Screenwriter »

• “The film the Vatican doesn’t want you to see.”

  March 5, 2012 @ 10:50 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  In the unlikely event that it cares, the Vatican will be happy to hear that I have not yet seen the film that it doesn’t want me to see. I have, however, seen the poster. The Devil Inside is a mid-budget exorcism horror that, to almost everybody’s surprise, became something of a smash in the US at the start of the year. Actually, this is not the first time that an unprepossessing shocker has stormed the US box office in the post-Yuletide period. If you want to make some money with your cheap programmer then sling it out when every other studio is still sleeping off the mince pies.

  Anyway, that poster. This strange artifact carries an extraordinary quote above the title. Attributed to the delightfully named Naibe Reynoso (surely an anagram) from some Mexican-American radio station, the line reads: “The film the Vatican doesn’t want you to see.” Now, I have done some very rigorous research — none of which involved me sitting on my arse while accessing Google — and I have failed to find evidence of the Vatican trying to stop me (or, indeed, anyone else) from seeing this promising entertainment. It’s almost as if they don’t give a toss.

  That’s not the point. What’s interesting about this business is the way distributors now regard (made-up) outrage from the Vatican as a genuine selling point. I suppose it was ever thus. When Father Dougal and Father Ted stood outside the Craggy Island cinema clutching signs reading “Down with this sort of thing!” they only served to generate interest in The Passion of Saint Tibulus. The BBC has created more than a few superstars by banning supposedly lubricious records.

  It remains, however, bizarre that, in a nominally Catholic country, film distributors choose to plaster the walls with posters telling us that the hierarchy forbids attendance at the advertised event. This could spread throughout the publicity industry.

  Nivea, the face cream the Pope tried to ban.

  Over 80 percent of archbishops named Cilit Bang as the degreaser most likely to encourage satanism.

  Cadbury’s Caramel, certified sinfully delicious by the conclave of cardinals.

  And so on. Don’t laugh. It could happen.

• Max Von Sydow and Last House on the Left

  February 14, 2012 @ 10:32 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Certain protocols apply in press interviews. Among the most important is that you don’t make a berk of yourself by getting your photograph taken with the talent. I remember being at a group interview a few years back for Miami Vice and some European twit insisted on grabbing each professional — Gong Li, Michael Mann, Jamie Foxx — and forcing his neighbour to take a snap of the highly paid star grimacing uncomfortably beside a grinning imbecile. “They don’t mind!” he said. Well, they’re hardly going to say they mind when in a room with journalists. The truth is they think this is one of the places they can go without being forced to gurn at cameraphones.

  You’re also not supposed to get things signed. On one or two occasions I have — after asking politely — sneaked past this particular rule. I got Terrence Davies to sign my BFI boxed-set of his complete works.  Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s signature is on my edition of Syndromes of a Century. (In an aside on an aside, no such dictum applies when interviewing writers. I remember one very prominent fantasy author positively demanding to sign my copy of his latest tome.)

  Where was I? Oh yes. Earlier this week I got to meet Max Von Sydow. There was no way I was going to leave that room without a record of the event. So, I brought along a copy of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. If you haven’t seen this fine 1960 film then you really should. A superbly grim folk thriller — Sydow described it to me as “Bergman’s Kurosawa film” — The Virgin Spring tells the tale of decent parents who, after encountering the murderers of their daughter, take spectacularly gruesome revenge. Fans of “video nasties” will find their ears perking up. The film was, of course, remade (the right word I think) by Wes Craven as The Last House on the Left. “To avoid fainting just keep repeating: it’s only a movie” was the famous tagline.

  Anyway, while Max was uncapping the pen and politely refreshing his memory as to my name, I asked what he made of Craven’s low-fi interpretation. “What’s that?” he said. It transpired that he’d never even heard of the 1972 film. Puritans will say this does him credit. He made me write its name down in his notebook. I worry a little. Max is pretty robust and very open-minded, but I feel a little bit uneasy about recommending a famously disgusting rape-revenge thriller to an 82-year-old man.

  The story didn’t make it into the piece (read the interview in this week’s soaraway Ticket), so I thought I’d share it with you here. You can catch Max’s fine, Oscar-nominated performance in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close from Friday.

  The Virgin Spring is one of the greatest films ever made. Did I make that clear?

• The strange story of the Jack and Jill press show.

  February 6, 2012 @ 10:04 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Here’s an odd one. Every now and then, some distributor will fail to screen a film for the press in this territory. More often than not the movie will be shown to our cousins across the Irish Sea. A good example is the recent Liam Neeson thriller The Grey. It is not unreasonable for readers to assume that the film in question must stink like last week’s socks. They’re usually right. But, quite often, the reason is pure meanness. The Grey, for example, has actually got fairly decent reviews. What a nuisance!

  

  But not for viewers in the UK.

  In over a decade at this job I cannot remember an instance where a mainstream film was screened for the Irish critics, but not for their UK colleagues. Until now. Look about the British papers this week and you will find no notices for Jack and Jill, Adam Sandler’s latest atrocity. Yet the fine people at Sony Ireland (good for you, folks)  unspooled the picture for your current correspondent and his fellow hacks. I really wanted to reward their professionalism by giving Jack and Jill a good review. But, well, it’s a film in which Adam Sandler plays an annoying man and his more annoying sister. It would have been an appalling dereliction of duty to lead you astray.

  What’s up? Well, it is worth noting (and regretting) that Mr Sandler’s pictures do significantly better on the island of Ireland — they particularly love them in Larne and Lisburn, incidentally — than they do in what Peter Robinson calls the mainland. Even though the reviews were bound to be awful, it may have been deemed worth the risk to make sure Irish Sandlerphiles were aware he was doing his awful thing in the nation’s blameless cinemas.

  Different rules apply in different territories. Note, for instance, that studios very often fail to screen horror films for American critics, but show them to Europeans. This surely stems from an interesting distinction between the reviewers on either side of the Atlantic. American pundits have never taken horror seriously. We are — in that regard at least — a bit more open minded.

  Obviously, domestic readers will be furious that they are left unable to peruse fascinating reviews in their soaraway Ticket. But does the lack of screenings have any effect on box-office returns? Not at first. But, as Tara Brady pointed out in a recent Rotten Potatoes column, such films do tend to flag after a few weeks. You watch. Jack and Jill will do much better here than it does in the UK. Oh, hang on. That would have happened anyway. We’re bleeding idiots in that regard.

• What is a horror film?

  September 2, 2011 @ 10:52 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  The question is prompted by the arrival of Ben Wheatley’s genuinely extraordinary Kill List. As Ms Brady explains in today’s Ticket, the picture is unquestionably one of the best of the year. Beginning in Mike Leigh territory, it steadily drifts into extreme violence, unsettling conspiracies and, eventually — we can be no more precise — somewhere very strange indeed. Here’s the thing. Is it a horror film? Well, the people at Bloody Disgusting reviewed it. So I guess it must be. On the other hand, the quotes on the poster (see above) cautiously refer to it as a “chiller”, a “thriller” and a “hit-man movie”. To analyse Kill List any further would be to risk giving too much away. Let’s just say that it feels like a horror film — you’ll jump at the twists; you’ll vomit at the quite staggering violence — and leave it at that.

  So, anyway, to get back to the more general question. How do we know a horror film when we see one? Let’s not pretend we don’t head to Wikipedia in such situations. The opening paragraph in the relevant (pretty well written) article offers the following definition:

  “Horror films are unsettling movies that strive to elicit the emotions of fear, disgust and horror from viewers. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres. Horrors also frequently overlap with the thriller genre.”

  The opening sentence is certainly indisputable. You’d have to work very hard to unearth a horror film that didn’t dally in fear, disgust and (d’uh!) horror. But you can find the same things in the films of Ingmar Bergman or Michael Haneke. Just think of Ms I Huppert hacking away at her private bits in the latter’s The Piano Teacher. Actually, don’t.

  The second, highly qualified sentence does seem significant here. “They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural.” I would argue that to count as a horror film a picture should appear to feature elements of the supernatural or the macabre. My italics are significant. Cast your eyes across the great horror films that preceded the blood-drenched silver period of the mid-1970s and virtually all (we’ll come back to that qualification) feature elements that satisfy the criterion. Dracula, The Wolfman, I Walked With a Zombie, Cat People, Rosemary’s Baby: perversions of nature abound in each of those classics.

  What of Psycho? Well, that’s obviously not  horror film. There are elements of horror in it. But the film is, for most of its duration, an exercise in sustained tension. Heck, nobody gets stabbed until halfway into the movie. The real problem arrives with the slasher boom of the mid-1970s. Surely, a film about a guy killing promiscuous teenagers with a carving knife can’t be called a horror film. Look, here. That’s just a bloke with a chainsaw. There are no actual monsters, for God’s sake. Hold your horses there, imaginary sceptic. The very invincibility of Michael Myers, Jason and Leatherface nudges them into the pseudo-supernatural. Consider the end of Halloween. Donald Pleasence looks at the space where Myers should be, but is not. “It was the boogieman,” Jamie Lee Curtis  suggests. “As a matter of fact it was,” the world’s second-greatest bald Donald replies. See? See? My definition holds up. The slasher-movie villain is, for all intents and purposes, every bit as “supernatural” as a vampire, a werewolf or a cat person.

  Of course, you can find exceptions. What about the Wicker Man? Well, if you will allow me the stretch, the film still hangs around supernatural matters. The cult very clearly believe in the existence of otherworldly powers and are prepared to kill to satisfy those entities. The supernatural hangs over that great picture.

  Thinking about it (now we get to that earlier raised eyebrow), the problem in definition really concerns that bit of the Venn diagram where science fiction crosses over with horror. If asked to list five horror films (does anybody else really like Pointless?) a large number of random persons would nominate Frankenstein. Yet, by any sane definition, all versions of that Mary Shelley novel count as science fiction flicks. Good Lord, this really could go on all night.

  Look, just go and see Kill List. Okay?  Since you didn’t ask, Ben does not appear to be any relation of the earlier Mr Wheatley.