In this special Halloween-themed podcast, Alex Fitch talks to three directors who have made films about man’s relationship with the land. At this year’s FrightFest, Robin Hardy discusses his classic horror film The Wicker Man and its new, belated thematic sequel The Wicker Tree, which both deal with fertility and terrifying pagan rites, while Larry Fessenden talks about his eco-themed monster movies No Telling, Wendigo and The Last Winter. In addition, in a Q&A recorded at the East End Film Festival, Alex interviews Steven Eastwood, co-director of Buried Land, a ‘mockumentary’/docu-drama about the real-life discovery in a small town in Bosnia of an ancient, buried pyramid, which may re-invent mankind’s knowledge of pre-Christian architecture and empire-building, but in the short term has changed the fortunes of people in the area.
Virginie Sélavy talks to Simon Rumley, director of the unpredictable murder ballad Red White and Blue, which tells the complex, violent tale of an emotionally reluctant girl and an edgy loner. One of the best thrillers of 2010 and a great take on screwed up love and serial killers.
Red White and Blue is released in UK cinemas on September 30 by Trinity Entertainment.
First broadcast on Resonance FM 104.4 on Friday 16 September.
In a companion piece to our May podcast on Secret Societies, we have a panel discussion recorded in the atmospheric confines of a Masonic Lodge on Liverpool Street in London as part of the East End Film Festival, including talks on Jack the Ripper, witches’ covens and religious cults in film. Speakers include Electric Sheep editor Virginie Selavy, 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.
Electric Sheep editor Virginie Sélavy talks to Russian scholar Sergei Kapterev (Institute of Cinema Art in Moscow) about Soviet science fiction and the connection between SF cinema and politics, the impact of the space race and the Cold War period, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979),and Roger Corman’s re-edits of popular Soviet SF films. (Originally broadcast 15/07/11 on Resonance FM)
Plus, in a Q&A recorded at SCI-FI-LONDON in April 2010, Alex Fitch talks to Polish poster designer Andrzej Klimowski and SF writer/journalist Wojciech Orliński about cinematic adaptations of the work of Stanislaw Lem from Steven Soderbergh and Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptations of Solaris to more offbeat films such as Edward Zebrowski’s The Hospital of Transfiguration.
Kosmos: A Soviet Space Odyssey runs at BFI Southbank throughout August.
To mark the Kosmos: A Soviet Space Odyssey season at BFI Southbank, Virginie Sélavy talks to Russian scholar Sergei Kapterev, from the Institute of Film Art in Moscow, about Soviet science fiction, including the first Russian SF film, Aelita Queen of Mars (1924), the connection between SF cinema and politics, the impact of the space race and the Cold War period, pioneering filmmaker Pavel Klushantsev, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), and Roger Corman’s re-edits of popular Soviet sci-fi films.
This programme coincides with our exploration of Andrei Tarkovsky’s work throughout July.
As part of the launch of The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology at the Horse Hospital on Tuesday 7 June, DJ Robin the Fog performed a live rescore of Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated (2009), adding a new experimental electronic / musique concrète soundtrack to the animated version of George Romero’s classic zombie film. If you would like to listen to the score while watching the film, it will synch with either the original version of Night of the Living Dead (1968) or the Reanimated (2009) version.
You can also listen to the soundtrack in two parts as a higher quality stream from mixcloud, where there is additional information about the tracks featured in the recording – part 1 / part 2
Additionally, for your listening pleasure, Zoë Baxter has also uploaded the DJ session she performed at the launch party to mixcloud, which includes tracks by Augustus Pablo, Josephine Siao, The Jellybeans and Ella Fitzgerald.
To complement our Apocalypse theme this month, you can listen to Alex Fitch’s podcast on the Sci-Fi London website, 3.16 – Apocalypse (cinema) now. In a pair of on-stage interviews recorded at this year’s Sci-Fi London 10 festival, Alex Fitch talks to a couple of filmmakers about their recent takes on the apocalypse in film: Dekker Dreyer, whose film The Arcadian stars Lance Henriksen and Brian Thompson, and mixes the iconography of shamanism with elements of the road movie in a post-apocalyptic setting; and Maxi Dejoie whose film The Gerber Syndrome is an Italian take on 28 Days Later…, using a pseudo-documentary style to follow a member of a biohazard clean-up crew who is scouring the streets looking for the contagious, and is the first overtly political zombie film in a long time. In the latter interview, Alex and Maxi are also joined by Gerber producers Claudio Bronzo and Lorenzo Lotti.
To celebrate the publication of The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, a collection of essays that explores the darker side of cinema, the book’s editor Virginie Sélavy will talk to two of the contributors: Jason Wood will discuss the endings of road movies and Nicola Woodham will talk about End of the Wicked, a Nollywood film about child witches.
Nicola Woodham is a writer and filmmaker who has written broadly on Nigerian evangelist horror films. Jason Wood is the director of programming for Curzon cinemas and the author of several books on cinema, including The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema and 100 Road Movies.
To buy The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology (price £13.99), please go to our publishers’ website, Strange Attractor Press.
Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, which Jason Wood discusses in his article and in the radio show, is available on DVD from Axiom Films.
Horror maestro Kim Newman discusses the new, updated edition of his essential book Nightmare Movies: Horror on the Screen since the 1960s with Electric Sheep‘s Virginie Sélavy. Nightmare Movies is published by Bloomsbury.
This programme was first broadcast on Friday 20 May, 5-5:30pm, on Resonance 104.4 FM. Podcast produced by Alex Fitch.
In connection with the East End Film Festival’s Secret Societies day of screenings, Virginie Sélavy hosts a discussion on Jack the Ripper and the Freemasons in cinema and the links between crime and the occult with guests Mark Pilkington, Strange Attractor Press publisher, and Richard Bancroft, contributor to both Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor.
This programme was first broadcast on Friday 22 April, 5-5:30pm, on Resonance 104.4 FM. Podcast produced by Alex Fitch.
In this special Halloween-themed podcast, Alex Fitch talks to three directors who have made films about man’s relationship with the land. At this year’s FrightFest, Robin Hardy discusses his classic horror film The Wicker Man and its new, belated thematic sequel The Wicker Tree, which both deal with fertility and terrifying pagan rites, while Larry Fessenden talks about his eco-themed monster movies No Telling, Wendigo and The Last Winter. In addition, in a Q&A recorded at the East End Film Festival, Alex interviews Steven Eastwood, co-director of Buried Land, a ‘mockumentary’/docu-drama about the real-life discovery in a small town in Bosnia of an ancient, buried pyramid, which may re-invent mankind’s knowledge of pre-Christian architecture and empire-building, but in the short term has changed the fortunes of people in the area.
