Posts filed under 'Interviews'
In a special third ‘episode’ of Bury Me With…, we asked many-fingers-in-many-pies Chris Golden about the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
He said: True Tales of Resurrection
True Tales of Resurrection was published in a special edition of Christopher Golden’s imagination only.
◊◊◊
About Christopher Golden:
Christopher Golden is the award-winning, bestselling author of such novels as The Myth Hunters, Wildwood Road, The Boys Are Back in Town, The Ferryman, Strangewood, Of Saints and Shadows, and (with Tim Lebbon) The Map of Moments. He has also written books for teens and young adults, including Poison Ink, Soulless, and the thriller series Body of Evidence, honored by the New York Public Library and chosen as one of YALSA’s Best Books for Young Readers. Upcoming teen novels include a new series of hardcover YA fantasy novels co-authored with Tim Lebbon and entitled The Secret Journeys of Jack London.
A lifelong fan of the “team-up,” Golden frequently collaborates with other writers on books, comics, and scripts. In addition to his recent work with Tim Lebbon, he co-wrote the lavishly illustrated novel Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire with Mike Mignola. With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the co-author of multiple novels, as well as comic book miniseries such as Talent and The Sisterhood, both currently in development as feature films. With Amber Benson, Golden co-created the online animated series Ghosts of Albion and co-wrote the book series of the same name
As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies The New Dead and British Invasion, among others, and has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, the online animated series Ghosts of Albion (with Amber Benson) and a network television pilot.
The author is also known for his many media tie-in works, including novels, comics, and video games, in the worlds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hellboy, Angel, and X-Men, among others.
Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in fourteen languages in countries around the world.
April 1st, 2010
In the second in the series of Bury Me With…, we asked scary Gary McMahon about the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
“I had to think about this one for a long time, and two or three books immediately demanded my attention – books that had a profound effect on my entire life when I first read them. Alan Garner’s Elidor, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But in the end, I went back to the first book I thought of when I saw the question:
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson.
Johnson’s book consists of a bunch of episodic short stories, all narrated by the same character – a nameless junkie in 1970s America. The stories chart his drug addiction and his ennui, but they also show us so much more about the character and the people around him. The narrator’s voice has a fragile poetic quality, but there’s also a grinding realism to the descriptions of the world he moves through.
There’s beauty here, and pain, and even transcendence. The spirituality of the book has little to do with God or religion, but provides striking insights regarding humanity in all its shattered glory. Everyone the narrator meets is as broken as him, and rather than wallow in self-pity he is overcome with the melancholy beauty of the human condition. His observations and insights are tender and life-affirming, yet he is a true lost soul. When he tells us “I knew every raindrop by its name”, we believe him, and we feel his sense of awe as he says it.
If you’ve never read this book before, do yourself a favour and track it down. My own copy is never far from hand. I’ve only ever read it all the way through once, but I dip into it often, licking the frost off the dream (to steal and abuse a line from Charles Bukowski).
Jesus’ Son is a masterpiece: it’s a book that reminds me what it is to be human.”
More information on Denis Johnson can be found at Wikipedia.
◊◊◊
About Gary McMahon:
Gary McMahon’s fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.K. and U.S and has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is the British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of Rough Cut, All Your Gods Are Dead, Dirty Prayers, How to Make Monsters, Rain Dogs, Different Skins, Pieces of Midnight, Hungry Hearts, and has edited an anthology of original novelettes titled We Fade to Grey.
Angry Robot/HarperCollins will publish the novels Pretty Little Dead Things and Dead Bad Things in 2010 and 2011. The Concrete Grove trilogy will be published by Solaris Books from 2011 onwards.
March 29th, 2010
Today our interview takes place in the attic of a derelict house far out across the moors. A long way from where anyone could hear if something happens to me. Who am I kidding? Something always happens to me, doesn’t it? The attic is strewn with dust and bones – I can’t tell whether their owners died up here or were brought along later.
Not to worry, though, it’s cosy as can be. And the shadows move as though something in the darkness is still alive. Home from home.
Joining me in the attic is Simon Bestwick, author of the inspiring short story collection ‘Pictures of the Dark’. It’s the best book of short fiction I’ve read in a long time. Simon sits opposite me, wrapped in a grey blanket edged with red, for all the world like some street-weary derelict.
What struck me about this collection was the fortitude of Simon Bestwick’s writing voice. Flawlessly genuine throughout the entire work, much of his strength seems to come from using the first person.
Joseph D’Lacey: Simon, thanks for suggesting this snug attic in the middle of nowhere. The air’s a lot…drier…than I’m used to in the basement of Horror Reanimated. Not so many uncategorisable things crawling the walls.
Anyway, welcome to the interview.
I wanted to know first of all why so much of the work in PotD is written in the first person. Is this your M.O. in longer fiction too?
Simon Bestwick: It’s just the easiest voice to slip into as a writer. I know some people say you should always switch it to third person unless you’ve got a really good reason, but I’ve never done that, although I have sometimes deliberately chosen beforehand to write a particular piece third person, just to break the monotony. First person’s particularly attractive in horror because of the nature of the field- it puts you right inside the character’s head and implicates you in their thought processes. That makes it harder to dissociate yourself if the character does something terrible- anybody is capable of just about anything, but we like to pretend otherwise and turn away, cop out by dismissing people who do certain things as ‘evil’. Plus which, of course, a first-person voice usually implies the character has lived to tell the tale, but that doesn’t have to be the case. And even if the character has survived, that’s not necessarily reassuring- just read Lovecraft’s ‘The Rats In The Walls’, or nearly any first-person narrative by Poe.
All my novellas have been first person- not deliberately, it’s just worked out that way. My first novel consisted of three different first-person narratives; my second one’s third person, although all from one character’s viewpoint, and the third’s going to be third person, and told from a lot of different viewpoints. Not planned beyond that yet…
JD’L: You’re very comfortable in the horror genre. I can’t help thinking you belong there. But you also write crime fiction – Never Say Goodbye, Starky’s Town and Vecqueray’s Blanket spring to mind straight away. If you had to write in only one genre for the rest of your existence (including eternity in hell, where we all belong) which would it be and why?
SB: Horror, because it encompasses all the other genres as well. The overlap between horror and the crime genre’s an obvious one, but it can just as readily go into science fiction or fantasy’s territory, and because it shares a lot of elements with magic realism as well, there are plenty of writers- Graham Joyce, in particular, springs to mind- who are just published as ‘mainstream’ authors.
I’d be lying if I said I’d never consciously sat down to write a horror story or ghost story, but I’d also be lying if I said I’d never just sat down to tell a story I really needed to tell and thought fuck genre labels. Genre categories are handy if you’re trying to sell fiction or analyse it, but if you’re trying to write it you need to treat them with extreme caution. Write the stories you want to write and worry later about who you’re going to sell it to or where.
There’s good genre writing and there’s good writing that happens to be in a particular genre. M.R. James’ ghost stories use language wonderfully and they’re great at giving you a pleasant shiver, but beyond that, there’s not really that much to them. Compare a few of James’ stories to any collection by, say, Raymond Carver and you’ll see what I mean. On the other hand, if you take a collection of Dennis Etchison’s short stories and compare them to Carver’s you’ll that they measure up, in terms of the quality of the writing and in terms of content. The best writing deals with whatever subjects, themes, issues are closest to the writer’s hearts and it does so with good prose, careful structure and sound characterisation; it combines all the tools of narrative art with actually having something to say.
JD’L: Can you cite any precursors to your writing style or have you worked hard to create an original voice?
SB: Both- there’s been a lot of writers whose work I’ve admired in different areas, and I’ve tried to learn from each of them. At the same time there’s a fairly definite goal in mind, and I think my style’s been shaped by aiming for that. Poe and Lovecraft both taught me how dark fiction can be and how to construct a story so it builds to maximum effect; Richard Matheson showed how clear, simple prose that tells a story smoothly and effectively could have poetry in it too; later Stephen King did much the same. Also, I came back to writing fiction from an acting background, and so there were playwrights as well, Edward Bond, Howard Barker and David Rudkin; they all dealt in very unsparing, often harrowing imagery and again, they were all trying to create a poetic language that was also very everyday, earthy, raw. I think that’s always been one of the main things I’ve striven for, and to use that to try and get as much as I can into everything I do- psychological depth, social comment, existential musings- but never forgetting a) to still tell a good, involving story and b) that horror fiction is supposed to unsettle, frighten or disturb.
Also, I’ve never bought into the idea that good writers have to starve in garrets and that only crap sells in large quantities. There are some people in the genre who get very sniffy about anyone actually wanting to make some kind of living as a writer, but I think the ugly truth is that commercial success and literary quality just aren’t related. There’s crap that sells by the barrowload (Dan Brown) while there’s good writing that gets overlooked (Joel Lane and Mark Samuels both deserve to be far more widely read and better known), but equally there’s crap that doesn’t sell and good work that does. I’d like, personally, to fit into the second category, but at the same time I’m not interested in fiction that doesn’t connect on an emotional level- anything I do has to become personal on some level or it’s a waste of time. The horror genre just happens to give me the best set of tools to do that.
Shakespeare wrote some of the finest dramatic literature and poetry in the English language, and he did so as a commercial dramatist; and he did that because writers had to cater for everyone- so his tragedies have these beautiful poetic passages after the style of the Latin dramatist Seneca for all the university-educated types in the ‘gods’, but also plenty of gore, poisonings and the sword-fights. And out of that, he synthesised something truly great, something that had both profundity and popular appeal. I don’t think that’s too shabby an ambition, and I think focusing on that has helped develop the style I’ve got.
It’s not just me, though; I think what we’re seeing more recently are different strands in weird fiction being drawn together, different traditions being integrated and synthesised. Conrad Williams is doing that, I think; Gary McMahon is another one.
JD’L: One thing I adored about PotD was your use of language. Partly because of this, the stories had depth and colour rarely found in any genre. Were you born a clever bastard or did you take lessons?
SB: You have a knack of asking questions I can’t answer without sounding like a vain git! I agree with the line about genius being the capacity for taking infinite pains- I’m not claiming to be a genius there, just that if I have reached any standard of quality it’s through a) reading widely in and out of the genre and b) being very tough with my own work. More and more now the first draft of anything is the raw material- the ‘brain barf’ as an American friend put it!- and the rest of the process as shaping and refining it. The first draft can be frustrating at times, but once the work’s completed it’s a hell of a lot easier to work out what to do next.
I’m about to start rewrites on the novel I’ve just finished, and there’s basically a long list of notes of all the things that need to be put right are improved, scribbled down at random and then sorted into some semblance of order to make the long process of setting things to rights a bit easier. Both parts of the process are a lot of fun, however knackering they can sometimes be.
I can’t stand writers who try to get away with second best when writing genre fiction- whether in prose, characterisation, plotting or whatever. I want to write the best fiction, the best work I possibly can. You’re a short time here and a long time dead, and when I’m gone, if I’m very lucky, the work might live on. In the meantime, I’ll be happy if it pays the bills.
JD’L: For your basic horror fan, PotD has got everything: Ghosts, Zombies, Vampires, Psychos, Demons and more Zombies. However, the themes in the collection make it far more than just a bunch of monster sketches. In PotD, story is everything and yet the resonance of each tale lingers. What comes to you first; story or theme? And if your theme comes first, do you worry that trying to explore it too fully will spoil the tale?
SB: Form dictates content, but content also dictates form. Most often the story comes first. Sometimes I can see the themes in there waiting to be pulled out; other times I’ve no clue what it’ll be ‘about’ until I actually start writing. When there is a theme in mind, the job is then to dramatise it, so the theme basically disappears into the characters and the action without needing any big Kevin Costner speeches, please god. And if you’ve done your job properly, form and content become the same thing, so exploring the theme fully will be the same thing as taking the story as far as it can go.
JD’L: What was the last piece of short fiction that blew your mind and why?
SB: ‘This Creeping Thing’ from Robert Shearman’s collection Love Songs For The Shy And Cynical. It’s a great collection; the nearest I can come to describing it is Raymond Carver writing magic realism for Jackanory. The stories start out light, almost whimsical. It’s only as you go on that you realise what he’s doing, and just how dark it is. ‘This Creeping Thing’ blew my away because it surprised me, not in a plot twist kind of way, but by going into territory I’d never have guessed it would, or could, go into. I can’t really talk about the story without spoiling it for people, but really, I can’t recommend it, or the collection as a whole, enough.
JD’L: I’ve always considered short fiction essential practice for novels. Yet some short fiction writers never touch the longer form and some novelists never write short stories. Sometimes, that middle territory occupied by the novella is where the most astounding things occur. Do you have a favourite form?
SB: I love them all! In the past year or so, I’ve been concentrating on novel-writing and haven’t written many short stories except when an editor’s requested one. Mainly it’s the time factor- not just the writing time, but also you have to mull over story ideas and let them brew up to a certain point before you can start writing them. Once the ball’s rolling, you can just come back to the desk each morning and jump back in where you left off. With a novel, that makes daily production an easy task. With short stories, on the other hand, they usually get done in one sitting, maybe two. And then you have to go off again and wait for the next one to rise to the surface.
The last couple of short stories were actually quite tough to write, because I kept thinking ‘this is for a professional anthology, you’ll get some real cash for it so it’s got to be good.’ And you can’t work like that. You can’t think of the money or the exposure at the time you’re writing it, just the work itself. It took a while to get my focus back on where it needed to be, which is writing something I wanted to write. Whether it’s a mass-market novel or a short story maybe a hundred people (if you’re lucky) will read, for god’s sake don’t write it unless you actually want to.
When I started out I wrote a story a week, which actually took a lot of pressure off; no-one was offering professional payment for it, the reward was the buzz of having written something you were proud of and seeing your work in print. Now there’s less time for them, so it tends to be about specific projects. And in the beginning it was easier to take chance and just discard the ones that hadn’t paid off. Now the emphasis is more on thinking through and reworking, so there are fewer individual pieces of work but hopefully the quality’s higher each time. So the old difficulties and challenges have gone and now instead there are new ones, but I can live with that- it’s part of growing up and developing as a writer.
It’d be nice to do some new short stories, though, just for fun. There are always those ideas that won’t leave you alone and have to be written. Maybe after the next novel I’ll have a blitz on them, start laying the keel for a new collection. I agree with you about novellas; they give you the focus and brevity of shorter fiction together with the additional depth, colour and range of a longer story. Some of the work I’m proudest of is novella-length, such as ‘The Narrows’ and in particular ‘The School House.’
JD’L: Have there been any supernatural or unexplainable events in your life that have shaped your creativity?
SB: No. Plenty of unpleasant non-supernatural ones though. Go to a private all-boys’ school for seven years if you really want a reservoir of painful memories to draw on. See ‘The School House’ for details; writing that fucker hurt.
JD’L: The sheer variety of ideas in PotD was a delight but I can’t help wondering about the things that you return to again and again, those rocks you can’t help but keep looking under. Are there any core themes that won’t leave Simon Bestwick alone? If so, what are they and why?
SB: Apocalypses, because there’s such a massive list of ways in which we’re fucked right now, or at least imperilled. Economic crisis, climate change, resource wars, peak oil, pandemics… They all basically serve to remind us just how fragile everything we take for granted, day to day, is, and how easy it is for everything to slip out of our control.
Sex and love keep cropping up too, probably because I’m male and single. Mind you, that happens even when I’m not. Not single, that is; my gender hasn’t altered (appreciably) in the last thirty-odd years, although… hm, there’s another potential story idea.
Also, I fear and loathe authoritarianism- fascism, fundamentalism of any kind, and I’m terrified of them having any power.
I think there’s a real danger of this country becoming an honest-to-god police state in my lifetime, and I just don’t know if there’s the will to fight against it. All you have to do to get a law passed is to say it’s a necessary measure to fight terrorism- six weeks’ detention without trial, bans on legitimate protest- and afterwards no-one notices when those laws are used to clamp down on people who disagree with their government. We’re living in increasingly interesting times, so that’s something that should scare everybody.
We’ve also got people trying to smuggle insane bullshit like creationism onto school syllabuses. We’ve got pharmacists who refuse to supply contraceptive pills and registrars who won’t conduct civil partnership ceremonies, all claiming religion as a defence. The head of the Catholic Church, who’s told his African congregation that condoms make the spread of AIDS worse and has worked to shield paedophiles from justice, attacks anti-discrimination laws for ‘restricting religious freedom’- presumably meaning the right to act like bigoted scum without consequence. People like this hold power. And this is in a world where we also have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The scary thought is not that those people might get access to those toys- under George W. Bush, they did. And it could- probably will- happen again, and we might not be so lucky. How that can’t appal and frighten somebody is beyond me.
JD’L: A fog of depression overtakes me…What projects can we look forward to from you next, Simon?
SB: I’ve just finished the first draft of a new novel,The Song Of The Sibyl, which I’ll be rewriting into its (hopefully) final form over the next couple of months. After that I’ll be writing the first of a planned quartet of novels set in Britain twenty years after a nuclear attack and incorporating Lovecraftian horror. There’s a couple of short stories in the offing- I have a tale called ‘The Sons Of The City’ in End Of The Line, a horror anthology coming out from Solaris Books and edited by Jon Oliver, as well as another that I can’t talk about as it’s still under wraps. I’ve also been invited to contribute something to Never Again, an anti-fascist anthology edited by Joel Lane and Allyson Bird, and another novella, Angels Of The Silences, should be due out from Pendragon Press at Fantasycon this year. I do my best to keep busy and have a lot of irons in the fire!
JD’L: No Horror Reanimated interview is complete without its incredibly bogus award ceremony. You have been given the power to make two nominations:
First, The Sword of the Ultimate Darkness goes to the work of horror in any media which you consider a timeless classic.
Conversely, you may banish to The Plague Pits the very worst example of the genre in any media.
Please make your nominations.
SB: The Sword Of Ultimate Darkness: Fuck. Never, never, never ask me to nominate a ‘best of’ anything. I should’ve told you before we started doing this. I’m hopeless at it. So hopeless, in fact, that I’m going to cheat. I’ll nominate Best Film, Best Novel and Best Short Story.
Film: Threads. You won’t find it in the horror section of your local HMV, but it still remains one of the most authentically frightening, haunting and distressing films I’ve ever seen. An ‘80s film about a nuclear attack on Britain, incredibly realistic, harrowing and bleak. (Similarly, I’d also recommend Peter Watkins’s 1965 film The War Game.) Threads terrifies while engaging the brain and the emotions, and it goes, again and again, way beyond what you hoped would be the cut-off point.
Novel: The Grin Of The Dark by Ramsey Campbell. There’s some bloody stiff competition, not least among Ramsey’s own work (The House On Nazareth Hill and Incarnate both came close too.) A friend told me a couple of years ago that while he still thought Campbell the finest living horror writer, he didn’t think he’d write anything again that’d blow him away like Incarnate had. I took great pleasure in giving him Grin as a Christmas present and he took great pleasure in eating his words.
Short Story: ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’ by Poe. Do I really need to say anything else? Not really. Other than, imagine reading that for the first time aged about nine (if that) and getting to that final line… Yes. Exactly.
The Plague Pits: this one’s even tougher, actually, because I’ve got less and less time for shit writing or films. I’d rather leave it and watch something else! Of course, sometimes you can find and extract a good idea from the awful mess…
Even though it hasn’t been released yet, I’m strongly tempted to nominate Michael Bay’s remake of The Birds because a) it’s (another) pointless remake of a classic and b) it’s Michael fucking Bay. Remakes in general- with certain honourable exceptions- are usually an appallingly bad idea and proof of the movie industry’s intellectual bankruptcy and contempt for both its audience and its own history.
But if I’ve got to pick one existing example… OK. Let me draw your attention to a film called Necropolis (1987, dir. by Bruce Hickey), which I saw back in the ‘90s. Time has mercifully blurred the memories, but not enough. Back then, my best mate and I would watch his enviable collection of shlocky ‘80s horror videos into the small hours. (And without seeing all those naff zombie movies, I’d never have had the idea for ‘Starky’s Town’ among others.) We’d usually be a wee bit intoxicated as well, so we weren’t exactly hard to impress.
The main character of Necropolis is a punky, black-leather-jacketed witch with spiky blonde hair. And six breasts. Which she gets out. More than once, as I recall. And still, we switched the film off after twenty minutes, which gives you some idea of what a steaming pile of half-digested llama guts it had to be. The main actress (I use the term advisedly) appeared to be a dance student on her summer break; every few minutes came footage of her doing a completely pointless dance routine to godawful ‘80s synth-pop. There were no good reasons to put that in the film and plenty not to, so I can only assume she was blowing the director between takes. Occasionally I wonder if I should watch it again just to check we didn’t switch off just before it turned into one of the great lost masterpieces of Western cinema, but so far I haven’t. I’m going those twenty minutes of my life back on my deathbed as it is without adding on Necropolis’ full running time of 77mins.
JD’L: It only remains for me to say a big thank you for talking to Horror Reanimated – albeit on your own rather unusual terms. There’s certainly been a lot of weird activity up here in this attic, much of it XXX rated!
On behalf of all of us, may I also wish you very much success with all your future work. There’s absolutely no question it deserves a much wider audience.
SB: Thank you.
Simon’s other fiction includes:
March 24th, 2010
In the first of what hopefully become a regular series, Horror Reanimated asks genre authors about the book that has influenced them more than any, the book they’d like to take with them to their grave… first up is Canadian author Simon Strantzas:
“The book I would like to be buried with is such an obvious selection for me that it hardly seems worth the effort to explain. Anyone familiar with my writing might guess the answer, but for those in the dark I suspect I’d most like to be buried with The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman. Aickman didn’t write a lot of fiction over his lifetime, but what he did write continues to fascinate and befuddle those of us who enjoy his work. He dealt with dreamscapes, with symbols and metaphors, and while many of his tales lack a clear explanation for what exactly has occurred in them, they are often like the best of our dreams – at times illogical, yet always adhering to their own internal logic.
Reading Aickman one can’t help but feel that it’s the reader, not the author, who is at fault if things aren’t clear – the tales make sense, 
one can feel that they do, even if how remains frustratingly elusive. To study these ciphers, to tease out their true meanings, would take eternity, and I suspect, trapped in that coffin beneath the ground, I’d have nothing more to do than put my mind to it once and for all. Imagine: to be the only corpse in the yard who understood Aickman… I wager I’d be the belle of the undead ball that year.”
The first two volume edition of The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman was published by Tartarus Press and Durtro Press in 1999 and is now out of print, but available through several specialist dealers.
More informaton about Robert Aickman can be found at Wikipedia.
◊◊◊
About Simon Strantzas:
Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically-acclaimed Cold To The Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), a collection of thirteen tales of the strange and supernatural. His first collection, Beneath The Surface (Humdrumming, 2008) was called “possibly the most important debut short story collection in the genre [in years]. . .” by multiple award-winning editor Stephen Jones. Strantzas’s stories have appeared or are due soon in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Cemetery Dance, Postscripts, and elsewhere. In 2009, his work was nominated for the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. Current projects include a third collection of short fiction, a novella, and a short novel. He also hopes to one day catch up on a voluminous amount of reading.
He has lived in Toronto, Canada, for his entire life and has no plans on leaving for sunnier climes.
- Visit Simon’s website
- Read a recent interview with Simon at Savvy Reader’s Bookshelf
March 22nd, 2010
Banquet for the Damned combines several very real elements – night terrors, shamanism, anthropology, witchcraft and heavy metal – in a very real location; St. Andrews. It’s one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read. I had shivers across my skin as I discovered within its pages the histories of the covens of Europe and the studies of evil spirits and familiars in the shamanic traditions of South America and Africa.
Into this world of student revelry and stuffy intellectualism, comes a renegade writer and explorer of altered realities, Eliot Coldwell. And he’s brought something nasty with him. Something hungry. Students begin to disappear from the campus.
At the same time, following the break up of their band, guitarists Dante Shaw and his best friend Tom travel to St. Andrews. They plan to meet Eliot Coldwell, Dante’s spiritual hero and author of the notorious cult novel, Banquet for the Damned. Dante intends to make a concept album using Eliot and his work as the theme.
But instead of finding inspiration in St. Andrews, Dante discovers nightmares stalking the town’s ancient streets…
*
It’s no secret that Bloody Books and Virgin Horror were in direct competition for the same share of the genre market. When the Virgin line folded, we were kind of pleased to be left in the game.
Horror Reanimated seeks the best in the genre and, as time went by, we featured Virgin titles and talked to their authors. (See our posts on Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell and Conrad Williams). Having read plenty of Virgin Horror, it now strikes me as tragic that such high quality fiction will no longer issue forth from that elegantly twisted horn of plenty.
My most recent read was ‘Banquet for the Damned’ by Adam L G Nevill. Originally published by PS Publishing, this title gripped me as hard as any supernatural tale ever has. It is a superbly crafted, beautifully told and genuinely frightening novel. As a final tribute to a noble and prematurely buried imprint, I bring you a candid interview with Adam L G Nevill, author of Banquet and editor of the Virgin Horror line.
We honour the genre’s slain; enemy and friend alike, generals and foot soldiers equally. Why? Because when you throw the festering undead into a pit, they stick together!
But that’s not all. Adam has recently proved himself truly undead having risen again with a major two-book deal…
Joseph D’Lacey: Adam, I’m going to thank you in advance for agreeing to what I realise may be an uncomfortable interview for you following the termination of your horror list.
But I’d like to talk to you first about Banquet for the Damned. This novel came right out of leftfield and slammed me hard upside the head. I’d long believed my supernatural ‘fear’ nerve to be burned out through overuse. Apparently not. What chilled me about the story was the depth of research the characters had done on witchcraft, familiars and evil spirits. It was all too real. What can you say to reassure me that you made it all up?
Adam L G Nevill: Thanks for the really kind words JD’L, and for reading it so carefully. There is nothing more satisfying than finding an ideal reader.
As for reassurance that it’s all fiction, who can say … Night terrors are an absolutely real and universal form of sleep disturbance long associated with witchcraft. My story is inspired by the many actual histories of witchcraft and demonology that I read and researched. And the authors of those tomes were pretty convincing …
While I was based in St Andrews and matriculated at the university, I discovered the most incredible archive of old books on the occult bequeathed to the university library by a former rector. And the university also has a world class anthropology department, with some terrific sources on the occult and superstition in the developing world too. I remember having 40 books on witchcraft and the supernatural on my post-grad library card, when a curious librarian finally asked me what I was doing at the university. It was Lovecraftian – some of the books had not been borrowed since the sixties and I would scurry back to my room and pore over them. I had a year up there and had the time to read dozens of secondary texts on the subject of the unworldly. From that I took great creative license with specific histories and idioms to create the sense that my fictional scholars were authorities in order to make the supernatural element seem authentic. I blended bits and pieces from many documented stories and phenomenon to create my own history of a forgotten pagan god/witch’s familiar that had been called by many different names and moved through the ages, worshipped by one cult or another. I wanted its origins and long story to reflect the patterns of how real history is interpreted and revised, so that even the documentation and sources seemed authentic.
Making the supernatural believable in a modern setting is no easy task, so the carefully wrought history, the scholars, the academic environment, are designed to add credence to a preposterous notion I want a reader to accept. I lose interest in so much horror fiction because of its errant silliness from the beginning, but well-researched books like Matheson’s Hell House, Blatty’s Exorcist and Legion, or most recently Simmon’s The Terror and Brookes’s World War Z unsettle you far more because of that sense of authenticity and plausibility. Place the unrecognisable subtly amongst the recognisable and it’s easier for a reader to lose themselves in a story.
JD’L: Great. Like I’ll sleep a wink tonight knowing all that.
Our resident supernatural horror author, Bill Hussey, doesn’t believe in ghosts, spirits or the afterlife. Aside from the research angle, how much actual experience of the supernatural do you have? Do you think there’s a world we can’t see, a world where dark forces conspire to enter ours?
ALGN: I suffered dreadful night terrors while writing the book. I’d never had them before. Bizarrely, two readers have emailed me to declare the same while reading it. Which would suggest we all induced them subconsciously while either writing or reading a book featuring vivid night terrors. Or, I do wonder, did I make myself receptive to a phenomenon that was actually there anyway? I began the book in St Andrews, but continued writing the novel’s first draft for 18 months in Kent, when these experiences occurred. I would awake periodically to see the outline of a very tall and thin figure standing before the curtains of my room, silhouetted by both the ambient light passing through the curtains and by a thin line of red light, like fire, around its shape. I would sit up, pinch myself, blink, make certain I was fully awake, but the figure would remain there, more or less at the foot of my bed, staring. You can imagine the terror. I even called out and challenged it on a number of occasions, but received no response. It would eventually walk the length of the room, then turn and vanish through the door. I base one scene in Banquet on what I experienced. My landlord in Kent was deeply uncomfortable with such talk, and his girlfriend told me of a family tragedy involving fire which explained his reticence. I said no more about it, but she also pointed out to me how a second shadow would follow my landlord from room to room in this lovely old house we lived in. And sure enough, it did. The second shadow was a different size.
Add to that, as an undergraduate, while billeted in halls that were once part of a military hospital, I would often wake because someone was standing beside my bed and leaning over me, with their face close to mine. It used to scare me witless. Door handles would also turn, doors would open, no one would come through, though other residents at the end of the corridor featuring the affected rooms would see a woman in a white uniform entering or leaving.
On holiday, in an old cottage in Dorset, we would sit in the living room and hear footsteps walk the length of the rooms upstairs. It was terrifying at first, but by the end of the week we became accustomed to the walking figure (though no one would go to the toilet alone). The owners of the cottage informed me that nearly every visitor experiences a haunting there and someone even took a photo of the ghost, looking through a window. Needless to say, we never went back, and I am relieved it was not me that saw that face at the window.
Add a whole raft of inexplicable sixth sense experiences to these brushes with the uncanny, as well as the fact that everyone has a ghost story, so I don’t rule out ‘activity’ after death. Both positive and negative activity (most of our family hauntings were positive farewells from the recently departed, and I have two relatives with psychic tendencies). I may revile religious fundamentalism, and am no fan of most organised religion either, but I do find the current atheistic lobby tedious. And believing in nothing but status and money seems to be a modern dilemma.
I think the very act of writing has an element of mysticism involved too, and I have sympathies with Machen and Blackwood’s creative visions, who were both mystical writers. A deep involvement in fiction, both reading and writing, has also given me transcendent experiences and I wouldn’t be without them.
JD’L: Banquet is set in locations that are very well known to you. Dante and Tom set off from Birmingham and spend 
most of the novel in St. Andrews. To begin with, I thought these real locations were going to kill my suspension of disbelief. In the end the effect was the opposite. Such was the power of the writing that I could see the streets of St Andrews and its old buildings and dark alleyways – even though I’ve never been there. How important do you think the setting was to the success of the novel?
ALGN: Thanks again JD’L. St Andrews is pretty much a character in the novel. I drove up there knowing I wanted to write a novel of supernatural horror, with a vague idea of the story featuring a notorious but nearly forgotten book and occult scholar. But when I received my first sighting of the town, I knew I had found my setting. The town was such a tremendous inspiration – it is one of those places that make the supernatural seem possible. The wealth of history, the architecture, the tributes to martyrs, the shadowy courts, the very age of the place, just conjured macabre fantasies. I was absurdly terrified of doing it an injustice, and was so enthusiastic about the town, I did my absolute best to recreate it in language as precisely as I was able at the time. Again, I do think a detailed sense of place and conjuring of atmosphere through specific details lays the ground for the insertion of the implausible, the impossible, and aids the suspension of disbelief. The very physical presence of the ancient town, twinned with extensive reading, allowed the story to write itself. So without St 
Andrews, there would have been no Banquet.
JD’L: There are so many passages in Banquet that are a delight to read. The story is magnetic but the way you tell it is reminiscent of the literary styles of bygone horror authors. It put me very much in mind of M. R. James. Was that a deliberate ‘one-off’ or is this the voice of Adam L G Nevill that we can expect to hear again? I’m particularly interested in your answer because I know you’ve had some good news recently…
We’ll get to that soon…
ALGN: I do wear my influences on my sleeve in Banquet. And M R James was the chief mentor that guided my hand. My dad read many of the classic supernatural writers to my brother and I when we were boys: James, Poe, Mare, Collier, and his shelves were groaning with Lovecraft and Blackwood, which I then explored on my own. Such dark matter had a deep impact on my imagination at that age – I truly experienced what one critic called “the sublime of terror” – and I was pretty much destined to try and recreate it in my own fiction at some point. So my reading of the canon of the supernatural in fiction will always be apparent, and I’m deeply in debt to the classic masters. As I also am to the modern masters in the field. Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, and Ramsey Campbell have taken the weird tale to the mountain, not only in terms of their actual bodies of work, but in a mastery of language and style that few can be consistently compared to in any genre. All three of those writers have given me wonderful examples of introducing more speculative and surreal elements to a treatment of the supernatural in fiction. I think this is evident in my second novel. I also think it’s worth mentioning that your development as a writer is in tune with your development as a reader. I was never sophisticated enough as a reader 
when I first began writing seriously, but by reading great writers patiently, pennies began to drop. So often these days I’ll pick up a book and think, this writer hasn’t read enough.
JD’L: Banquet is a brilliant example of the triumph of style over gratuity. It’s tense and claustrophobic and the exact nature of the evil remains veiled even when you describe it directly. When violence and malevolence occur, when blood is spilled, it’s done with great delicacy and poetry. How did you manage this?
ALGN: When describing the supernatural, producing risible descriptions is probably the easiest thing to do. And it is the bane of the field. Fear is also difficult to describe. Producing clarity and impact, is bloody hard. I doubt there are many books as bad as bad horror novels, nor films for that matter as bad as bad horror films, but there are few books or films as powerful as great horror novels and films. I aspired to, and looked to, the best in the genre. I pretty much took two years out from work and lived on about three grand a year, in the late nineties, to deliberately hone the craft and improve as a writer. I paid a lot of attention to cultivating subtlety through glimpses and suggestions, as opposed to full reveals. There are no better examples of this style in the field than in the fiction of M R James, who only wrote fiction with the full intention of frightening and disturbing a reader. It was my goal to combine the stylistic traits of the better late Victorian and the Edwardian authors, like James, within a thoroughly modern multi-plot structure that Stephen King and Dan Simmons made their own, and to also write in the present tense to emulate a cinematic feel. If a reader could accept that immediate-tense narration, I hoped the actual appearances of the supernatural in the novel might take on a more vivid nature within the reader’s imagination. Perhaps in a personal film. I also wanted the power of a short story to endure throughout a long novel. What was I thinking? In hindsight, I realise many seem to believe that it cannot be achieved in a horror novel. Stylistically, it was a bloody ambitious book to write, though the occult element may appear conservative and ‘old school’ to many as it deals with possession and witchcraft. So, Banquet was every bit as much of an example of a new writer trying to achieve a particular set of criteria within a novel, and also hoping that it would be a good story for an average reader who would be unaware of the scaffolding.
Did it work? It took three years of constant revision to complete the book, and I remember being profoundly disappointed when I finished it. Looking back, and reading generous praise from readers, I feel much happier with that debut.
I also read a terrific thesis by Peter Penzholdt, in which he identified and explored various treatments of the supernatural in fiction, including M R James. His study identified techniques that I was only occasionally stumbling across, on an instinctive level as a writer, and wondering afterwards how I’d achieved a certain affect. His study helped me find more consistency. My tutors at St Andrews were also poets, and poets are masters of language, which is why I chose St Andrews in the first place to study writing formally. I never doubted my ideas, but I was right to doubt my ability at expressing them. I desperately needed a mentor – someone who could look at my actual writing and tell me what was wrong with it. Get the actual writing right first, is the best advice I can give anyone. At times the criticism was crushing and I doubted whether I should even continue writing. I’d go back to my room after a tutorial, deflated. But by the end of the year, I’d experienced nothing short of a personal renaissance. I learnt how the use of simple, innocent diction, in a calculated and coercive fashion, can build and build, and prove more powerful than the use of language that on its own, in isolation from the rest of a sentence, carries an unpleasant meaning. I eschewed the latter, and used the former. M R James preferred “wet” to “slimy” and I do too. Good poets and short story writers consider the music and image of every descriptive word to create the desired effect. I’ll approach every scene in that way, then look at how these scenes are attached to the one preceding and following, and then rework to maintain fluency and pace without losing descriptive power in the set-pieces. Above all I learned that good writing is all about rewriting. Draft after draft with long breaks in between each draft. Eventually when the removal of one comma will cause a total collapse, it’s as good as it will get.
JD’L: When readers see a book on a shelf and the name on its spine they rarely understand the time and effort that put it there. I’m not just talking about the novel they’re actually looking at either. So much more has to have already happened for the miracle of publication to occur. At times, I even think other authors believe those with bigger, better deals or greater sales figures have somehow lucked into it overnight. Can you tell us a little about the crests and troughs you’ve ridden from dream to publication?
ALGN: Banquet was complete in 2000. I began it in late 1997. But by 2002 every agent who accepted fiction in the Writers and Artists Yearbook had eventually turned down my letter of introduction. I don’t think anyone ever read a word of the actual book. “No horror” being the usual refrain, or “too many authors already”. And as no publisher took unsolicited manuscripts, that was that. Game over. By then, I’d forsaken a career in television a second time. I was living on a shoe-string (again) and enduring an existence above an old pub in East London and working nights as a security guard. And going mad with sleep deprivation and a sense of despair. Only my erotica novels kept me afloat.
From 1997 onwards, I was lucky enough to be published as an author of erotica. I wrote nine novels in total, for Virgin Books’s Nexus imprint (which I was asked to edit in late 2004). Approximately one each year, so I carried on cutting my teeth in another genre that was box-office back in the nineties, while horror seemed all but dead as a mainstream publishing concern. My Nexus books kept me going. Built morale. It was pulp fiction under a pseudonym, but it was the ultimate confirmation of publication and a great education in novel-writing. I even wrote one erotica novel in the second person, several from first person female POVs – with each novel I attempted a different approach to narration.
Then my editor at Virgin, James Marriott, showed one of my horror stories to John Couthard, who recommended me to Ramsey Campbell. Ramsey was putting together a collection called Gathering The Bones and took my story, Mother’s Milk. I was amazed. My first publication under my actual name and the rite-of-passage horror story that I wrote at the end of my masters in St Andrews. Being a cheeky blighter I then asked Ramsey in 2003 for advice with the novel Banquet for the Damned, which I had revisited and rewritten again in 2002, and Ramsey recommended me to Peter Crowther at PS. I was unaware of small presses at the time, but Peter read and accepted Banquet within a week. Without Ramsey and Peter, Banquet would have remained an uneaten meal, mouldering in the pantry of my hard drive. Peter then championed the book for years and it started to develop a modest reputation among other writers and critics who said some very kind things. Had it been the eighties, the story may have been different, but I’d written a big supernatural horror novel in a publishing climate that had no interest in horror. I was bloody lucky to find a sympathetic writer of considerable reputation, and a sympathetic publisher in Peter Crowther. They brought me into print as a writer of supernatural horror.
JD’L: Having been through all this yourself, it must have been tough notifying your Virgin Horror authors that the imprint had reached the end of the road. Was the imprint doomed from the word go or do you think, if certain things had been different, the line might still be going?
ALGN: We’d been taken over by a big international corporate publisher in 2007, but were still working under the existing Virgin management and I was asked to create new fiction lines. I immediately put horror forward as one idea. Everyone was excited, we had big plans, the critical path was set, so it certainly wasn’t doomed from the get go. On the contrary. But during the first year in 2008, despite how promising the line was, the company’s strategy began moving in a non-fiction direction. New management, new staff, more changes, new focuses, and I was kind of left alone in fiction on the sidelines, but without any real resources to publish the 2009 list. Then cutbacks and title-count reductions hit with the recession, people started losing their jobs etc. Fiction was wound right back to the erotica I had been editing since 2005, plus the cult fiction reprints I was producing for Bukowski. The editorial strategy had moved almost exclusively to non-fiction, leaving horror, erotica and me, high and dry. But the list was acclaimed, it was successful at the level it was published, and may well have continued at a better level had the company’s publishing strategy not changed. So it was deeply disappointing having to tell the authors of the end after such an exciting start. Nine months later I was delivering the same message to a hundred erotica authors too. Again, not something I chose to do nor enjoyed doing. Considering the re-emergence of horror – one of the only good pieces of news in fiction publishing these days – it now looks horribly premature to have buried us thus and so quickly. Ironically, The Birthing House was the first book I tried to buy for the list and that went on to sell 150K copies for Sphere, who published it so well. I’d even say, we were ahead of our time. As I said to the authors too, we may not have swung wide the gates of hell, but we certainly took the catch of the porch door. Having Bloody Books up and dancing at the same time as the Virgin horror line, it was an exciting time to see the underground – the punks – looking to the mainstream again. We raised consciousness and published some fine books. Can’t believe I got Thomas Ligotti into Smiths Travel too – I mark that as an editorial achievement. And if you look at the breadth and quality on those two horror lists, in an age of mediocre thrillers, predictable post-colonial literary fiction, ghost-written celeb fiction, and Vatican conspiracy nonsense, I think we can hold our grizzled, lipless and mottled heads up high.
JD’L: It’s been my experience of publishing that you never know what’s round the next corner. Your personal story seems to fit with this. After all you’ve put up with, suddenly there’s some real sunshine brightening the next part of your writing journey. A two book deal, no less! How did it come about and what was your reaction?
ALGN: To quote Chevy Chase in Caddyshack, “Cinderella Story, boy from nowhere.” When my agent John Jarrold called me to tell me the results of the auction, as I held the phone, my hand shook. Pretty much waited my entire life as a writer for an opportunity like this. I started writing seriously, with it being the major focus of my every day, and as a purpose for life, in 1995. So after fifteen years, I do feel like I have spent a long time in an apprenticeship.
I finished my second novel of supernatural horror at Xmas – another ambitious three year epic, this time written around a very busy fulltime job in publishing. One publisher expressed firm interest in late May of this year, then another and another … And John set an auction date. The very word “auction” in relation to me is hard to even say, and the enthusiasm from the editors was overwhelming. And that’s not false modesty. I vividly remember 40 plus rejections to my introductory letter for Banquet in 2000. They took two years to come in, and by the time the final one had landed on the mat, my head was down. Having worked in publishing I also know how hard it is for editors to pitch and get enough positive feedback from sales, publicity, export, rights, marketing, and management about a proposal. But my second book seemed to generate that at the appropriate levels, and as I’m 50K words into the first draft of a third novel, we submitted a partial of that too. So it became a two-book deal.
JD’L: Any chance of a whisper of what your next novels are about?
ALGN: The second novel is haunted building story spanning generations, my London novel; the third a ‘great outdoors’ novel of psychic terror.
JD’L: Time for the awards ceremony, Adam…
You have honour of making two nominations. First is the Sword of the Ultimate Darkness which goes to the work of horror in any medium which, in your opinion, is a timeless classic.
Second, you may banish to the Plague Pits the worst example of our beloved genre in any medium.
Please make your nominations.
ALGN: I consider this a real honour. For the Sword of Ultimate Darkness, I’d like to mention a book that may have slipped under the radar for many, but it’s a magnificent second horror novel by an American writer called David Searcy, whom I know almost nothing about, but the book needs its profile raised and I treasure it. I found it in a bookshop in New York in 2004. The cover caught my eye. I read the back, checked the first few pages and bought it. It’s one of those books that both made me want to write and also to give up writing because it is so good. It’s a terrific amalgam of M R James and William Faulkner, of Daniel Woodrell and Algernon Blackwood. American noir, scarecrow horror. I read it in one sitting in Hyde Park under a tree, and found myself glancing over my shoulder as the end drew near. It’s called Last Things by David Searcy.
The Plague Pits are overflowing, but I’d like to cast the remake of The Haunting, starring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta Jones, into the pit, along with the entire cast and crew for taking part in such a sham, plus the studio that probably ruined what was originally an honest endeavour. If anyone else was unlucky enough to pay to see this film, they’ll know why it belongs at the bottom of the pit.
JD’L: Lovely choices!
It only remains for me to say a heartfelt thanks on behalf of all at Horror Reanimated for joining us here in the rotting colon of purgatory. And to apologise for the smell, of course. We wish you the very best of luck for all your future projects.
It was a pleasure, thanks very much for the kind words and for having me. And also for giving me an opportunity to leave the indistinct bone-thing, that has been following me, with you. The runes are cast…
August 17th, 2009
Back in August 2008 I managed to get in to the UK premiere of Johnny Kevorkian’s excellent and chilling urban ghost story The Disappeared at the Frightfest in London. (Review here and film website here – from whence I purloined all these images). The film went down a treat and was a highlight of the festival, IMHO.
A few weeks later I managed to catch a busy, somewhat relieved and very amiable Mr. Kevorkian, (no relation), for a coffee and a chat to discuss this very British film, which is currently enjoying a well-deserved run at the ICA cinema throughout June and July.
MFR: Where did the seed of the idea for The Disappeared originate?
JK: Myself and Neil Murphy, the Producer had had a really bad experience of a film script that we had optioned. I’m not going to mention the name. We’d tweaked the script and made it much better, but then we lost the funding and it was very, very frustrating. We said to ourselves that we couldn’t keep on getting other people’s scripts and spending all this time and money on them and then losing them at the eleventh hour. People were getting greedy and other comanies became interested and talking about getting big actors, big stars involved. Most of the time it doesn’t work, you want something gritty instead of too polished, something that sends shivers down your spine, the hairs on the back of your neck, that’s what we wanted. The cheaper the horror film, the scarier the horror film. That’s my thing. We wanted to concentrate on the horror in it, the atmosphere; whereas if you’ve got a big studio-type horror film they won’t allow you to get away with that. Atmosphere is the last thing on their minds. They want you to focus on the stars, and I don’t think it works for a horror film, those slick techniques.
So we thought, let’s just write our own, let’s come up with our own damn idea! We sat down and said let’s do a horror film, we can do it really cheaply and get away with it. And in the UK, at the time, there weren’t many horror films being produced. Not this type of film, maybe a few slasher films, which I love as well, don’t get me wrong I love all that sort of stuff, but we wanted to make a more atmospheric film, with more about the characters. We wanted to make a classic, old-school chiller, something we hadn’t seen for a while. It started out the the EVP (electronic voice phenomena) idea of watching a press conference about a murder and hearing a voice of the victim. We saw a few of these on television a while ago, and we decided to see what we could do with that.
But we had to be careful as there was that Michael Keaton film, (White Noise), coming out and we didn’t want to go down that route. I avoided that film at the time, and have only just seen it, and there’s no comparison. Once we had the main idea we looked at the environment. Where could we set the film? Suburbia? No. Let’s go to somewhere a bit more gritty. Let’s make it scary. A council estate. Let’s give people something they aren’t expecting. Once we’d found the estate we’d have the whole place to set the film. Not just the inside of a suburban house.
MFR: And how did you find the collaboration process with Neil Murphy?
JK: We sat down at different desks in the same room and just wrote. We had to be quite disciplined. Neil would come over and we’d lock ourselves in the flat for the whole day until six or seven at night. I really enjoy the process. I had a lot of ideas for scenes that I could already see in my head. Then we’d go off separately and I’d write pages 10-20 and Neil would write pages 21-40 and we’d put our own intepretation on the story. Then we’d sit down and combine the two versions; we got rid of loads of stuff – that’s crap, that’s crap. When we got the green-light to do the film we had a first draft that took a month to do, and the second draft took another month and a half.
MFR: The film has two distinct halves – the contemporary urban ghost story, influenced by Asian scares; and the eerily atmospheric, almost gothic horror of the tunnels beneath the Church, influenced by the British Hammer and Amicus traditions…
JK: The big dilemma was how much to actually put in the film itself. In the older drafts we had more horror running throughout the whole film, and we had to think about how much we could leave in and still tell the same story. Having really interesting locations helped make that choice as they really help the tone and atmosphere, without really having to ‘say’ it in the script. A lot of the gothicness came in as we shot. The church is one of my favourite locations. I found the location I had in my head. The brief was find a place that gives me a feel of the church in Salem’s Lot. I love that seventies scary unpleasant feel. That was in Honor Oak in South East London. It even had the right door!
MFR: Are you a Londoner? How did you set about finding the locations…
JK: I’ve been in London forever! It was interesting and we had to look around for a while, and although it’s a low-budget film, it does have a budget and a whole film-crew to look after and to get from place-to-place. It’s not a Blair Witch, put-a-camera-on-a-shoulder-and-run-around, so there was a lot of responsibility. I gave the location guy a brief: it had to be colourless, it really had to feel creepy. I avoided shooting scenes with lots of extras, and tried to keep everything to a bare minumum. I wanted the atmosphere to come through by itself.
When I saw the pictures of Heygate, (the estate near Elephant and Castle, now being redeveloped and its residents rehomed), I knew straight away. When I went there for the first time it was really odd. It’s surrounded by the city, but when you get there and walk through the heart of the estate you can’t hear anything. It had the atmosphere I was looking for – no one’s going to want to walk across this estate, it had a sense of being forgotten about, like the kids who are going missing in the film. It also had a sense of timelessness. I kept technology out of the film as much as I could. There are no mobile phones. I wanted the place isolated, cut off from the rest of the world. The bland colours of the buildings were striking, blending into the background really well.
We liased with the Council and shot there for three and a half weeks; the whole film took just under five weeks. We tried to keep in the background, but as soon as the kids on the estate got wind that Tom Felton (of the Harry Potter films) was there, they ran around asking for autographs, but it helped us befriend the locals who were absolutely lovely. There were a few ‘junkie’ types who didn’t want us there; but the majority were a good bunch, and it was an estate full of families, a family-run estate, with lots of people working there who also lived there. In the playground scenes we had to stop the kids running around: we’ll give you an autograph if you sit still for a few minutes, and they were great.
MFR: Matthew’s flat had a real impact on me. I couldn’t imagine living in such a place…
JK: The interior of the flat was real. We actually did it down a bit. It was a great location, but it felt so claustrophobic. After being there in the flat for a whole week, it felt hot and enclosed, althugh the walls were paper-thin. It was the real deal, as were all the locations in the film.
MFR: And where did you film the subterranean scenes? In London?
JK: The tunnels are the Chislehurst Caves, on the borders of Kent. There are 20 miles of man-made tunnels. People used to live there in the Second World War. There are churches down there, whole communities lived there beneath the ground. When you first go in, it’s quite daunting and the crew were a bit freaked out. We were going to be there over three days, from first thing in the morning to last thing at night. It feels cold in there at first, but it’s got this bizarre temperature that you get used to – not cold or warm. Nothing grows in there. or lives in there anymore. It’s absolutely pitch black. No lights at all. You have to take torches and if you got lost you had a whistle. It’s the real thing and we thought we’d just film this thing. If we’d had a budget we’d have probably lit it or built it in a studio. In the sequence where Matthew’s running through the tunnels, I wanted the scene to be just running and running until the film runs out of the magazine, and you couldn’t get that in a studio. In a studio you’d have to be clever with the lighting and cutting, but there was no cutting, he just kept running. There was a problem with the crew running after him though! But I like the idea of this whole manicness. You can hardly see what’s going on, and that’s purely deliberate, and not knowing what’s going on I wanted to bring that across in this great location. I think the crew became a bit stir crazy, and it was exhausting carrying all the equipment a long way in there. It wasn’t just a cave, for example, the altar room had six or seven different areas leading off from it, so to make up that one location there were six or seven places to be used. That’s where a studio has an advantage, I had to cut to make things seamless.
MFR: How do you make locations scary?
JK: Excellent question! I think it’s to do with the way you shoot it, in terms of lighting and colour. And I think it’s how you time your shots. Going back to other horror films, there a lot of fast cuts, but I think you lose that sense of what’s scary. What I find scary is staring at someone or something for a long time and the atmosphere builds around you and absorbs you. But a lot of the time it is the actual location itself, the look of the thing. We filtered a bit, but what I wanted the most was to use it and show it how it was. The brief to Diego, the cinematographer was let’s make it realistic, let’s not stylize, right up until the caves let’s not follow a strict way of doing things. Once we got into the caves – let’s go for stark lighting and bring up the horror elements and I think the contrast really works.
MFR: So the darkness, a time-old problem for horror film-makers. Does hi-def make a difference?
JK: When we did the first cut of the movie, which was about two hours, me and the Editor sat down and tried to bring out the horror and the atmosphere. I was very nervous, because the last half of the film is so dark, we filmed with one light source, but people like it, and I think it worked. A lot of the films you see these days, it’s dark, but it’s not dark. It’s not what you’d see. If there’s no light you can’t see anything and that’s why it’s scary!
You could shoot it in hi-def, but it goes quite milky and you lose that denseness of the blacks. So we shot on film. If we’d used hi-def we wouldn’t have got the gritty atmosphere we did. We had a cast and crew screening and we’d converted to hi-def – it looked good, but not good enough. We projected it on 35mm at the Odeon (at Frightfest) and it looked great. On DVD it’ll look great because we’ll keep the source elements, the discipline of how we shot it, in the negative. The 35mm and the Hi-def are two completely different versions really.
MFR: The Disappeared’s a very English film, but perhaps employing Asian-inluenced techiques for the portrayal of the ghosts – e.g. reflections in glass, and so on…
JK: People are doing simple things to scare people because they work. The blander and more mundane the settings the scarier they are too. I use classic chill techniques like echoes because they do work. The handheld cameras in the caves also adds to the atmosphere. It feels real and organic. It does feel as if somebody’s there with you. The key is not to make it look handheld, but for it to be handheld. This was all hand-held, but it doesn’t come across, especially for the first part of the film.
MFR: I really enjoyed the way you set-up a mythology of South east London ghosts…
JK: Again, you just don’t see this in films. This city and that area in particular has a massive history of sightings and they’re just not used enough.
MFR: Were you aware that the characters and story could be seen as a metaphor for those people who live on the estate, some with troubled lives perhaps, and those who’ve lost children…
JK: Yes. The story and locations play on the biggest fears of society; estate gangs; dysfunctional families; child abduction. All these things, if you put them all into one location and it becomes even scarier. It makes it real, and people respond to that.
[A series of photos taken around the estates of the Elephant and Castle by students studying photojournalism can be seen here. Check out image 11 - the Ashenden building on the Heygate Estate.]
MFR: Harry Treadaway, as Matthew Ryan is awesome. How did you find the casting process?
JK: It was more of a case, especially with the more established actors, that I’d meet them and see if they wanted to work with me, as a first-time Director.
With Matthew’s character, Harry Treadaway nailed it. Without him the film would be nothing. It’s a drama as much as anything so if he’s dropped the ball at anytime it would have been over. Due to his success, Harry’s very selective about the roles he chooses these days, but Matthew’s a great, great character. So I had to reassure Harry, and talk with him about what I wanted from the character: let’s not have this character, who, depsite being scared, runs about screaming. Matthew’s messed up in his head; and in the film, is it in his head, or is it real? He liked that angle and especially the fact he is a quiet character. There was one scene, where Matthew and Jake, his father, blow up, and I took it out as it detracted from the atmosphere. Greg Wise who plays Jake is about 20 years older than Harry, so the father and son relationship worked really well. You had to feel so sorry for the kids in the film. Matthew’s character is quiet and messed up; whereas Tom’s character, Simon, is louder and more confident, but who goes through massive attitudinal changes later in the film, when his sister goes missing.
Casting the evil character was challenging – how does he play it? Not under or over play it? He needed to be menacing and was the last character casted. The evil character, you could take him back to another time, another place, and people make their own interpretations. Some might say he’s a vampire. But he’s not. All these different things come up, and it’s quite nice. I definitely wanted to keep the ending very, very ambiguous.
MFR: Frightfest was back in August 2008, so I got an update from Johnny on progress since then…
JK: The Frightfest guys really helped us get a lot of press which has been great and it has resulted to having its Uk theatrical release at the ICA in London.
The ICA run and some great reviews have also led to interest from some other distributors to pick it up for DVD in the Autumn.
Up to this ICA run the film has been doing the festival circuit over the last few months and picking up some awards along the way at some nice festivals. The film recently won best feature and sound at the Eerie Horror Fest in Pennsylvania, Mauvais Genre France 2009 – Winner of Young Jury’s Prize 2009 in the feature category and also Houston International Film Festival 2009 – Winner of Best Narrative Feature Award. It also screened at Screamfest in LA, Lund in Sweden, the Dublin Horrorthon, Dead Channels San Francisco, Ravenna in Italy, Leeds, Malaga.
We have also sold the film to IFC films in US and it will have its release from the IFC theaters platform which which be screened all over IFC’s channels across North America. The release is from the 8th of July, very exciting!
My next projects starts the end of this year. It’s called, Sleep Thief. It’s a combination of Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, and The Machinist, it has a great story with very strong central characters. It does have some ghostly elements like in The Others. It plays very much on modern fears and is very topical. We are in the process of casting the male lead now – will keep you posted.
Interview with Johnny Kevorkian, by Mathew F. Riley
June 24th, 2009
Next Posts
About Christopher Golden:
