Ahead of the release of his new film The Seasoning House, Alex Fitch talks to actor Kevin Howarth about his career so far, from his memorable lead role in The Last Horror Movie (2003) to his forthcoming zombie action movie GallowWalkers with Wesley Snipes. Howarth talks about resisting his typecasting as a horror film actor, working as a voice artist on video games and the experiences of working with make-up artist Paul Hyett on various projects before the latter turned director on The Seasoning House. (Originally broadcast 21 June 2013 on Resonance 104.4 FM)
The Seasoning House is released on 21 June 2013 in UK cities by Kaleidoscope Entertainment.
For more info and formats to stream/download, visit www.archive.org.
Author and Strange Attractor publisher Mark Pilkington, author and filmmaker Roland Denning and artist Kypros Kyprianou talk about their fascinating documentary Mirage Men (co-directed by John Lundberg). A companion to Mark Pilkington’s book of the same title, the film offers an extraordinary insight into the American government’s manipulation of beliefs about UFOs to create a myth that would serve their counterintelligence strategy.
Electric Sheep have teamed up with MUBI to bring you a free month of films. Get 30 days of access to MUBI’s hand-picked selection of the best films from around the world, with a new film added every day.
Evil Knights Templar rising from their graves, riding skeletal horses in pursuit of tourists gone astray, ruined monasteries and deserted villages: Amando de Ossorio’s creepy, atmospheric Tombs of the Blind Dead has some of the most memorable imagery of the Spanish horror boom of the 1970s. Influenced by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, de Ossorio nevertheless makes the returning dead his own: having had their eyes pecked out by crows after being hanged for their wicked ways, the Knights rely on sounds to hunt their preys. Released in the final years of Franco’s dictatorship, Tombs of the Blind Dead is not only a terrific eerie chiller, but also a subversive allegory for corrupt military and religious power oppressing and persecuting ordinary people. Tombs of the Blind Dead was followed by another three films on the blood-sucking Knights, all directed by the prolific de Ossorio.
Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor are proud to present a rare screening of Tombs of the Bind Dead at the Masonic Temple, Andaz Hotel Liverpool Street, London, on Saturday 29 June, as part of the East End Film Festival. Jim Harper, author of ‘The New Regime: Spanish horror in the 1970s and the end of the dictatorship’, published in The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology (Strange Attractor Press), will introduce the screening.
The screening ends a whole day of cult classics around the theme of secret societies at the Masonic Temple starting from 2pm: Sherlock Holmes hunts Jack the Ripper in British classic Murder By Decree, introduced by critic and novelist Kim Newman; a woman begins seeing strange apparitions in 1970’s giallo The Perfume of the Lady in Black; Jodorowsky’s Mexican circus grotesque Santa Sangre is introduced by its composer Simon Boswell; and finally, we descend into the Tombs of the Blind Dead.
Schedule:
2.00pm | Murder By Decree | Dir. Bob Clark
4:30pm | The Perfume of the Lady in Black | Dir. Francesco Barilli
6:15pm | Santa Sangre | Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky
8:45pm | Tombs of the Blind Dead | Dir. Amando de Ossorio
In association with Titan Books, Cigarette Burns Cinema, Electric Sheep Magazine and Strange Attractor Press.
In May 2011, Electric Sheep took part in the East End Film Festival’s first celebration of Secret Societies at the Masonic Temple. Read our feature on the Freemasons and their connection to Jack the Ripper and listen to a podcast of our radio show on Jack the Ripper, the Freemasons in cinema and the links between crime and the occult with guests Strange Attractor Press publisher Mark Pilkington and Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor contributor Richard Bancroft. You can also listen to a podcast of a panel discussion on Jack the Ripper, witches’ covens and religious cults in film recorded at the Masonic Lodge. Speakers include Electric Sheep editor Virginie Sélavy, assistant editor Alex Fitch, Nollywood scholar Nicola Woodham, filmmaker and horror specialist Jennifer Eiss, and Jim Harper, author of Flowers From Hell: The Modern Japanese Horror Film. Includes clips from Murder by Decree, Season of the Witch, The Wicker Man and Rosemary’s Baby.
In an interview recorded at Sci-Fi-London earlier this month, Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte talks to Virginie Sélavy about her film Vanishing Waves, a hypnotic, sensual sci-fi experience in which a scientist connects with the brain of a comatose patient with whom he has increasingly intense neural encounters, which gradually reveal what happened to her.
For more information on Vanishing Waves, please visit the Facebook page.
First broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM on Friday 17 May 2013.
Electric Sheep are proud to present a screening of Khavn de la Cruz’s Mondomanila at the Flatpack Festival in Birmingham on Friday 29 March.
A joyfully outrageous slice of life in the slums set to a punky soundtrack, Mondomanila is a slap in the face of Western expectations of politely miserabilist depictions of the downtrodden. A hyper kinetic, super stylised wild carnival of the destitute, it follows a midget, a one-armed rapper, a ‘day-glo fairy’, a disabled pimp and their friends as they try to get as much sex and drugs as they can and tackle a racist white paedophile. A toothless showman opens this exuberant bad taste spectacle, promising something horrible and creepy, but the Mondo-style shockumentary aspect is underpinned by the crude reality of life in Manila, making the film vital and energising.
Although Filipino director Khavn de la Cruz has made 33 feature films and 100 shorts, British festivals have tended to ignore his prolific output, and the Flatpack screening provides a rare opportunity to discover his provocative work.
Carla MacKinnon, film festival producer (Branchage, London Short Film Festival, East End Film Festival) and organiser of film and thought events Rich Pickings, talks to Virginie Sélavy about her latest venture, The Sleep Paralysis Project, a cross-platform investigation of a common parasomniac phenomenon and its cultural and scientific background through film, live events and online. The project was launched at the London Short Film Festival in January with an evening of film and talk. A short documentary is currently in production.
I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, Friday 15 February, 5-5:30pm, Resonance 104.4 FM
Writer and comic artist Mark Stafford talks to Virginie Sélavy about Michael Mann’s dark, atmospheric 1983 movie, in which German soldiers stationed in an old Romanian castle during WWII are faced with an ancient evil, and the use of Nazis in exploitation and horror films.
Writer and director Jennifer Eiss, and freelance journalist and co-founder of The Duke Mitchell Film Club Evrim Ersoy, talk to Virginie Sélavy about Jen and Sylvia Soska’s provocative, gruesome and stylish American Mary, discussing among other things the Soska twins’ description of their film as ‘feminist horror’, the hype surrounding them, and Katharine Isabelle’s performance as the disenchanted psychotic surgeon at the centre of the film.
First broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM on Friday 18 January 2013.
Ahead of the release of his new film The Seasoning House, Alex Fitch talks to actor Kevin Howarth about his career so far, from his memorable lead role in The Last Horror Movie (2003) to his forthcoming zombie action movie GallowWalkers with Wesley Snipes. Howarth talks about resisting his typecasting as a horror film actor, working as a voice artist on video games and the experiences of working with make-up artist Paul Hyett on various projects before the latter turned director on The Seasoning House. (Originally broadcast 21 June 2013 on Resonance 104.4 FM)
