Frightfest

August Bank Holiday is rolling around, in the same sort of way as a rhino that’s about to run you down. It’s big, it’s slow-moving, but somehow it’s on you before you realise it.

Normally at this time of year I would be getting ready to wallow in the mud at the Reading Festival. Due to circumstances both beyond (tickets sold out in 15 nanoseconds flat) and within my control (laziness) Radiohead will just have to manage without me. No, this year I shall  be at Leicester Square, for a day of Frightfest.

The UK’s premier horror and fantasy film festival hits it’s tenth anniversary this year, and it’s ringing the changes in a big way. A move to the Empire, one of the bigger cinemas in The Square, and the opening of a second Discovery Screen for new talent. Which means more films, of course, and with that the chance to miss something you really want to see because something you want to see more is screening at the same time. So it goes.

I’m easing in gently, by just doing the Saturday, which has the highest concentration of must-sees for me. Unlike hardcore Festers like Leading Man Clive, who regularly do the whole thing, which can’t be good for you.

The real pick of the crop for me, is Giallo, the new film by Dario Argento. It seems like a move back to his stylish slasher roots, and should be an absolute blast. There are rumours that he might be attending, which would make me a happy horror head.

(FanBoy Fact: One of my discoveries of this year, Frederic Brown’s noir novel The Screaming Mimi, was the uncredited source for Argento’s first giallo, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. Different kinds of pulpy yumminess).

One feature of the fest that I may well miss is the Zombie Walk around Leicester Square on the Monday morning. Don’t be fooled. That’s not makeup. This is what horror fans tend to look like after three days in a dark room with inappropriate nutrition and not enough kip.

Bacon saaarnieesss... erm, we mean braaaainnnns...
Bacon saaarnieesss... erm, we mean braaaainnnns...

I’ve meant to do Frightfest for years, and I’m really excited to be sitting down with some good friends and just indulging my geeky half.

Alright, two-thirds.

Frightfest begins tomorrow evening with the premiere of seaborne shocker Triangle. Hopefully nothing like the old soap opera set on the Le Havre ferry…

Free Speech

So, let me see if I’m getting this right. Legislation is being mooted by an unelected plutocrat that would effectively criminalise one Briton in eight. Anti-piracy association FACT are pushing for no-trial prosecutions due to the sheer weight of numbers of people they plan to put through the courts. It would seem that now is the time to either bone up on copyright law, or buy shares in prison construction companies.

The launch of the Pirate Party in the UK couldn’t have been better timed then, really. Their manifesto gladdens my heart, and I’d just like to quickly quote from the front page:

In recent years we have seen an unprecedented onslaught on the rights of the individual. We are treated like criminals when we share entertainment digitally, even though this is just the modern equivalent of lending a book or a DVD to a friend. We look on helpless as our culture and heritage, so important for binding our society together, is eroded and privatised.

Now there is a democratic alternative. We, the people, can take back our rights. We, the people, can overturn the fat cats and the corrupt MPs who hold our nation’s cultural treasures to ransom, ignore our democratic wishes and undermine our civil liberties.

The internet has turned our world into a global village. Ideas can be shared at incredible speed, and at negligible cost. The benefits are plain to see, but as a result, many vested interests are threatened. The old guard works hard to preserve their power and their privilege, so we must work hard for our freedom. The Pirate Party offers an alternative to the last century’s struggles between political left and political right. We are open to anyone and everyone who wants to live in a fair and open society.

I can’t agree more. I’m sick and tired of the thoughtless and bloodyminded manner in which punishment and retribution is being sought from movie and music moguls who can’t see past the blunt end of their revenue streams. Spotify and programs of that ilk are not the full answer (just look at the disturbing evidence that if you’re not on a major label, then your royalty rate plummets) but it’s a start, and significantly better than assuming that your entire client base is stealing from you. The approach the Pirate Party seem to be taking is one that actively seeks out innovation and practical solutions to a game where the rules, scorecard and goalposts are changing at a dizzying rate. Rather that than the one we have at the moment, where legislation is led by outside interests and is frequently rushed through, ill-conceived or plain wrong.

I know which side I’m on.

Bigmouth Strikes Again

Just a quick rant to get something that’s been stewing for the last 24 hours out of the system.

Janet Street Porter in yesterdays Indie. Dear Gods. I’ve had little respect for this yawping bray-factory since she sold what tiny fraction of her soul she had left to cosy up to fellow clueless gobshite Gordon Ramsay, but her thunk-piece on Twitter (sound made by my jaw as it hit the table on reading it) couldn’t have missed the mark more if she’d been facing the other way when she shot at it.

Typically ignoring the social and rapid-response attributes that have made Twitter the phenomenon it is, she decided to focus on the fact that it difficult to have a cogent political argument in the 140 character limit the format imposes.

Twitter is not a forum. Twitter is not a place for long, painful dreary conversation and dry discourse. Twitter is a place for jokes, for sharp, short opinion, for staying in touch with your mates, for posting links to cool and interesting stuff on the web, and yes ok it is sometimes the place where you post pics of the gardening owie you inflicted on yourself one morning.

Belittling the #welovethenhs campaign as empty sloganeering is, however, not just rude but lazy. The hashtag was designed as a way for people to show support and demonstrate why the service was so valuable in personal, human terms. The campaign was so successful not purely because of weight of numbers, but because it showed that everyone had a story to tell about the positive experiences they’d had with the NHS. Her sneering at this powerful grass-roots movement simply shows up Street Porter as elitist and out of touch. I should not, therefore, be so angry at her. She’s clearly just an anachronism who’s looking at the future and realising it’s moving just that little bit too fast for her.

Look, Twitter is not about turning sophisticated commentary into OMG UR SO LAME blipblogs. It’s about being able to react quickly and succinctly to the world around you, and having a bit of a laugh while you’re doing it.

Further, the assumption that Twitter is solely the home of air-headed narcissists and vapid ghostwritten celebrity updates shows a paucity of research that would be staggering were it not so unsurprising, given the quality of discourse of the journalist in question. Writers and film-makers like Neil Gaiman and Errol Morris regularly post and update on Twitter, and are as funny and incisive in the micro-blogging format as they are in the day job. There’s a real art to that.

Nothing concentrates the mind like a short word count. Maybe JSP should try it once. Although I seriously doubt she has it in her to make a simple point and then shut the fuck up, no matter how much I might wish it.

(you may noticed I’ve not bothered to link to the article in question. Google it if you want to waste five minutes of your valuable time. She’s not getting any link traffic out of me.)

A Few Recommendations

Darwyn Cookes “Parker” adaptation, the only one approved by Donald Westgate (and that’s including the masterful Point Blank)  is on bookshelves NOW, and there is a preview of the first twenty pages here.

To reiterate what I was saying in my last post, Templar, Arizona is one of the most consistently surprising, innovative and imaginative comics I’ve read in a long time, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Start here.

You all read Diesel Sweeties, right? Rich Stevens has been a mainstay of my feeds for years, and he is just an unstoppable joke machine. No? Well, everything to date is up on his site as downloadable PDFs. Essential for all your sexy robot needs.

Adam Curtis is the alchemist of archive film. His latest, “It Felt Like A Kiss” will give you chills as he tracks where we are now to a tightly interwoven set of coincidence and dodgy interventionist foreign policy. Wildly funny, deeply unnerving. Free on the iPlayer.

In case you think I’ve been slacking off reading comics and surfing the interwebs well… you’re right. But. The observant amongst you may have noticed a couple of minor tweaks to the site. I’m also knee deep in a new short story that I’m really excited about.

Oh yeah. And we have us a summerhouse now. We raised it ourselves. Greetings from Copse End.

One Week Later

It would have been tempting to let the dust settle. It would have been easy just to try and get a little distance, to take a breath, to allow for a pause.

No. No, we shall not do that. There is work to be done, and the time to do it is right fucking here and right fucking now. We have a film to fix, and in the name of The God That Walks Between The Sprockets, we shall mend it and send it out into the world. This we promise, my friends. This we swear.

*sigh* OK, vent over. That needed doing. I feel better now. So, a progress report.

The film has been retransferred, and we have taken out the offending shot (the best part of ten seconds by Dom’s calculations) and resync…ered to the available soundtrack. The ending that we’d storyboarded is, of course, missing. We will have to sort out a half day of reshoots – although technically speaking as those shots never made it onto film in the first place I believe the word I’m looking for is pickups. The process has been complicated somewhat by the fact that Kiki has gone blonde. But this is OK. We shall deal in an appropriate, adult and manly fashion, and we shall not burst into tears.

Simon Aitken has a nicely objective view of the events at Straight 8 on his blog, which I urge you all to read.

The work continues. That is all.

Straight 8: showing your mistakes in public

It’s done for another year. Three days of screenings. Three days of triumph, of disappointment, of joy and pain, of ecstasy and despair. There’s nothing else like Straight 8, and that’s probably a good thing. I’ve done four films under the discipline now, and I still can’t honestly say I recommend it. It’s like any addiction. You know it’s going to do you some damage, but you just can’t help going back for another hit.

This year was new for me for a few reasons. It was the first time working with my good friend and docobuddy Dom Wade. It was the first time working with a pick-up crew sourced from Shooting People.

And it was the first time that we badly screwed up.

Rewind to March. We are in London Bridge, at our first location. We’re set up in the kitchen of the flat that is our primary indoor location.

And Dom is convinced something’s gone wrong with the camera. He didn’t hear the film roll on the last two shots we ran. And that mechanical claw is loud. But we have a lot of ambient noise going on, to help our actress Kiki get into character. He can’t be sure, but he’s used the Braun Nizo on every Straight8 film he’s shot. In his bones, he knows something ain’t right. So he reseats the battery.

It’s a tense moment. We reset the shot without the noise, and are relieved to hear the clatter of the camera mechanism. Problem solved, we think, although there’s a danger that we have the same scene twice. That’s something we have no way of checking, so we carry on.

Dom was right. There had been a problem. The scene was shot as planned. But at some point, the camera triggered while left on its side, and rolled for 8 seconds. There is a shot of a corner of a kitchen counter in the film that shouldn’t be there. It was a mistake which blew our carefully timed sound effect, and the entire conceit of the film, to bits.

We found this out at the same time as everyone else, in the crowded screen two at the Curzon Mayfair.

The heightened atmosphere at a Straight8 screening is like no other. Everyone is in the same position, not knowing, hoping, dreading. The highs when your film goes well are unbelievable. The lows when it doesn’t are black dogs.

Confronted with the realisation that my carefully laid plans had gone horribly wrong, and were playing out in front of a room full of my peers was not one of the finer nights of my film-making life.

I felt sick. I needed a wee. I wanted to cry. I watched the rest of the film through my fingers.

I excused myself as soon as I could, and stood in the loos, letting the waves of nausea ebb. I felt frantic, panicky. If I’d had my jacket with me, I probably would have walked out. But no. This kind of thing is always a risk with Straight8. You can never be sure what you’re going to get. I took a deep breath, and walked back in. The place for drama was up on screen.

Afterwards, a surprise. Both Ed, who runs Straight8, and Fiona Brownlie, who made the best film of the night, mentioned how much they liked the idea. (“But Ed,” said Dom in the quote of the night, “It’s completely wrong!”) We must have been doing something right for it to get into the screening in the first place. But my disappointment was tangible. I don’t know if it was better or worse that only one member of our brilliant cast and crew, Hayley, could make it. As it was, I found it hard to look her in the face as we said goodbye. I felt like I’d let everyone down somehow.

Enough of this pitiful attempt to curry sympathy. It belittles us all. The fact is that this can be fixed, and no-one has to see Time Out in that form ever again. We have the film, and will retransfer today. Then it’s a simple matter of cut, top and tail, and we can get the film out there properly. I’m fascinated to see just how well the sound drops back into sync once we chop out the offending shot. I’d like to feel that all my hard work with stopwatches and schedules wasn’t completely in vain.

I have to remind myself that we went through exactly the same shit last year with Code Grey, where we lost the important final shot. the fix was done, and it went on to great success. Who knows where Time Out will lead us?

So, that’s it for this year, and I ask the question I always ask. Will I do it again in 2010?

Dunno. Like any addict, I have to take it one day at a time.

Scare Tactics

Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist appears to be stoking one hell (sorry) of a row. It was the subject of controversy at it’s Cannes screening, and now has a reputation to defend as a hardcore slice of nastiness.

If Von Trier was hoping for the sort of press that helped Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible to acclaim, he’ll be disappointed. The critical response to his psychological horror about the descent into madness of a couple following the death of their child has been at best muted, at worst out and out hostile.

Masochistic readers of the Daily Mail film column were treated to a frankly surreal tirade from Christoper Hart in which he reviewed the film without actually having seen it. Fair point, I suppose. I don’t read the Daily Mail, but that doesn’t stop me from ripping the piss out of it. 

A common reaction to Antichrist, and one which I’m seeing used more often from critics that clearly have no better commentary, is to call this kind of horror “boring”. Not the words that look good on a poster.

However, now self appointed media watchdog Mediawatch and Tory backbencher Julian Brazier have waded in, calling for the abolition of the BBFC. Their argument:

“Films of this sort, with such extreme content, should not be classified for public exhibition anywhere. The BBFC should have declined classification and rejected this film.”

“When people are being entertained by mutilation, that is beyond the pale.”

Better yet, Mr. Brazier has said:

“From the accounts I have heard of Antichrist, this does seem to be one more example of how the BBFC has given up on trying to regulate material which the majority of the public feel is offensive.”

Pretty typical cant from a loudmouth who hasn’t seen the piece in question, but fancies a few column inches.

But actually, as the clever chaps at MediaWatchWatch point out, advice rather than regulation is a good thing. The BBFC have been guilty of some downright bizarre spates of nannying over the years (take the debacle over cuts to The Sasha Baron-Cohen homomentary Brüno which has led to two different versions of the film being available at the cinema) but in general they seem to be showing a bit more restraint than one would fear. An advisory role would seem to make sense for a body that is, after all, the British Board of Film Classification, not censorship.

The reaction to all this that most closely mirrors my own comes, appropriately enough, from a fellow film-maker. Michael Booth of Pleased Sheep Film heaps approbation on both Brazier and John Beyer of Mediawatch, calling, in a priceless display of righteous fury, for the abolition of Mediawatch. I recommend the whole post on his forum, but couldn’t resist this quote:

I propose we ban Mediawatch and censor their ridiculous outbursts as one day someone may read one of their quotes and is patronized to the point of a machete/gun spree killing. Trust me on this, as there’s just as much foundation to this as any of Mediawatch’s petitions, protests or claims. Lives could possibly be lost or corrupted by Mediawatch’s very existence. When I read the quotes by John Beyer, I myself a mild mannered person punched a cushion in anger. I hate to think what would have happened if another person had been in the room – or I was a more violent man. It could quite easily have been someone’s smiling face, a child or a pensioner. It could have been catastrophic.

I also propose we seek out and remove politicians that try to exploit the subject of fictionalized violence instead of tackling the real crime that happens on our streets. And in some cases using fiction as a scapegoat for real crime. And all to win many misguided votes to keep them in a very large wage courtesy of you and I the taxpayer – who will have our right to decide for ourselves removed.

I’m siding with him. I, like Mike, believe that if you are expected to act like an adult then you should also be expected to be treated like an adult. Adult films are exactly that, made for an audience that should be able to make up their own minds about what is distasteful.

Let’s not forget too that Mediawatch are vocal but pretty much powerless. They have as much chance of getting Antichrist taken off the screens as I do. By their own logic, if they can’t fulfill their duty, then they should be dissolved. Michael’s right to be angry, but I don’t think he has anything to worry about.

It’s interesting to note the intersection between this film and bête noire of this site, section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. Let’s remind ourselves of what constitutes an offence under this law, shall we?

(7) An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following—

(a) an act which threatens a person’s life,

(b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,

(c) an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse, or

(d) a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive).


I hope I’m not spoiling your enjoyment of the film, or indeed your dinner, if I mention that Antichrist is chockful of subsection (b). Which would make the film illegal, were it not for it’s 18 certificate, quite literally a get out of jail free card. Proof, once again after the dropping of a test case attempting to apply the Obscene Publications Act to writing hosted purely on the internet, that legislation attempting to foist value judgements onto a legal framework seems to be unworkable.

Let’s not get too complacent, though. This little storm in a teacup took place in the week when the first trial attempting to convict under the Act is taking place in Belfast. Publicity there is pretty much absent.

Which, I guess this is really all about. Reports of the furore Antichrist created at Cannes have been somewhat exaggerated, as Michael pointed out. Four people walked out of the screening. Four. That’s hardly a damning indictment. Combined with the poor reviews, the noise is all starting to feel like a tactic to gather some heat under a director whose reputation has been tepid for a while.

It also shows is how in this country our relationship to censorship and freedom of speech could not be more conflicted if they dressed up in armour and whacked each other around the helms with axes. The only winner in this battle would appear to be Lars Von Trier.

Blood & Roses – And Now The Screaming Starts

B&RExcellent news from X&HTeam-mate Simon Aitken – his horror feature Blood + Roses is finally finished!

It’s been a long, hard road, with a lot of pitfalls, mis-steps and out-and-out crashes along the way, but the completion of this film shows what can be done with determination, hard work and the willingness to max out as many credit cards as you can lay your mitts on. Simon tells the full story in unexpurgated detail on his website, which is well worth a look if you’re interested in finding out just how much time and effort has to go into a low-to-no budget film.

I’m very very happy for Simon, and will be buying him a celebratory beer when he joins the Time Out crew on Monday for our Straight 8 screening.

Just the one, though.  I don’t want success to go to his head just yet…