1. The new wave of British horror films | Film | The Guardian 11/06/2010 11:20
The new wave of British horror films
Low-key concepts and limited budgets have given British horror
films a gritty realism that is the envy of the industry – but can they
ever really compete with their US rivals?
Ryan Gilbey
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 June 2010 22.29 BST
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Bill Nighy in Shaun of the Dead. Photograph: Rouge Pictures/Everett / Rex Features
Unlike the western or the musical, the horror movie never seems to be under threat of
extinction. The occasional phenomenon – a Blair Witch Project or a Paranormal
Activity – helps to fortify its commercial appeal, as do hits like Scream or Hostel,
which refresh the familiar conventions. But horror remains in perpetually good nick,
not least in its UK outpost, from which some of the most inventive shockers of the last
10 years have emerged. Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later kicked off a new wave of Brit
horror in 2002, but it fell to emerging film-makers to properly paint the town blood-
red, from Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) to Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The
Descent), Michael J Bassett (Deathwatch, Wilderness) and Christopher Smith (Creep,
Severance).
In 2008, Johnny Kevorkian set his creepy debut The Disappeared on a Nil By Mouth-
style housing estate, where hoodies stalk the concrete walkways like delinquent Grim
Reapers, while Steven Sheil's Mum & Dad was a brilliantly grubby scare story about
the sort of depraved family who might have enjoyed wine-and-cheese evenings with
Fred and Rosemary West. Paul Andrew Williams didn't skimp on the gore in his rural
monster movie The Cottage. And this year brought the release of Lawrence Gough's
Salvage, which relocated the zombies and political commentary of Night of the Living
Dead to the Merseyside cul-de-sac formerly known as Brookside Close. Then there are
those titles that may have fallen below the radar of all but the most dedicated horror
nut, such as Wild Country (werewolves in Scotland) or Gnaw (cannibals
in Eastbourne).
"It didn't feel like a new wave at the time," says Christopher Smith. "I was always just
trying to get the next film going. But with hindsight, it's clear something was
happening. It's extraordinary to think that Shaun of the Dead, The Descent and Creep
all opened within a year."
With the UK release schedule and production calendar spattered with horror movies,
that momentum shows no sign of abating. The producers of Shaun of the Dead are
behind Attack the Block, the directorial debut of Joe Cornish (of Adam and Joe). A
resurgent Hammer Films (which has co-produced Let Me In, the US remake of Let the
Right One In) has announced it will turn Susan Hill's modern gothic novel, The
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2. The new wave of British horror films | Film | The Guardian 11/06/2010 11:20
Right One In) has announced it will turn Susan Hill's modern gothic novel, The
Woman in Black, into a 3D extravaganza directed by James Watkins (writer of My
Little Eye, Eden Lake and The Descent Part 2).
Then there is Monsters, about infected creatures on the rampage in Mexico, and the
bizarre Devil's Playground, which will sidestep the age-old horror-nerd question of
"can zombies run?" by portraying a species of the undead who dabble in parkour, no
less. Even non-UK talent is moving in for the kill, with J-horror pioneer Hideo Nakata
directing a largely British cast in Chatroom, scripted by Hunger writer Enda Walsh,
which premiered at Cannes this year.
The UK film industry is understandably anxious to produce internationally appealing
products, but one of the key qualities of the best British horror is the skill with which it
turns cultural specificity to its advantage. Simon Sprackling, who co-wrote and co-
produced The Reeds, a Norfolk Broads-set chiller pitched as "The Shining on a boat",
believes this our trump card. "We're very different from the US because we have a
proper gothic tradition," he says. "And we have a fatalism to our view of the world,
knowing that things can't possibly work out well in the end."
One of the inspirations for The Reeds was the case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer
who was imprisoned for shooting dead a teenage burglar. "Part of what informs British
horror is the old adage of 'write what you know'. Those things on the news or in the
papers that scare us tend to reverberate through our films, which is how you get a lot
of horror now that is urban-based."
Kevorkian agrees. "With The Disappeared, I had the idea of taking something many of
us pass every day — a council estate — and turning it into a haunted-house setting.
Despite the fact that these estates are in central, built-up locations, I wanted to create
a sense of isolation and abandonment."
Smith also highlights cultural idiosyncrasies in much of his work, from Creep, set in
the tunnels of the London Underground, to Severance, about a team-building exercise
gone wrong, and his gory new medieval thriller Black Death, which is in the grungy
spirit of Witchfinder General. "Contemporary British horror automatically feels grotty,
but in a good way," he says. "Look at Mum & Dad, which is such a horrible film, but
also really great."
Budgetary constraints obviously have an effect on the look of UK horror movies: they
simply can't compete with the good-looking US model populated by, well, good-
looking US models. "We do gritty and realistic better than anyone else," says
Kevorkian. "I don't think we have the budgets to do big elaborate horror films here, so
we turn to a more reality-based horror, which is a hell of a lot more frightening."
"Money definitely has something to do with it," says Lawrence Gough, who financed
Salvage with £250,000 from Northwest Vision and Media. "A big budget production
here can mean £10m-£15m, whereas $40m (£28m) in the US would be considered
cheap. There's also a tendency in British film-making toward realism, which I don't
think the Americans share."
In common with TV counterparts such as Being Human and Psychoville, much of the
new wave of horror celebrates uniquely British elements. You can practically hear the
glottal stops in a concept like Dead Cert, a low-budget, gangsters-v-vampires movie
shot in Dagenham with Guy Ritchie regular Jason Flemyng, and the smell of livestock
and ale hangs around Alex Chandon's horror-comedy Inbred, in which Yorkshire
teenagers on community service are preyed on by sinister villagers.
More unsettling to financiers and distributors than anything supernatural is the matter
of whether such films will travel beyond UK borders. "The US is a consideration when
you're putting a film together," says Sprackling. "You don't want it to be, but it is. It's
much easier to sell a film internationally if you have American characters in it. It's a
simple fact. The value of your movie is reduced without that." He cites the model of
Adrift, a thriller released in some territories as Open Water 2. With its English-
language script, highly marketable stranded-at-sea premise and US cast, most
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3. The new wave of British horror films | Film | The Guardian 11/06/2010 11:20
language script, highly marketable stranded-at-sea premise and US cast, most
audiences didn't even realise it was German. Sprackling's next script, he tells me, will
feature two American characters. "If you can get someone from Glee in it, you can
make the film at a level where you can pay the crew properly."
"If your characters are British, there is already a subtle problem for some US
audiences," says Smith. "We should remember that films which we consider classics,
like The Wicker Man, didn't travel well. The exceptions are usually US horror films
made here — The Omen or An American Werewolf in London. They can come here
with their stars, but somehow we're not able to export it."
Smith moved away from straight horror with his last film, Triangle, while he describes
Black Death as "more of a horror story than a horror movie – it doesn't set out to scare
you, but it's about a scary world". Still, he is already planning a return to the genre in
which he made his name. In the scale of his vision, there might just be a way for
British horror to compete commercially with its Hollywood equivalent.
"It's about the brand," he says. "You need a great costume, a great monster, a Freddy
Krueger. To make one of those is an ambition of mine. I feel now like I imagine Wes
Craven felt before A Nightmare on Elm Street: he'd proved what he could do, so it
became all about moving up a gear. The way we'd have to do it would be to get one of
our English brands and put that into a polished kind of product. How Richard Curtis
and Guy Ritchie have done so well is to give a polish to something very British.
Without the polish it doesn't travel, and you don't get the breakout franchise. Get Jack
the Ripper, say, with the right stars and budget level, and you could definitely sell that
in America."
But even among the film-makers responsible for the future of British horror, there is
some disagreement over whether this country could ever produce a megahit on the
scale of Paranormal Activity. "I think we could do it," says Kevorkian. "People are
making horror films more easily with the smaller cameras that are out now. I really
believe that one of those will become the next Blair Witch or Paranormal."
Smith isn't so sure. "I was asking myself that question the other day. I came to the
conclusion that it couldn't happen. One thing you need is that huge platform to release
it on; it needs to come out in America first to have that degree of impact. And it
wouldn't work somehow. Nicole Kidman in a mansion in The Others felt right because
she was posh. If you haven't got posh, then forget it. I don't think we could make a film
with some Londoners in a house going, 'Oi, 'ang on, there's a ghost 'ere.'"
The Disappeared is out now on DVD. The Reeds will be released later this year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
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