draft of Vincent and Victor: Two Short Films by Tim Burton for the Short Films edition of Splice (due for publication Winter 2009) yesterday. Whilst waiting for this text to be proof read, work will begin on the Final Draft of This is the place where everyone dies: Reading the Gothic in David Fincher's Alien 3 for the Gothic Science Fiction publication with Napier University.

Welcome

Welcome to James Rose’s blog, a repository for his published works, current commission news, ongoing projects and general observations on Horror and Science Fiction film and television.