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

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.