David Moody's Blog, page 16

I’m really not sure about this one, but I promised some original writing every month, so here’s April’s submission. It’s a particularly timely one, given the first test of the UK national emergency warning system that took place last Sunday afternoon.

Like many people of my age, I’ve long had nightmares about the four-minute warning being sounded. What would you do in such a short, but critical, period of time? For a bit of ‘fun’, I role-played, and turned the results into a very short story: FOUR-MINUTE WARNING.

By the way, as I explained at the outset, 12STORIES is really little more than a chance for me to self-indulge and explore some of the mountain of writing ideas that have been building up over the years. As I don’t yet know what I’m going to do with any of these stories, they’ll only remain online for a short while. So this is advance notice that when May’s story is posted, January’s (OVER AND OVER AND OVER) will disappear.

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This is the second part of my interview with Ryan Fleming, writer and director of WELCOME TO ESSEX. Last time, I talked to Ryan about how the idea for the movie came about, and the first steps he took to turn that idea into a reality. This time, we cover more about the production of the film, and how a Hollywood A-lister (unfortunately now a prominent conspiracy theorist) came to be involved.

As a first-time director, how did you prepare for the shoot? How did you feel shooting the first scenes?

WELCOME TO ESSEX was my first film. I’d not made anything before; no short films, no YouTube videos, nothing. I think this actually helped as much as it hindered me, as I had no expectations going into it. I just knew what I could see in my head and it was my task to get the crew and cast to produce that for the cameras. That makes it sound simple, and it’s really not, but as with anything, the more you do it, the easier it gets.

The first day of shooting, which was Catherine’s scenes at an abandoned ammunition depot, (used during the opening titles) were shot on a cold February morning in 2013 and were difficult. Cat did an amazing job and delivered everything I asked of her, but our inexperienced crew and me being an inexperienced director made getting a few simple shots take hours. Contrast that with, say, the RUSSELL BRAND footage, which was shot a year later as additional scenes, and we had a multiple camera set-up, live audio, on-location filming and with an actual Hollywood movie star that could only give us a short amount of his time before he had to run off to do some promo for his book, and we had it all in the can in under an hour with enough time left over for a few extra takes and a quick photo shoot.

Despite not having directed anything for many years, I would feel totally at ease walking on to a set full of professional actors and crew and getting shots done with no problems.

You mention Russell Brand, and in the first part of this feature you hinted that you managed to film all the major stuff you’d written into the script. How did a film planned after a random discussion in a pub scale-up so impressively?

Need a helicopter? We phone some local airfields, looking to hire one, and find a guy with an ex-Argentine Air Force Huey that got ‘waylaid’ after the Falklands War. He agreed to let us have our way with it for a day in exchange for some “liquid payment”, so a quick run to Sainsbury’s secured that. We asked people doing much better than us in life and managed to borrow an Aston Martin for a morning. We cheekily called around and secured a shopping mall in Romford for a weekend to fill with zombies and blood (that was a fun day of shooting, especially the prank we played on our two main female leads. And we got it on film!). We managed to get the local and county councils to agree to shut Brentwood High Street for 8 hours on a Sunday morning so we could load it with over a thousand extras.

One of my favourite ‘blags’ came about because I wanted to use a can of Fosters lager being sipped in an early scene. I emailed Fosters  in Australia and was told they’re owned by Heineken, so I emailed them as well, asking for permission to use a can of Fosters on screen. I included the script pages for the scene, along with some storyboard pictures and an assurance that the brand would not be misrepresented in any way.

A few days later, I got an email from a company telling me to bring a van up to near Stansted Airport, as Heineken had a few bits and pieces for us. I assumed it would some branded stuff we could use or keep. What we actually got was two crates of every drink they make under their banner, which nearly filled the van!

The downside to the tale is that all this took place just before the producer’s 40th birthday, and the booze was stored at his house, so none of it made it through the weekend, forcing us to have to buy a 4-pack of Fosters anyway!

I’m often asked how we got so many extras and the simple answer is Facebook. All we did was set up a Group page on there and put the call out to as many zombie groups as we could find. Pretty much instantly, we had hundreds of replies . I think we had over 2000 people interested, with about 1200 actually turning up on the day, along with over 100 crew to wrangle them all. Looking back on it, it was an immense undertaking but, at the time, it was just a hoot ‘n’ a holler!

And about that Russell Brand cameo?

I happen to know his cousin a little bit, as he lives just up the road from me. I got him to call Russell one day whilst we were having many beers in a pub garden and ask him to film a scene for our movie, knowing he’d say no. However, he said yes but we had to film it near him in London and he could only spare us an hour of his time. Naturally, we weren’t remotely prepared for this so, the next day, I knocked up a scene requiring only the cast I knew we could get for the shooting day, which was a week or so hence. I wrote some dialogue and loaded it with humour, as well as some plot points, but also left plenty of wriggle room in case he wanted to ad-lib a bit. We then did something we’d never bothered with up until that point and rehearsed the shoot! We spent an evening with our camera and sound guys, planning the shoot and filming it with myself and Phil standing in for Russell and his cousin.

I took an afternoon and scouted locations in Dalston, near to where Russell was living at the time, and took many photos. We then decked out his cousin to look like Marty McFly, for no reason other than to fuck with him, as he’s usually incredibly sartorial and having to wear a body-warmer pissed him off no end. Eventually, it came to shoot. We all got to the small, dead-end road in London, knocked on doors and told the residents what we were doing and set up the cameras.

Phil asked our production manager, Laura, to nip to the local shops and buy a big bunch of flowers for Russell’s assistant, who had helped organise a lot of the day. Laura asked what she should get Russell for helping us out. Phil told her that, because Russell doesn’t drink any more and is a vegan or whatever, she should get him a Battenburg cake, as he really likes them. Eventually, the star of ROCK OF AGES, GET HIM TO THE GREEK and ARTHUR arrived to be in our stupid little film. Laura gave his lovely assistant her flowers and proudly presented Russell with a Battenburg cake, which he graciously, if slightly bemusedly, accepted. Phil then told Laura he has no idea if Russell likes Battenburg cake.

People were either starstruck or professionally busying themselves with their equipment. I took the moment to introduce myself to Russell and asked him if he was okay with the dialogue, as I had some script pages with me. He told me he was just going to his own dialogue and wing it.

Now, at this point, it’s worth mentioning that Russell Brand is very tall, standing at about 6′ 4” in his boots. However, I’m 6′ 9” in my trainers and I want him to say my lines, so I stood a bit closer to him. Not to intimidate, mind, as he’s doing us a massive solid, but rather than to assert myself as the top dog on that set in that moment. I told him I need him to do my dialogue, as it contains plot points for later in the movie. I also added that we’d do three takes; one of mine, one for whatever he had in his head and one where he could totally ad-lib it all. He was totally professional and courteous and kind about it all and immediately ‘fell into place’ as an actor. In person, Russell is incredibly nice and polite and really rather shy, nothing like his brash on-screen persona.

We rolled camera and went for it. He nailed my lines perfectly first time out with no mistakes. We reset and let him do his thing, which was utterly hilarious, both versions. In the final cut, I ended up using a mixture of all three takes and I think it works brilliantly. A week or so later, I edited it all together and sent it to him to look at. He was pleasantly surprised at how well it all came out and that made us happy.

The production was very drawn out. Why was this? Did you ever think you might not get to cross the finish line?

Filming with Russell was one of the last things we shot for the movie. We had a few pickup shots to get here and there but they were simple enough and, before long, the film was in the can. It was late-2013.

Now we started post-production. Our sound man had a Mac with Final Cut on it so we started using that. Before long, it became apparent that his Mac wouldn’t be able to handle the massive amounts of data we’d created so our newly-formed production company, Smoking Monkey, commissioned a bespoke editing computer. We now had all the gear but still no idea, as none of us had edited anything before. However, as it transpired, cutting footage together is pretty easy. We were using the latest version of Adobe Premier and all the tools that came with it, as well as countless YouTube tutorials whenever we got stuck. After a couple of months, we had a rough draft. It was 5 hours long and sounded like shit.

Chopping it down to 2 hours was easy for me and took another month or so but the problem with the audio was terminal. Despite literally half a year of attempting to salvage it, we came to the conclusion that the original audio for the entire film was unusable. A bit of advice I was given at the time (from DON MURPHY, producer of the TRANSFORMERS movies and a nice guy who replies to random emails from idiots like me) was that you can put any old crap up on the screen and call it ‘artistic choice’ and the audience will forgive it but they won’t forgive bad audio.

So, we took the momentous decision to ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) the entire movie. That meant we had to get the cast back, one at a time, to re-record all their dialogue into a microphone in our tiny studio while watching themselves in the movie. As you can imagine, we knew this was going to be a nightmare but, very much to our surprise, they all nailed it first time! We even got to piss about and do some ‘alternate audio’ for some of them, many of which play in the out-takes over the end credits. An unforeseen side-effect of ADR is that now there was no background noise at all, so we had to learn how to add every single sound artificially in a process known as ‘Foley’. It took about 5 months of 8-hour days, 6 days a week to get it all done. Then all the audio had to be mixed and levelled whilst at the same time the footage was being formatted and colourised and cleaned up.

Before we knew it, we were well into 2016 but we nearly had a finished film at last!

What has audience reaction been like? How did you feel about the response?

We finally ran out of money and patience and all agreed we’d polished this turd long enough, so it was time to release it into the world. We’d made a good friend in SPENCER HAWKEN, another local film-maker who was 2 films ahead of us at this point. He was also heavily involved with the burgeoning ROMFORD FILM FESTIVAL (still going, by the way!) and they were focusing on horror films that particular year (2018). He invited us to premiere WELCOME TO ESSEX and open the festival with it, which we obviously agreed to do.

We advertised it all on our Facebook pages and groups and sold out both screens of the multiplex the festival had us on at. It sold so fast that they booted SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY on its opening night to put us on a third screen!

I sat right down the front on opening night, as I had to do a Q&A afterwards. I could hear murmurs and hubbub behind me as a few people came into the cinema. Then the film started. When the first visual joke appeared on screen, the place erupted with laughter, causing me to finally turn around to see a packed house all laughing at the stupid knob and fart gags I’d written on a barely-functioning computer six years ago. I gotta say, it was a great feeling!

What were your high points?

The high points for me were seeing everyone come together to make a stupid idea of mine come to life. The longer people got involved, the more passionate they became. Or that’s how it seemed to me at least. There really weren’t any low points. I’d say the worst of it all is that the entire industry changed whilst we were in production. When we started, there was a tried and tested way to get a film out there: you made a movie, shopped it around and hoped someone would buy the DVD rights off of you. By the time WELCOME TO ESSEX came out, DVD was dead and it was all about streaming and we just weren’t prepared for that at all and I think it cost us dearly in the end.

How can people watch WELCOME TO ESSEX?

Currently, the only way to see it is on DVD, which you can get from Amazon, eBay or from our website. We initially avoided going down the streaming route, as it pays so badly to the creators. These days, now it’s a largely-forgotten film, I probably will chuck it some streaming platforms before releasing it on YouTube, or I might just go straight to YouTube and aim for the views. Don’t forget to like and subscribe!

The post Making a zombie movie – part two appeared first on David Moody - author of AUTUMN and HATER.

The second in my series of zombie-related columns for THIS IS HORROR is now available for your reading pleasure. This month, I talk about the explosion in zombie-related books and films around the turn of the century, and what might have caused it.

You can read EVOLUTION OF THE DEAD over on the THIS IS HORROR site. Thanks again to Michael and Bob for hosting my ramblings.

The post Evolution of the Dead appeared first on David Moody - author of AUTUMN and HATER.

…I do have a large collection of stamps. I should explain – in 1980, when I was 10, my mum and dad started buying my brother and I First Day Covers whenever the Royal Mail issued new stamps. The thinking was, I believe, that we’d each end up with a valuable collection to sell or pass on to our children. Whether it was a sound investment or not is anyone’s guess. Thing is, when Dad died, Mum insisted we continue the tradition, and when my mum died last year, my brother and I felt strangely obliged to carry on. So we’ve both amassed collections of forty-plus years worth of stamps, and neither of us are sure what to do with them.

That’s a long and roundabout way of introducing today’s post. Fact is, a lot of the stamps the Royal Mail have issued over the last few years have been gorgeous. Gone are the days of stamps featuring trains and nature and interminable royal celebrations, these days we have them commemorating DAVID BOWIE, PINK FLOYD, THE X-MEN, DOCTOR WHO, GAME OF THRONES and so on.

The ISLE OF MAN POST OFFICE got in touch with me recently to ask if I’d be interested in helping them promote a set of stamps they’re releasing this month, celebrating the works of a legendary native of the IoM – NIGEL KNEALE. As I’ve talked previously about how Kneale’s work has influenced me (see my posts on QUATERMASS and THE STONE TAPE), I jumped at the chance.

And here the stamps are in all their glory. You can buy them from the Isle of Man Post Office here.

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My friend Ryan Fleming decided to make a zombie movie. What began as a throwaway conversation with friends turned into something else entirely, and the end result was WELCOME TO ESSEX, which celebrates the tenth anniversary of its release this year. I wrote about the movie a while back, and you can read my thoughts here. A decade on from its release, I asked Ryan some questions about how the film came about, and how him and his band of largely inexperienced mates turned an idea cobbled together in the pub into a fully-fledged feature.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a frustrated filmmaker at heart, and I’m full of admiration for what Ryan achieved. He was kind enough to give me a number of very comprehensive answers to my questions, and also to provide me with a lot of behind-the-scenes photographs. I’ve therefore decided to split this feature over two posts. Huge thanks to Ryan for agreeing to contribute.

I started by asking the most obvious question – where did the idea for the movie come from? I wanted to know whether he had a movie idea that he wanted to film, or whether he wanted to make a film so came up with an idea?

I’ve always been fascinated with the apocalypse, especially the transition part where things go from normal to collapse and chaos. The first film I remember seeing that triggered those feelings was the original DAWN OF THE DEAD. Even now, I still prefer the first 30 minutes of the movie to the rest of it. Watching a large city rapidly fall apart as the zombie plague grows exponentially is fascinating to me. One of my favourite shots in the whole film is one that most people don’t notice, especially when watching a non-HD version, like maybe an old VHS copy, and that’s when the scene at the police dock draws to a close and the camera focuses on the city skyline and the lights in the skyscrapers start blinking out. I don’t know what it is about that shot but I dig it the most!

So, fast forward a million years and I’m working as a mobile security guard, pulling 12 hour night shifts, driving around London and Essex, answering alarm activations. Sounds exciting but it’s totally not. The one thing it did afford me though was plenty of time to listen to the nonsense in my own head, which mostly involved fantasising about an apocalyptic scenario unfolding around me as I traversed the usually-empty motorways and main streets of the South East of the UK. Eventually, I was made redundant and, not being one of life’s worker bees, I decided to take some time before finding new employ. It was just coming into summertime of 2012 and the weather was already nice and hot, so I treated myself to many afternoons of ponderings in pub beer gardens.

Read more: Making a zombie movie – part one

At some point, you got in touch and asked me to fill in for you at an press day opening of a fully immersive zombie experience at a large nuclear bunker complex near me. I love visiting that place anyway so I said I’d do it. It turned out to terrifying and indeed fully immersive.

This is true. You can read Ryan’s report from the LAST SURVIVORS experience at KELVEDON HATCH SECRET NUCLEAR BUNKER here.

The next day, whilst having a pub lunch with my friend TASHA SMITH (‘Patient Zero’ in WELCOME TO ESSEX), I got to telling her about the bunker zombie thing. She introduced me to a friend of hers at the pub and he was very interested in it all. Over a few beers, we all started talking about making a zombie movie. It was a fun conversation that I knew would vanish when the hangovers did the next day. However, this time the idea had taken root, so I fired-up my ancient and very basic computer and knocked up a 3-page story outline. It seemed awfully generic to me upon reading it back so I started adding loads of humour. The TV show THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX was filmed in my town and, at that time, was at the height of its popularity, so I thought maybe I could tie that in on some level. The idea of a zombie outbreak being caused by a contaminated batch of fake tan was born (small references to it still exist in the main movie. Look for posters for Flashburn Tanning Lotion!).

I actually originally wanted to do a nuclear war movie akin to THREADS but I knew that would cost money, and money and I are rarely on speaking terms, so I figured a zombie movie would be the cheapest option. I started telling my close friends about it and they good-naturedly smiled and nodded, as this wasn’t the first hare-brained scheme I’d had. But this time it felt different and I was determined to see how far I could take it.

I asked Ryan at what point he realised the project had become a reality – when he moved from talking about making a film, to actually making it.

I think the moment it went from a daft idea to becoming an actual thing was when I was introduced to PHIL SCOTT, who went to produce the film. We quickly realised we like a lot of the same things and have a shared love of MR JOLLY LIVES NEXT DOOR (usually, if someone likes that film, they’re alright with me!*). I told him about the movie idea and he said he wanted to get involved. Phil owns a local multimedia business and had a few pennies to chuck at the production, which at this point was nothing more than that 3-page treatment. I still felt the whole project would fall apart at any minute, once people grew bored of it, but I sat down and wrote the script.

My first draft focused of getting the (generic!) story down, with a beginning, middle, and end. That was easy enough. Then I started fleshing it out with scenes I wanted to see on film and dialogue I wanted to hear. My whole thought process for writing the script was “This will never get made so just write a multimillion dollar movie!” so I started adding things I knew we’d never get if we ever actually made the film, like a helicopter, thousands of zombies, deserted towns and cities, etc. As I revised each draft, I noticed the comedy side of it all was becoming more and more laboured, so I dropped it entirely from the script, leaving just a few of the funnier lines of dialogue in, mainly because I didn’t want to take it ‘too’ seriously.

The moment for me personally that it went from ‘idea’ to ‘actual thing’ was when we got contacted out of the blue by BBC Essex, who wanted to do an interview live on air about the project (must’ve been a slow news week). That was a big deal to me. It was the BBC!

That also put us on the map and started getting us offers of assistance from all over.

*at this point, I have to echo Ryan’s mention of MR JOLLY LIVES NEXT DOOR. It’s one of the greatest things ever committed to film. If you’re in the UK, you can watch it on ALL4 (and you really should).

What was the writing process like?

One of my biggest challenges when writing the script was getting the format correct. I literally spent weeks downloading free script software and reading conflicting and lengthy articles about it before realising I’d be directing it and it would probably just be my mates acting in it so it didn’t really matter! Once I was over that hurdle, the floodgates opened and I had a finished, polished script in a week or two (I write fast!).

Now, for those who may not know, a page of script is roughly equal to a minute of screen time, so you ideally want to aim for a 90-page script. My trouble was, I didn’t have any word processing programs on my knackered old computer, so I wrote the whole thing in WordPad (which doesn’t have page numbers. Or page breaks, actually. It’s just one continuous document!) and gave it my best guess. Eventually, my computer started to fail (I’d bought it in 2003 and it was now 2012) so I got myself a new one. This one had Word installed and Word had page numbers so I transplanted the script across and added said page numbers, hoping I was just over or just under the 90 minute mark. 330 pages. That’s over 5 hours long. My genuine feeling at the time was “Ah screw it, we’ll film it anyway!”. And we did – I have an edited, fully finished cut of the movie that comes in at four and a half hours, including some pretty rad scenes we had to cut from the theatrical release purely for time!

So apart from the producer, did anyone involved have any film-making experience at all?

I had zero film-making experience but I’ve always been an avid movie fan. 2012 was still the age of the DVD and I had hundreds. I was that geek that would watch the movie then watch it again with the Director’s commentary on, then watch all of the special features. I could (and still can) quote entire scenes from hundreds of movies. The way some people are with football, I am with movies. It’s probably the only thing I have in common with Tarantino!

Talking of DVD special features, they are an excellent way to sort-of learn how to make a movie. At least, they give you an idea of the order in which to do things. A fine example would be both the 2-disc edition of JAMES CAMERON’S THE ABYSS as well as the ALIEN QUADRILOGY box set, with the latter being a cracking resource for the first-time film-maker. Remember, the budget is just numbers – the process is the same. Another must-have is a copy of ROBERT RODRIGUEZ’S book REBEL WITHOUT A CREW. Apart from being a fun read anyway, it really will put the wind in your sails when things seem a bit futile!

Before I knew it, we had a crew. Everyone involved in the movie worked for free. They had to because we didn’t have a budget.

We held auditions. I actually got to sit in front of beautiful people as they stood on a stage and read out the stupid words I’d written. And then I got to decide if they were good enough for my dumb little movie. It was insane!

Talking of auditions, an interesting side note is that CATHERINE DELALOYE, who plays the main lead role of Ryley, asked to read for that part, even though I’d written it for a male. She was so good though that she won me over instantly and I had to rewrite all her dialogue to fit her gender. I even wrote (and filmed) a whole scene explaining her American accent away but it got cut for time.

The filming started in early 2013 and rattled on here and there until late summer of that year. Because nobody was getting paid, and we had such a large ensemble cast, we had to work around everyone’s schedules. I can’t say the script evolved too much from page to screen as it was a pretty basic plot to begin with, but all of that daft, ‘we’ll never get it’ stuff I wrote back in the early drafts? We got it all!

In the second part of this feature, we’ll cover the filming of WELCOME TO ESSEX (including some of the audacious set-pieces and guest spots) as well as audience reactions to the film.

The post Making a zombie movie – part one appeared first on David Moody - author of AUTUMN and HATER.

A couple of weeks back when I recommended THE OLD DARK HOUSE, I mentioned FREAKS. I’m sure most of you have heard of FREAKS but, just in case you haven’t, and in the interests of completeness, I thought I’d add it to my long list of film recommendations.

A beautiful circus trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

Read more: Film Recommendation – Freaks

FREAKS is a remarkable film. Based on a novel (SPURS by TOD ROBBINS), and largely unseen for many years following its release, it’s most notable for its sympathetic presentation of its cast. At its heart is a relatively straightforward story – a beautiful woman and her strongman lover attempt to swindle a young dwarf out of the vast sum of money he’s just inherited – and its message is clear: what makes a person a freak, an outcast, a monster, is as much their personality and character as it is their physical appearance.

The film makes for unquestionably uncomfortable viewing. I’ve seen it many times (I even had the honour of hosting a screening of it at Birmingham’s ELECTRIC CINEMA back in 2014), and I still find it a hard watch. The first and penultimate scenes (added as a result of studio interference – more about that in a second) follow a hawker leading a crowd of punters through a freakshow. Such events would never be allowed today, and rightly so. And yet, as the film progresses and the individual cast members’ differences are exposed under the camera’s unblinking gaze, you realise that, by watching, in some ways you’ve become as guilty as the people who paid for access back in the day. I’m sure this was intentional.

The opening twenty minutes of FREAKS is little more than a montage of scenes of the characters’ daily lives. We see the conjoined twins with their shared personal experiences and total lack of individual privacy, a group of young girls with microcephaly playing together, and various cast members with missing limbs eating dinner and carrying out other day-to-day tasks. It feels uncomfortable and voyeuristic to watch, and yet it also serves the purpose of increasing the impact of the film’s genuinely shocking ending. And you can’t talk about FREAKS without mentioning that ending. The brevity of the film means you’re there almost before you’re realised, and all the forced jollity and awkward humour of the movie’s first half disappears in an instant. The circus takes a nightmarish turn as the caravan of wagons becomes stranded in a storm, and the sideshow people exact their collective revenge on the trapeze artist and the strongman. It’s brutal and horrific.

FREAKS received a critical mauling after its initial release in 1932 and effectively ended the career of director Tod Browning, who’d previously found extraordinary success with his adaptation of DRACULA starring BELA LUGOSI. It’s hard to imagine the impact a film like FREAKS would have had on audiences back then who’d never seen anything like it (other than in the flesh at sideshows and carnivals), though there’s anecdotal reports of walkouts and worse. To say that it’s a landmark horror movie is an understatement. It’s another pre-Code film, and it’s hard to imagine how it could have been made if there’d been any consideration of censorship or other restrictions. Incredibly, the original 90-minute version was said to have had an even more brutal ending, which was lost when the film was hacked down to just over an hour’s duration by the studio. The missing footage is, unfortunately, gone for good.

People still think of FREAKS as an exploitation flick and, to an extent, it clearly is. Even the title feels exploitative today. It’s far much more than that,, and I urge you to seek out a copy of this important film if you haven’t already.

The post Film Recommendation – Freaks appeared first on David Moody - author of AUTUMN and HATER.

A couple of weeks back when I recommended THE OLD DARK HOUSE, I mentioned FREAKS. I’m sure most of you have heard of FREAKS but, just in case you haven’t, and in the interests of completeness, I thought I’d add it to my long list of film recommendations.

A beautiful circus trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

Read more: Freaks

FREAKS is a remarkable film. Based on a novel (SPURS by TOD ROBBINS), and largely unseen for many years following its release, it’s most notable for its sympathetic presentation of its cast. At its heart is a relatively straightforward story – a beautiful woman and her strongman lover attempt to swindle a young dwarf out of the vast sum of money he’s just inherited – and its message is clear: what makes a person a freak, an outcast, a monster, is as much their personality and character as it is their physical appearance.

The film makes for unquestionably uncomfortable viewing. I’ve seen it many times (I even had the honour of hosting a screening of it at Birmingham’s ELECTRIC CINEMA back in 2014), and I still find it a hard watch. The first and penultimate scenes (added as a result of studio interference – more about that in a second) follow a hawker leading a crowd of punters through a freakshow. Such events would never be allowed today, and rightly so. And yet, as the film progresses and the individual cast members’ differences are exposed under the camera’s unblinking gaze, you realise that, by watching, in some ways you’ve become as guilty as the people who paid for access back in the day. I’m sure this was intentional.

The opening twenty minutes of FREAKS is little more than a montage of scenes of the characters’ daily lives. We see the conjoined twins with their shared personal experiences and total lack of individual privacy, a group of young girls with microcephaly playing together, and various cast members with missing limbs eating dinner and carrying out other day-to-day tasks. It feels uncomfortable and voyeuristic to watch, and yet it also serves the purpose of increasing the impact of the film’s genuinely shocking ending. And you can’t talk about FREAKS without mentioning that ending. The brevity of the film means you’re there almost before you’re realised, and all the forced jollity and awkward humour of the movie’s first half disappears in an instant. The circus takes a nightmarish turn as the caravan of wagons becomes stranded in a storm, and the sideshow people exact their collective revenge on the trapeze artist and the strongman. It’s brutal and horrific.

FREAKS received a critical mauling after its initial release in 1932 and effectively ended the career of director Tod Browning, who’d previously found extraordinary success with his adaptation of DRACULA starring BELA LUGOSI. It’s hard to imagine the impact a film like FREAKS would have had on audiences back then who’d never seen anything like it (other than in the flesh at sideshows and carnivals), though there’s anecdotal reports of walkouts and worse. To say that it’s a landmark horror movie is an understatement. It’s another pre-Code film, and it’s hard to imagine how it could have been made if there’d been any consideration of censorship or other restrictions. Incredibly, the original 90-minute version was said to have had an even more brutal ending, which was lost when the film was hacked down to just over an hour’s duration by the studio. The missing footage is, unfortunately, gone for good.

People still think of FREAKS as an exploitation flick and, to an extent, it clearly is. Even the title feels exploitative today. It’s far much more than that,, and I urge you to seek out a copy of this important film if you haven’t already.

The post Freaks appeared first on David Moody - author of AUTUMN and HATER.

I post about this every couple of years, and I think it’s worth repeating. When you buy a print edition of an Infected Books title, you’re able to download an eBook version of the book completely free. I think that’s only fair.

There are two ways of getting hold of the complementary copies, as shown below. Over the last couple of months we’ve made a lot of changes to the Infected Books store and have automated the redemption process. It’s quick and straightforward, and I hope you’ll make use of it. You’ll find both Kindle and ePub versions in your download, so that should be most eReaders covered.

If you’ve bought a print edition of an Infected Books title direct from www.infectedbooks.co.uk

Check your inbox! Your receipt should show the available downloadsClick the link and download your files

If you’ve bought a print edition of an Infected Books title from any other bookstore, or you’ve received the book as a gift

Go to the back of your book, and visit the URL shownFind your book and follow the instructions to find a passwordEnter the password and download your book

Please have a look at www.infectedbooks.co.uk if you haven’t already. You’ll find the largest range of my books there, available for immediate dispatch. All books are signed, come with a complementary eBook version (see above!), and are at prices lower than most other book stores. And if you’re in the UK, shipping is completely free.

The post My (updated) approach to eBooks appeared first on David Moody - author of AUTUMN and HATER.

I stumbled upon this week’s film recommendation many years ago. It was back in the days of the BBC’s ‘horror double bills’, when two horror films, usually one Universal and one Hammer or Amicus, would be shown late on Saturday nights on BBC2. Often, as a horror-starved kid, I’d be desperate to watch the more recent colour movies, not the older black-and-white films of the 1930s and 1940s. Sometimes, though, those creaky old chillers delivered far more than those relatively modern films drenched with overly bright red blood. THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932) was a film I thoroughly enjoyed back then, and it’s one I regularly rewatch today.

Driving through a ferocious storm, five travellers seek shelter in an old and remote house in the Welsh countryside. There, they find themselves at the mercy of the bizarre and eccentric Femm family. Though no one is entirely happy with the situation, a dry and relatively safe night progresses until other, previously unmentioned, family members make their presence known.

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There’s so much to unpack about THE OLD DARK HOUSE that it’s hard to know where to start. Based on J B PRIESTLEY’s 1927 novel BENIGHTED, it set the blueprint for haunted house movies, whilst at the same time somehow managing to pastiche the very genre it’s defining. This is in no small part due to the excellent (and often gently hilarious) script, and the conflict between the cast of increasingly bizarre characters. The film (which was remade by Hammer in 1963) was directed by JAMES WHALE, fresh off the huge critical and financial success of FRANKENSTEIN, and prior to repeating that success with THE INVISIBLE MAN. Considering its relatively small size, the cast is terrific. BORIS KARLOFF is unforgettable as Morgan, the Femm family’s mute manservant. The group of stranded travellers includes such luminaries as RAYMOND MASSEY, MELVYN DOUGLAS, and CHARLES LAUGHTON. GLORIA STUART, who decades later went on to play the elderly Rose in JAMES CAMERON’s TITANIC, is also excellent.

The film is only 72 minutes long, but it rattles along at such a pace that it feels half that length. The brittle interplay between the travellers and the family who begrudgingly agree to shelter them from the storm is engaging and the production design is excellent. The decrepit, decaying gothic mansion is almost a character in its own right, and the constant soundtrack of the swirling, moaning wind and rain outside leave you ill at ease. Released in the pre-Code era, it benefits from an honest, liberal approach that would have been impossible under the anti-immorality crusade that came a year later and resulted in far stricter censorship and studio oversight.

Despite strong reviews, when THE OLD DARK HOUSE was originally released it was something of a flop, and it was many years later before it finally received the level of acclaim it always deserved. It’s a beautiful film, drenched with atmosphere, that both created and defined a genre at the same time. I think it’s interesting that the film threatened to derail James Whale’s career in the same way that director TOD BROWNING was affected after following the huge success of DRACULA with FREAKS. Ah, FREAKS… now there’s a film I need to write about here.

As usual, this is a recommendation not a review, so I’ve said next to nothing about the plot. If you’ve not seen it, I definitely recommend getting hold of a copy of THE OLD DARK HOUSE. If you can, try and find the 4k restoration of the film that was released in 2018.

The post Film recommendation – The Old Dark House appeared first on David Moody - author of AUTUMN and HATER.

The fact this story is being published here the day before a particularly odious public figure is up in front of a standards committee is entirely coincidental. But it is about people like him.

The post 12STORIES – PEOPLE LIKE YOU appeared first on David Moody - author of AUTUMN and HATER.