Feature Category: Features

Gavin Grant Smith is a Scottish science fiction writer best known for the sci-fi novel Veteran. His latest work is the critically acclaimed Bastard Legion series, which is cracking military sci-fi. We caught up to find out more about his latest novel, The Bastard Legion War Criminals.

STARBUST: What’s the elevator pitch for The Bastard Legion War Criminals?

Gavin Grant Smith: Aliens meets The Dirty Dozen. Or: a mercenary legion, consisting of some of the worst criminals in human space, is blamed for a series of atrocities – most of which they didn’t commit – whilst fighting a vicious colonial war on an alien jungle planet. But if they didn’t commit the atrocities who, or what, did?

And how would you pitch that to someone who has only ever seen Star Trek?

If the Federation were to hire the Bastard Legion, the Borg would just go home. These are the people you send to frighten the Klingons.

What character is the most fun to write?

Miska, the protagonist, is a lot of fun to write because she’s a horrible person, but she’s very upbeat about it, and that’s very refreshing (for me, at least). I also like the Mafia consigliere ‘Uncle’ Vido Cofino because I write him as a genuinely nice guy, and I suspect he probably is. Also Massimo ‘the Fisherman’ Prola, Vido’s right hand man, who’s not so nice. With those two characters, I get to embrace my love of the likes of The Sopranos and Goodfellas, which becomes all the more interesting when you get past their archetypal exterior and find out what they’re really about. The big fun about the series is writing about a group of people who have an excellent reason to dislike one another coming to very begrudgingly like each other. It’s best not to get too attached to any characters, however, as the body count is so high Sean Bean fears being drafted.

Which character seriously needs to have word with themselves?

Well, Miska doesn’t really get morality… but she seems reasonably content. Torricone, one of the convicts, tries to be her conscience and I suspect he can be a little sanctimonious about it. The serial killer known as the Ultra, leader of the Nightmare Squad, a kind of post-human weapon of mass destruction only used in emergencies, is a bit too cool for school but he seems popular. I’m not sure that they’re ‘have a word with themselves’ kinds of people. There’s a lot of psycho/sociopath juggling amongst the Bastard Legion.

Why did you go for military sci-fi?

I’m not sure I have a really good answer for this. I’m interested in military history, particularly the history of Special Forces, but I also saw Aliens when I was 12, decided that Star Wars wasn’t for me, and I haven’t really looked back since (also Rogue Trooper!)  I’m a bit wary of mil-SF as a subgenre but there’s no denying that’s what the Bastard Legion books are, though there’s a big crime element as well. I guess I see myself as writing SF action adventure stories.

Why did you use the name ‘Bastard Legion’?

Because punk rock – that’s why! Err… I genuinely can’t remember. I was thinking about all the names of pulp – I love pulp in all its myriad forms – bad boy military units: The Dirty Dozen, Inglorious Bastards, The Expendables, Bad Company, etc. and Bastards just seemed to fit. Legion came because I wanted a big pool of potential victims err… I mean characters choose from and this feeds into a central mystery running through the series. It’s caused some problems, it made some people in my publishers a bit nervous, doubtless it didn’t help foreign sales, and I can’t advertise it on that guardian of public morality: Facebook.

The Internet tells us that you won the Campbell for Veteran. How has that shaped your writing career so far?

Sadly I didn’t win the Campbell award, I was nominated for it but Ian McDonald won it, which is worrying because I’ve been holding a grudge against Hannu Rajaniemi for winning it for years now. Also I saw Ian in the pub last week could’ve railed bitterly against him if I’d realised! It’s made no discernable difference to my career and I have to admit that when I was told about it I had no idea what a Campbell award was or its significance. Now my only award ambition is to get the award that George R. R. Martin allegedly gives out for not winning a Hugo!

What has been the most interesting shift in sci-fi writing in recent years?

It feels, and I’ll probably be told that I’m hugely out of touch for saying this but we’ve moved a little beyond trends in science fiction. My sweet spot is the sort of post/transhuman space opera and that seems to be going great guns at the moment. I think the most interesting thing that’s happening, however, is that we’re starting to hear from a much more diverse spectrum of writers. I know there’s people out there who feel it’s a cynical box ticking exercise but I think it’s making a huge difference. We’re getting perspectives that we’ve never seen before, which is in turn making us older hands reassess our comfortable position and so every one is just making a bit more of an effort across the board. What I don’t understand is the resistance to this, particularly in a genre like SF. I mean it’s not as if all of Heinlein’s books have been burned.

What tropes do you personally avoid the most?

I love tropes! I’m irritated that so many of them are now considered old hat. I’m the guy who’s annoyed that he can’t get away with writing a book where a dwarf, elf and wizard all go on an adventure together. The ones I do avoid are the ones I know I sort of should because people express dislike for them. There are also some properly toxic tropes out there tied to representations of race, gender, and sexuality – those can do a burton. Other than that I avoid the chosen one trope because I’m deeply suspicious of messianic figures (as good guys anyway), and think people should save themselves rather than wait for a hero to do it for them. Thing is people say they don’t like the chosen one/messianic trope but it’s pretty much every superhero film. At least Harry Potter was bred as a weapon!

If you could give the 16-year-old version of yourself any advice, what would it be? Would you listen?

Be less of a dick, try harder in college, write more, mullets aren’t cool, go easier on your family. Also, here, take this manuscript and send it to this address before the Internet takes off! And no, he wouldn’t listen. He was an idiot.

THE BASTARD LEGION WAR CRIMINALS is available now.

STARBURST has a feeling of déjà vu as we get the lowdown on HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U from the film’s stars JESSICA ROTHE and ISRAEL BROUSSARD…

STARBURST: How was it getting back into the character of Tree/Carter for you?

Jessica Rothe: It was amazing and completely terrifying! Shooting the first film was an unbelievable experience because we bonded as a cast and crew and Chris Landon (the writer/director) was our captain. He is such an intelligent, generous, and kind human being that he set the tone on set and challenged everyone to be their best version of themselves. So when the opportunity for the second film came around, I was so excited to get the band back together again. But I was nervous because sequels are tricky and it’s easy to sit back and do all of the same things as the first one, but that can create a boring film. I have to commend Chris for saying we can’t do that; we have to turn this thing on its head to make it crazier and funnier and more emotional and continue evolving the world and expanding it. Once we put the focus on that, I realised that it’s just a continuation and I don’t have to replicate anything, and I can expand on what I did before.

Israel Broussard: It was little difficult, to be honest – Carter had such a happy-go-lucky vibe that I was worried the energy wouldn’t match from the first one, especially because of the continuity and starting the story from the next day. But once I got that out of my head and we started shooting, I fell right back into being Carter. It was super fun in the end.

It was a great choice was to have your character called Tree, meaning that her growth over time works on another level.

JR: Exactly! Chris is great like that. There’s also the joke about if a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound. Tree is in a metaphysical quandary, and I think another reason people connected with the film is she turns into such a badass and seizes her own destiny without having to wait for someone to save her – it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t need help or that she won’t ask for help, but she’s not the kind of person to run away from the killer. Blumhouse has been doing a great job with helping genre films with female empowered characters and leads – for example, look at the new Halloween movie, it had a purely female-driven protagonist story. I think that audiences are really ready to see that.

What are some of your favourites scenes (or more specifically, deaths) that you shot across both films?

JR: There is truly a plethora of fun and strange deaths that Tree has. There was a time on set that the game of the day was “What are all the weird and creative ways that we can kill Jessica?” [laughs] which was a very funny but morbid game. I loved shooting the skydiving scene in HDD2U, which was a reshoot; it was added after we had wrapped the second film. Chris had wanted to do and wasn’t sure if it would work, but once we did it, he said we have to use that. It was so much fun, and our costume designer nailed the bathing suit, and I got to do a trust fall, in which I fell kinda far. The electrocution death was also a lot of fun, that hairstyle was all my hair and lots of hairspray. These weren’t death scenes, but I also loved filming the scenes with Tree’s mum in the second film because they were emotionally challenging. They had a different energy and it as fun figuring out how to balance that with the rest of the film.

IB: I had fun re-watching the first one, and with this one, I had read the script but had no idea on how Chris was going to execute it. The dorm room scenes were always a lot of fun; in the second one, specifically, I loved the scenes with Tree and her mum. Almost every time I saw that I would tear up. That definitely gave the movie what the first one lacked, which was pure emotion and we did it while maintaining the main concept. And, of course, the skydiving scene [laughs], it was so much fun to film.

HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U is in cinemas now and you can read our review here. Read more from our interview with Jessica and Israel as well as director Christopher Landon in the latest issue of STARBURST #458 – on sale now.

For last year’s Halloween, director David Gordon Green got fans on his side when it was announced that the original Shape, Nick Castle, would be making a cameo appearance as Michael Myers in the re-enivisioned sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic. While Castle has been retired from acting and making films for several years, it seemed like those making the new Halloween were dead-set on connecting the new film to the original as much as possible. While he only appears in one scene – when Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode first encounters Myers – Castle also recorded all of the sounds of the Shape, from his breathing to the grunts from the many hits he takes in the film’s no-holds-barred finale.

STARBURST: How far along in the process did you become involved with the new Halloween?

Nick Castle: About a year ago, August, I got a call from my agent who books me at horror conventions. He also represents all the other guys who played Michael Myers in the other films, and the casting people from the movie were calling him up, trying to get ideas. He suggested me, without asking me, and he called and asked, “Would you be interested? I found out that they’d be interested in you doing it, if you want to.” I knew that they were going to do a new Halloween. I didn’t know what the script was, but I knew John [Carpenter] was involved. So, that was in August [2017], and they were going to do it in October, but they delayed it a few months to work on the screenplay, and wound up shooting it, I think, in February.

The recreation of the famous on-set photo of you drinking a Dr. Pepper with the mask on suggests that shooting was pretty fun. Was it as enjoyable as that image suggests?

Oh, yeah. All that and more. First of all, it was great to be on a set again. Y’know, I’m a filmmaker, but I’ve been retired for a while, so I haven’t been on a set, so that in and of itself was nostalgic. Met a lot of great people – very talented and warm. Got a lot of pats on the back for my own career and my own movies – a lot of fans of those. And, because I had, for the last few years, been going to these horror conventions, I know the fans, and know how much they love this genre, and I know what they would like, so some of my suggestions of revisiting these old photos and reliving some of these old moments from the original were ones that both myself and the filmmakers there wanted to do, so we had a blast with that. A lot of fun – got to meet Danny McBride, one of my favourite comedy actors, and see Jamie Lee Curtis and John again, so it couldn’t have been more fun.

You’re the one who recorded all of the breathing for Michael Myers in this film. What’s that process like – is it kind of ridiculous, sitting in a recording booth, breathing heavily into a mask?

Well, that’s basically what it is. I got an email or a call – I don’t remember which – and David [Gordon Green] said, “Wouldn’t it be great if you did all the breathing?” and I went, “Oh, that’s great. I love that idea.” [chuckles] He said, “We’ll do it in L.A., and we’ll just send you to one of these post-productions houses,” and that’s what we did. I went there and Ryan Turek, who was one of the producers, was there, along with the post-production group, and that was the first time I got to see the movie, too – in stops and starts. We just played through all the scenes with Michael Myers and we started by me actually putting on a mask and breathing. Then, we took that off, and I just kind of ended up breathing into my hands, instead. That’s what we ended up using – it came out better than going through the mask itself. That was fun, and I got to be a part of the movie again.

Seeing all of those scenes with just the Shape – how did that prepare you for seeing the final, completed film?

Not only did David send the me the original script when I first got on, but was gracious enough to hear my thoughts on some of the scenes and things like that, so I was very much aware of the storyline. But, I was only on the set for about a week, so I saw material that was being done there, but seeing it [during post-production], it was hard to tell, because of stops and starts, but it looked like it was really working. What I really appreciated was the work they did on extending the ending of the movie. I thought that was really helpful to giving some impact to the finale.

Of all the scenes for which you recorded the sound, which required the most interpretation on your part?

Well, the entire ending. There were so many efforts – it’s not just breathing, but when you’re hit or when you get shot or what the character might do. Then, you leave it up to the director and the editors to decide how much of that impact they want to hear. Does it play within the setting of the scene, because it might not be as prevalent as if you’re alone in a closet, hearing the Shape’s menacing breathing. There’s not a lot of nuance you can give to these things – you’re breathing! [laughs] You just have to figure out how this is going to play – he’s a tough guy, so he’s not going to say, “Ouch,” out loud. You don’t want it to come off as comical – let’s just put it that way!

HALLOWEEN is available on Digital Download now, and 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on February 25th from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.

Richard J Hand is one of the foremost experts in ‘Grand-Guignol’, the ‘Granddaddy of Modern Horror’, which has influenced many of the classic horror films of past and present decades. STARBURST had the pleasure of speaking with him after his excellent lecture ‘Horror and Hilarity: The Legend of the Grand-Guignol’, which took place in London in February 2019.

STARBURST: When you look at the whole history of ‘Grand-Guignol’, would you say it encompasses everything we have grown to know and love, or are there specific films and subgenres of horror that it focuses on?

PROFESSOR RICHARD J HAND: What is probably most important to note about the original Théâtre du Grand-Guignol is that, despite being the ‘Theatre of Horrors’, it was not interested in the supernatural or the fantastic: rather, the horrors it focused on were possible. It emerged out of the tradition of realist and naturalist drama but pushed it to the max with graphic displays of violence with plays – often based on true news stories – of real-life terror and extremity accompanied with ultra-realistic special effects. The repertoire of the original theatre loved to start with a slice of life but descend into full-blown, full-blooded melodrama – without the audience noticing the join. The Grand-Guignol is full of monsters, but these are emphatically human monsters. So, in this way, Grand-Guignol is most accurately applied to those tales of feasible terror: serial killers, vendettas and revenge attacks, escaped axe murderers, lunatics who have taken over the asylum, deluded doctors and mad scientists whose experiments are less grandiose and a bit more squalid than Doctors Frankenstein or Jekyll. In terms of cinema, the most truthfully Grand-Guignol are therefore films like Psycho, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Peeping Tom, Blood Feast, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, Silence of the Lambs, Saw, Hostel and so on. At the same time casting a long shadow over the splatter genre; we must remember how much the Grand-Guignol audience relished the acting ensemble and core actors – such as its resident ‘scream queen’ Paula Maxa – and this emphasises how Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele, Jamie Lee Curtis through to Vera Farmiga, Eva Green and Sarah Paulson have acted in the Grand-Guignol tradition of heightened performance whatever the specific horror narrative might be.

What struck us about your presentation in London recently was how naïve we have become in thinking we knew what it was and how clear a lot of the influences are. When did you first become interested in ‘Grand-Guignol’ and what specifically was it that sold it to you?

I remember as a child getting Denis Gifford’s book A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (1973) for Christmas. With a lurid green cover with drawings of Karloff, Cushing, Lugosi and others, I read it again (and again). The first chapter was called ‘How Grand was My Guignol’ and gives a concise outline of the Grand-Guignol before its detailed and wonderfully illustrated journey through horror film. It was then years later that I read Mel Gordon’s Theatre of Fear and Horror (1988) with its amazing pictures, plot summaries and sample scripts. When Michael Wilson and I started working together as lecturers at the University of Glamorgan in Wales, we shared a mutual admiration of Gordon’s book but wanted to learn more. So, we read Agnes Pierron’s excellent French anthology of Grand-Guignol plays (1995), visited library collections in Paris and located numerous original French scripts. We set up the Grand-Guignol Laboratory where we worked with drama students in mounting full in-house and touring productions of translated Grand-Guignol plays with recreations of special effects and the whole Grand-Guignol ‘experience’.

A lot of the Halloween and Chainsaw generation first heard the term via John McCarty’s classic horror volume Splatter Movies – Breaking the Last Taboo. Did you read his book and how comprehensive was the chapter he covered compared to your own books?

Yes, indeed. John McCarty gives an excellent account of the significance of the Grand-Guignol as the ‘root’ of the splatter genre and persuasively argues how Hammer’s landmark film The Curse of Frankenstein is an assimilation of the traditions of the French Grand-Guignol and the English Gothic. He sees the spectre of the Grand-Guignol in subsequent high points of cinematic horror: persuasively arguing, for instance, that The Exorcist is Grand-Guignol on an operatic scale. McCarty made a very important intervention in popular horror studies which signals, as it were, that before horror cinema there was horror theatre. There are even more depths and connections than McCarty has space to discuss: the story of the Grand-Guignol is richer and richer the more we look into it…

Censorship certainly was a big issue both here and in France and in the UK particularly with the Lord Chamberlain’s Office at the time when it came to London in the 1920s. Would you say the political and world context ‘Grand-Guignol’ found itself at the heart of helped shape it’s evolution until its demise?

Luckily, the Grand-Guignol had a comparatively easy ride in Paris, although there was considerable outrage at its use of the guillotine in various plays – a serious emblem of the state some felt should not be parodied on stage – and various critics (as well as, no doubt, some spectators) disapproved of its explicitness and immorality. In the notable London experiment in Grand-Guignol in the early 1920s, censorship was a complete nightmare for the company. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office – in charge of licensing plays for public performance in the UK – took great exception to the Grand-Guignol, including its comedies as much as its horror plays. It disliked this continental import and enforced edits and even banned outright numerous plays on the grounds of indecency, obscenity or profanity. Eventually, the Grand-Guignol in London will call it a day after being under the censor’s microscope for so long. However, the Grand-Guignol will recur on the London stage. We must remember that the Grand-Guignol used reality for its inspiration: both in France and the UK, there are remarkable and uncompromising plays about the First World War, plays which must have been arresting for the audience. Similarly, the Parisian theatre staged a play about the Boxer Rebellion and the brutal experience of the French legation siege which reconstructed recent horrors for its enthralled, perhaps voyeuristic, audience. The Grand-Guignol stayed open during the Second World War and was popular with the occupying German forces. The sadistic terrors of the Grand-Guignol probably didn’t seem quite so playful for the Parisians after that.

It was interesting to note that Noël Coward and Joseph Conrad, both classic writers, had an interest in ‘Grand-Guignol’. Tell us more about their contributions and how successful they were.

Noël Coward wrote The Better Half for the London Grand-Guignol. He was only twenty-two years old at the time. It is a dark and delectable comedy which is as witty as one would expect from Coward, in which we see a frustrated woman encouraging her rather bland husband to run off with her best female friend for the sake of everyone’s mutual satisfaction. Things turn very Grand-Guignol when her husband threatens to kill her. However, all ends happily. Indeed, it is interesting that the Lord Chamberlain didn’t object to a happy ending in which a married woman runs off ‘to find a lover and live in flaming sin – possibly at Claridges’. A writer at the other end of his career, Joseph Conrad, was also interested in seeing the Grand-Guignol imported to Britain. This grand old man of English letters went to see a Grand-Guignol performance and immediately wrote Laughing Anne, a very violent thriller set in Macao in which a group of gangsters attempt to rob a boat transporting money. Unfortunately, the Grand-Guignol politely declined staging the play as it was difficult to stage and, in two acts, probably somewhat long for the classic Grand-Guignol formula of short plays. I was lucky enough to be the first director to stage the play in 2000, eighty years after it was written.

In terms of putting on ‘Grand-Guignol’ – type productions these days – and we understand there are several companies throughout the world, including one in Liverpool who have put on regular productions. What advice would you give any enterprising theatre companies in terms of securing the performing rights and what should they be careful of in terms of the graphic violence that defines it?

I would, of course, encourage theatre companies to explore the Grand-Guignol. It is a wonderful form of theatre and for companies can be enormous fun to stage. All of the translations in the books by Mike Wilson and I are free to perform: all we ask is that companies get in touch with pictures or posters – we love to hear about any Grand-Guignol shows and add any documentation to our collection! Be warned: although the Grand-Guignol is fun and playful for a company and audience, it does handle very dark material. In this way, we always attempt to balance the horrors on display so that we don’t have an evening of plays in which just women are victims but ensure something more balanced and inventive. Similarly, we have had spectators faint during graphic scenes and I have been in shows where audience members have walked out. It may be theatre, but it is real people enacting realistic illusions on stage. The Grand-Guignol’s all-important douche écossaise (interspersing horror plays with comedies) is significant here: the Grand-Guignol was a theatre of laughter as well as its more famous horrors. Theatre ensembles must not forget that. Keep it intense and compelling but always keep it fun and playful. At the end of the day, the Grand-Guignol is something of an adrenaline-fuelled thrill-ride.

Tell us more about your experiences working on productions and some amusing and interesting anecdotes from a selection of these.

It is great fun putting together Grand-Guignol plays. I have staged all kinds of theatre but some of the biggest laughs and closest ensembles have emerged while doing Grand-Guignol productions. The actors may do awful things to each other on stage, but behind the scenes there is real camaraderie – there has to be! We once took a show to the Edinburgh Fringe which included a finale in which a female doctor castrated a male patient as an act of revenge. We even had a real doctor take the actors through a detailed description of the castration procedure in rehearsal. In early performances of this immaculately rehearsed play, we went to the trouble of ordering numerous pairs of sheep’s testicles from a specialist butcher. However, during one performance I was in the audience and overheard a spectator whisper in all earnest ‘Look, they are using plum tomatoes’. After this, we revised the scene so that the doctor’s scalpel punctured a concealed condom filled with stage blood. The resulting pool of red, gradually spreading over the patient’s white boxer shorts and dripping onto the floor proved to be much more effective. It gave us the desired result for the rest of the run: it made every male member of the audience gasp and cross his legs and every female roar with laughter. Sometimes, less is most definitely more!

What productions should people start off with in terms of reading and research?

I would obviously recommend Mike and my books! Each contain ten or more plays and substantial context and, in book 3 (Performing Grand-Guignol, 2016), lots of ‘how to’ stage a Grand-Guignol performance. In addition, do check out Mel Gordon’s classic study – it will certainly whet your appetite. Just as importantly, go and see some horror theatre in the broadest sense! There are major works like The Woman in Black and revivals of Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories or the touring thrillers of Peter James. Also, festivals such as the London Horror Festival and the London H. P. Lovecraft Festival host wonderful displays of fringe-scale horror theatre. If you get chance to go further afield, go and see the Molotov Theatre Group in Washington DC, the Grand Guignol in Milan, or Vigor Mortis in Brazil – great custodians of the Grand-Guignol.

Please tell us about some of the key writers who contributed the classic works in their native France.

The single most important writer at the Grand-Guignol was undoubtedly André de Lorde, the prolific ‘Prince of Terror’ who joined in 1901 and wrote over 150 horror plays. Even when criticising the themes or morality of his plays, critics like the influential Georges Bourdon had to admit that ‘nobody surpasses Monsieur de Lorde in theatrical technique’. De Lorde was a great and generous collaborator, writing with experts from the world of science, history, psychology, and criminology to ensure the plays were as accurate as possible. It is also worth noting that other major writers were drawn to the Grand-Guignol: Maurice Level (much admired by H. P. Lovecraft), Gaston Leroux (Phantom of the Opera), Maurice Renard (The Hands of Orlac), and Octave Mirbeau (The Torture Garden) all write original plays for the Grand-Guignol.

Every art form evolves and has to move with the times to survive. Could contemporary theatrical companies create more ‘Grand-Guignol’ influenced modern works, in the same way that Dracula influenced Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot for example?

When I work with students and professional actors on the Grand-Guignol, I am always emphasising the contemporary potential of the form. Escaped lunatics and outrages in the colonies are probably dated anxieties which might make us giggle more than gasp. So what scares us now? Such angst was the spirit of the Grand-Guignol and contemporary interpretations (including our own) have created some fantastic modern terror plays: the world of social media, internet dating, house sharing, and fast food home delivery is ripe for latter-day Grand-Guignol! Fascinatingly, the content may have changed but the formula would be something de Lorde could still recognise!

Finally, what is your goal in terms of spreading the word about ‘Grand-Guignol’?

It is a shame that the original Théâtre du Grand-Guignol is long gone. Although the original venue is still a theatre the inside has been transformed and the giant angels and other residue of its days as a deconsecrated chapel are no more. The first-hand memories of the original are rapidly receding if not almost vanished. But the legend lives on. And unlike some legends, the true story of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol is perhaps even more rich and fascinating. A world of gruesome tales of true terror, eye-gouging and blood-letting, tragic victims and sadistic villains. In other words, great writing, amazing special effects, and superb acting. In other words, a bloody good night out that can still be hugely thrilling and hilarious when restaged – the ultimate three-dimensional horror experience!

Check out Professor Hand’s books on Amazon.

In 2016, a short film entitled POLTERHEIST caught our attention when it played at the STARBURST International Film Festival. We were delighted to when we heard that the team behind it were expanding it to feature length. Now that the film is available on DVD and VOD, we spook – sorry, spoke with the director David Gilbank to discuss making the gangster horror comedy…

STARBURST: Why did you decide to expand the original short to feature length?

David Gilbank: From the very start, the reason we made the short film version of Polterheist was to make a ‘shop window’ for our writing and filmmaking. Even though we didn’t have a feature-length screenplay of Polterheist, we always considered there was a 90-minute version lurking in the background somewhere that we would have to write one day. The short film was to be something we could shop around as a taster for someone to make it into a feature film. Of course, no-one is ever going to do that, or it’s a very rare occurrence, as we learned. There’s no avoiding hard work. Yet the short film won a bucket load of awards all over the world and attracted some favourable reviews. So we wrote an original screenplay that was OK.

Then we asked a Leeds-based theatre playwright called Gemma Head to add some magic to it. She gave the film some real humour and heart that is testament to her talent. So we had a screenplay, but nothing happened. I started to get frustrated that the film wasn’t getting made so I approached a few people asking for money, including a guy that broke my ribs in an international Rugby League match a few months previously. There was another guy who I played rugby with who gave us some money. I guess you could say I forced the agenda and just started filming with about 20K in the bank. I just started to make it without a plan. I just did it.

Then I asked a great producer called Pepe Fowler to come on board and help me get things organised and she did a fantastic job. So we started filming bits here and there over the course of a year, as and when the actors were available. We managed to get hold of a top-notch cast who really added some quality to the film. The acting and screenplay are really impressive.

What was the biggest challenge on the film?

Every first-time filmmaker with a small budget gets the same two pieces of advice: keep your costs low by a) setting your film in one location and b) have three characters only.

My response: fuck off. I’ve never taken advice that everyone follows. I love Apocalypse Now and Colonel Kurtz is an inspiration. My motto is ‘do what is necessary to achieve victory’. Fuck that one location rule. Fuck that three actor rule. So I gathered a team around me that fought tooth and nail to make it happen. We did. Everyone around me believed in what we were doing and we all marched together.

My ambition was to make a good film, and to that ends, Polterheist is set in over 20 different locations and uses a cast of hundreds. We used our money wisely with a few extravagances like set builds and car rental. We paid our actors and crew.

It’s a low-budget film, and that is a big challenge in itself. We auditioned all the key roles and when I saw the actor I wanted we did everything we could to get them in the film. Pushpinder Chani did a sensational audition for the psychotic crime lord Uday, and I knew he was the guy I wanted to be in the film. But Pushpinder is very much in demand as a stage and TV actor so we had to synch up his rare free days with those of the other cast members. Likewise, Jo Mousley (Alice the psychic) and Polly Lister (The cop). Both our main protagonists Siddique Akbar Ali and Jim Cymbal are also bust people. Getting them all together in the same room was a challenge.

Was there anything that you wanted to do but couldn’t, either for budget or other reasons?

We wanted to have a massive shoot-out between the Pakistani gang and the Polish gang towards the end of the film. I wanted to make it like Heat and Zulu but set in Bradford. The cost for it would’ve been extravagant. Paul Renhard loves guns and action films and he wrote a doozy… the audience would have felt the bullets ripping into skin. But, alas, it never happened. I imagined that the Polish gang were all ex-military so would have had that methodical approach but the Pakistanis were more feral and inventive. But in the end, we did perfectly well without it, but that scene would’ve been sensational.

The film looks as though it cost more than the low budget you had – how did you manage that?

Our cinematographers, Charlie Leek and Chris Powell are very, very talented and they shot it beautifully. But importantly, we worked with a post-production house in Brighouse, West Yorkshire called One Bright Dot. The guy there, Chris Brearley, has an amazing eye and gave the film a seriously good look, scene by scene. Chris went through the film and was meticulous. He’s an amazing talent, as was Nick Nestle, who did all the Foley and sound effects work. We were also very lucky to get Umberto Gaudino to do the film music. I discovered Umberto at the Leeds Conservatoire of Music. I approached one of the tutors and asked if there was any talented movie musicians there and he immediately told me about Umberto. I met with Umberto and agreed to work together. He went back to Italy soon after and completed the music from his bedroom in Turin. He’s one to watch. The music in the film, like all the other elements enables it to punch well above its weight.

POLTERHEIST is available on DVD, VOD, Digital Download and Prime Video. Read out review here. It will screen at the STARBURST International Film Festival with the director in attendance.