ATLRetro

Splatter Cinema presents CANNIBAL FEROX (1981); Dir. Umberto Lenzi; Starring John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), Lorraine De Selle and Robert Kerman; Cinevision Screening Room; Saturday, August 15 @ 8:30 p.m.; IndieGoGo campaign w/ advance ticket sales end July 24; Admission at door is cash only; Trailer here.

By Aleck Bennett
Contributing Writer

Splatter Cinema wants to bring you a rare chance to see Umberto Lenzi’s notorious CANNIBAL FEROX, aka MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY on the big screen at Cinevision in all its 35mm glory. Incredibly they’ve scored a fully restored print from Grindhouse Releasing! But the catch is the rental and shipping is expensive, so they are dependent on an INDIEGOGO campaign with advance ticketing. If it doesn’t make its goal, this screening won’t happen. That would be a real shame because Splatter Cinema has really delved into the fetid jungle of grindhouse treasures to unearth this putrescent piece of gut-munching gore. 

As I’ve mentioned here before, the horror genre is, in the eyes of many, disreputable. It’s not hard to see why—its primary purpose is to elicit something negative: fear. Comedy doesn’t get that reaction, because who doesn’t like to laugh? Action films promise thrills and excitement, which generally equals fun. Drama deals with serious topics and explores a wide range of emotion. But horror films conjure up some of our darkest emotions, and thus fall victim to the stigma of being “bad for you.” And some of horror’s subgenres get criticized more harshly than others. The slasher film, for instance, constantly comes under fire for celebrating slaughter. But no subgenre inspires the kind of wholesale, visceral revulsion than does the Italian cannibal film.

The whole craze started in 1972, when Umberto Lenzi helmed THE MAN FROM DEEP RIVER. Almost a beat-for-beat remake of 1970’s A MAN CALLED HORSE, Lenzi shifted that movie’s setting from the old west to the Thai rainforest and added a fascination with ritualistic acts, cannibalism, violence and animal cruelty (largely inspired by the worldwide success of exploitative pseudo-documentary Mondo movies such as MONDO CANE and AFRICA ADDIO). Its huge success in Italy and on the US grindhouse circuit led to the subgenre remaining successful for nearly two decades.

Generally speaking, the Italian cannibal film follows a particular pattern: it opens in the “civilized” world—typically New York, though this isn’t written in stone—and some incident occurs that pulls our protagonists into the (again, typically) Asian or South American jungle. There, they encounter some previously unknown, long-lost or much feared native tribe; witness or experience graphic violence, torture and/or rape; and then a bunch of people get eaten and the lone survivors return, battered but wiser. This plot plays out in Lenzi’s CANNIBAL FEROX, which ups the ante on all its predecessors by claiming to be the “most violent movie ever made.” It goes to such extremes that Italian exploitation stalwart John Morghen (aka Giovanni Lombardo Radice) expresses regret that he agreed to act in the movie to this day.

Now, there are a wide variety of reasons why CANNIBAL FEROX and its kin are viewed so negatively. To start off with, there’s the insinuation that entering into some foreign jungle will pretty much guarantee that you’ll become the next meal of some “savage tribe.” It might stop short of actual racism (and my use of “might” is mighty shaky), but short isn’t where most people would prefer to stop. Then there’s the issue of sexual violence and rape. Sexual violence in these movies is almost always a threat, whether it’s perpetuated against indigenous women by the outsiders or against female outsiders entering hostile territory. Sympathetic critics have defended both elements on the grounds that many of the Italian cannibal films are explicitly anti-colonialist in tone and critical of Western capitalism. The conquering white heroes invade a remote locale, rape its women and kill its men, and are dealt retribution in kind. It’s not particularly subtle, but then, neither are these films when it comes to anything else. They’re blunt instruments, the argument goes, meant to shock a complacent audience into examining itself and the violence inherent in the system.

And then there’s the actual animal cruelty depicted in these movies. For some reason, this is a longstanding element of the subgenre, and is the main focus of most people’s revulsion. Defenders of the cannibal genre argue that the presence of actual animal cruelty works as a technique because it causes you to question the reality of what you’re witnessing—if that is real, what else is? Others argue that some of the depictions reflect actual practices of the people populating the film, so it’s an introduction of documentary realism into a fictional framework. Still others argue that these elements are present in any number of critically celebrated films—from Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW and Cimino’s HEAVEN’S GATE to Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV and Godard’s WEEK-END—and that singling out these films amounts to bigotry against the horror genre (“sure, I’ll let Coppola show a water buffalo being slaughtered because that’s art, but all horror is pretty much crap, so this cannibal movie is fair game”). All of which are salient points, to which I’ll add that the raison d’être of horror films—to evoke fear and revulsion—draws more attention to these acts than in other, more mainstream films. There’s no shift in tone to relieve the audience. Not that it makes the viewing any easier.

The genre reached what many consider its apex in 1980-81. Ruggero Deodato’s landmark 1980 film CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST touched on all of these elements and not only set aim at the horrors of colonialism, but turned its sights on the fact that an audience even existed to relish in the horrors he was putting on screen. As with Michael Haneke’s FUNNY GAMES, the viewer is made implicit in the crimes depicted as he or she watches. In making HOLOCAUST, Deodato seemed to be saying, “look upon the disgusting nature of this genre’s demands and know that they exist because you fools pay money to see them!”

Then came 1981’s CANNIBAL FEROX, released in the States as MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY. So uncompromising that its marketing brags about having been banned in 31 countries, the movie sees Lenzi largely eschewing the postmodern moralizing of Deodato (while still picking up on the evils of colonialism and Western capitalism) and going straight for the jugular. It’s brutal, it’s ugly, and it represents one of the twin peaks of Italian cannibal cinema. Lenzi is an accomplished filmmaker and knows precisely how to push buttons and fills his movie with energy to spare. That it’s as well-made as it is only makes the bludgeoning savagery of the film that much more affecting. If it were truly a bad movie, then no amount of outrage would sustain the attention paid to the film over the years. I mean, nobody’s talking about Bruno Mattei’s MONDO CANNIBALE, which sports many of the same superficial elements (heck, it’s basically a remake of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST) and it’s only 12 years old. No, CANNIBAL FEROX is a quantifiably good movie—well-paced, intelligently structured, and uniformly follows through on its line of reasoning to an inevitably downbeat conclusion (it’s always hard to judge the acting, because most Italian films were shot without sound and dubbed after the fact even in their home countries, but what is here is perfectly acceptable). It just may be completely reprehensible, depending on your point of view. To paraphrase Walter Sobchak in THE BIG LEBOWSKI, say what you want about the merits of CANNIBAL FEROX, Dude, but at least it’s got an ethos.

But at any rate, it’s a film that demands to be seen, experienced and then talked about. See it with your friends and debate the various controversial aspects of the movie afterward. No matter where you stand on the appropriate nature of the vile events that are depicted in the movie and the philosophical reasoning behind how they’re depicted…well…

It’s definitely something to chew on.

Aleck Bennett is a writer, blogger, pug warden, pop culture enthusiast, raconteur and bon vivant from the greater Atlanta area. Visit his blog at doctorsardonicus.wordpress.com.

by Aleck Bennett
Contributing Writer

Atlanta filmmaker Brian Lonano has been garnering raves on the festival circuit for humorous horror short CROW HAND!!!, which makes all of us at ATLRetro laugh like crazed lunatics every time we see it. Now he  is on the cusp of bringing us another heaping helping of the hilariously bizarre with GWILLIAM, a tender tale about the love between a man (William Tokarsky of TOO MANY COOKS and YOUR PRETTY FACE IS GOING TO HELL) and a goblin (an animatronic puppet). But he needs your help! That’s why he’s running an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign, promising an insanely inventive and perfectly perverse variety of rewards for donors.

The short film has long been the weird nephew in the motion picture family. Since theatrical exhibitions largely abandoned the “selected short subjects” of days gone by (aside from, say, Pixar’s commitment to the form) in favor of more movie trailers and before-the-show advertisements, it’s been a constant struggle to get short films in front of large audiences. Sure, film festivals routinely devote chunks of programming to shorts, but the audience is always limited to the people in attendance. In recent years, however, that has changed. Say what you will about the Internet’s impact on the film industry, one thing is indisputable: it’s provided makers of short films with a platform that allows more people to see their work. That, in turn, has had an impact on television programming. Animated TV series have used the “two cartoons in one half-hour” format for a long while now, but some networks—most notably Cartoon Network and its [adult swim] programming block—have embraced the 11-minute episode as a standalone entity. And [adult swim] has taken that short film format into live action, with series like Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s multiple offerings (such as TIM AND ERIC AWESOME SHOW, GREAT JOB! and CHECK IT OUT! WITH DR. STEVE BRULE), YOUR PRETTY FACE IS GOING TO HELL and that twilight zone of weirdness at 4:00 a.m. where things like TOO MANY COOKS show up.

Brian Lonano – SXSW

That’s where we cross paths with Kool Kat of the Week Brian Lonano. Lonano has been making short films for a decade now. His nine shorts have screened at festivals from SXSW to Fantasia International Film Festival, from Canada to Cambodia. And here in Atlanta, he’s been shown at the Atlanta Film Festival and the Buried Alive Film Fest. (He’s done promotional bumper shorts for many festivals around the world as well.) His shorts are typically a deft mix of wacky comedy, horror or sci-fi tropes and inventive practical effects.- a combo no better seen than in last year’s CROW HAND!!! His 10th film, GWILLIAM, is currently in preproduction, and to raise the funds for this endeavor (because while the Internet is a convenient platform, it’s really hard to monetize it), Lonano has turned to the new audience that the Internet has provided for assistance via this IndieGoGo campaign.

ATLRetro caught up with Brian Lonano to ask him about the campaign, his history in short films, what GWILLIAM is all about and what’s on the horizon.

ATLRetro: You’ve got nine short films under your belt in the past decade, including the inspired THE TRANSMISSION and the utterly berserk CROW HAND!!! What first drove you to dive into filmmaking?

I grew up watching films that featured a lot of special effects and puppets. I am a big fan of Jim Henson, Tim Burton, Spielberg and classic STAR WARS. JURASSIC PARK came out when I was 10 and I wanted to make movies ever since. I became obsessed with seeing any and every movie that Industrial Light & Magic did the special effects for. I didn’t have a camera for a long time so I drew comics and made puppets. As I get older I seek out more bizarre film oddities like HAUSU, THE VISITOR and A FIELD IN ENGLAND. Those kinds of films coupled with what I grew up worshiping keep me inspired to make movies.

You’re not only known for your short films, which have screened all over the world, but you’ve also been recognized by the industry for your commissioned work for festivals and television, something our readers might not immediately know about. What does Brian Lonano do when he’s not dreaming up weird short films?

My full time job is working at a post-production facility that processes dailies for TV shows and movies that shoot in town. The commissioned work I make is mostly for film festivals. I would direct a short film called a bumper that advertises the film festival and I would more or less have creative control which is great. I’m very grateful to film festivals that show my work so when I’m asked to make a bumper for one, I put a lot of effort in making a kick ass bumper to show how bad ass the festival is.

It’s a tale as old as time: a man and a goblin in love. What attracted you to this story, and just how disgustingly screwed up can we expect the end result to be?

GWILLIAM came about from a drawing my brother did back in 2011. He was drawing a picture of this weird little man—it just looked completely wrong in the best way possible. We laughed about the picture and decided we had to name the weird man. So we asked ourselves, what’s a gross name that would fit this monstrosity? And we decided on Gwilliam. After that we came up with a strange story where a different man was prowling at night and has an encounter with Gwilliam…I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. I’m excited about how gross this movie is going to be because it’s not gore centric like my previous film CROW HAND!!!. It’s a whole new kind of disgusting.

The preliminary sculpt you’ve shown on the website is impressive even in this early stage. Who’s behind the design of the Gwilliam puppet?

The sculpt of Gwilliam is actually created by Splatter Cinema super team Blake Myers, Luke Godfrey and Nick Morgan. They will be responsible for making the creature puppet for the film.

I see designer Rachel De Urioste mentioned in the IndieGoGo campaign. What she’s bringing to the table? Rachel De Urioste is a local artist, fabricator and designer and she’s designing the GWILLIAM perks for IndieGoGo. She designed the crow totem that was featured in CROW HAND!!!. When we were on the festival circuit with CROW HAND!!! I asked Rachel to make some plastic versions of the Crowtem so I could plant them in theaters and see if anyone would pick them up. I loved the idea of something tangible to take away from the movie. CROW HAND!!! is so short that I wanted to make a big impact with the promotion of it. So with GWILLIAM I wanted to make a new prize to give out to potential donors. If I was giving to a campaign, I would want something cool like a toy. I think people gravitate towards tchotchkes like that.

The variety of rewards you’re offering investors range from the innocuous (digital downloads, credit listing) to the utterly depraved (a Gwilliam sex doll???). How did you come up with these ideas?

I brainstormed ideas for prizes with Rachel and my wife/co-producer Victoria Cook. We all agreed the totems from CROW HAND!!! were a great idea and we wanted to take it a step further. Rachel had never dabbled in designing toys and I am a big fan of Archie McPhee‘s novelty finger puppets so I thought a Gwilliam finger puppet would be a great prize to give out. As I said earlier, if I was donating to something, I would want to get a cool toy. Rachel is making full painted Gwilliam finger puppets but she is also making rainbow editions of the Crowtem and Finger Puppet as well as solid color Gwilliams (we’re calling it the ROY G BIV collection) and even glow in the dark finger puppets! The blow up is another prize we all came up with. The doll would be life size (meaning Goblin size) and the goal is make it a functioning doll. We wanted our campaign to stand out and I figured weird finger puppets and blow up dolls would do the trick!

You’ve lucked up in nabbing William Tokarsky fresh off the TOO MANY COOKS brouhaha, but he’s also popped up in projects ranging from THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE to YOUR PRETTY FACE IS GOING TO HELL. How did your paths cross, and how did you know he was the right man to romance a goblin puppet?

William was very easy to get in touch with. I sent him a message on Facebook asking if he would be interested in working together on a project. We agreed to meet in person and I gave him the script to read. I didn’t say much about it until he read it. Thankfully, he was laughing at the script and said he would absolutely be a part of it. So far working with William has been terrific. He’s easy going, very funny and a great team player. I look forward to shooting so I can direct him.

On the local front, you’ve worked with the Buried Alive Film Festival as a judge, you’ve shot a great bumper for them, and you’ve had your shorts exhibited there as well. Any hope you’ll be bringing GWILLIAM to BAFF screens in the future?

If the film is completed in time I would absolutely love to screen it at BAFF this year. But because I am friends with Blake and the whole team (and they are also working on the film), it would be an out of competition entry. I love screening my work here because the audience gets what I am trying to do and they all seem to really enjoy it!

CROW HAND!!! from !ROBOT HAND! on Vimeo.

All photos courtesy of Brian Lonano and used with permission.  Aleck Bennett is a writer, blogger, pug warden, pop culture enthusiast, raconteur and bon vivant from the greater Atlanta area. Visit his blog at doctorsardonicus.wordpress.com.

Ashley Thorpe. Photo courtesy of Carrion Films.

British filmmaker Ashley Thorpe’s trilogy of terror, SCAYRECROW, THE SCREAMING SKULL and THE HAIRY HANDS, earned a Visionary Award at Atlanta’s Buried Alive Film Festival in 2010. All three shorts produced by Ashley’s Carrion Films were set in the fascinating mythos of Dartmoor in Devon, a place so layered in fog and legend that people literally were known to disappear into its mists and never be seen again until they returned as ghosts. But it wasn’t just the rich subject matter that turned heads here in Atlanta, it was the unique look achieved through rotoscope animation, which particularly in SCAYRECROW, the tale of a haunted highwayman who rises from the dead to avenge his lover, also evoked Hammer Films’ horror movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s in its texture.

Ashley wasn’t able to attend the last Buried Alive but sent a trailer for his next film BORLEY RECTORY, a documentary short on a Suffolk manor that has a reputation as the “Most Haunted House in England.” Since then, he’s attached veteran actor Julian Sands (WARLOCK, GOTHIC and a guest at DragonCon 2013 next week) as the narrator and Steven Severin, one of the founding members of Siouxsie and the Banshees and now an acclaimed composer/accompaniest for silent films, to create the score, and is in the midst of an Indiegogo crowd-source campaign to fund the project which has the potential to launch Ashley to the next level. Meanwhile he’s also writing and painting some cool covers for Fangoria magazine, and yes, he has several features in preproduction as well – HELL-TOR, an Amicus-inspired portmanteau, and SPRING HEELED JACK, based on the Victorian London legend.

Beyond his talent as a filmmaker, Ashley’s one of the nicest chaps we know and the Indiegogo campaign is in its final push through Aug. 31, so well, we just couldn’t resist making him Kool Kat of the Week.

ATLRetro: Your past films are based on legends of Dartmoor near your home town of Exeter in Devon. Can you talk a little about how growing up in such a haunted area has influenced the arc of your filmmaking?

Ashley Thorpe: I was surrounded by local myths and ghost stories and specifically elderly couples eager to tell them! It seemed like an inevitability that most social get-togethers – especially at a country pub – would end with a grisly ghost story or two. Though I initially dreaded these chilling stories – in fact I’d often go and hide in the toilet until they were over – I now feel very lucky to have been “exposed” to these diverse tales of ghosts, demons and devilry at a young age as they’ve absolutely inspired and influenced pretty much my entire body of work, in there in my mind, a nest of tiny scorpions breeding in my cranium!

I think it’s because it’s a landscape that is simultaneously very beautiful and yet potentially very dangerous. It’s romantic and it’s deadly. And what’s more. Dartmoor has always felt to me like a region that has been precariously tamed. We may have civilized the outskirts by posting churches on the boundaries, but it’s really still a wilderness out there. Tales of the devil are common in this region and are more often than not pre-Christian. For instance, the actual tale of the demonic Huntsman and his pack of hellish Whisht hounds that I referenced in THE DEMON HUNSTMAN [ Glass Eye Pix’s TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE radio theater series] is based upon a genuine Dartmoor myth that I’d heard as a kid, and its origin I suspect is probably prehistoric. It’s an ancient legend bound in the conflict between Celtic and Christian religions; the benevolent horned gods of one age becoming the malevolent devils of another.

I didn’t really appreciate how important the stories were to me until I’d moved away and lived in various cities and abroad, but it’s a land very close to my heart. I remember being told as a child that if all the unclaimed bodies, scattered in their shallow graves, rose from the moor, the dead would outnumber the living. Wonderful stuff! The earth out there is alive with their stories. The land has a thousand ghosts; all you have to do is listen.

Borley Rectory is in Suffolk, taking you away from Devon, but it’s also a story you discovered as a child. Can you talk a little about what drew you to it and made you want to make your next film about it?

I had the USBORNE BOOK OF GHOSTS as a boy, and although a great deal of the book frightened me, it was that moniker “The most haunted house in England” that really caught my imagination. I’d seen images of Harry Price debunking other supernatural phenomena in other mystery books, so for him to all but declare this as the pinnacle of ghostly phenomena made it seem all the more fascinating and scary. So the story has been with me again since childhood.

I spent a couple of years working on radio scripts and developing a feature script and it had all become very laborious. I wanted to make a new short to remind myself why I loved doing this in the first place, and I chose Borley Rectory because I could picture it very visually and it seemed like a nice summation of what I’d attempted to do thus far. I’ve always loved vintage ghost photography, not just because of the subject material but primarily because they are often very beautiful images. I wanted to see if I could make a film that evoked similar sensations that are evoked by such photographs. It’s a story that is rich in gothic archetypes, so visually very strong with plenty of scope for the various apparitions.

BORLEY RECTORY has a rich history of hauntings from headless coachmen to a bricked-up nun, a screaming girl, and being built on the grounds of a Medieval monastery, the British equivalent of an ancient American Indian burial ground. Will you be portraying the house’s story more generally or focusing on a specific legend?

Very generally. The funny thing about Borley is that the Nun is the only ghost that seems to have any “back story” as such, with the other apparitions almost functioning as satellite phenomena. This film is going to be an introduction, a primer if you will, very much like the Usborne book that sparked my interest. It’s a “way in” to the legend. The historical data on Borley and the hauntings are incredibly rich and layered and dense, often contradictory and beset with duplicity, so I think to make something “definitive,” you’d have to do an HBO series on it. You could make an entire film just on Marianne Foyster, for instance! What I’m really interested in is trying to evoke the place, and explore what it was that attracted people to the Rectory and its legends – manifestations of desire, loss or some fatal flaw in character.

The animation in your previous films, especially SCAYRECROW, owes an aesthetic debt to Hammer films, which you also grew up with. In the Indiegogo pitch, you talk about being fascinated with ghost photography. Will viewers of BORLEY RECTORY also see a Hammer influence or is this an indication that you will be taking a different direction?

Yes, SCAYRECROW is the one that is most obviously a love letter to Hammer horror, although I think  THE HAIRY HANDS has aspects of an episode of the HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR TV series. BORLEY RECTORY will be created in the same fashion as SCAYRECROW’ and THE SCREAMING SKULL, but visually will be quite the different animal. I’m really aiming for vintage ghost photography – glowing black and white imagery, images that conceal as much as they reveal, yet texturally very beautiful. On occasion, it may even veer into abstraction with only the narration keeping it grounded. Consider it my ultrasound of a haunted house!

You met Julian Sands through interviewing him for Fangoria, for which you’ve recently been a correspondent and cover artist. How did this blossom into Julian as narrator, and I understand he’d like to work with you on future projects as well?

Yes, indeed. I interviewed Julian for a retrospective I wrote on Ken Russell’s GOTHIC. Julian saw the films, loved them and asked me if I was working on anything. I’d literally just finished the first draft of BORLEY RECTORY, and so I asked him if he’d be interested in performing the narration and thankfully he said “yes.” Julian and I have loosely discussed working together on other projects, but future work will absolutely depend on the success of this campaign. If BORLEY RECTORY goes well, I’d love to develop the Dartmoor portmanteau feature HELL TOR, as there’s definitely a role in there for Julian.

Julian Sands shares a laugh with Ashley Thorpe while recording the narration for BORLEY RECTORY. Photo courtesy of Carrion Films.

What about Steven Severin? Talk about a score in landing him to do the score. How did you get him on board?

That was Fangoria again, although believe it or not, I initially turned him down! Steven performed in Exeter, and I interviewed him about his score for Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR. We kept in contact regarding the article [recently published in Fangoria #325], and then Steven asked me out of the blue if I’d had anyone in mind for the BORLEY RECTORY score. I was stunned. At the time, every film I’d made up to that point has been scored by my old friend Mick Grierson, so I initially said no! The Banshees are one of my favorite bands, but I explained that Mick was as much a part of Carrion as I am and that it would  feel like a betrayal. Mick is a department head at Goldsmiths College in London, and as the year wore on, it became obvious that he just wasn’t going to be able to dedicate so much of his time to the film. However, Steven remained dead keen even after the long production hiatus, and a combination of circumstances and Mick’s academic responsibilities just really made the partnership at this time an obvious choice. I couldn’t be happier really. It’s very exciting to be working with Steven, and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can create together.

The entrance scene from THE SCREAMING SKULL. Photo courtesy of Carrion Films.

Reece Shearsmith also has joined the cast recently. I know not everybody over here knows who he is, but for those of us lucky ones who discovered the weird and wonderful LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, that’s quite exciting, too. How did he get involved and what role does he play?

Reece is amazing! He’s mainly known for his comedy grotesques, but he is an incredibly gifted actor. What’s more he’s also, like most of the League of Gentlemen team, an absolute dedicate of classic horror films. He’s a sincere fan, and we share many points of reference. His involvement came via a number of supporters like Derren Brown and Andy Nyman. I noticed that Reece had been tweeting support for our campaign so I tweeted a note of thanks. We got chatting, and he expressed real excitement for the project and the subject. So I just came out and asked him, and Reece, to my amazement, said yes. His involvement has really elevated the project. His fanbase are ravenous!

Reece will be playing the Daily Mirror journalist V.C Wall who was the journalist that really broke the story to the world in 1929, so a key role, and he’ll get to speak some wonderful and genuine news reports written by Wall from the period. I’m excited and simultaneously terrified to direct him! It’ll be fun. I have a feeling there’ll be a lot of horror nerd-outs!

You’ve also attracted some pretty amazing supporters such as Stephen Volk (screenwriter, GOTHIC), British mentalist Derren Brown, Robert Young (director, VAMPIRE CIRCUS) and comics writer Steve Niles. Have any in particular surprised or delighted you as the Indiegogo campaign progressed?

The support has been amazing actually and really quite diverse. Local support has been strong, but I’ve been slightly overwhelmed by the response internationally across the horror community. I’ve never been a fan of scenes as such, but the horror community have restored my faith in humanity after the film and TV industry gave it a good kick in last year! Stephen Volk and Johnny Mains have been incredibly supportive and generous with their time, and Chris Alexander [editor] at Fangoria has been there since the beginning. The support from Derren was great as he said a number of lovely things about SCAYRECROW when it came out back in 2008, so it’s a nice feeling to know that he’s still supportive, still watching. Indie filmmaking is tough so it’s invigorating, energizing to know that someone out there cares about what you’re doing or trying to do. Can’t do it without you!

Crowd-sourcing has its rewards but also its challenges. You have more than 80 supporters and have raised over 5,000 pounds, but you did extend the fundraising period and reduce the target of the campaign from 20,000 pounds to 10,000 pounds. Will you have to turn to another source to make up the difference, or will you just be tightening the production’s belts.

Yes, the extension was inevitable. I got hit with a very time-devouring contract to animate some feature titles shortly after the campaign launched, so as I was AWOL for a few weeks, I pushed the deadline back to the end of August. I reduced the target, too, as it became clear that we were going to struggle to reach 20K. We still may have to turn to other sources to make up the additional budget, or we may get started with what we raise and reevaluate later next year. Either way the budget has always affected me far more in terms of “time” rather than “quality.” Less money means less crew and more for the core to do. It will be distinctive and original whatever happens. “Don’t panic lads, we’ve been saved from casual mediocrity by lack of money again!” If we can’t afford horses, we’ll get the coconuts out again, ha ha. You know at no point during SCAYRECROW did any of us get on a horse. I spent much of it riding a tree trunk! You’ve gotta have that Terry Gilliam spirit to survive.

You have some pretty cool perks for contributors. What’s your favorite and why?

I spent a long time working out the rewards, but I think my favorite HAS to be the limited edition vinyl of the Severin soundtrack. I mean that has to be the best fundraiser perk ever, hasn’t it? It was Steven’s idea actually. I made a mock-up for fun of what the soundtrack would look like if it had been released in the 70s with a very Pan Horror / Amicus style sleeve, and Steven went crazy for it, loved it and suggested that we try it for real, make it a super limited edition very special reward for investors. It’s going to be a beautiful thing. A real collectors’ item. Even if I don’t make a penny from BORLEY RECTORY, at least I’ll get one of those! The tour of Borley with author and publisher Johnny Mains is pretty amazing, too, plus you’ll be “written into” a Robert Aickman tribute collection to be published next year. That’s pretty amazing, too.

THE CONJURING, an old-fashioned haunted house movie, has been a big hit stateside. Does that encourage you that there’s a market for a return to atmospheric ghost stories in the horror film genre?

I think it’s great that a decidedly – perhaps archly – old-fashioned ghost story has made such an impact, but the audience has always been there, it’s just taken the market an age to catch up with what people really want as is so often the case. I think the market becomes less and less important as time goes on. The audience will find or indeed make its own entertainment. I didn’t start making the animations about neglected myths to get noticed; it was an attempt to tell the stories I wanted to hear. If you can find a way of telling your stories whilst bridging a cultural void, you’re onto a winner. Fingers crossed, eh?

Finally, would you like to share anything else about upcoming projects, such as HELL-TOR and SPRING HEELED JACK or your recent work with FANGORIA?

I’ve always loved the Amicus portmanteau, and when I initially started developing a feature, my first notion was to create one of my own. HELL-TOR is a collection of Dartmoor legends woven together. THE HAIRY HANDS was originally the book-end story, but ended up being developed into the short I produced with the Arts Council. ‘THE DEMON HUNTSMAN was mooted to be in there, too. The other three stories haven’t seen the light of day yet, although the kelpie / exorcism story, “Crows Mere,” was one of the first pitches for the second season of TALES BEYOND THE PALE. It’s definitely something I’d love to make. It would be a wonderful opportunity to get a British Horror portmanteau back on the screen. I should probably chat to Reece about this!

My long term project is SPRING HEELED JACK – a Dickensian horror story – as opposed to the more familIar later period that sired Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll & Hyde and the Ripper crimes – and is inspired by the “genuine” boogeyman from the early 1800s. The tale of a rooftop bounding demon that could appear and disappear at will caught hold of the public imagination, becoming in time a popular character in Victorian fiction, in particular the Penny Dreadfuls [popular working class fiction] of the period who took the figure and transformed him from a shilling shocker phantom into an embryonic super-hero. With his crime -ighting exploits bedecked in bat-like cloak and horned cowl, it is difficult not to see him as anything other than the template of what would become Batman.

I have been fascinated by the myths of Spring Heeled Jack and have often wondered why his presence on film has been so negligible. Apart from it being a delicious bit of British esoterica, the story fascinates me because it occurs in a period that has thus far pretty much only been defined by Dickens. It presents itself not only as an opportunity to explore early Victoriana – at a time when genre templates for horror and detective tales were coalescing in popular fiction – but a chance to make something akin to a classic “Hammer Horror” with a real underworld edge. The script is currently in development, and I have started pre-production character and concept art. I suppose if I could pitch it, I’d have to say it’s “Victorian Batman meets Sweeney Todd meets THE FLY!” It’s quite melodramatic, psychologically disturbing, a tale of a super hero becoming a super villain.  It’s easily the darkest thing I’ve written, dark and dastardly – and deliciously deviant. I’d love to make it, a dream come true, but I have to be a midwife to history first!

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