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Evolution: Interview with Lucile Hadzihalilovicz

Evolution3
Evolution

Format: Cinema

Seen at LFF 2015

Release date: 6 May 2016

DVD release date: 20 June 2016

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Lucile Hadžihalilovic

Writers: Lucile Hadžihalilovic, Alanté Kavaïté

Cast: Max Brebant, Roxane Duran, Julie-Marie Parmentier

France 2014

81 mins

Lucile Hadžihalilovic explains how she created her oneiric exploration of birth and matter in an elusive, disquieting female world.

Evolution, Lucile Hadžihalilovic’s masterful follow-up to her 2004 debut Innocence revolves around a little boy living on an island peopled only by women and other young boys. After a disturbing discovery while swimming in the sea, the boy becomes suspicious of the women’s behaviour. He soon falls mysteriously ill and is sent to the hospital, where he is subjected to a no less mysterious treatment.

Virginie Sélavy met Lucile Hadžihalilovic at the London Film Festival in October 2015 where the director explained how she created her oneiric exploration of birth and matter in an elusive, disquieting female world.

Virginie Sélavy: You made Innocence 10 years ago. Why did it take you so long to make another film?

Lucile Hadžihalilovic: What took so long was the financing of the film. It wasn’t quick to write, and it went through many drafts, but that wasn’t the reason. It was really difficult for people to understand the project on paper. I thought it’d be easier, because unlike Innocence, Evolution is more narrative and more of a genre film. But even though it is connected to horror, science fiction and the fantastique, it’s not completely a genre film, it’s also an auteur film. People who finance auteur films in France are not used to dealing with the fantastique, it’s a little too close to exploitation and not serious enough for them maybe. The other problem, even if no one said it explicitly but it seems obvious to me, is the fact that it is about children who are subjected to unpleasant things, and on paper people could imagine things that were even more terrible than what I intended to show.

To straddle art and genre film is very difficult for filmmakers, and maybe especially for French filmmakers. A clear example of that was Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day.

That’s true, and when she made Trouble Every Day she had already made a number of films, she was a name. The theatrical release of Innocence was more successful in countries like Britain and the USA than it was in France. It wasn’t a big release but we got press and people understood the film. I think there is a cultural problem with what is imaginary, metaphorical, people don’t get it in France. I think that people here understand it better because there’s a literature and a cinema that are closer to it, and they don’t look down on the fantastique so much, as though it were only for children or teenagers.

What’s your relationship to horror?

I saw a lot of horror films when I was 20. When I started going to the cinema on my own around the age of 13, it was a time when there were a lot of Italian horror films coming out, Argento, etc. It was fascinating because at the same time they were very seductive, very beautiful, and at the same time rather horrible, and I didn’t understand that combination or the adult world they depicted very well. Until I was about 25 I watched a lot of those films and then I stopped. Now I’m not focused on horror film, but it was important to me at a certain age, and I think it’s something that remains with you. It seems natural to me to watch horror on the screen even though I’m easily scared in real life. It’s like a catharsis and it evokes a lot of things for me.

Despite the fact that nearly 10 years elapsed between the two projects, Innocence and Evolution are very close in terms of theme and atmosphere.

I’d started working on Evolution before Innocence but I wasn’t aware that they were so close. Obviously Evolution was about children again but I wanted to get away from Innocence in the sense that I wanted to make something more narrative, more within genre, whereas in Innocence that was more in the background, it was more abstract. But I didn’t think, ‘right now I’m going to make a film with boys’, rather I thought that for this story it wasn’t interesting if it was a little girl.

Yes, even though the story seems to be about a little boy, the film seems to really be about the feminine again, but from a different angle compared to Innocence.

Yes, it’s a feminine world once more, seen from a more disquieting, more threatening angle. But it’s also about a boy who is not separated from his mother, who is still in his mother’s belly and cannot come out, and what it would be like to give birth. It’s the nightmare of maternity or pregnancy, which is a girl’s anxiety. The relationship to society was also stronger in Innocence, the fact that it’s set in a school means that it’s about a certain form of education with specific aims. Evolution is a more intimate story of this child’s fears, rather than a reflection about society. In this sense, it is not a science fiction film and that’s why I wasn’t interested in saying who these women are exactly, and what the hospital is. It’s more the internal theatre of this child.

Evolution also features much more horrific imagery than Innocence, and the most shocking of all is the documentary footage on a Cesarean birth that you include.

Yes, I liked the idea of horror coming from reality, and that’s because a Cesarean is not a natural birth, it’s surgery, so it’s another abnormal way of depicting birth, another fear of it. Before making the film we had to look for those images and I had seen some videos, and they are really difficult to watch. I liked the idea that there would be some gore at some point in the story, you have to have some gory elements.

Evolution evokes a number of literary, cinematographic and mythical figures, Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the siren for instance. Did you deliberately want to evoke those figures?

Yes, absolutely. I think that we have this whole shared mythology, classical mythology but also science fiction literature, more recent things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also Philip K. Dick. Theodore Sturgeon, H.P. Lovecraft. Those references are now so much part of culture that I thought I had to be very careful not to say too much because it seemed so obvious. It’s better to guess.

Your film very much functions like a myth, it is built from very simple elements that recur throughout, the village, the red colour, the starfish.

I like to start with something very real, and for the mystery or the strangeness to come from very simple, familiar things. The image of a child playing with a starfish on a beach is incredibly familiar but if you look closely at the starfish you think, ‘what is this monster?’

You seem fascinated by organic matter, the starfish, the strange creature that the children bury, or the body of the women for instance.

The intention with the film was to explore the organic, because it’s this archaic thing that is part of us but at the same time is really odd. It can be disquieting as well as attractive. So we tried to have that throughout the film, to fabricate the film with it. It was upsetting to be forced to shoot on digital rather than celluloid, I thought it was such a shame not to be able to have the material of film. But we tried to work differently to create texture.

The village where you filmed looks dilapidated, the paint on the walls is chipped, everything looks a little decrepit.

It was to give it a reality, a patina. Locations were a key issue, including the interiors. It was out of the question to shoot in a clean setting, in a studio, regardless of what it would have cost, precisely to render the materiality of the walls. As the film is a little abstract, it had to have a very concrete aspect to counterbalance that, and for me that was the setting. That village was great because there’s the humidity from the sea, the saltpetre. It was used as a holiday place and people didn’t live there all year round so it wasn’t all freshly painted. We even added to the decrepitude, to avoid smooth white surfaces and have a sense of reality, of materiality, the sense of time that had passed.

Where did you shoot the film?

We shot in Lanzarote, and the hospital was near Barcelona, it’s an abandoned hospital that has been often used in Spanish horror cinema. It’s very big, and you have the structure, the operating theatres, the tiling, all of that is there, in a state of more or less disrepair, so we had something real to start from, but we could also paint things how we wanted.

Was it important for you to use those two places specifically?

Yes, I thought the most important thing was to find the locations. Early on in the project we found the village in the Canaries. I thought, ‘that’s incredible, it exists’, and it really helped me to think that the film was possible, that we wouldn’t have to create everything from scratch, that there was a very strong place that carried a lot of emotions and mythology. It was a little more difficult with the hospital because some of the ones we saw were too derelict, others were too new, and we had to find something in between.

How did you approach the sound?

I would have liked the sound editing to be done together with the image editing but because the film was a co-production, the sound was done in Spain and the image in France, so it ended up being more separated than I would have liked. We knew from the start that we’d have to create a lot of sounds because there wasn’t much dialogue. I wanted the sound to reflect the feelings of the child, and not to be realistic, but rather emotional, internal and oneiric. We worked in this way using natural sounds from the location such as the wind and the noise from the sea – which we had to rework because it’s difficult to record the sea, you have to recreate the waves one by one.

In the mixing I wanted to create something very specific and not use effects like the ones you have in horror films, to create tension using the sound but not through the usual means. I didn’t think I’d use so much music – there isn’t that much, but it’s quite a lot for me – but as we didn’t have sound when we were editing the editor asked for music, and it led me to use more than I had intended. I wanted something with an instrument that wouldn’t be recognizable, something a little strange. I heard pieces by Messiaen that used the Ondes Martenot and I thought that was exactly what was needed. I couldn’t get the Messiaen piece unfortunately but we were able to do something with the Ondes Martenot on some of the recurring tracks. They bring a certain melancholy, almost a human voice, and it instantly creates a particular atmosphere.

You’ve worked a lot on the sounds, textures and colours of the film, and like Innocence, Evolution is an intense sensory experience. Is that how you view cinema, as an immersive, sensory experience?

Absolutely, and I’d say that’s why you have to see the film in a cinema, it’s like dreaming awake, with other people, in the dark. That’s also why it was so difficult to explain the script even though we tried to describe it in an expressive manner, because it’s an emotional, even physical, experience, with sound and image, and so you have to go through it to understand it, for something to happen.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

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Mario Bava Season at Castle Bleasdale (Part One)

Blood and Black Lace 1
Blood and Black Lace

A diary of watching Mario Bava films over a week.

It was January, cold, and everyone was dying. I chopped enough wood for the week and stored it against the wall with the kindling. There were frosts every night at Castle Bleasdale – my current residence, a shuddering pile located on the River Piave where the plains meet the first mountains of the Dolomites – but while my wife and children slept fitfully upstairs, I would get the fire roaring, turn out all the lights and watch a film by Italian horror director Mario Bava. Prior to this week, I’d never seen any of his 30-odd films. This is a scientific record of the Mario Bava Season at Castle Bleasdale.

Monday, 11th of January, 2016

David Bowie died last night. An inauspicious beginning to the week, to the year in fact. I resist the temptation to watch The Man Who Fell to Earth – there’ll be time enough for that later – because tonight I must begin my journey into the cinema of Mario Bava. I’ve put it off too long and now it calls to me. All the wonderful titles: lots of blood, lots of black, covens of witches and parties of demons. I eschew the synopsis and trailers and pick Blood and Black Lace from 1964. In Italian (and I watch it in Italian) the title is Six Women for the Murderer. The first thing I notice is the wind. A wind blows through the film as a series of murders are committed around a fashion house. The models and the owners are somehow involved. Throughout there is an air of scandal and the diary of a victim becomes a focal point for many of the characters. There is a widespread guilt. The women fear exposure as much as they do the murderer who stalks them with his strange cloth mask, as if he (or she) were fashion itself. The murders are brutal and the sadism of the killer mixes with obvious misogyny, as the fear of the women is accentuated and one of the women has her face thrust against a red hot stove. Everyone is trapped in or about the creepy villa and Bava is obviously attuned to the Gothic. The wind slams windows and billows curtains. Mannequins stand frozen waiting to come to life. There is drapery and blood and the grotesque comedy of death which leaves the women in poses without poise, eyes bulging, faces ruined, mere things to be carted around. This is the very beginning of the giallo, a whole genre dedicated to the fascination of what beautiful women look like when they’re frightened, and later when they’re dead.

Tuesday, 12th of January, 2016

Last night I tweeted about my first Mario Bava film and Massimo B. sent me a message from Amsterdam. They’re making a horror movie: would I submit a treatment? I base it on Blood and Black Lace and send it off. He gets back to me. Read it, liked it, will be in touch. Heartened, I build the fire up. It’s almost too hot. Outside there is a full moon casting sharp shadows. The cold is so intense, it’s like you’re immersed in freezing water. My daughters and wife sleep upstairs. I have chosen Kill Baby Kill (1966). A title that Roger Corman might have been proud of. Operazione Paura in Italian! But the film opens like something out of Hammer. A village is approached. There’s a terrible secret. The young doctor arrives to assist with the investigation of a grisly death. The local villa houses a Miss Haversham of sorts, who in the ruins of her former glory, surrounded by the dolls of her lost child, leaks a malign influence onto the village. The corruption of the locals see them hounded to death if they spill the secret. Inside the corpse of the young girl – an apparent suicide – a coin is found. The investigating policeman is found killed and the coroner, played by the impossibly square-jawed Giacomo Rossi Stuart, teams up with a local girl (Erica Blank), who has returned after a long sojourn away to find out what is going on. Bava is extremely good at the traditional elements of the horror story. As with Blood and Black Lace, the wind moans and shutters slam. A little girl wanders the film, a terrifying precursor to the little red riding hood of Don’t Look Now and a ball bounces down a spiral staircase and we could be forgiven for thinking it settles in a corridor of the Overlook Hotel. As the film slides effortlessly into the surreal, the haunted house becomes increasingly psychotic and beguiling. As I turn off the lights and lock all the doors before going to bed, I catch sight of my own reflection and recoil at the lurid grin that contorts my face.

Wednesday, 13th of January, 2016

One of my students died. Death comes by email these days, or worse still, Facebook. I learned of a suicide via Facebook two years ago. Last year Twitter alerted me to the massacre in the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The world we live in death comes tweeting. The fire is lit early this evening. The Planet of the Vampires (1965) was Bava’s foray into science fiction. He also directed comedies and Spaghetti Westerns. Two space ships land on a mysterious planet after they pick up an SOS message. As they land, the crew are gripped by a mass psychosis and set about trying to kill each other. Once recovered they find that the crew members on the other ship were similarly affected but had gone the whole hog and murdered each other. The film was made on the cheap with only a couple of rocks, some slow motion and a wind machine with which to make an alien planet. The wind blows again and seems to be a crucial element to the Bava universe, that invisible force that we all take for granted but which moves and affects the world. Likewise there are invisible beings on the planet that can only be perceived by their effects on others as they reanimate the corpses of the dead crew and attack the living. Bava regular Barbara Steele joins US TV actor Barry Sullivan in trying to make the sets and the situation credible. The creepiness is well done and although everyone involved denies it, there is more than a germ of Alien here, though Bava’s film borrows liberally from Forbidden Planet (1956) as well it must be noted.

Thursday, 14th of January, 2016

I’m rehearsing a play to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday when I get the news that Alan Rickman has died. I saw Rickman in St. George’s Hall in Liverpool perform Hamlet in the mid-90s. He was a wonderful Dane and I walked back to my student digs blathering fake Shakespearean verse. I take the rest of the day off and decide tonight I will double bill Mario Bava. The fire is lit and the wood is consumed, the flames, reaching high into the chimney as if they’re trying to grab something. Just as Dario Argento – influenced by Bava’s Blood and Black Lace is claiming the giallo for his own, Bava lurches back towards the Gothic, which lies at the heart of his concept of horror. Baron Blood has the Italian title Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga. Peter Kliest (Antonio Cantafora) visits the castle of his ancestors where he meets Eva (Elke Sommer), a student who is studying the ancestral pile, which is due to be sold. A series of murders coincide with the arrival of the wheelchair-bound Alfred Becker (played by an ageing Joseph Cotten), the new owner of the castle. There is gruesome murder, an Iron Maiden gets some use and a wonderful foggy chase. Joseph Cotten can’t really compete with the grisly make-up of his un-rejuvenated Baron, but it doesn’t really matter as it is the Austrian castle that is the true star of the film. Released the same year – 1972 – Lisa and the Devil also starred Elke Sommer, this time as Lisa, an American tourist in Spain. Here she meets a strange man (Telly Savalas) in a mannequin shop. He bears a striking resemblance to a fresco depicting the devil on the wall of the local church. Lisa loses her group and is given a lift by a rich couple and their chauffeur, who in turn find themselves stranded near a fog-shrouded villa, the butler of which is the mannequin-lugging devil. Invited in, the travellers find themselves part of a weird role-playing game as a mother and son see in Lisa a resemblance to a sweetheart long dead. There is necrophilia, sadism and black magic at play as Leandro (Savalas) manipulates everyone in the house like the mannequins he positions, which come to life. Leandro could be seen as a stand-in for the director himself, manipulating pain and grief and exhuming memories in order to make his own entertainment. Savalas sucks on a lollipop throughout the movie, a detail that he liked so much he used it for his iconic TV detective Kojak, which he filmed the following year.

Friday, 15th of January, 2016

The funeral took place in the local cathedral and outside the sun was strangely, unseasonably warm.

John Bleasdale

To be continued…
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Ironically Howling at the Moon with An American Werewolf in London

American Werewolf in London 2
An American Werewolf in London

The soundtrack to John Landis’s much-loved horror comedy inventively subverts the clichés of the genre.

John Landis’s 1981 classic horror film An American Werewolf in London was something of a pet project: the script was written by the director many years before but the studio thought it either too funny or too scary to green light. Following the success of National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980), Landis found himself with a carte blanche for his next project. Despite its odd comedy/horror mix An American Werewolf in London became yet another box-office smash. In 1981 it was a film everyone was talking about – particularly horror makeup man Rick Baker’s first-rate gore and the great man-to-wolf transformation scene. Landis and Baker would team up again in 1983 to zombify Michael Jackson in Thriller.

After all these years the inventiveness of the film remains striking. It is clearly in the horror genre and yet sidesteps cliché at every turn, and nowhere more memorably than with the soundtrack. There’s no scary music; instead we get mood music so subtle it is hardly noticeable and handful of pop songs with the word ‘moon’ in the title. All great songs and used with irony and humour.

The film opens with a shot of the moors, but not the foggy storm-battered moors of horror classics. These hills are pleasant and green and lit by a slowly setting sun. These shots are accompanied by the first of the film’s three moon songs, Bobby Vinton’s classy 1963 version of ‘Blue Moon’. It was recorded for his ‘blue’ concept album along with his hit records ‘Blue on Blue’ and of course ‘Blue Velvet’. This smooth, sweet, almost sugary confection stands as a paradigm of American pop music between rock’n’roll and the British invasion. With its lush production complete with subtle tasteful instrumentation and backing vocals whispering ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, this is perhaps the piece of music with the least tension ever to open a horror film.

There is a gap of an hour featuring a visit to a pub, a wolf attack and a few dream sequences before the next song accompanies the young lovers: the werewolf attack survivor and his nurse take a shower to Van Morrison’s 1970 ‘Moondance’. Although less obviously ironic than the other songs its light jazzy swing is certainly at odds with the typical wailing saxophone that usually enhanced such scenes in 1981. The third moon song follows shortly after. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s apocalyptic stomp ‘Bad Moon Rising’ (1969) accompanies our lycanthrope as he spends a weekday afternoon battling boredom (he even tries British daytime television), a strange restlessness and lack of appetite. It is a truly great song and a great stripped-down production with one of the best drum sounds ever recorded, and it is completely at odds with the scene. Boredom never seemed so much fun.

Two more versions of ‘Blue Moon’ follow. Sam Cooke’s unique soulful phrasing plays over the painful transformation scene. And after the heartbreaking ending, the end titles are accompanied by the famous ‘bom-di-di-bom’ of The Marcels’ upbeat doo-wop version. It is now the most famous version of the song written in the mid-30s by show-tune specialists Rodgers and Hart. The joyful ending seems so perfect for a film imbued with the love of making movies. Landis’s career went from strength to strength and many more box-office successes followed. Those subsequent films were tight and entertaining but his love of cinema was never again so obvious.

Paul Huckerby

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A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: Interview with Ana Lily Amirpour

Girl
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour

Writer: Ana Lily Amirpour

Cast: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Moshan Marno, Dominic Rains

Iran, USA 2014

100 mins

After enchanting festival audiences around the world, Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour’s acclaimed debut feature A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night finally comes to UK screens. Shot in gorgeous black and white, this Farsi-language tale about a chador-wearing skateboarding vampire drifting in the desperate world of Bad City creates a seductive, singular world out of an eclectic mix of influences that include comics, David Lynch and Italian Western music.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Amirpour at the London Film Festival in October 2014, where they discussed places of the mind, the magic of music and the loneliness of humans.

Virginie Sélavy: You’ve described your film as an Iranian vampire Western. The first two elements are fairly clear, but in what way do you see it as a Western?

Ana Lily Amirpour: I think it’s definitely the music that was such a defining characteristic. The musical spine throughout the whole film was Federale’s awesome Ennio Morricone-esque music. I think there is that slow-cooking construction that a Western does as well, but it’s more the music.

Why did you choose to shoot in America but in the Farsi language?

I don’t think a film is the real world, a film is a world of the mind of a person. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is supposedly in LA, but it’s the LA of his mind. So I think this is a dark fairy tale and it’s a place of my mind. I’m part Iranian and part American and born in England, and it’s like a soup of so many things. What’s so awesome about the film is that it doesn’t have any loyalty to the real world and it doesn’t have to. It’s like a dream, it’s just consistent to itself.

You grew up in California.

I had my period there, yeah. [laughs]

So where did you spend most of your childhood and adolescence?

I think where you have your puberty and period is a big part of it. I was in Miami before that, but I was just a kid. When I hit puberty I was in Bakersfield, in California – there’s this redneck desert, farming, malls, I was going to a mall, I wore short cowboy boots, and there’s also all the Mexican gangs, and all the Mexican girls that I was mixed up with because I was brown, the cholas, the gang girls with lipstick, they’d push me and all that [laughs].

It’s interesting that you grew up in America and that the Iranian part of your identity is a place of the mind for you.

It’s a weird thing about Iranian culture. We’re one of those cultures like Italian or Jewish, we have very strong families, aggressively imposing families, in an awesome way. So I always had my Iranian-ness in that way, my grand-mother and my aunt and everybody, and the dinners and the noises and everything. But I never had the place itself. There was a weird thing that happened when I made this film. It became this imaginary limbo. I felt like I was making my own country in a way. Here’s the rules, and here’s the citizens, and now is the place and everyone can come and visit, and if you like it, stay… Other people in the film were similar. Arash [Marandi] was in Germany, his family lived there, and Dominic [Rains] went to Texas and Sheila [Vand] was born in California, very similar to me. I think everybody liked how it was like getting to have a place that was Iranian. Because even when I went to Iran I didn’t feel like it was my country… It’s something else. But I am Iranian. What am I? [laughs]

I liked the chador for the vampire because it’s very visual, but it’s also very interesting because it is a piece of clothing that has become a symbol for the oppression of women and in your film it becomes a superhero cape.

And a brilliant disguise. No one is going to expect it from her. For me it was just because I put one on – I had one as a prop in a movie and put it on for the first time. It felt like a stingray, I instantly felt like a creature. It moves, and it’s made of a different kind of fabric, it’s very soft and it catches the wind, and it’s beautiful. And I just felt like a badass. And then I thought, this would be an Iranian vampire, this is it, it’s this girl. And the whole idea for the film started with this character. I don’t even like black in my movies. But it’s black and I just pictured it against white, and so it had to be a black and white movie. And the whole thing about whether, like you said, it’s something that symbolizes oppression for women, I think somebody who is Muslim maybe wouldn’t feel that way. You feel that way because that’s what you are bringing. I do like flipping the script, but it’s about something else. In this world, with all these people and all these countries and all these places, we come up with systems on how to exist as people, the clothes people wear, the bumper stickers on the cars, saying ‘This is who I am’, ‘This is what I believe’. But with all of us, if you start peeling it back like an onion there’s weird, weirdo, weird shit inside all of us. And if you get into the inside, and see the weird shit, usually it calls to question the system that’s on the outside, and that’s what I find interesting.

I like the fact that there’s so little dialogue in the film.

It’s weird because I noticed that I have an aversion to it, and yet I talk a lot. When I was a kid my dad called me ‘Chatterbox’, and I had that New Year’s resolution many years to talk less and listen more, and then there’s this stuff, which is really self-indulgent. I love Sergio Leone and I love David Lynch, and I feel they do similar things with the soundscape and the sound design and the music. If you really think of it as a character in itself you have to create space for it. In Once upon a Time in the West Leone was playing that music when Claudia Cardinale was coming on the train in that sequence when she arrives in town. He had that epic piece already made and he was playing it for her to move to the music, so if you make films that way you’re thinking of it like a character and you make space for it. I also love Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue, I could listen to it all the time, and Woody Allen’s films, they talk all the time, it’s a different thing, it works well, but not in my own films so far. Actors were like, ‘I want to fucking say some lines,’ because they want to talk, they don’t want to just stand there. But what you don’t realise is that the less you’re saying the more you’re saying.

THe lack of dialogue makes the film more powerful. In the case of Sheila Vand in particular, if she was talking more, she would be less menacing.

She was always such a creature. I’m very close with her. She’s hypnotic, I can just stare at her face, stare at her eyes, infinitely. And there’s a sadness and a lonely, aching dissatisfaction to her that I find extremely charming and beautiful and self-destructive. The biggest thing was that, it’s supernatural, it’s not human, and she is a human, so my only concern was, ‘you’re a creature, no matter what, at all times, in all scenes’. So we were watching cobra videos on YouTube, and they follow your hand and imitate the movement, and looking at the tension of it too because they can strike fast.

The film seems to have a very melancholy view of human relationships, and it seems to show how those two isolated characters slowly learn to trust each other. Is that what you wanted to put in the film?

That’s my favourite part, when you say stuff like that, it’s the most interesting time for me. I love what people say about the film. My relationship to my film is like my relationship to my reflection in the mirror, like how others look at you. Yeah I have loneliness, and being a person is so singular and lonely in a way, fundamentally. And also when you’re making stuff you go even more into your little mind tunnels. I think I just want magic and meaningful connections and intimacy and it’s so hard, and life can be so automated. And it’s terrifying. That’s why I love music because it’s that and it’s instantly that. And it’s really special when it happens with other people because that’s really rare. But music does give me this feeling of freedom and comfort.

For that lovely scene of the first intimate moment between Arash and The Girl, when he comes up behind her in her room as she plays a record, you chose ‘Death’ by White Lies. Why that particular song?

It’s a really great song. I heard it when I was living in Germany the year before I made the film. It has this vintage nostalgia, it’s a new song but it has this feeling of synth-pop from the 80s. It just felt like the feeling of falling in love but in an adolescent way, it has a high school love feeling, it’s this innocent John Hughes kind of feeling. That’s what they are to me, those two. Because it’s so dumb in a way to fall in love, it’s two people who have no clue who each other are, so it’s that dumb, sweet, nostalgic love.

Why the title?

It’s so weird because I made a short film that was called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, it was five minutes long, in black and white. It was after I put that chador on and I thought of that character. I thought it’d be so cool to have her in a park and some man starts following her, through the streets, into a building and then into an apartment, and then right when he enters into the apartment she turns around and eats him. I was telling Sina [Sayyah], my producer, and I was explaining ‘and there’s this girl, and she walks home alone at night’, and then I was, ‘that’s it, that’s the title’.

The secondary characters are very interesting, there is something very rich about them. This is particularly true of Atti, the prostitute, because it is hinted that there are many things in her past, and it feels like she could be the main character of another film.

I feel like that about all of them, they are all the main characters in their own films. And they all had extremely detailed back stories, every single one of them. Atti watched her mother kill her father when she was 14 years old. She has a very intense and long story that ended her the way she is. But she is also a pragmatic, sensible, tough type of hero. I feel like it’s hard to ruffle her feathers. I love the pimp so much too, he is a fetish of mine.

Why?

The character was based on Ninja from Die Antwoord, the South African rap-rave duo. I’m a huge fan and I love Ninja, and I modelled Saeed a lot after him. I knew he was going to be this scary gangster because he looks so intense, so I made Dominic watch Friends because Saeed loves the show and Russ is his favourite character, and six weeks after the shooting he was still watching Friends. It was just to bring it down and make it sweet because it’s impossible, if you look like that you’re going to be taken a certain way.

The two women characters, the Girl and Atti, seem to know more than the male characters, they seem more aware of the forces that move them, whereas the male characters seem more confused about what is happening around them.

Yeah, I would say that’s interesting. The girls are cleverer. I read one time that the men seem more open and vulnerable, and the women are more closed-up and hard to read. I think both are astute observations. I feel that they’re also lonely. It was the one common thing that they all had, stages of it becoming crusty, a loneliness that becomes so stiff it’s really difficult to change.

The soundtrack to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is available from Death Waltz.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Watch the trailer:

Check it out, Cinema releases, Interviews

Rigor Mortis: Interview with Juno Mak

Rigor Mortis
Rigor Mortis

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 April 2015

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Juno Mak

Writers: Philip Yung, Jill Leung, Juno Mak

Cast: Chin Siu-ho, Anthony Chan, Kara Hui

Hong Kong 2013

101 mins

Cantopop star, record producer, Hong Kong fashion designer, actor and writer: the multifaceted Juno Mak makes his directorial debut with Rigor Mortis, an elegant dramatic horror film that’s both a melancholic story of bereavement and a sombre love letter to Ricky Lau’s hopping vampire classic Mr. Vampire (1985).

Mark Player talks to Juno Mak about reuniting the cast of Mr. Vampire, working with J-horror icon Takashi Shimizu and, of course, hopping vampires.

Mark Player: You first began your career in the music industry before branching out into acting. What made you then decide to transition to directing?

Juno Mak: I never went to university; I started working when I was 18. Fortunately, I got signed under Universal Music and when I was 17, I spent a year in Japan doing all sorts of training – signing, dancing and speaking Japanese. Then I started working as a singer. But to me, I guess, throughout all these years, composing a melody, singing a song, or producing music, writing a script, being an actor, or being a director and a producer all goes back to being creative. It’s just a different way to express creativity; sometimes through music, sometimes through visuals.

Even before Rigor Mortis you seemed keen to start to writing scripts for films, for instance, Revenge: A Love Story (2010), which you also starred in.

Revenge: A Love Story was a great experience. I was very lucky because that was my first script and I wrote it without knowing whether it would be made into a film or not. There wasn’t such a genre in the market at that moment, so I just wrote it out of curiosity. Luckily we found a producer and investor who were interested in such an extreme, depressed, heavy genre film. It was done with a very low budget and we shot only for 19 days, I believe. Being able to make Revenge: A Love Story was very surprising for me, as was the film festival circuit after we finished production. We got invited to the Moscow International Film Festival. That was my first time attending a film festival and we were fortunate to get the Screenplay Award; the director, Wong Ching-po, won Best Director as well. We also attended the Puchon International Film Festival in South Korea and won another award for Best Actor. Soon I was approached by different producers. They were looking to do a sequel to Revenge: A Love Story, which was difficult for me because I’ve never really believed in doing sequels. Other producers asked me what kind of genre I would like to explore if I could write something of my own will,? That’s when I brought up the hopping vampire (jiangshi) genre, which was very popular during the 1980s but has been gone for almost 30 years. They were willing to let me explore this genre and that’s how Rigor Mortis started.

Rigor Mortis explicitly references – and even subverts – tropes from that Golden Age of jiangshi films you just mentioned, specifically the Mr. Vampire series. It’s very self-referential and very… meta, let’s say. Where did the idea for this approach come from?

At first, it’s about my childhood. I grew up in Vancouver and Mr. Vampire played a big part in my childhood. Renting it on VHS, I watched it so many times that I guess it just got stuck in my mind. I am very familiar with the hopping vampire genre and when I was approached to create Rigor Mortis, I started giving it a lot of thought again. I don’t believe Rigor Mortis is a remake of Mr. Vampire. Since the original film was so popular and great, I didn’t think it was necessary to do one. Approaching this genre, I felt that I had to have a different point of view. Mr. Vampire is more of a comical horror type of film and Rigor Mortis became a heavier, more humane type of film. But by reuniting the original cast of Mr. Vampire, I believe that there’s a certain homage. Sadly, some of the main actors from the film have passed away and others have retired.

Yes, I noticed that you pay tribute to those that have passed in the end credits (Ricky Hui and Lam Ching-ying). But you did manage to reunite actors Chin Siu-ho, Anthony Chan, Richard Ng and Billy Lau from Mr. Vampire. How did it feel to work with these childhood heroes?

It was beautiful. Again, I don’t believe in remaking such a classic, but by reuniting the cast, I felt I got a cast that was much older and more experienced. Most of them are now over 50, and seeing the wrinkles on their faces was just so beautiful. I wanted to make the film about people who have entered a certain age and are quite confused or uncertain about the future. They are broken, basically.

Chin Siu-ho plays a washed-up version of himself, and is also suicidal and mentally disturbed. What was his reaction when you first gave him the script?

We had worked together before. He played a role in Revenge: A Love Story, and that’s how I first met him. He’s always been an action figure, even in the original Mr. Vampire. So when I told him the idea for Rigor Mortis, it was a huge challenge for him because I’m not in for the action, or the stunts; I was more into the idea of him as this fictional character. He lives very happily with his family, so the whole depressive, washed-up side of him is my fictional point of view.

It took me quite a while to get him to open up about his feelings and how he could be more emotionally naked in front of the camera. He’s very healthy and very into sports, and he’s very happy with his family. So I had to make him look depressed as quickly as possible because we only had about three weeks of pre-production. I feel really sorry about it now, but we basically had to torture him to make him very depressive. We consulted three different doctors on the fastest way to break down a person and they all came up with the same solution, which was to not let him sleep. So during pre-production, we had to break up his sleep every two hours. We’d call him and have him stay on the phone for at least 10 minutes before he could get back to sleep, and then we would call him again two hours later. He also went on a diet so the whole process was definitely a torture. But it turned him into what he looks like in Rigor Mortis within three weeks. It was a cold-hearted decision, but he understood.

There’s a scene right near the start of the film when he is unpacking old film costumes that his character has kept over the years. Were they the genuine article?

Some, yes. Some I had to remake because they didn’t keep a lot of the costumes from the original Mr. Vampire. So some of them were the originals and others were the result of my own interpretation from the films I remembered seeing him in as a child. When it came to the hopping vampire, we ended up doing a whole new costume design.

Because horror films tend to be very transnational in their appeal, was it a case of trying to strike a balance between, on the one hand, making a film that was rooted in Chinese folklore and, on the other, making something that a modern international horror audience aren’t going to scoff at or find a bit silly? There’s certainly a lot less hopping in Rigor Mortis than in Mr. Vampire.

I believe it’s definitely more towards the drama side as opposed to the horror side. I didn’t make this film intentionally to be horror. I’m not really into the blood, the gore, or making you jump in your seat. There are moments like that in Rigor Mortis but those are not my main concern. My main concern is about this group of people. For example, I wanted to see how Nina Paw’s character [the widow who wants to resurrect her dead husband in the film] transforms from a really friendly person into a really evil one. Even with Anthony Chan’s character, you can see they are all about the fear of losing, or not knowing what to do about their lives. So definitely Rigor Mortis is about drama and these lost souls instead of just horror thrills.

Having said that, you co-produced the film with Japanese horror cinema veteran Takashi Shimizu, perhaps most famous for Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) and its various permutations. How did he get involved, and what did he bring to the project?

Takashi Shimizu got on board right after I finished shooting the film, so as a producer he joined us pretty late. He worked mostly on the post-production with me. I met him in Japan. I guess the reason he was interested in the project is that the hopping vampire genre plays a big part in Japanese pop culture as well, so people there recognise it too. With Ju-on, he has become a popular name in the horror genre, but deep down I believe he tends to want to work on a more character-driven story that’s heavy on drama. So when he read the script for Rigor Mortis, he saw the elements in it that are more than just thrills, blood and gore. I believe he’s always wanted to make films that are more than just horror. And of course with his experience and insights, he assisted me with things like sound design, the colour tone and the CGI.

So, I guess Rigor Mortis is a revival or sorts for jiangshi films?

The genre has been gone for a long time. It used to be a very commercial and popular genre in Hong Kong. Why did it disappear? That was my main question when I was working on the script. When we were in post-production, we got the announcement from the Venice Film Festival that the film had been selected to play there. That was a big triumph for the team because it had been a very long shoot. We had shot for 70 days, and post-production was almost a year. We never really expected it, and from there the film had a life of its own. It went from Venice to Toronto, then to Tokyo and Taiwan, and then it came back to Hong Kong for the premiere. I guess what connects this film to the audience is more than just the hopping vampire genre, it’s also the characters, the love among these older people. I guess it’s a very universal topic. Of course, at the same time it has a sort of mythical essence to it that got people’s attention.

The film is incredibly stylish and features a lot of special effects sequences. Was this daunting, considering that you were directing for the first time?

Yes… I guess it was like a mission, or a goal for me to achieve. During pre-production, that’s what I wanted, even with the minor details. We’ve seen at lot of hopping vampires from those original films and we absolutely understand the way they hop, but is there another way that we could show it? For our film, we put the hopping vampire in a water tank because I really wanted that slow-motion effect for his clothing and the way he moves. It was a very difficult moment, and because no one had ever done something like that in Hong Kong cinema before, we had to design and build our own tank. But since you can’t really hop in water, we had to use eight wires and four scuba divers to push the stuntman forward in order to present that hopping visual. That’s just one example, but there are lots of minor details like this throughout the whole film. The concern I had as a first-time director was that I wanted people to tell the difference between this film and the other hopping vampire films that came before it. I had plenty of ideas for the visuals and, fortunately, my producers were very patient with me. It was an experiment for all of us because a lot of the things that I wanted to do hadn’t been done before in the Hong Kong film industry. So I am very grateful for having such a great team.

Another element to the film’s style that shouldn’t be overlooked is the apartment block that the whole story takes place in. Was it a real location?

It was based on an actual place. We went location scouting and looked at a lot of housing compounds in Hong Kong, and that was fascinating to me. However, there were technical issues to consider and although these places looked interesting, there wouldn’t be a lot of space for the camera, lighting or the wire rigs. So we had to build our own corridor and all the apartments along it. I guess what you see in the film is about 20% real housing compound and about 80% on set.

What’s next for you? Are you looking to continue directing?

It’s kind of funny, in a sense. When travelling with the film to festivals, I was approached to do a Rigor Mortis sequel. That’s when I realised that I don’t have much more that I want to express in this genre. I want to move on to a different genre, so I have started work on a new script that has nothing to do with Rigor Mortis, or ghosts, or vampires; it’s more of an epic crime thriller. The first cut we did of Rigor Mortis was three hours long and had a lot more character development and extra scenes. I got many people asking if they could see this longer cut. At a certain point it became a pressure for me because I felt like I needed to take a break from it. I may revisit it later, after directing some other films, and maybe I’ll get a different perspective on it. The script I’m working on now is going to be a long shoot. The scale, the budget, the cast, the story, the shooting days, and the technical difficulties I think will be 10 times heavier than Rigor Mortis, so that’s my main focus at the moment. The working title for it is Sons of the Neon Night.

Interview by Mark Player

Watch the trailer:

Check it out, Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada

Interview with Canadian Genre Writer Tony Burgess

Ejecta 2

Greg Klymkiw’s Colonial Report (on cinema) from the Dominion of Canada

The Dominion of Canada is one massive cesspool of alternately creepy and majestic wilderness. In one isolated corner of the colonies, evil permeates the very soil upon which the foundations of Canada are built.

It is in this seemingly innocuous burgh where we find an all-night disc jockey trapped in an isolated, rural radio station while a virus rages outdoors, sending its victims into states of madness, violence and almost superhuman strength.

Not too far away is the nefarious local factory, providing most of the community’s livelihood, but spilling its foul industrial waste into its faulty septic system, which unloads into the watershed, whereupon a brave septic man plunges into the bowels of the system and gradually turns into a hideously deformed monster, half man, half shit.

There is, of course, a multitude of decrepit graveyards in the burgh, and one unlucky crypt keeper becomes an unlikely hero against a network of evil that leads to the very maw of Hell.

And then, there are the alien visitations.

Ejecta is available in North America and Canada on DVD + Blu-ray (A/1) via Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada, IFC Midnight (USA) and Raven Banner Entertainment (World Sales). It is also available in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray (B/2), released by Signature Entertainment earlier this year.
Pontypool is available on DVD (Region 1 or 2), released in 2010.

These four respective tales of horror, Pontypool, Septic Man, Hellmouth and Ejecta, all spring from the diseased brain of one of Canada’s most celebrated novelists and screenwriters. The first film was directed by Canada’s King of Rock ‘n’ Road movies, Bruce (Roadkill, Highway 61, Hard Core Logo) McDonald. The three other films were spawned by Foresight Features, an independent south-western Ontario production company headed by Jesse T. Cook, John Geddes and Matthew Wiele, three 30-year-old gents who love horror movies as much, if not more, than life itself.

They have an unholy alliance as filmmakers with the aforementioned author.

Tony Burgess lives in Stayner, Ontario. It’s just to the south of where the mighty Bruce Peninsula begins. Yes, The Bruce is the very pioneer territory I do my writing from. Stayner itself is situated quite conveniently next door to Collingwood, Ontario, home and production headquarters of Foresight Features.

Mr Burgess has agreed to a few pulls from a jug of local shine and to chat with me about the science-fiction horror thriller Ejecta.

* * *

Greg Klymkiw: One of the many reasons Ejecta resonates with me, especially in terms of the writing – character, dialogue in particular – is that it comes from a place that FEELS legit. Sure, everyone is fascinated with the notion of other worlds, aliens, etc… God knows, even as a kid, the 50s-60s science fiction I watched and/or read fuelled me, as did the nutcase Erich von Daniken. But during the past 15 years or so, I became hooked on the Art Bell/George Noory ‘Coast-to-Coast A.M.’ radio program, and via that unhealthy obsession, I became quite an avid reader of the Graham Hancock books, especially his Fingerprints of the Gods and The Mars Mystery tomes about pyramids on Mars and how humans come from Martians. And, Jesus, I’ve even read a whack of stuff from Zecharia Sitchin, that nutcase who’s written a zillion books about ancient races of aliens on Earth who seeded all of humanity with their interplanetary love juices. I’ve even read scholarly works like Life beyond Earth: The Search for Habitable Worlds in the Universe by Athena Coustenis and Therese Encrenaz who are astro-biologists. Like, really, I love there’s actually a legit scientific field dealing with extraterrestrial life. And, of course, I’m crazy about the beautifully written books by physicist Michio Kaku, who makes my worst subject in high school completely understandable, albeit 35 years after the fact. In book after book Kaku links physics to stuff like parallel universe theory, the shitload of dimensions that exist but that we can’t even begin to comprehend, and all sorts of other neat factoids pointing to life outside of our own measly planet. So given all that, Ejecta feels very real and, as such, is really fucking scary.

Tony Burgess: Well, generally I’d say that working in genre film and novels, the first fascination on any given project is always some conceptual novelty… but once you start batting away at it, you realise that it all has to be happening to someone in a way you/they are compelled to believe in. And that can be done no matter how stretched the reality is. I call it the toilet rule: is it is more riveting to be invisible in a bathroom watching someone wash their face than it is to listen to the Mercury Theatre radio play of War of the Worlds? So everything I do has to have a scene like that – where you’re with someone and nothing is happening – and if it’s not mesmerising somehow, then nothing is. For example, an owl in the attic that frightens a babysitter for two hours can work. So can time-travelling Sasquatch robots. Just hang out in the bathroom for a while to see if you’re getting the job done.

What fuelled your need to write Ejecta?

Well, in this case many of the story elements were brought to me. Initially co-director Matt Wiele approached me with an eye to making a found-footage alien feature. We then did what’s become a ritual between me and Foresight Features. We met at dawn, hammered a few pots of coffee back and then drove a few story pylons into the ground. Around 4pm or so, when were fairly sure we could trust ’em to be sturdy, we pulled out the whiskey – we affectionately called it ‘pull’ – and then we drank our way through the finer points of the story until the wee hours. It’s an excellent way of building a stable structure, then decorating it madly.

Gotta love those frilly dollops of icing on the cake, eh? Those delectables you leave for last.

Ah, but alas, as Alex in A Clockwork Orange says, ‘we then got to the long and weepy part of our story’. We realized once we put everything that I’d written into the can, not enough footage had been shot. We didn’t have anything resembling a feature length. So we had meetings, fights, meetings, fights, pull, meetings, fights, suicide watch, pull, more meetings, more fights, more pull etc., until we came up with the wrap-around story.

Uh, the rest of the movie, eh?

It ended up being a hell of a ride. And you know, the film is very close to my heart.

How so?

What I wanted was to dramatically explore the idea of aliens meeting inside a human mind, that the brain of an individual is really just another room in a building for them. I also liked the feel of a single night in a single place that starts to feel broken up, and perilous. There was a trick I was trying too, which became necessary in part because it’s a film swallowed by a film, and that is the notion of NOW not EVER being verifiable. The timeline is sort of like a Moebius comic… ending on the moment it started, but if you parse its linearity it has to be ending LATER.

Why do YOU think the aliens like the room of William Cassidy’s mind? I like that they DO like it, but I must admit that while watching the movie, I also like that I’m not always sure WHY they like it. It’s only in retrospect that I can figure out why, or at least, figure out ‘why’ in terms of the things you’ve provided in the script with respect to his character. Still, this inquiring mind needs to know. Why do YOU think the aliens like his ‘room’?

It’s one of those things that really is just suggested and not verified by the film, which, I agree, is preferable. Is it his location? Is it a feature of his personality? His reclusiveness? Hmm, actually, I’d kinda rather hear your answer than mine.

Well, I’d get a kick out of having some tea and crumpets in Julian Richings’s mind.

I love it that Julian’s been in every Foresight Features movie I’ve written to date.

Goddam, he is a great actor, a super crazy-ass fucker.

It never hurts having Julian Richings howling out from the derailed train [laughs, almost demonically]. It was sort of cubist in a way… a broken lens that allowed timelines and POVS to scramble the present image. It rhymes with the way thought takes on the characteristic of a place. The mind is a great place to house beings that can choose to ignore their surroundings. I can also put it this way: HOW the film was made resembles what is IN the film. One film has no idea that it’s in the other film, and that’s also how the central struggle is constructed. The aliens inside Julian’s character have little understanding of who or what he is. He’s a room. His mind is a room that they like, for whatever reason, finally.

Were the various POVs employed directly linked to infusing the movie with the creepy-crawly sense of reality which pervades the piece?

Oh yes, for sure. And you know, it was such great fun to work with two directors [Wiele and Chad Archibald], because it forced me to think about two incommensurate directorial styles of storytelling in the same story – the film within the film, or rather the film enveloping the film, the wrap-around, which is the real-time aspect of the story. That it works is certainly the willingness of everyone to entertain big engineering feats and leaps of faith.

Have you always been ‘obsessed’ with alien encounters in the ‘normal’ way many people are, or have you ever, or continue to be, ‘unhealthily’ obsessed with aliens?

To tell you the truth, I am a stone-cold sceptic: I don’t believe in ghosts, aliens, God, reincarnation… anything. I just see all those things, at least in the way they’re talked about, as being too important to the person talking. Oddly, I live in a ‘haunted house’ and hear voices, footsteps, etc. almost daily and I still point a finger of blame at my house rather than in the direction of any paranormal shenanigans. I do, however, believe in some very peculiar sensations I have from time to time that suggest massive differences between what is is and what we think is.

I used to experience hearing voices on the old Windfields estate where Uncle Normie Jewison has his film school, the Canadian Film Centre. When I used to work there alone at odd hours, I could never hear precisely what was being said, but I could tell the sex, the rough age-range and the emotional state of the voices. In your house, can you make out any words in the voices you hear? Or rather, WHAT do you hear?

I hear very natural snippets of conversation. I can’t make out what is said and my impression is that I am not expected to. I also hear, all the time, footsteps upstairs and furniture move. I would say I hear something every day. I have even yelled ‘Quiet!’ without ever compromising my scepticism.

Have you read any of the decent non-fiction on the subject of other worlds, parallel universe, etc.?

I did go through a period, yes, of reading all that. My wife and children are avid believers, so I get exposed to lots of alien hunter-type stuff. I can freak myself out easily but I think that’s explained to a willing suspension of disbelief. I am a classic want-to-believe type so I have all the time in the world for those that do.

Living in Winnipeg for so many decades and now in the middle of fucking nowhere on the northern tip of the Bruce Peninsula, I am always looking at the sky. Do YOU also look to the skies where you live in Stayner?

Well, yes, of course. A friend of mine once claimed to have seen something in the sky up here. For years he thought that if he submerged his head in a bathtub those beings would communicate with him [laughs]. Sort of ‘Close Encounters of The Drownsman’. Not a bad idea… [The Drownsman is a recent Canadian horror thriller about a Freddy/Jason-type who drags cute, young babes into water and drowns them.]

It seems Ejecta adheres to the J. Allen Hynek triple-header of close encounters. How conscious were you of injecting it into the screenplay?

Not very, except that those classifications are now part of how we all imagine an encounter. The idea of contact. This is the threshold all faiths enshrined. The trail that leads to the thing. The indexical sign. The holy relic and the spectral photobomb. I have stood at the bottom of the stairs and yelled `Shut up!’ but even that is too soft to be contact.

Am I just being too egg-headed about this?

[Laughs] Yeah, totally.

Forgive the yellow viscous oospore of my line of questioning. Does Ejecta simply come from a cool idea that morphed into what it became?

Well, yes of course, but I do believe that the process of constructing a story attracts other kinds of stories, pulls at shadow elements, sneaky resonances, that if you tune things right, will reveal themselves. Is it about something? I can only answer that as a member of the audience.

Do you write for yourself? Are YOU the audience?

Oh, I think both. There are elements, especially things I don’t want to fully understand, that I create as a member of the audience, and things for myself, which are illegible, half-lit ideas.

Did the style of cinematic storytelling employed have more to do with exigencies of low-budget production or is it more deeply linked to my aforementioned thoughts on creating a sense of reality?

Well, the two don’t cancel each other out. It’s so very hard, especially with film, to know exactly what you are making. You prep things and talk about things then you push it all in front of a light for a few moments. What is it? If you want it to feel that it is something, that it’s a good idea, then it always helps to have people who can think on their toes, turn on a dime and do it with immediate conviction. This really was a great team to work with.

I’ve been impressed and obsessed with the Foresight Features guys since they started making movies. Here they are in Collingwood, Ontario, all pals, making cool shit in the middle of nowhere. It really reminds me of other pockets of regional, low-budget waves like Romero, Tony Buba and company in Pittsburgh, and certainly all the Winnipeg wackos like myself, Maddin and Paizs, plus, of course the Astron-6 nut bars. You clearly love working with these guys. To what extent is the region of Collingwood/Stayner an influence upon what you write and what those guys make?

These guys are my brothers now. When I had a heart attack a few months ago, I got sprung three days after the surgery and it was THEM, all three of ’em, who drove down to the hospital in Newmarket to get me home. So those relationships now go beyond creative partnerships. But yeah, how we work, where we work, it often reminds me of those eccentric bands of characters who spring up locally and do shit the way they want to. I think of John Waters and his Dreamland gang too. And yes, being here, doing it all here changes everything. It marks everything. It’s in my books too. It was certainly a part of Pontypool. The names, the people, the streets, the buildings; you make shit in your backyard.

Was there a piece of writing or movie that was some kind of epiphany for you in terms of pursuing writing and the kind of stuff you write?

When I was a teenager I thought I was insane, so I sought out things I could read that would help me cultivate the insanity rather than fear it. You know, all the usual stuff a kid might read: Alfred Jarry, Jean Genet, Isidore Ducasse. Surrealists provided the survival guides I needed to shore up my crumbling personality and mind. And from early childhood I was always a horror fan. I used to hide in my room at night, all night, and make those plastic monster models.

Moi aussi, dude. I loved all those Aurora models from the Universal Pictures monster movies of the 30s and 40s.

I couldn’t help but associate horror films with supercharged unnatural events that I was actually experiencing. The airplane glue I used to put the monster models together would make me hallucinate when I woke up in the middle of the night, which I almost always did.

Yeah, like who doesn’t?

You asked if I had any epiphanies? Oh yeah! Dracula would be staring me down from the end of my bed and the Hunchback of Notre Dame would be springing around my room like some deformed toad on crystal meth.

Interview by Greg Klymkiw

Check it out, Reel Sounds

Silent Night, Deadly Night

SilentNight_DeathWaltz
Silent Night, Deadly Night

Format: Double LP + CD

Release date: 8 December 2014

Label: Death Waltz Recording Co. via mondotees.com

‘You’ve made it through Halloween, now try and survive Christmas,’ croaks the voice-over at the end of the trailer for 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night, the controversial slasher movie. The film itself is pretty ordinary, but the ad campaign had parent groups across America up in arms, fearful their children would be exposed to a homicidal Santa Claus. On the Siskel and Ebert show, Siskel said: ‘Showing Santa with an axe, on free TV, is sick, sleazy and mean-spirited’ before going on to name and shame Tristar Pictures, Columbia Pictures, CBS and HBO for making it.

The music made for the film comprises two very different offerings: 1) Perry Botkin’s synth dominated score; 2) Morgan Ames’s 80s AOR. Botkin has worked as an arranger with Harry Nilsson, Bobby Darin and Carly Simon; and on TV shows such as Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. His work with The Carpenters on the title track of the film Bless the Beasts and Children got him an Academy Award Nomination in 1971. The Silent Night, Deadly Night chaotic jumble of baroque electronic sounds is a whole other world in comparison to his previous output. Its power lies in the jarring and elaborate tonal changes. This is encapsulated in the opening ‘Main Title’, which discordantly attacks from the moment there is sound, but soon descends into an icy, serene electric piano track. In contrast, the rumbling and distorted ‘Never Stop for Strangers’ strips itself down to absolute minimalism by the time it ends. Whatever the tone or shade, it’s always chilling and troubling.

Californian Morgan Ames has written, performed, and/or collaborated with Quincy Jones, Roberta Flack and Al Jarreau. Her 10 tracks take in a gamut of 80s AOR tropes. ‘Slayrider’ is the obvious fist-pumping anthem. However, ‘The Warm Side of the Door’ is a particularly addictive power ballad sounding like Johnny Mathis’s ‘When A Child Is Born’ meets Michael Macdonald. You’ll swear blind ‘Christmas Flu’ is a lost Bob Seger holiday song. Equally moreish is the cod-calypso rock sound of ‘Christmas Party’. The a capella of ‘Santa’s Watching’ is straight out of the songbook of Ames’s jazz vocal group, Inner Voices (coincidentally known for their annual Christmas shows in LA).

Double vinyl is limited to 400 and is strictly a one-off pressing for Christmas 2014. Liner notes are by Botkin, Co-executive Producer Scott Schneid and the writer Michael Hickey. It also features a selection of original reviews, including many of those calling for the film to be banned.

Read our Reel Sounds column on other Death Waltz releases including the scores to Ms. 45, Halloween III and The Fog.

Stuart Wright

Check it out, DVD and Blu-ray releases, Interviews

Nekromantik: Interview with Jörg Buttgereit

Nekromantik
Jörg Buttgereit (left)

Format: 3-disc digipak (Blu-ray, DVD, CD)

Release date: 15 December 2014

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Jörg Buttgereit

Writers: Jörg Buttgereit, Franz Rodenkirchen

Based on the novel by: Thea von Harbou

Cast: Daktari Lorenz, Beatrice Manowski, Harald Lundt

Germany 1987

75 mins

Just in time for Christmas, Arrow Video are releasing Jörg Buttgereit’s legendary underground sex-and-death shocker Nekromantik on Blu-ray and DVD for the first time in the UK. Banned in a number of countries, the film was never officially banned in Britain, having never been submitted to the BBFC, although any imported copies would have been seized by British customs. Shot with friends on Super8 in the greatest underground tradition, the story of necrophiles Rob and Betty, and the corpse that comes between them, became notorious and sought after for its outrageously grisly imagery. This release, 27 years after its creation, finally makes widely available a film that has much more to offer than shock for shock’s sake.

Virginie Sélavy talks to Jörg Buttgereit about the naivety of serial killers, disappointing people’s expectations and the academic theory that saved him from jail.

Virginie Sélavy: What’s your reaction to the fact that Nekromantik is getting an official Blu-ray release in the UK?

Jörg Buttgereit: The idea of releasing it on Blu-ray is something we had in mind for quite a while. It took ages because we did our old master from the Super8 film stock, which is not negative but positive film stock, because Super8 is made for daddy’s home films from the 70s, so you don’t have a negative. It was a lot of annoying work and I felt, what’s the use, because I prefer the movie to look very dirty (laughs). But when you transfer Super8 film stock to HD material there is not more depth, and there is no 3D effect, you get more dirt and more grain, so I’m happy (laughs).

That Super8 look is very important to the film.

I think so too. When I saw the dailies – as we say (laughs) – of Nekromantic, which was not the dailies, because when you shot on Super8, it took two weeks for the films to come back… so after two weeks, I saw the footage and I felt that it looked too normal and not dirty enough, so I was a little bit worried. So when we made film prints for the cinema in 16mm (this was a blow-up), we made sure we did it on a certain kind of film stock so the movie had this kind of greenish look, which looked dirtier, and the black looked more right in my opinion. But one curious thing happened. When we put out the film on VHS in Germany there were a lot of bootlegs in the US. I read reviews in magazines – because the internet was not there, this was 27 years ago – that said, ‘the movie looks so strange and it’s very dark’, and the viewer had the impression that they were watching real corpses. And I thought, well, it always works for the movie if you don’t see the real picture. I remember when I got my first Texas Chainsaw 2 VHS from the Netherlands, I couldn’t see anything. It was just darkness and noises, and I thought, what’s happening in that movie? I was totally fascinated. It’s the opposite of a movie experience today.

What did you think when you saw it properly?

It looked a little like a TV movie to me! It’s so bright! The first Texas Chain Saw is also very bright but it’s shot on 16mm so it still looks dirty. There was a hazing, they sprayed dust in the air, and it’s something that I did excessively when I did my episode for German Angst, my new movie that’s going to be finished at the end of the year. That film was shot on HD in CinemaScope so I wanted to make sure that it looked like a film and it looked dirty, so we did a lot of hazing. I was really afraid of seeing everything in HD.

The contrast that comes from using a home movie format and the subject matter is great. But using Super8 also makes Nekromantik look like an underground film, like those of the Kuchar brothers. It seems much closer to those films than to a straight horror film.

That was our thing, it is an underground film. The inspiration came from seeing Throbbing Gristle live in Berlin during that time, and watching John Waters’s movies, like Pink Flamingos, and having the book Film as a Subversive Art. And me being a big fan of old horror movies like Bride of Frankenstein. So it doesn’t work as a horror movie, there’s no tension, it’s terrible in that way – it’s terrible in a lot of ways… (laughs)

And as in underground film, you use non-actors who have a very unique presence. Daktari Lorenz has that weird wired energy, and it’s almost as if he’s not acting but just being himself.

CB0201a

Yes, I wasn’t trying to make them act. I was aware of the fact that they couldn’t deliver any lines and I couldn’t deliver good writing. I started doing good scripts when I started doing plays for German radio, but the first was in 2000. Until that time I wasn’t really sure if I could write good dialogue. Now I’m doing comic books, like Captain Berlin.That’s dialogue stuff I grew up with, very 70s, it’s something I can deliver very fast. So dialogue is something that I’m more able to deliver now. But these people who were acting in the film were just my friends, so how could they act? The film was never planned to be seen outside of my circuit. It was done mainly for this punk-rock-spirit audience inside Berlin. We were in this walled city so I didn’t even dare to take the movie and drive out of the city with it because there was the wall and they would have searched you, so it would have been impossible to screen outside of Berlin. With my short films I did stuff like this. But with Nekromantik I didn’t dare until the wall came down, which was two years later.

Did you not have more ambition for the film than just screening it within your circle?

Ambition maybe, but I was aware of the fact that it was impossible to reach this kind of audience. How could I, there was no internet. I’d only made short films before, that was Hot Love, which is also one on the Blu-ray. With Hot Love I did a tour through Germany. That was the only thing that was a little bigger than anything else I’d done before. I went to 10 different cities, in the West of course.

How do you see Nekromantik now? When you introduced the FrightFest screening in August, you seemed surprised that people were interested.

I’m amazed that it gets so much… not attention, because I understand why it gets attention. The poster we did back in 87 is an attention-grabber, but the movie doesn’t deliver on the poster. It does something else, and that’s nice, but I would never dare to hope that it really works. When I see the film I have to laugh. I see some stupid little kids trying to do a horror movie, or trying not to laugh in front of the camera. There’s a new de-noised soundtrack on the Blu-ray and in the first shot, where you see the legs and the panties coming down and then a girl is pissing, if you listen you can hear me laughing behind the camera. That’s how I approached the movie.

I think it is part of the appeal of the film, this anarchic charm, the gleeful pleasure at showing the most disgusting things possible.

I think maybe where we were ahead of ourselves was in the fact that the movie pretends that everything you see is normal. There is no justification, there is no chain-smoking police guy divorced from his wife who is uninteresting, but is there to put law and order into place. The fact that the corpse-loving scene is depicted in a way every normal love scene would have been, with piano music, with slow motion, all the clichés, I think that’s the trick, and that’s what gets people worried. Today Betty is like some emo goth chick, but back in 87 there was no such thing. There was no Tim Burton, no Johnny Depp. I was having fights with people about the fact that the main actress is in the bathtub with sunglasses on. That was actually like making fun of goth chicks before goth chicks were invented (laughs).

The way the music undermines all the romantic clichés is brilliant. You use the music similarly in Hot Love and Nekromantik 2, and running through those three films there is the same disillusioned view of love.

That’s what I was struggling with. If you see the introduction for Hot Love, it’s a revenge against my girlfriend who had left me. And the film is called Nekromantik, you can see it’s a combination of two extremes. Other horror films have the same topic, love and death, but nobody was going straight for the meaning of the word. To me, it’s about a very naïve part of you. I like innocence. And if a necrophile is having sex with a corpse and his girlfriend, then it should be presented from his point of view, that’s the interesting thing. I had some trouble explaining all these things. Two years ago I did a stage production on Edward Gein, the grave robber, so I had to sell it to the authorities by saying that this case is a cultural thing, it’s the basis for Psycho, Texas Chain Saw, Silence of the Lambs. But what fascinates me in this case, and this also became an inspiration for Nekromantik, is the naivety and the childish appearance of this guy called Ed Gein. One and a half years ago I went to his grave and I made a short film there. It’s not on the Arrow disc but it’s on the German Blu-ray. It’s called A Moment of Silence at the Grave of Ed Gein. So you can see that I deal with these people in this sort of sensitive way. I don’t think you can learn anything from them if you just deal with them as monsters. And that’s the same as Nekromantik. You have to care about them, otherwise the movie will be boring. And if you don’t give them a Jodie Foster character in Silence of the Lambs, or someone who can deliver them from evil, then you have to make these so-called bad people sympathetic.

You do that very well in both Nekromantik films and also in Schramm, which is an astonishing serial killer portrait.

I’m trying to do the same thing on stage now in Germany. I found a topic that’s very much fitting because last year I did a German version of The Elephant Man, and that’s exactly the same thing. You have this deformed man and everybody thinks he’s gruesome, but he isn’t. It was very revealing to do that on a stage and to have a different audience. Because The Elephant Man is something that people would go to even if they don’t know who I am, so I have a lot of normal people in the theatre. And they were surprised that the production was so sensitive, that’s what the critics said. Of course they have this picture of me, they see the movie, they don’t see the person. They were saying, ‘we’re so surprised that your stage version of The Elephant Man is so sensitive’. That’s an insult when you think about it, but I was still happy!

Elefantenmensch Buttgereit
The Elephant Man

A lot has been made of the necrophilia, but the rabbit scene remains the most disturbing scene in the film.

Because you know it’s real. For me it was important to have real death in the film, being inspired by underground movies that deal with this kind of thing. I was always annoyed by people explaining why they watch horror movies – ‘because we like special effects’. And I didn’t want to have that excuse for my movie. The scene is there to make people aware of what they’re watching, and to make people sensitive about why they’re watching it. Because when you watch footage like this, sooner or later you will begin to ask yourself, why am I watching this? That was something I was asking myself. I didn’t have all the answers but it’s a movie, I just made it with my friends. I had this guy who was a producer and was giving me all these facilities, but I did everything on my own, I experimented, I had nothing to worry about in terms of budget because nobody was paid anyway. So we were trying stuff out, which is the opposite of the experience of making films nowadays – or in general.

You said you made the film in reaction to German censorship at the time. What reaction did you expect?

With the first Nekromantik nothing really happened because nobody noticed that the film was there. In Berlin we had two film prints and it was screened at three cinemas. One cinema shared one print by driving around all the time. Only people who already knew me and who were from this underground scene watched the film, so nothing happened. People were a little worried that the film was too serious – that was the first reaction. The first review I read was in a gay magazine, saying that this was the first movie about AIDS, because people are going to bed with the dead now, and that wasn’t something I was thinking about. So I was totally surprised by people taking the film seriously and thinking that it was about AIDS.

Did you agree with that interpretation?

I didn’t have that in mind when I did the script, which wasn’t really a script, it was about 20 pages of scribbling. But of course AIDS was a big thing during that time. I knew people who were suffering from AIDS so it was in my head. If something is in the zeitgeist then it will show up in the things you do, I think. So I agreed with it but I was also surprised by it. And it goes on until today. I read reviews explaining my films and I wonder… (laughs)

What’s the weirdest explanation of Nekromantik that you have come across?

I think the strangest, and on the other hand the most convenient, interpretation was done by this film historian when we were in court with Nekromantik 2. The first Nekromantik was shot in the West side of Berlin before the wall came down, and after it came down we shot Nekromantik 2 in the East part. So the thesis is that Nekromantik 2 is art compared to Nekromantik because it’s a film about the decaying East German part of Berlin (laughs). That explanation saved me from going to jail and having the movie destroyed, so I really embraced it. And of course it was a conscious decision to shoot in East Berlin because everything looked so dead and so old over there, like the 60s, or 50s even. All the outside shots look strange, it was like a movie shot in the past. So that was the weirdest explanation, but it’s also true because it documents a version of Berlin that is not there anymore. But the main reason was of course that we could shoot in East Berlin with no money. I wanted to do all these petting zoo scenes, so we went to the West Berlin zoo because they have much nicer animals and they told us it was 350 Deutschmarks an hour. We went to the East German zoo and they told us it was 50 pence a day, because they weren’t used to professional camera teams. You could take your home camera there and film for the whole day for 50 pence. There was no capitalist concept in East Berlin, they didn’t ask for money. So we paid nothing for shooting outside, it was heaven. It took a while for East Berlin to get a hold of the rhythm of the West, but all the West Berlin people were going to the East and doing stuff there, so it was like tourism what we did (laughs).

At the FrightFest screening you also mentioned another interpretation that was given of the film, which was that it’s about the unearthing of Germany’s past. Do you see it that way?

I know that depicting death in German movies is a problem because of the German past. And if you watch my earlier short film, Bloody Excess in the Leader’s Bunker, which is not as good as the title, together with Nekromantik, you could come to that conclusion. But to me it’s more about Ed Gein than about concentration camps.

But there are references in Der Todesking and Schramm too, so do you think it runs through the background of everything you do?

Nazi trash was something that was part of the punk rock spirit – Sid Vicious was running around in Paris with a swastika. Something like this would have got you in jail in Berlin at once. So doing a film like Bloody Excesses in the Leader’s Bunker… I did a premiere of that film in 1982 in a punk rock club, Risiko, with Blixa Bargeld from Einstürzende Neubauten at the bar and the police came to check if it was a neo-Nazi meet-up. So over there it was daring to use these symbols because even now it is forbidden to use these images.

Is that why the German authorities have such a problem with horror?

Yes I think so. Under the Nazis you had this clean screen thing, there was no dead body during the Nazi occupation, no dead body on the screen. It was just Heimat films, stupid propaganda movies, something like what you would get in North Korea today. And for some reason until today something that is connoted as horror is only possible in the underground, and you need a very good excuse to deal with this kind of matter. So for me it’s only possible to work in this field if I do it for the radio or on the stage. I did a play on Ed Gein for the stage, it would have been impossible to do it for the screen. Because there would have been no money. But for the stage I had lots of money to do it.

Ed Gein Buttgereit
Ed Gein in Kannibale und Liebe

Is that why you stopped making films for the cinema after Schramm?

We did four feature films with no money, so as it was like what Throbbing Gristle did once with all their fans, they sent them a postcard, ‘the mission is terminated’ (laughs). I had everything, the movies were banned, the police raided my home, I was labelled an artist in court, and Schramm was nominated for a German film prize. It was the right moment to stop because it wasn’t subversive anymore. And everybody was running out of money. Because getting our money back like today with Blu-ray editions was not possible.

You said in an interview that you like to disappoint people’s expectations. Is that how you would define your general attitude?

It’s a natural reaction I have. When the first Nekromantik came out it had this strange success, people were demanding Nekromantik 2, and of course it should have been even more gross. To me that just felt so predictable and stupid that we came up with Der Todesking, which everybody was disappointed with in the first place. Later on, we gave them Nekromantik 2, which was also very disappointing because it’s even more romantic than the first one. It’s a natural reaction because I don’t like to be told what to do, in terms of what I’m allowed to do from the censorship boards, but also from the audience (laughs). It’s a childish reaction maybe. Nekromantik 2 is full of jokes about what people expect, this art movie on the ceiling in black and white, it’s all stuff people who were waiting for Nekromantik 2 hated. And only after the film was banned did they try to rethink, and they liked it then. You can never trust the critics or the fans. If you give them what they expect they will tell you that you don’t have any new ideas. If you don’t give them what they expect they have another reason to be disappointed (laughs). But in the long run it’s always more interesting to play around with a concept.

It’s interesting that it seems to define your relationship with both the censors and the fans.

Because to me the so-called artistic freedom is very important. And this freedom can’t be harmed by a fan wanting to have ‘Nekromantik 10’ and also by a guy who says, this tape should be burned. In the end it’s the same for me.

Arrow Video’s limited 3-disc digipak including Blu-ray, DVD and CD soundtrack comes with a bounty of extra features, notably Buttgereit’s short films Hot Love (1985) and Horror Heaven (1984), new documentary Morbid Fascination: The Nekromantik Legacy, a new interview with Buttgereit, as well as a 100-page book featuring articles by David Kerekes, Kier-La Janisse and Linnie Blake.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Check it out, Cinema releases

The Babadook: Interview with Jennifer Kent

The Babadook 1
The Babadook

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 October 2014

Distributor: Icon Distribution

Director: Jennifer Kent

Writer: Jennifer Kent

Cast: Essie Davis, Daniel Henshall, Noah Wiseman, Hayley McElhinny

Australia 2014

93 mins

The Babadook website

A great addition to the pantheon of cinematic monsters, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook has been creeping out festival audiences around the world, and with good reason. The story of a grieving mother, Amelia (Essie Davis), and her troubled son Sam (Noah Wiseman), it is a startlingly original debut imbued with great emotional depth and nuance that is able to both scare and move. One night, Amelia and Sam read a strange book before bedtime, in all appearances a children’s tale about a sinister creature called the Babadook, which has mysteriously appeared in their home. But in doing so they unleash a monster that they will both be forced to fight.

The Babadook is released in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray on 16 February 2015 by Icon Distribution.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Jennifer Kent about creating a monster, facing the shadows and partial resolutions.

Virginie Sélavy: You’ve invented a great new monster, which is not an easy thing to do. What was the inspiration for the Babadook?

Jennifer Kent: I would say it’s Amelia. Everything started with her. Every element of that entity or energy, or whatever you want to call it, is based on what she’s suppressed, so the focus was really on her first. And then all the physical elements of it started to creep in, things that scare me. I really hate cockroaches, we have big ones in Australia, and they fly when you’re not expecting it, so that frightens me. And I also based it on what I like, early silent horror, early silent films, and Georges Méliès obviously makes an appearance. I’m very inspired by the beautiful handmade nature of these early films, I think they were very theatrical and really something extraordinary. The Babadook is really two layers. The top layer is what you see in the book, it’s that kind of strange-looking male figure. But that’s only the top part, it’s like something quite evil is playing at being human. And what’s underneath is something nebulous and far more sinister.

You say that the monster comes from Amelia, but watching the film, it also feels like it’s something that both mother and son create together.

Yes, I think that’s very true. Take one of them out of the picture and this thing couldn’t have come to life. I think that they both created it, just through their dynamic, and although that’s the case, that it’s Amelia’s monster, it’s certainly taken both of them to bring it to fruition.

How did you work with Alexander Juhasz on the art for the book?

For me the whole film really rested on that book, and not just in terms of story – it’s like a pop-up film. So it was really important for us to get that book right. We were looking at a number of Australian illustrators, and I kept referencing Alex, saying to my producer, we need something like this, and then I just said, ‘Why don’t we just ask him?’ And we did, and he lives in America, he’d never been to Australia. Six months before we started shooting, we took all the core crew away for the weekend, and I talked about the film and I showed them all the films that inspired me. Then he and I got to work on the book pretty quickly after that. I would show Alex my crappy stick drawings and try to describe what was in my head. A lot of illustrators do their own thing, but Alex is very original and inventive and he took directions very well. So what we ended up with was really what was in my head.

Many people would like to see the book printed. How do you feel about that?

Actually, Mister Babadook and I are secretly working on that at the moment. I’ve written a standalone book and it contains the pages and the story from the book, but it goes a little bit further, and we’re really excited about that. So that’s our next little Babadook adventure.

I know a lot of people will be very excited to hear this.

Great! I was adamant that I would never make ‘Babadook 2’. I’m such a purist, so it was, no merchandise, that’s it, nothing. People were joking, ‘What about Babadook trainers?’ And I’d tell them no way. And the only thing I wanted to make was that book, and I think it could be really special for people to own their own Babadook book.

Did you set out to make a horror film, or is it just the way you had to tell this story?

I really think it’s the latter. I’m quite bemused, actually, by the need to place it in a box. I understand that films are marketed via a certain genre. But it would be a shame if people who would love this film don’t get to see it because they say they hate horror. With this I focused on the story of Amelia and her boy. That for me was the entry point. And not just their relationship, but the need to face our shadow side and how important it is in life. And to do that is scary. So it made sense that the world of the film would be one full of fear and terror. I wanted the film to be true to those emotions, so horror was the most logical place for it.

The film is like a dark fairy tale and, like the best fairy tales, it is both very creepy and deeply resonant emotionally.

I love fairy tales, traditional folk tales resonate with us, they’re universal. I wanted this story to be universal, I didn’t want it to appeal just to people who live in Adelaide. For me this film could be happening anywhere. And I think fairy tales and myths have that power, to connect with what it is to be human.

Why did you decide to focus on a mother?

I think it wasn’t an intellectual choice, it was just this need to face the shadows. And Amelia doesn’t. She starts the film as far away from that darkness as she possibly can. But it’s at the point where she’s got to face it or something terrible is going to happen. And it always felt right to see it through her eyes. Early on people said it should be about the boy, but it really was never about the boy. Of course he’s really important, but the point in adding Sam was that, when you suppress things, you don’t only hurt yourself, you hurt everyone around you. And I thought, who would be that person close to her? And it made sense that it was a young child. Even when she goes to some really dark places, I still tried to keep it within her point of view as much as possible, so that people would not sit back with their arms folded and judge her, but they’d actually travel through that experience with her.

The great thing about the film is that you end up identifying with both of them at various points, sometimes simultaneously.

Some people have said, ‘That kid is so annoying’, and I say, ‘Good’! That’s deliberate, he needs to be. We need to feel for her, how hard it is. And I think it does flip, your sympathy lies with both of them, that was my aim, and I’m really happy to hear that that’s how you felt about it.

Through the figure of the monster, the child seems able to understand what’s going on with his mother a lot better than the adults around them.

Absolutely. For me he’s the hero of the film, and I don’t underestimate the strength that children have, and their intuition, and their connection with something other than the mundane world. And it’s him that first sees this. He feels that energy that’s coming. And he’s trying at all costs to protect his mother, but he’s six years old, so he’s not able to do this, and ultimately it’s her choice. She needs to face up or pay the price of not doing so.

The end is very nuanced and unconventional. Did you always know it would end that way?

Yes I did. It is unusual but it’s very much how I feel about life. I couldn’t have written it any other way. We had offers to finance the film if we changed the ending. And that was non-negotiable for me. Because darkness is not something that you throw away, and then life starts and you’re all happy. Darkness is a part of life. And it needs to be integrated.

It’s a very brave and interesting way of finishing the film, because it’s neither totally reassuring, nor totally dark.
It pisses some people off, but I think, OK, fine, it’s good! It isn’t the usual way to end a horror, definitely not. It’s a partial resolution, a negotiation that’s begun, but we never really arrive at an ending. If you go through what she did, how can life become exactly the same again? It can’t. You wear that with you for the rest of your life.

As an actress, did you consider playing the character of Amelia?

No way, that would be my own horror film! I have no interest in acting anymore, none whatsoever, and I haven’t in a long time. I love doing what I’m doing. And I think all those years of acting have given me enormous compassion for actors. And it’s given me a lot of feeling reading them and instinctively knowing what they need, and pushing them when they need to be pushed. For example, I could never have done that work with Noah, directing that little boy, without my acting experience. So even though I have no desire to do it I’m very grateful for my ability to act and understand what it is from the inside.

It definitely pays off. Both Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman give incredible performances.

Without sounding too schmaltzy I think a director should really love their actors. Can you imagine Essie, what she had to go through to do that performance? It was my job to take care of her, and make sure she didn’t look foolish, and make sure she could be as brave and horrible as that woman is at times. I have enormous respect for actors.

Most of the action takes place in the house, and it becomes a sort of mental space where past traumas have to be resolved.

The most wonderful scary films that I can think of, like The Innocents, The Tenant, or Rosemary’s Baby, the environment they play out in are all extensions of the characters’ mental space. Even The Shining. And it doesn’t need to go anywhere else. Gradually the film becomes just the house. But the house is alive, it’s a reflection, an extension of what’s going on for Amelia – and for Sam, but mostly for Amelia.

The atmosphere of the house is also determined by the work on colours. They are all very muted. How important was that for you and how did you work on creating that atmosphere?

I really needed a world for this film, and the biggest thing I love about cinema is that you can create such complete worlds. I knew that this was not social realism. I knew that for this monster to spring out and to be believable, it needed to be captured in a world that reflected it and that wasn’t something that felt naturalistic. So I wanted things to feel grounded in reality but for them not look modern. I worked really closely with our wonderful production designer Alexander Holmes, and we created an aesthetic that wasn’t quite black and white, but the colour palette was really reduced, so we had just blue and burgundy and then black through to white. I was really stubborn about that and I think I drove Alex a bit mad in the beginning. I didn’t want to put filters on the lens or gel on the lights, so we did it all in camera. And he’d be like, ‘Can’t we just put this brown cupboard in?’ And I’d say, ‘No it’s brown!’ When we saw the finished effect, we were really happy because there’s a cohesiveness through everything in terms of colour. It felt right for the world to feel quite cold. It was deliberate, and it creates, for me anyway, a fugue state, a dream state.

In keeping with this, your filmmaking style is very unshowy, elegant and restrained.

Yes, I’m not so much into flashy. I wanted it to look beautiful. Early silent horror and 1930s horror really appeal to me. It has this elegance and beauty. And even 70s horror, John Carpenter, Halloween and The Thing are very elegant films, they’re very sparse, they’re not crowded aesthetically, they’re really strange. And I love that.

The special effects are also very simple.

I was really adamant that I wanted handmade-looking special effects. The reason for that is the world needed to reflect the nature of the book, and the book is this pop-up, handmade-looking thing. So I wanted the effects to look like that, because that’s where the Babadook springs from. So it’s not like, if we could, we would have done CGI, not at all. I really wanted the effects to be stop motion and in camera. Everything, I’m proud to say, is in camera, and of course we did do some smoothing in post-production.

It’s interesting that you started by being reluctant to categorise the film as horror but throughout the interview all your references are horror films. It seems that it is a territory that you like working in.

I absolutely do. And I can’t deny my inspiration. Unfortunately the ‘horror’ word is reductive for many people, and on the other hand when you say ‘horror’ you have this large subculture who cross their arms and say, ‘OK, scare me’. And I’m not interested in that. What I find most satisfying is when people come up to me after the film, like this one guy who had lost both his parents before the age of 15, and he said, ‘That was the most moving study of grief for me’. I’ve had people in tears after the film and that means so much to me, much more than people saying, ‘It was really scary’. I like that too, but it’s not my entire focus.

What’s your next project? Are you going to carry on working in the sort of horror area?

I have two film projects. What is more appealing to me is creating a unique world from an idea. So the film that I’m working on at the moment is set in Tasmania in the 1820s. Tasmania is an island at the base of Australia and it was considered hell on earth in that time. It’s a story of revenge, portrayed through the eyes of a female convict, and I’m exploring how futile revenge is, and what the other options are. So it’s a horror world, certainly, but it’s not what most people call a horror film. I let the ideas dictate the forms the story needs to come alive.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Watch a clip from The Babadook:

Check it out, Features, Festivals

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: A Script Analysis

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Format: Cinema

Screening as part of the 58th BFI London Film Festival at BFI Southbank, London

Screening dates: 10, 12, 13 October 2014

Director: Tobe Hooper

Writers: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper

Cast: Marilyn Burns, Edwin Neal, Allen Danzinger, Paul A. Partain, Gunnar Hansen

USA 1974

83 mins

During the pre-production of ‘Leatherface’, a horror film script by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel, the production manager, Ron Bozman, was away in Houston playing poker, and he pitched the idea around the table. One of the players suggested an alternative name – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (TCM). A classic was born.

2014 sees the 40th anniversary of its release. The title alone is a work of art, but it’s the way the film transcended traditional notions of the genre and threw us headlong into a terrifying nihilistic attack on the American dream that secured its longevity.

The story is simple. Five hippie kids (Sally Hardesty, Franklin Hardesty, Kirk, Pam and Jerry) visiting their grandfather’s long forgotten, dilapidated house in rural Texas are terrorised by a grave-robbing family of cannibals (Old Man, Hitchhiker, Leatherface and Grandpa).

The 40th anniversary restoration of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is released in the UK on Blu-ray by Second Sight on 17 November 2014. The two-disc limited edition Steelbook Blu-ray is packed with new bonus features, including a new audio commentary by Tobe Hooper.

Watching the ‘making of’ documentary The Shocking Truth I was amazed by the accidental way in which the armadillo spinning in the road in the opening moments ended up in TCM. The script version doesn’t mention it. Instead, it has the rotting carcass of a dog baking in the hot sun before the camper van zooms by. There is also no mention of the grave-robbing or the freeze-frame flash of the camera showing us the gruesome sculptures Hitchhiker left behind. Intrigued, I decided to explore some of the key moments of the screenplay to see how what Hooper and Henkel (H&H) wrote on the page shaped the film.

H&H’s first draft of ‘Leatherface’ was a whopping 160 pages. This was reduced to 103 by the time it went into production. Roughly speaking one page of script equals one minute of screen time. TCM is a short film, clocking in at only 83 minutes. The main reason for this is that only half of the first 40 pages actually ended up on the screen: much pointless, hippy dippy dialogue about the zodiac and unnecessary exposition were thankfully dropped.

When academic Carol J. Glover dared to watch TCM in 1985 she wrote in the introduction of her book Men, Women and Chainsaws: ‘It jolted me into questioning for the first time the notion of the “male gaze” and its assumption of masculine.’ This is best illustrated by the way our hero, Sally Hardesty, is introduced in the script. First she is an archetype – ‘a beautiful blond girl’. Just another one of the five stereotypical young Americans in a camper van driving through Texas. Even wheelchair-bound Franklin is simply described as: ‘a young man in a wheelchair’. The only hint of his weight is the ‘sagging ramp to the ground’ when he exits the camper van for a pee.

When they leave the confines of the vehicle to wander around the cemetery she is quite definitely singled out on the page for her sex appeal. H&H wrote:

Sally is braless and her breasts bounce enticingly beneath the thin fabric of her t-shirt.

This exact image plays out on screen. With this shot, Hooper is able to make the camera, and therefore the audience, become the wandering eyes of the lusting rednecks in the graveyard.

Out on the highway we are introduced to Hitchhiker. This Charles Manson caricature is clearly a product of casting, because on the page H&H described him with curly carrot-coloured hair. His role in the screenplay is to point out the post-industrial wastelands that the city (represented by Sally and her friends) had left him and his family through the economic destruction of this rural community.

This exploration of the socio-political climate for horrific ends continues what The Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Last House on the Left (1972) had started. For decades the horror genre explored evil fantasy monsters or ghosts in far off places like Eastern Europe. But with America stuck in a war it couldn’t win, the liberal dream stabbed to death at Altamont and serial killers now becoming pop celebrities. George A. Romero and Wes Craven’s films invited audiences to look at the dark reality of their country. For Hooper, appalled by the atrocities of the Vietnam War, ‘man was the real monster’.

The initial appearance of Leatherface is as fleeting as it is shocking on the page. With the whirring ‘motor noise’ still rattling in the background the hapless Kirk wanders into the house. Our only worry at this stage is that the owners may catch him trespassing. He bounds inside, but trips up. As he gets to his feet H&H write themselves into the modern horror history books with the line:

Kirk catches a fleeting glimpse of a horrible leathery mask covering the face.

The first genuinely new horror icon of the post-war period is born. A couple of hammer blows later and Kirk is dead. This visceral moment ends abruptly and attention immediately switches to Pam. Naturally, she goes into the house to look for her man. H&H revel in spoiling us with terrifically gruesome scene descriptions that resurrect the spirit of Ed Gein’s domesticity. They tease out the gory details over three pages from this understated starting point:

As her eyes adjust she sees that the furniture is constructed of a combination of bone, metal, wood and some sort of thin leathery substance.

Each piece of the macabre decor magnifies Pam’s fear and trepidation. It’s uncomfortable because you’re watching and waiting to see someone die. On the page it’s a much slower, more gruelling experience as you pick your way through each piece of human bric-a-brac. There’s far more here than the camera has time to look at, but you get the sense they’re in the room nevertheless. When the killer finally reappears H&H reveal precisely what Leatherface looks like using Pam’s POV.

It is a close fitting hood rather than a mask, covering the entire head and slit to accommodate the ears. The face of the hood is human, but shrivelled and leathery. There is a throat piece which is tucked below the collar. Over his clothing the masked figure wears a black heavy apron.

Later, on the same page, they condense the description to christen him Leatherface at the very moment when he stuns Pam with a hammer. The formula is speeded up for Jerry’s more efficient death. The surprise of the first murder and the subsequent suspense in the run-up to the next two elevate the drama in the TCM screenplay above the purely exploitative graphic violence of Last House on the Left. This is because Hooper’s direction never lingers on the violent act. Like Craven he shocks you, but he’s never interested in the blood spilled by Leatherface. Although the screenplay revels in the blood lust of our killer, none of it made it on screen.

For example, we see:

With a squeal the masked figure lifts Pam high in the air and rushes her across the room. She feels a smooth warm prick and she is free, high in the air impaled on the brutal steel of a meat hook. Pam kicks weakly. Her eyes roll in their sockets, she tries to scream…

But we don’t see:

…but her throat fills with blood and she chokes and gags. Leatherface moves swiftly. He strips Kirk’s body of its remaining flesh, lifts it from the meat hook and lays it on a huge butchers block. Blood pours from Pam’s mouth. Her hands flutter weakly; her eyes have rolled back in her head and show only white. Leatherface draws the starter rope of a gasoline powered chain saw and it coughs then roars. Pam twitches faintly. She coughs and spews a bloody mist clouding the air. The chain saw changes pitch as it bites into Kirk’s flesh.

No doubt budget and time would have had an impact on Hooper’s directorial decisions. Certainly the introduction of the chainsaw is held back a little bit longer.

It’s night when Sally and Franklin decide to look for their missing friends. Up until this point, Franklin is her only antagonist in the film. His disability isn’t enough for H&H’s idea of drama. Instead they give us a pig-headed brother who resents having to leech off his sister and doesn’t mind letting her know with his constant whining. It’s not always clear on the page how annoying Franklin is being, but his performance never fails to show it. This may have had more to do with how Hooper treated his actors during the shoot. At SXSW in March 2014 Hooper said: ‘I would separate the actors and not let them socialize. Franklin, I would advise him and he went with it … to not change his clothes to get as sweaty as possible, to never have lunch with anybody else.’

At this crucial point in the film the screenplay is explicit about how tense Sally is becoming about their missing friends and how much of a burden a needy, wheelchair-bound brother is in this situation. She fights with Franklin for the flashlight and the right to search for everyone on her own. His role as Sally’s antagonist is never clearer than at this point:

Franklin guesses her intentions and is reluctant and deliberately stupid.

Here’s where Franklin begins to honk the horn and they discover the van keys are missing. They no longer have the choice of heading back to the gas station for help. Sally has to go looking for their missing friends. But her brother, ever the burden, goes after her and for the first time his disability actively becomes a problem for both of them.

FRANKLIN
Sally… I’m going too.

Sally moves rapidly away; she does not respond to Franklin.

Franklin is close behind, labouring desperately to keep up. His chair wobbles awkwardly and he has difficulty in steering.

FRANKLIN
Sally…. I can’t keep up.

Still Sally does not respond and Franklin begins to drop behind. She enters the forest; Franklin is desperate.

Rather than make you wait until they reach the house, H&H use the cloak of darkness to deliver a new, loud, visceral surprise. They wrote:

[Sally and Franklin] whirl to face the noise and see a massive, hulking figure roar down upon them wielding a chain saw. The ugly steel fangs of the saw flash in the moonlight and the waving beam of the flashlight.

It’s the first time Leatherface is paired with his signature weapon. In the script this is page 73 out of 103. Admittedly, it’s only around 50 minutes in on screen. Franklin is dispatched in seconds and Sally runs away screaming.

By killing Franklin, H&H invented ‘the final girl’ phenomenon.

Sally escapes to the Old Man’s service station via the house and through a forest. In the screenplay there is some traffic on the road that swerves around Sally as she ‘screams and pleads’ for them to stop. None of this made it into the film. I would argue that the presence of others at this stage would have severely weakened the end sequence.

Safe inside, and the threat of Leatherface seemingly gone, she soon discovers that her saviour is also part of the murderous clan.

The Old Man is carrying a gunny sack; his behaviour is strangely ominous. Sally senses something is amiss and looks more closely at him.

In the script the graveyard crimes from the opening segment of the film are used by the Old Man to chastise the Hitchhiker as they bring Sally into the house.

OLD MAN
I told you to stay away from that graveyard.

Whereas on screen this line changes to:

OLD MAN
I told you. I told you never leave your brother alone.

So what would appear to be big, important changes at the start of the film barely get another mention by the end of the film.

Decanted to the house she meets Grandpa, and in a satire of the nuclear family, Leatherface plays the role of matriarch.

The mask is distinctly different from the one he wore earlier. It is the tanned facial skin of an elderly woman.

On screen you see Leatherface has lipstick and pale blue eye shadow on. It’s a macabre sitcom scene in the making. The screenplay goes on to paint a clearer picture of the absurdism at play here:

Behind the mask Leatherface is smiling broadly; there is a flash of filed teeth. He is excited and pleased with himself; he approaches wiping his hands on his apron.

H&H try to get Leatherface to interact. The words on the page are not lines for any actor to learn verbatim, they are just gobbledygook. His first line of dialogue reads:

LEATHERFACE
’A ab e y ob er ewe ober’

Rather than make him a fully fledged member of the family, each time he speaks, it gives the Old Man more reason to shout at him. It is during these exchanges that the film, more than the screenplay, expose this sadistic, mindless killer as no more than a simple child behind closed door.

James Rose’s book about TCM (Devil’s Advocates series, Auteur Press) describes this scene as a warning about how far people are prepared to go if you cut them off socially and economically.

On the page we can read a list of horrors that Sally can see in the room. Whereas on screen Hooper chooses to show the horror etched into Sally’s face as she, bound to a chair and gagged, takes in the room. He saves the revelation of the bone ornaments and mobiles for a wider shot when the family bring Grandpa into the room.

The humiliation and torture of Sally is written blow for blow by H&H. Starting with a clever reversal of expectation, they describe Leatherface approaching her with a knife. You think that he is going to slaughter her like a cow, but no, not yet:

Hitchhiker turns her palm up and quickly and expertly cuts deep into the tip of her index finger. Leatherface lifts her hand and with Hitchhiker’s assistance they force it into the Grandfather’s mouth.

Her will to survive is tested over 14 pages of script (pages 86-100 or 64-78 minutes). The moment she sees her opportunity she runs for it. However, H&H don’t let her get out without an obstacle or two. Blood pouring down her face, they write, she trips over the washtub and crashes through a window in a shower of glass.

When she reaches the highway the real world makes a surprise appearance in the shape of a cattle truck and a pick-up. Sally escapes in the back of the latter.

It’s a swift, and surprisingly neat end to such a lengthy, torturous ordeal. In just two minutes of screen time Sally leaps through a window, outruns the family, Leatherface is fatally wounded by his chain saw, and she is in the back of a pick up being driven away from this nightmare experience. This compares to over four pages of screenplay. Stylistically, the script deviates from how it has been presented so far. H&H begin directing the camera. This simulates how frantic the situation has become. Like a cap that has been let off, the film and all the tension are being released.

NEW ANGLE
The Driver leaves the road and runs into a field.

NEW ANGLE
Leatherface recovers the saw, sees Sally and the Driver running in nearly the opposite directions and squeals in terror, rage and pain and flailing the saw wildly in the air and now hobbling and bleeding profusely, he charges after Sally.

NEW ANGLE
A battered, old pick up approaches beyond Sally

It has become traditional to linger on the victim’s success as the credits roll, but H&H’s finale is about the monster that’s left behind. That iconic silhouette is no accident.

Leatherface stands in the center of the highway squealing in maniac rage and wielding the chain saw with savage, idiot fury.

In conclusion H&H’s story is a simple one – five young people leave the city and become isolated from the real world as they knew it; and then from themselves. One by one they are killed until there is only one left. It was a novel idea at the time, but now it is a tired formula used by almost every slasher film. Regardless, this 1974 original still rises above all its competition because of its clarity.

On the page H&H lavish the reader with lots of extra scenes and gory details of the kills that are unmistakeable horror tropes. However, Tobe Hooper decided much of it held the story up and just weren’t necessary. More importantly, he decided to leave the bloodshed to our imagination and that choice gave the film its power. As a result the perceived feeling of many viewers, after watching TCM, is that it is a much more graphic film experience than it really is. Proving suggestion rather than details is what our eyes and ears need when we’re watching a movie. Hooper no doubt had this all in hand when he started shooting TCM, and the screenplay acted as both a road map and footnotes for his vision.

This feature is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

Stuart Wright

Watch the remastered trailer (2014):