Beyond Hammer gets a Mention...

I have just found out that my first book, Beyond Hammer: British Horror Cinema since 1970 was mentioned in the book The Best Horror of the Year. Edited by Ellen Datlow and published by Nightshade Books, Beyond Hammer is mentioned and briefly discussed in the opening Summation of the book.

Forthcoming Publications

The Directory of World Cinema: Britain will be published June 2012. Edited by Emma Bell and Neil Mitchell and published by Intellect Books, I contributed a historic account of the emergence and development of the British horror film alongside a series of reviews of various horror films, including The Haunted Curiosity Shop (Walter R. Booth, 1901), The Dead of Night (Various Directors, 1945) and Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987).

Bringing to mind rockers and royals, Buckingham Palace and the Scottish Highlands, Britain holds a special interest for international audiences who have flocked in recent years to quality British exports like Fish Tank, Trainspotting and The King’s Speech. A series of essays and articles exploring the definitive films of Great Britain, this addition to Intellect’s Directory of World Cinema series turns the focus on England together with Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

The Book can be preordered from either Intellect Books or Amazon.

Recently Published

Interview with Marc Price, the director of Colin

My interview with Marc Price, the director of the British low-budget zombie film Colin has just been published online at Offscreen. Here is a brief extract...

When did your interest in filmmaking begin?

It’s a difficult one to sort of pin down. I think the big thing that happened was that when I was younger I watched movies like Superman 2 and the Star Wars movies – and this is just me speculating – my dad took me to the cinema to see… I can’t remember! I kind of like that I don’t know! I don’t know whether Superman 3 or Return of the Jedi came out first? I went to see one of those movies in the cinema and there was something about seeing characters that I was familiar with on a gigantic screen with loads of people reacting to what was happening. I think maybe something kind of got me there so film was obviously the exciting medium for me. I was raised up on blockbuster and genre films specifically so it started off as entertainment but then as I got older I started to discover other films as well. I didn’t turn my back on genre; I think genre is a really important type of film with an awful lot to offer.

Did any of these films influence you when you were writing and directing Colin or was it zombie cinema in more general that influenced you?

In a way I think they are all wired in but I think when it came to Colin I think it owes a lot more to King Kong than any other zombie film specifically. It obviously references Bub from Day of the Dead – a character I am clearly attracted to. What I really liked about Kong was the connection between Kong and the audience is only said between Kong and the audience. The other characters in the film don’t accept him in quite the same way. I kind of thought, that’s a really amazing thing that an audience is so capable of making that connection. I thought that would be the way to go so the idea with Colin was to find ways to put on the audience the awareness of any danger that Colin would be in that that character wouldn’t be aware of because of the lack of cognitive thought. That was the idea really, to look at the audience’s relationship with the character and to find a way to make that work in the same way that it did for me with King Kong.

To read the interview at Offscreen, follow this link.

Recently Published

World Film Locations: London

World Film Locations: London is an exciting visually focused tour of a diverse range of films shot on location in London. This volume will contain concise but knowledgeable reviews of carefully chosen film scenes and evocative essays about key directors, themes, ideas and historical periods that explore London's relationship to cinema. This book will be illustrated throughout with scene-specific screengrabs, stills of filming locations as they appear now and city maps that include location information for those keen to investigate the cinematic landmarks of London. The individual scene reviews, theme specific essays and illustrations will collectively offer up their own wider questions relating to London itself and how cinema shapes our view of the city. Covering the periods of the Victorian era via the swinging 60s through to the post 7/7 atmosphere of modern day London and seen through the eyes of the full range of communities that have been portrayed onscreen World Film Locations: London will illuminate all corners of this richly diverse and cinematically fertile city.

Edited by Neil Mitchell and published by Intellect, my contribution examines the relationship between the London Underground and the horror film, including Quatermass and the Pit, Death Line and An American Werewolf in London.

You can buy the book online at amazon by following this link or direct from Intellect Books by following this link.

Forthcoming Publication

I recently wrote an essay for World Film Locations: London. Edited by Neil Mitchell and published by Intellect, my contribution examined the relationship between the London Underground and the horror film, including Quatermass and the Pit, Death Line and An American Werewolf in London.

As described on the Intellect website, the book

is an exciting visually focused tour of a diverse range of films shot on location in London. The volume will contain concise but knowledgeable reviews of carefully chosen film scenes and evocative essays about key directors, themes, ideas and historical periods that explore London's relationship to cinema. The book will be illustrated throughout with scene–specific screengrabs, stills of filming locations as they appear now and city maps that include location information for those keen to investigate the cinematic landmarks of London. The individual scene reviews, theme specific essays and illustrations will collectively offer up their own wider questions relating to London itself and how cinema shapes our view of the city. Covering the periods of the Victorian era via the swinging 60s through to the post 7/7 atmosphere of modern day London and seen through the eyes of the full range of communities that have been portrayed onscreen World Film Locations: London will illuminate all corners of this richly diverse and cinematically fertile city.

World Film Locations: London (ISBN 9781841504841)
will be published on 12th September 2011.

Order your copy through the following links:

Intellect Publishing

Amazon.co.uk

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.

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.

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

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

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.