Tag: British horror

How do you live with ghosts?

Posted on by Paul Risker

Director Ben Charles Edwards’s Father of Flies, is centred on Michael (Keaton Tetlo), a young boy frightened of his stepmother, Coral (Camilla Rutherford), discovers a supernatural presence lurking in the house.

Following his creative feature début Set The Thames on Fire (2015), Edwards combines naturalism and a surreal style in his visually striking sophomore feature.

In conversation with DMovies, Edwards discussed his haunted childhood home and the need to own the responsibility of being the storyteller.

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Paul Risker – I’ve read that the story is partly based on childhood experiences, is that correct?

Ben Charles Edwards – Partly, yeah. A good friend of mine Dominic Wells, was the editor of Time Out when he was very young. He’s a terrific writer and he wrote some of my first films. When I told him I wanted to write something I could in a sense own myself, he said, “Ben, make it about something you know.” I love horror, and so it was the connection of how I draw from something I can relate to, and feed into the horror genre.

I was on a train in Morocco, going from Fez to Marrakesh, and I sat there and turned out all of the beats for the story on this six hour train trip. I thought that’s actually quite good, I’ll probably invest a bit more time into it.

It’s like everything, I never set out to make films; I started out as a portrait painter and then a photographer. I’ve just done what feels right, and this story did. It’s about a family that has gone through a divorce and the children are at the centre of it. While that’s not a huge part of my life, it just so happens to be an interesting beat that I thought I could draw off.

PR – Was the experience of divorce the only personal beat you drew from?

BCE – … I grew up in what I believed to be an incredibly haunted house. It was on the edge of Woking and it was built on the old cemetery, on some unmarked graves we later found out. It was old marshland that was sold off, and I know it sounds a bit nutty, but I do believe it was a haunted house. There were certainly unexplained and quite terrifying things going on there.

I had five brothers and sisters, many of them were teenagers at the same time. There’s a lot of tension and emotion running through a house like that, so sometimes you wonder if it’s something we manifest and create ourselves, or if there is another entity in the house?

PR – What we’re talking about here is the question Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1960) asks – is the house or are the characters the ones that are haunted?

BCE – Perhaps it’s both, and we feed into the machine, or into that emotion, and that’s how we manifest the emotions from past lives lived in those houses. We always think of it as our house, and it’s really not. This is England, and the majority of homes that people live in, certainly outside of London, will be houses that many people have lived in before. They’re little vessels of time and we’re just one little moment, a little part of its story, not the other way around. So it doesn’t surprise me that we feel the other stories that have lived their before us.

PR – There’s the idea amongst filmmakers that there are three versions of the film – the film that’s written, the film that’s shot and the film that’s edited. I recall Pablo Larraín telling me that the film is discovered in the final cut. Would you agree, and was Father of Flies a journey of discovery?

BCE – Films do take on three stages and a great editor is a storyteller, or certainly a great problem solver and storyteller. Of course you aim to get what’s on the page, and you hope what’s on the page will work perfectly well in the edit suite. Sometimes it doesn’t and there are adjustments that have to be made.

With this film, the concept was quite strong in my mind from the beginning, and all of the beats felt strong. Without giving too much away to the reader, those beats needed to be precise, otherwise the twists wouldn’t work. You couldn’t veer off the script within it’s structure, and like any film, the foundation that you lay at script stage is everything. An old friend of mine tweaked it and padded out the characters, and that was vital. It brought something to it the actors enjoyed, and to be honest, many of the performances were improvised.

The actors knew where they were going with the scene, they knew how the script had to hang together in its beats, so I just let them go with it. I’m not someone that over-directs. It takes longer to go through improvised scenes in the edit, but you do find some natural magic and that’s something I wanted to bring to this horror film. Hopefully the performances demonstrate that.

I went through three different editors [laughs]. They were all talking to one another, so it was part of the plan, and each editor brought something new. We had someone that looked over the dailies and pulled out the best options, and then we had someone that pulled together the structure in accordance with the script. We then had someone who said, “Ben you’re wrong, give it to me and I’ll clean it up.”

PR – Does improvisation create a space for the audience to enter the film, and can the naturalistic performances that support this?

BCE – It depends on the movie. Some directors and some scripts lend themselves to sticking to those step aged elements. When you look at a movie by Wes Anderson, it would be hard to assume that any of that’s improvised. Then you look at the kitchen sink dramas by Mike Leigh, and you assume that a lot of that is improvised. They’re different approaches to different types of filmmaking and emotions. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

I’ve only made four movies and I’m still learning, and rightfully so. We should all be on that journey to continuously learn and find out what works best for us, the story we’re trying to tell and how we’re going to tell it. I enjoyed the approach to Father of Flies. I let the actors have a little freedom because unless I am the best bloody writer, which I’m not, you’re going to get a more natural performance, and something more interesting and human.

When you’re trying to create a horror, you want to connect with the naturalism, and especially in a film like Father of Flies because there are elements that are quite stylised. It was a worry about keeping it grounded to some degree, so the audience can relate, be scared, and believe the scenes, the characters and the emotion. For a film like this it helps to improvise and keep that natural, giving the actors the freedom to create the play ground, by giving them the stage and saying, “Knock yourselves out.”

PR – Does the collaborative nature of filmmaking, and if you say the editor is a storyteller, challenge the validity of the auteur theory?

BCE – … I’ve never considered the auteur question too much. When one is the writer and director, it’s pretty clear who the author is. When a director is executing someone else’s script, they can take a script where they want, so in that sense they’re the auteur because they’re inspired by the script.

I’ve watched movies by great directors, and when I’ve met them and looked over the original screenplays, you realise how they went off script. In that sense, it’s their vision to execute the story.

In answer to your question, the director is the auteur, providing they’ve taken on the responsibility and grabbed it by the balls, and made it theirs.

Father of Flies has just premiered at Grimmfest and played at the Raindance Film Festival.

Real-life horror begets film horror

Posted on by Paul Risker

Corinna Faith’s independent British hospital horror is set in 1974, when a period of unrest between the UK government and the coal miners led to a scampering to ration electricity. Trainee nurse Val (Rose Williams), arrives for her first day at the crumbling East London Royal Infirmary. With most of the patients and staff evacuated to another hospital, she’s forced to work the night shift in the dark, near empty building. The walls house a frightening secret that will force Val to confront her own traumatic past, and discover the pain behind the wrath of a malevolent spirit.

Her debut feature, her previous films include the shorts, Ashes (2005), about a father and son who are thrust into a situation, Care (2006), and The Beast (2013), that centres on a young woman’s perilous infatuation with the myth of a beast that stalks the moors. In 2006, her radio production In The Bin for BBC Radio 4 received the Mental Health Media Award for Best Factual Radio. Her documentary work Body-Snatchers (2003), African ER (2004) and Little Angels (2004) have been broadcast on BBC television.

In conversation with DMovies, Faith spoke about the joy of accidentally discovering films, Saturday afternoons watching a film noir, the authored period of British cinema from the 1980s, and how her feature debut is a response to stories of institutional abuse.

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Paul Risker – Why filmmaking as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or a defining moment for you personally?

Corinna Faith – I’ve always been excited and fascinated by visual images, and just anything to do with cameras [laughs]. I started out as a photography student, and then it just happened that on my degree course we got the chance to try cinematography, and I was offered the chance to move onto the film side because they liked what I’d done. I realised that was my dream come true, but I hadn’t ever reached for it.

PR – We naturally perceive movement even in a still image. Did your photography background give you an appreciation for how in cinema you can create movement without moving the camera, instead using the audience’s imagination?

CF – There was always a crossover in my love of photography and cinema. I’m a film fan in loads of different ways and in lots of different areas, but I’m often drawn to films that have an intense sense of atmosphere, that you may be able to look at something for a while. So that definitely connects to my love of being able to delve into an image, and a lot of the photography that I loved was quite narrative. What I started doing myself was instinctively creating these almost film type images, putting myself in them and setting up little worlds in photo form.

PR – Picking up on your point about having a diverse interest in cinema, what films resonated with you when you were young, and are there any that have particularly nurtured your love of cinema?

CF – When I was young I was very lucky because anyone who’s my age, there wasn’t very much choice, but there were a lot of films on TV. You’d stumble across films in a way that these days, you’d have to seek stuff out, and so you might accidentally watch a film that blows your mind less often because you’re making a lot of choices.

I was often just immersed in some black and white American noir on a Saturday afternoon, or whatever was on. It showed me the massive landscape of classic American Hollywood, and because I was watching my early films in the 80s, quite an authored time for British cinema, I got a taste for the idea that you can create a singular vision.

Besides all the Hollywood stuff, I was watching Peter Greenaway films, and Young Soul Rebels (Julien, 1991) had a massive impact on me at the time. I still absolutely adore Terence Davies.

They’re all so different, but I feel I was lucky that I got that film education just by being sat at home. It’s something I’m trying to pass onto my kids [laughs]. I’m always trying to make them watch something slightly obscure and older to keep their minds open. I feel it was a very fortunate time in that way.

PR – Do you think films not being on tap that created an appreciation that has since been lost in changes with technology and distribution?

CF – There’s definitely something different about the whole experience of how we access and find things. It’s less random and there’s less of, “Oh, I’ll give it a shot and get through it because I’ve got literally nothing else to watch. I spent two hours choosing it at the VHS store, so I have to watch it.” You can get bored and turn off now, but on the plus side there’s definitely a lot of passion around, and there are the curated possibilities like the Film4 movie, and Shudder if it’s a horror. There are people attempting to do the same thing but in different ways, and it’s not the same as the accidental old film noir on a Saturday afternoon, but it’s still good.

PR – You spoke about how the films of the 80s were all different from one another. Looking through your filmography, you’re not leaning in one direction, but seem to be interested in creating a nuanced body of work.

CF – Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. I’m not a horror or genre devotee, I love quite a few particular films across the entire range. I’m quite discriminate in what works for me, and I guess it’s always about being transported somewhere particular with that conviction, and that could be anything from E.T (Spielberg, 1982) to Aliens (Cameron, 1986), or The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) to Paddington (King, 2014). If it has that world you can commit to in that way and be taken somewhere else, then it works for me. I suppose I’m just looking for stories that have enough meat and depth for me to push through and commit, and do what I know it takes to get them made, which is a lot.

PR – Speaking of commitment, seeing a film through requires you to give up a period of your life. What compelled you to believe in The Power and decide to tell this story?

CF – Well that’s the interesting thing because by the time you get to make the film, it has been ages since you first started the process. It has to be universal enough to still be relevant in my own head, and even with this being my first feature, I knew that was going to be the ride because I’d already had one that was not made. In that case I was thinking about people not being heard, and the experience of being a woman and not being heard, which I’m sure is part of the creative journey, as well as the themes of the film.

I was responding specifically to all the stories about institutional abuse that were surfacing like a nightmare into the news at that point in time six years ago. They resonated for me, and I found it incredibly sad in a way that I couldn’t shake off the thought of the lost souls of those places, and those experiences. I wanted to write a ghost story, and all those themes just tied up for me. I thought I was not going to lose interest in this topic because it’s something that doesn’t go away.

PR – Before anything happens we’ve determined that we should be scared. What you create is an uneasy atmosphere in which the music along with the past, the hospital building and the institution agitates our unease and fear, which is then heightened by the supernatural haunting.

CF – What’s interesting to me about this character is that she has reason to be scared even before she steps foot in that hospital. It’s not actually the ghost, it’s a lot of stuff that has happened already, and it’s everything that could happen to her. It’s the nature of the place she’s working for the night, as well as a haunting.

I always wanted the institution and the situation to feel as frightening as the haunting for specific reasons that unfold as the story goes on. I’m glad it felt like that when you watched it because that’s more real.

PR – You mentioned liking to be immersed and taken somewhere else by a film. The effectiveness of the story hinges on us going on a journey with Val, in which we find ourselves lost in her trauma, trapped like she is.

CF – I wanted Val to feel relatable and accessible, and for us to have empathy with her from the beginning. Rose did a brilliant job with that, and it was one of the reasons I was drawn to her.

This is a story about a character peeling away layers of themselves, and going to their darkest place. We all have a dark place [laughs], and we don’t necessarily all want to look at it, but she’s forced to. It’s a big journey for her to go on, and what I love about Rose is that there’s a warmth about her. It’s a real quality she has as a person, and that was helpful as a starting point for that journey, on the surface as well, and where she goes to is quite a different place.

The Power is streaming exclusively on Shudder.

The Power

Posted on by Paul Risker

Corinna Faith’s independent British hospital set horror has a captivating appeal. Set in 1974, when a period of unrest between the UK government and the coal miners led to a scampering to ration electricity, she sinks her imaginative tentacles into our fear of the dark. Trainee nurse Val (Rose Williams), arrives for her first day at the crumbling East London Royal Infirmary. With most of the patients and staff evacuated to another hospital, she’s forced to work the night shift in the dark, near empty building. The walls house a frightening secret that will force Val to confront her own traumatic past, and discover the pain behind the wrath of a malevolent spirit.

The Power’s conventional three act structure is predominantly built around atmosphere, not themes and ideas. Its effectiveness lies in Faith’s reluctance to revert to juvenile jump scares, which are mostly absent apart from a sparing few. Instead she nestles into the unsettling aura of the building, its shadows and history, as well as the propensity for human cruelty, narcissism and judgement. Once the surface of the film is scratched, as in so many horror stories, perhaps the source of terror is humanity and not the supernatural. The truth is likely that we’re caught in the cross-hares of a conflict between the trauma that bridges the realms of the living and the dead, each with their cast of protagonists and antagonists.

The unrest housed in both the hospital and Val’s traumatised psyche echoes the social and political unrest, and the internal hierarchy of hospital politics only hastens us to see Faith’s ghost story as an echo chamber. Genre cinema has a way of effortlessly commenting on broader issues, and at it’s heart Faith’s film is about trauma and institutional abuse. Rather than forcefully using these themes to add an intellectual weight to the story, she leans towards a thematic simplicity that lacks such ambitious overtures. This draws interesting comparisons to Rose Glass’ Saint Maud (2019), another recent British horror about a traumatised young woman, a former nurse turned carer.

Opposite Saint Maud’s thematically richer story made simple, The Power has an honest simplicity. The sparse expression of themes and ideas places the emphasis on mood and atmosphere, while Glass shuts off rooms in the vast house like structure of her story, living out of only a few lit rooms. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the path either filmmaker takes, and each show a different tack towards simplicity. This reflects a tendency towards silence, of communication repressed in the shadow of trauma, conveyed by each filmmaker.

If we look back to 1999, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project (Sánchez and Myrick, 1999) are more likely to spring to mind before David Koepp’s Stir of Echoes will, in spite of it being a very good film. Faith’s film is likely to share a similar fate, the shy and quiet child opposite the much-lauded Saint Maud. An interesting question for anyone with an interest in storytelling, albeit it’s one without a definitive answer, is to question why certain films overshadow others?

The Power is an angry cry, a scream even about the cruelty that has scarred many a soul. It’s an example of catharsis through storytelling that’s so often denied victims of trauma in the ‘real world.’ Val is the outsider, a victim of life experiences that have made her afraid of the dark.

A simple and applicable reading of the film would be to assert that its message is of the need to confront our fears to find resolution and catharsis. We might suspect that the film is Faith’s own expression of anger that communicates the empathy many of us feel towards victims of abuse. As an act of catharsis, it has shades of the revenge film, but more deeply it’s a meditation on how each of us belongs to certain social tribes, and how we feed off the energy of others, that creates harmonious and contentious connections.

The film is attempt at bringing order and justice to trauma and cruelty, but as the end credits begin and control slips from Faith’s grasp, if we are to be honest, the evil lurking in the everyday reality will reassert its control over the characters. The Power is film and story as a dream, a soothing mechanism for the horrors that blacken human civilisation. We cannot escape into the shadows of this safe space forever – we must return to the light of day.

The Power is streaming exclusively on Shudder.

The Unseen

Posted on by victorfraga

A toddler dies, a family cries and by a stroke of strange luck, a woman is saved when she is failed by her eyes. Thus begins Gary Sinyor’s The Unseen, a 12-year project that changes charming Cumbria’s Lake District into a site of blurry bereavement and tense psychological thrills. But with so many films called The Unseen, it remains to be seen whether Sinyor’s vision will find a high perch among its cinematic compatriots.

The scene of The Unseen is perfectly set in the opening moments of the film. We are introduced to voice artist Gemma (Jasmine Hyde) and Irishman Will (Richard Flood), a happy couple with a young toddler and a comfortably middle-class lifestyle. Indeed, their homely comforts prove to be catastrophic when their child crawls into the basement swimming pool and drowns to death. This inflicts deep psychological wounds on both parents.

While Will retreats into religion and its ethereal promises, Gemma experiences anxiety that triggers temporary blindness, a rare neurological condition known as amaurosis. During her first episode of blindness, Gemma panickedly stumbles out of her house and is taken to the hospital by a concerned passer-by, Paul (Simon Cotton). The three form a relationship bound by bereaving vulnerability and Paul’s empathetic kindness. Soon enough, Gemma and Will accept an offer to stay at Paul’s calm Lake District guesthouse, where the majority of the plot unfolds.

Although the grieving parents hope to find silent solace in this distant lakeside retreat, their psychological horror intensifies. Will is haunted by apparent auditory hallucinations of his son, which in turn take their toll on his sanity as he struggles to disentangle reality from fiction. Gemma’s panic attacks also escalate and her vision blurs time and time again. In a nice optical touch, the audience shares Gemma’s amaurosis with the help of digital effects. The first time this happens is truly terrifying and disorienting, as the viewer is forced to rely on vague visual outlines and frantic auditory clues. The dualistic representation of bereavement works well in its exploration of how the mind can play tricks at the worst possible moments. This sense of mental confusion is aided expertly by the delightful dread of Jim Barnes’ score. Snappy strings give a chilling accompaniment to the secluded setting and ratchet up a riveting atmosphere.#

As a concept, The Unseen is full of excellent potential. Unfortunately, its execution is far from Hitchcockian and ultimately disappoints. The film was made with an eight person crew and a low budget. This is evident all too often through recurring bouts of inauthentic acting. Himesh the taxi driver seems to be a pleasant enough man, but his delivery feels more at home on a daytime soap opera. Similarly, Will’s madness is frequently played with frenetic melodrama that leads to unintended laughter rather than horrified sympathy. The plot also has a few too many holes. The relevance of Gemma’s pregnancy remains unclear, as does Will’s erratic behaviour and Paul’s wanton intentions.

While the imposition of Gemma’s blindness onto the viewer has an initial impact, it starts to wear into a thin gimmick by the fourth or fifth incidence. In fact, the pacing of the film is let down by its overwhelming length of 108 minutes. Too much time is dedicated to showing Gemma’s visual deficiencies, yet Will’s character isn’t given enough development for his psychological breakdown to convince. The final sequence is then resolved in a quick, fortuitous fashion that can only disappoint when the muddled middle is so lengthy.

The Unseen provides a fascinating snapshot of bereavement and the ways in which grief can alternately manifest itself. As a psychological thriller, it feels somewhat drawn out until the final third. Likewise, the strange lack of motive in the big plot twist, as well as some sub-par acting, break the mood just as the tension is cranking up. The Unseen is by no means a bad film, but it may have been better suited to a 70 minute Saturday night television release. The Unseen is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 15th.