Feature Category: Interviews

As one of many new soundtrack labels to crop up in recent years, Tiger Lab Vinyl isn’t a surprise. However, their focus absolutely is. Rather than reissue horror, sci-fi, or other cult films, the label “emphasises the Golden Age of anime by focusing on the best scores from the era.” Given that many anime scores and soundtracks struggle to find a release outside the East on anything but overpriced compact disc, much less vinyl LP, Tiger Lab has found a niche completely unoccupied. Their first release, Osamu Shoji’s score for the 1987 fantasy/horror Wicked City, went up for pre-order earlier this week, and officially releases in mid-July. We spoke with by phone with Tiger Lab’s Jon Dobyns, who – along with Clint Carney – founded the label.

STARBURST: Where did Tiger Lab’s very specific focus come from?

Jon Dobyns: With all of this resurgence, everyone’s been focusing on the classic cult following of ’80s horror soundtracks, ’70s exploitation soundtracks, and I always wanted to somehow get involved and do something. I’ve always had a huge love for anime, and specifically, horror anime films of the ’80s and ’90s.

No-one was really focusing specifically on putting any of those scores out, and I wondered if it was because of licensing, or if because it was all in Japan, and all international licensing – but I just thought that somebody needed to give it a shot, because – not just because the movies are fun and amazing, but those scores, the soundtracks, are so epic that I feel that if I love them this much, there are other people who love them. It’s just no-one knows how to find them, because they’ve never been released in America before. That’s how it started, really.

It does seem that for years – if not decades – anime fans have really had to jump through hoops to get anything related to the films that they enjoy.

Right. I felt the same way. I’m obviously speaking from my experience. I don’t know what it’s like for fans in Europe or Japan, but it’s so much harder to get any kind of content – specifically, soundtrack-related – for any kind of anime here. That’s kind of why I wanted to focus on getting this started, because I felt like, “If I’m not going to do it, someone’s going to do it,” but I really felt like I should see if I could make it happen.

The coolest part of that story about how Tiger Lab started is that I just kind of wanted to see if I could get the rights to Wicked City. I found the contact for Mr. Shoji, the composer, and he e-mailed me back that night. It just kind of set something off in my head, like, “This happened. Maybe I can actually do this.”

Mr. Shoji, when we went back-and-forth, his response was just so overjoyed and happy that someone was actually interested in his work and wanting to release it.

Although it’s Tiger Lab Vinyl, will you be attempting any compact disc releases? Especially since Japan is the one place where CDs are still big.

It really is! The thing is that, a lot of the releases that we’re doing either haven’t had an official release before or it’s a promotional LP release that’s very rare, or it’s actually just only on CD. Right now, we’re only focusing on vinyl and LPs. It’s just something that we feel really passionate about, and that’s the main focus, but a lot of the times, when we go after the licensing, we’re only able to get the vinyl , because the CDs are still widely available in Japan.

Why Wicked City?

Wicked City is one of my favorite animes of all time. The score itself is so interesting: it’s really fun, and the composer Osamu Shoji is an amazing synthesiser programmer, and he did absolutely everything by himself on the score. It just has a very cool vibe. I’ve been a huge fan of electronic music my entire life – and still am – and Shoji’s score showcases really cool electronics and vibes, drum samples, pianos… I just really wanted to be the one to release it, just because – being a fan of the movie and the score, I just didn’t think anyone was going to.

The other thing is that everybody is just doing straight horror soundtracks on vinyl, which is great – I love them, I collect them. Death Waltz, One Way Static – Sebastiaan from One Way Static actually helped me start the label, and mentored me in how to do it, which was a great thing. But, I felt that the people who buy these soundtracks definitely love horror anime. I felt that Wicked City was a perfect example of a true, classic horror anime.

That seems like a good way to combine passion and savvy. Going forward – what kind of details can you offer, regarding the release?

We’re going to be doing our own take – original artwork, but staying true to the character of the anime. It won’t be as abstract as some of the other reissues that we’ve seen – more of a fresh take, but using the classic characters.

Kind of like what Scream Factory does with their DVDs, then?

Exactly! The thing with the anime cover art: Clint Carney, who owns Tiger Lab with me, we have long discussions about how we wanted to do the cover art, because it’s such a huge, important part of these LP releases.

Originally, we thought about all-original artwork. Clint’s doing all the artwork, but we decided that we really wanted to stay true to the anime fans, because it’s such an integral part of the aesthetic: the characters, the scenery, and these things. We just wanted to stay true to it.

Also, we were invited to do a Comic-Con exclusive for Wicked City, which we’ll be showcasing this summer. It will have a completely different variant colourway.

Tiger Lab Vinyls’ release of Wicked City on 180-gram vinyl is available for pre-order now in the United States through their store, and in the UK and Europe via One Way Static. Tiger Lab is also offering a subscription, which nets you Wicked City, along with their next three releases and a t-shirt, as well as other ‘exclusive merchandise.

With Future Artists’ web series PORTAL is currently going down a storm with sci-fi fans, we caught up with star CHELSEA EDGE to quiz her on the role and more…

STARBURST: How would you describe your character and where we find her in Portal?

Chelsea Edge: Sarah is in many ways like a lost little girl, she becomes addicted to Portal as it’s the one thing in her life that provides her with reassurance of her worth, even though it’s artificial. In a world dictated by aesthetics and social status sometimes a climb on a social media site is easier than it is in real life. Real life for Sarah is clearly a lonely and dark place, and although we see Sophie as a glamorous avatar type with nothing to want for, there is still something clearly lacking in that version of her life that even Portal cannot fulfil.

How did you get involved with Portal in the first place?

I met Clay .

Both Sarah and Sophie are two contrasting personalities, even though they are essentially the same character, so how did you approach both aspects to your character?

I think that most people have contrasting personalities depending on varying social situations, particularly when it comes to social media profiles. I took Sarah as a lonely powerless young girl and tried to imagine what type of profile she would create for herself, something that everyone else would only see through a screen. It was important for me to make sure that, although Sophie is quite a harsh character in that she is still tethered to Sarah, Sophie’s bitterness towards men is less shallow than we think and more to do with how vulnerable Sarah has been made to feel in the past.

Did you find yourself relating to her in anyway at all?

I think that anyone can empathise with a character, that’s what makes us human. I don’t really have a particularly addictive personality, chocolate is about as hard-core as I get when it comes to vices! However I do understand her, we live in a society where people don’t really communicate as we used too, everything is through computers or tablets etc. its easy to become withdrawn socially, I see it with many people and then when you only know someone through something such as Tinder for example its almost like they become less human, they become objects. We are breeding a generation of sociophobes and it’s really sad.

What was it like going from one small cameo in The Lost Generation to effectively being the main lead in this?

I guess there was a lot of pressure; Mark took a huge chance on me considering he hadn’t actually seen me act before.

What’s Mark like as a director?

Mark is a very relaxed director to work with and completely supportive! He created a very good environment to work in, and if there were any issues he’d be there to help. He also understood the way I worked, when I first arrived on set I think a few people thought I was a bit odd – not realising I was in character, but Mark backed me up which meant I didn’t have to break out of my work to explain.

What was it like working with the other actors involved?

In most of my scenes I didn’t really get to interact with anyone other than Victoria. When I first met her she was very welcoming, I was the new kid and she made it very easy to fit in, which helped when we filmed, as her character is the only crutch that Sarah has in the real world. Clay I have worked with before, it’s funny ’cause he plays a lot of tough characters but he’s one of the sweetest men I know.

What inspired you to become an actress?

I really wish that I had some kind answer that sounds a little bit more serious, but I don’t. It became an actor because I like to play, I’ve never taken life too seriously and eventually I found that acting was something I could do without ever actually having to grow up completely. I never want to lose that freedom that being a pretender gives; the feeling you get when you know you’ve had an impact on someone through performance is amazing. I always rate films that I have seen by how much I empathise with the story or character, I want to have that power, I want to make people feel when they watch me perform.

You’re also a model, is there any preference between the two professions, or do you enjoy doing both?

I only got into modelling through acting really, and I generally choose my modelling jobs on how much I like the story behind the concept, or the kind of vibe I get from the photographer. Some of the work that I have done is with people who have now become some of my closest friends. I don’t really see the modelling work that I do as modelling, they’re stories to me, pieces of art rather than commercial images.

If you weren’t a model or an actress, what you would you be instead?

I worry about this almost every day, there is nothing in the world that I would rather do than act. However if it came to it, I would love to work on a nature reserve somewhere!

Would you be interested in doing big budget Hollywood movies at some point?

I think it’s irrelevant whether the project is a big budget Hollywood movie or a small independent production. It’s the story that matters, I would work on anything that I found intriguing; to me there is no such thing as a ‘little person’.

Are you a film fan, and if so, what’s your favourite film of all time?

I love film! My favourite films always change depending on my mood. Pan’s Labyrinth is definitely up there; del Toro is brilliant.

PORTAL can be viewed on Dailymotion. Episodes 4 and 5 are available to watch now.

Writer and director Bryan Coyne’s new film INFERNAL incorporates many horror traits while at the same time remaining fresh and inventive. He recently took some time out to sit down with STARBURST for a chat about this film and the industry as a whole…

STARBURST: What inspired you to be a filmmaker?

Bryan Coyne: I grew up in Simi Valley, California which a lot of people know as where the Manson Family used to hang out and also where this little film called Poltergeist was filmed, so I was always pretty close to things I guess! I lived next door to a woman who was an assistant to a director and at 23 years old I somehow talked my way into getting hired at Sony TV directing a documentary, which was some achievement given they’d seen nothing of my work. I was so spoiled though as my first assignment was a studio film and it means that now I’ve been able to see things from both sides; the studio and the independent. And both suck! I consider myself primarily as a writer and I know you’re never going to get that true validation. It’s like rolling a boulder up a hill, day in, day out. I was a producer on The Human Race last year which was a great time but with Infernal it’s all mine; I wrote it, I brought the money and I directed it, so it’s an entirely new and different den of snakes.

How was the post-production process as getting distribution can be the most difficult thing for independent filmmakers?

Firstly let me say my management team of Jeff Katz and Richard Marincic are rad! I am so fortunate in the sense that they both used to be studio executives and have their hands all over town. So when we were getting finished on Infernal, the connections that Jeff and Rich have were phenomenal because selling a film can be miserable. Festivals are part of the problem as buyers only care about certain ones. I could throw a festival in my apartment and give out awards, but buyers wouldn’t care. They start to think that if you’ve shown your film too many times then the product can become diluted.

Do you think then that the horror genre market is flooded and that perhaps critics are too harsh and dismissive of independent productions?

I just think critics are too harsh generally. I personally try not to look at reviews as sometimes you wonder if we’re all watching the same thing. Every filmmaker, though, is an egotist in some way, we have to be to think that what we are doing from our viewpoint is the right way of doing it. There are those people though who just grab an SLR camera and go into the back yard with their friends and shoot a movie, but I don’t know what that movie is. You can’t compare it with Sinister or Insidious, or even Infernal. Sometimes as a filmmaker we just have an idea and you nurture it but because I didn’t want to compromise the third act I had to make it independently as no-one else would.

The key element in Infernal seems to be the comparison between the relationships; Imogene’s parents and their disintegrating relationship, and Imogene herself with the demon.

That’s the only reason I wanted to make the movie. I knew I had a good idea, but that the character work would be central. Something that I find amusing is when I do actually read a review, and it says something about the characters being unlikeable; it makes me wonder what their relationships must be like if they’re all so perfect! I was in this bad relationship myself, but I just didn’t realise it. We’d been together for a while and were engaged but a lot of the fights you see in the movie were ones I was having in real life. When reviewers miss this point and also think it’s okay that this couple fight in front of the kid then that’s what makes me mad. This couple can’t get past the little things to concentrate on the kid and what’s really important. There is a superficiality to young parents that I have seen, and that’s part of what I wanted to convey. And people assume that any child with any kind of problem must be autistic; it’s all crazy.

If your film is generating an emotive response from the viewer though you’re achieving what you set out to do?

I never set out to make Infernal a crowd pleaser. The demon in my movie does do some terrible things but in many ways he really is there for Imogene more than her parents are.

In many films, you see demonic influence as more of a supernatural force than a physical being, but in Infernal it’s very much the latter. Was that always the plan as revealing a creature can be a difficult thing to get right?

It’s incredibly difficult, and I think there are times when maybe we didn’t make it work as well as it could have done. Ken Russell was a huge influence here and I felt that if we gave the demon a face, and use a man in a suit, then we could make it into something that felt very different to most films, like a creature that almost has a smile on its face and is enjoying what it’s doing. The demon also appears almost subliminally as a presence in other shots like when the parents are fighting and so on, so is always around.

The opening scene sets up these relationship issues with the awkward reveal of the pregnancy and as the viewer you immediately feel that not everything is perhaps all as it seems.

That wasn’t the original opening. There was no improvising and everything was written but the actors completely sold it. I felt we need a punch at the very beginning, to set it up properly. Nathan is almost duped into the engagement, and his heart isn’t quite in it. He loves Sophia, but marriage really isn’t top of his list at all.

There seem to be so many cinematic references in Infernal but could you explain what films and filmmakers have influenced you.

The surrealistic nature of Ken Russell made me feel comfortable in actually realising the demon and capturing it in those moments on film. When I first started kicking the idea around I thought it would be like The Omen meets Paranormal Activity meets Kramer vs. Kramer. I wanted it to include things that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with genre filmmaking. I feel like a student of everything.

Your next film then is Utero? The posters are very striking.

It’s my Cronenberg meets De Palma. Utero is on my hard drive, and I’m literally working on it right now and it is more of a body horror than a supernatural film. There are a couple of other things I’m hoping to do this year which are very close to my heart, and I’m just waiting to hear.

INFERNAL is released in the US on April 10th, although there’s no UK date as yet.

STARBURST caught up with Mark Ashmore of FUTURE ARTISTS ahead of the launch of PORTAL, the first scripted drama for Dailymotion later this month, which he directed and co-produced… Plus, PORTAL EPISODE 1 is now available, plus EPISODE 2.

STARBURST: Mark, thanks for finding the time for a quick chat. So, in one paragraph, what is Portal?

Mark Ashmore: Imagine the ultimate social network, a place you can be who you want to be, not the person you’re expected to be. Portal puts you in a coma, and rips your mind out via a drug of the same name and inserts you into a digital character. Our story starts when 95% of the world is hooked on this legal high, and it’s just been BANNED! How are people gonna get their fix…  OMG!

And when did it all start for you?

We completed a little feature film in 2014 that we self-funded and DIY distributed The Lost Generation about reality TV, banks and death! It proved quite popular after it was pirated and released via BitTorrent by a fan; within three months The Lost Generation’ had been seen over 500,000 times on streaming sites. At this same time, I was trying to convince Dailymotion that they should be making original content, and with The Lost Generation going big, it was like, these views should be on your channel, so they agreed to fund it. Because the production was based in Yorkshire, the film agency Screen Yorkshire could get involved, and they co-funded it. The executive producer Hugo Heppell from Screen Yorkshire has produced Shane Meadows films, of which I am a big fan – it all kind of came together.

So that’s the business side of things as a producer, but my other job was as filmmaker – I am also the story creator of Portal. The story I wanted to tell was that of the disconnected generation, all those people on trains and buses and in cafes and bars, those couples on Facebook when they are out in public together, they are addicts. With new technology coming through, Google Glass, wearable tech, Oculus Rift and virtual reality, where are we heading and what are the consequences? Portal is my expression on this, and, as a sci-fi fan, creating a world like Portal means as a filmmaker I can do anything, show anything, and explore with an audience anything.

Little fact here too: the screenplay is by Jack Casey who I worked with on Life on Mars series 2. He was the runner making everyone tea, and I was John Simm’s stand in, the lowest on the crew, first to arrive, last to leave, lowest paid, and now we have worked up to this level and we get our own TV series and feature film. Just wanted to share that!

What has been the trickiest step along the journey?

My influences are Blade Runner, Star Wars and Martin Scorsese gangster films, so with Portal, although the screen and the budget were small, I wanted the film and the story to be huge and cinematic. We had a tiny budget on this film, and 12 crew and over 70 cast filmed the whole lot in 13 days too! Everything from logistics to filmmaking was hard work, but because the way Future Artists works, we have an agile, flexible and creative mindset. A crew of 12 worked like a 60-piece crew, the locations where spectacular, the VFX are top notch and the script, which is the base of everything, is tight. We are also getting praise from the performances by our three leads, so stack all this together, and although it’s hard work, creativity see’s you through.

Our motto is ‘without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible’

Can you talk a bit about the cast? Chelsea Edge looks set to be a big star of the future but the whole cast put in strong performances. Were there any special challenges you faced?

I am glad that you brought this question up. I met Chelsea on The Lost Generation; she came in to read one line as a receptionist, her scene is as follows: the lead actor points a gun at her, she puts the phone down and buzzes our lead into the building – 3 seconds on screen. She is part of our collective at Future Artists, and when I was casting this film, Clay Whitter (who plays John in Portal) suggested I should look at Chelsea for the lead role. I watched her music videos, where she didn’t really say much, but she just holds the screen. She had moved to London in-between Lost Generation and Portal, so I invited her to Dailymotion HQ to chat. She is such an intelligent actor and is hardworking (we met in her lunch hour from an admin job), from that moment I knew she had the whole movie star package. If she was part of the old Hollywood studio system, she would make her way through from B-movie to leading lady. Hopefully Chelsea, like the rest of the cast can grow with Future Artists.

Screen Yorkshire helped fund this project; can you tell us a bit about the history of their involvement?

I was at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 with The Lost Generation and managed to blag a meeting with the head of Screen Yorkshire. I live and work in Yorkshire, so I told them Dailymotion were keen to back me. Screen Yorkshire have this development fund, where they invest in projects they see as a commercial return on investment. I had to pitch, produce a business plan and enter months of legal contract negations between Dailymotion and Screen Yorkshire; at the end of it, they fully supported the project, me as a filmmaker and the vision for digital web series. This is their first ever investment in a web series, so no pressure!

Once the series has aired, you are looking to release a film late summer of 2015. Is that a re-edit of the series or something different?

Something different. We shot a lot of extra and alternative scenes, Portal is an alternative universe after all. I started out as an editor and I love working in a digital environment as a storyteller. I intend the feature version to be a little different in terms of learning about the characters. You won’t get the adverts, so the viewing experience will be different, plus you get to see it on a big screen, Portal is made for cinema.

And what happens afterwards? Portal 2, or something new? Of course, that rather depends on how this ends – any hints gratefully received!

Each episode is a day, so episode one starts on Sunday, and we go through to Thursday, so it ends then. A lot can happen in a week; this is the week after portal, the most addictive drug on the planet, has just been banned. We explore this concept, so new characters will come in, some favourites might die, or fan-fiction takes over and they take ownership of the world and write what they want to happen. I have loads of ideas, as does Jack, the writer, but the future model of indie media is to work collaboratively with your audience; so as a storyteller, I have set this up. I would love the fans to take ownership and write what happens next, and I’ll go and film the bits I can…

And what else have you planned for the next year or so; is there room for any other projects?

Portal Season 2 is my main focus, so we want fans to share Season 1 and talk about it and give us feedback. We will also be re-editing and shooting some extra stuff for The Lost Generation, which we decided to release as a mini-series online, so we are working on that, and looking for sponsors.

There is always something going off at Future Artists it’s never dull. We work with creatives and artists to support their careers. I think we might be opening up a venue with a pop up cinema, but this may or may not happen.

Ultimately, our focus is Portal and making sure it connects with people who ‘get it’. Then I want them to take ownership, fill in the blanks, write some scenes, and help us tell the story. Portal can go on for the next 10 years and be as big as Game of Thrones or Star Wars, but as an indie we need our champions. I hope people enjoy Portal as much as I enjoyed making it, it’s a year of my life!

Fans can let Mark know what they think by tweeting @dmportal and @futureartists and can watch all of Season 1 at http://www.futureartists.co.uk where they can also read more about the making of this project.

The lovely EMILY BOOTH has gone on to become a staple of the British horror scene after initially crashing into many a young man’s life with the brilliant BITS back at the turn of the millennium. Despite often appearing wherever the creepy world of horror rears its head, “Bouff” has regularly fronted the HORROR CHANNEL in recent years. We were lucky enough to get some time with the lovely Emily to talk about the HORROR CHANNEL’s upcoming APOCALYPSE SEASON, her short film SELKIE, a whole host of horror goodness, and even a little bit of chatter on the much missed BITS.

STARBURST: Horror Channel’s Apocalypse Season is on the horizon for April, including screenings of The Mist, The Day, The Stand as well as the network premiere of Planet Terror. What film are you most looking forward to seeing?

Emily Booth: Of the apocalypse films, I think Planet Terror – it’s the ultimate sort of apocalypse film. The Mist is actually really good. I haven’t actually seen The Day, so I’ll probably be checking out the ones I haven’t actually seen. That’s more exciting for me. It’s a big deal for the Horror Channel as well, because we’re making a lot of effort with the actual filming that I do for the Season. We’re going to an old RAF base to film all my links at Greenham Common in Berkshire. It’s desolate and grim, and the sort of thing that urban explorers would find interesting. I love doing things like that, going to facilities that are now shut down and you’re the only ones there running around. It’s really atmospheric, creepy, cold and grim.

Planet Terror is likely to be the film that stands out the most to casual viewers, and you just so happened to have a role in one of the faux trailers initially sandwiched between Planet Terror and Death Proof during its US cinema run…

Yeah, at the time I didn’t know I was sort of getting involved in this soon-to-be relaunch of the whole grindhouse era. All I remember is getting a phone call from Edgar Wright. He actually met me, and I didn’t actually know it at the time, but he worked as a runner or something on Pervirella, which was my first film. His name wasn’t on the credits, but he just came down for a couple of days. Edgar Wright, for his Don’t! trailer, he really wanted people from the world of B-movies and cult movies. He just phoned me up and asked me to be in it. Ironically, it was the tiniest thing I’ve ever done on the biggest budget I’ve ever seen. That was great. But, of course, loads of people didn’t see it because it wasn’t released as a double bill over here.

There were so many people looking forward to seeing those two movies back-to-back and with all of the fake trailers from people like Edgar, Eli Roth, and Rob Zombie. Then when it came to a UK release, the films were released separately.

It was just a box office bomb really . You’re probably a fanboy, I’m a fangirl, so we probably would’ve gone. Just the general public weren’t up for it – a 4 or 5 hour bender. It’s the sort of thing that you’d get at a festival, something like FrightFest or up in Leeds, they still do the all-nighters until 6 in the morning. You’ve got to be die-hard to do that rather than the general Joe Public. It’s a fanboy thing. I once saw the trailer, I think, at a screening I was at, but no one in the UK really saw it. I think you might be able to view it online. If you go to my IMDb page, it says Grindhouse. That’s great but it’s like I wasn’t really in Grindhouse. I’m going to say I was involved for maybe 2 seconds of screen time. That was it.

Going back to the Apocalypse Season. Say there were no money or rights issues involved, which other films would you personally like to see air as part of the season?

Maybe Mad Max again. There’s not hundreds of apocalypse-type films out there. When we say apocalypse, you think of this vision of the world being decimated and it’s overgrown. I Am Legend? That was a bit naff though, really. 28 Days Later, I would like to see something like that actually. Even though if you’re talking about subgenres then that’s a zombie apocalypse, I think visually they did a really amazing job at creating an atmosphere in London that was so freaky and realistic. The reason it was freaky and realistic is the opening shot itself, where Cillian Murphy’s leaving hospital and he walks through London and the camera keeps pulling back and pulling back and pulling back and it reveals more and more of London but you can’t see anything. I remember looking into it and thinking “How the hell did they do this?” London never sleeps, but they did catch moments at various early times in the morning in the summer. I don’t know how they did it. Apparently there’s like one moment where you can see a tramp shuffling around. London is so saturated with buzzing people from every corner of the globe, so to see that completely decimated and washed out of any human life is so amazingly chilling and eerie. But 28 Days Later would have been top for me, really. I think that sort of depicts that kind of horror apocalypse quite well in terms of the more recent horrors. That film did a really good job. They did it genuinely, I don’t think it was done with CGI or anything.

Horror Channel has put together some brilliant seasons to date, but do you have any ideas on what subgenre you’d like to see highlighted in a future season?

I’ve got a thing for tentacles and creatures. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know – it’s probably very Freudian. Films that feature monsters and tentacles, I just think they’re really fun and you can have a lot of fun with that subgenre. But there’s hundreds of subgenres. We’ve just done mad science, which was fun. We get new premieres every single month, usually seven or eight, and then obviously we’ve got our own library of films for which we’ve got options on for a number of years. So when we come up with a season, it’ll be premieres and then a few films that we already have. Like the Apocalypse Season, Stephen King’s The Stand isn’t necessarily a premiere, but it fits really well with the whole doomsday kind of thing.

What’s been great about the Horror Channel is how you guys tend to show certain films that you can’t find on DVD or Blu-ray in the UK yet, such as Chillerama for instance.

We do have some really weird, rare, quirky films, and it literally covers all your bases. If you like those wonderfully freaky gems that don’t get made now… I don’t know if we’ve still got it, but we used to show this film called Baby Blood. It’s French and so brilliant, but I would never have caught it if it wasn’t on the Horror Channel. Then on the other end of the scale, they’ve got the light and fluffier stuff which doesn’t take itself too seriously. Then there’s a lot of Hammer Horror because that’s just very British. Then there’s the silly stuff that’s like a homage to grindhouse films. And then there’s the highbrow horror really, like the David Cronenberg Season or the David Lynch stuff or Dario Argento stuff, a lot of the Italian horror giallo is covered. We go from lowbrow to highbrow.

And you also show films like Martyrs that you wouldn’t see anywhere else.

Yeah, well that was a really good season, the French films of horror. Of course there was Martyrs, which split opinion, then others like Switchblade Romance. And what about this for a season, we could do female directed horror. But we’d have to get American Mary, we could get The Babadook if they’d let us. That’d be a really good season. One of the favourite things with horror, I think for a channel, is the amount of fun and creativity you can have with it both in your seasons and in your original filming. Obviously we do our own links and I used to do Horror Bites, the show that I did which promoted what we did on the channel. Now we just do the links. What we’ve started doing recently, which I’m really happy about, is we’re doing links the way I’ve always wanted to do them, which is being really creative and just letting the seasons or films dictate it. Last month I was in a morgue, a doctor’s room, there was the Re-Animator shoot, there was the anatomical skeleton. It was really cool. So now it’s not me standing in front of a green screen set, this is me having fun with it with costumes and props. It’s kind of like old-school horror hosting again. That’s a good thing with horror, you can have so much fun. The guys who come up with the new seasons, every month, year after year after year, they’re coming up with new seasons. It just goes to show the wide variety of weird little subgenres out there. But I’d love to see a Spanish horror season. Spanish horror is one of my favourites. The Orphanage is really brilliant. There’s a film called Para Elisa, and that looks brilliant and has a really horrible, horrible poster. Then there’s the Rec films, there’s the del Toro stuff, there’s Julia’s Eyes. There’s a lot of good stuff.

So how actually hands-on are you with the Horror Channel stuff then?

Well I don’t do acquisitions. I’m not in the office or anything. I’m freelance. But I am very hands-on in terms of social media, and I blog every week. Sometimes it’s like Horror Channel public relations, but a lot of the time it’s just stuff I want to talk about. I’ve got a lot of freedom with that. Like my latest blog is about horror posters that made you want to see a film. 

It seems these days that a lot of that has been lost. There was always the mystique of going to a video shop and being drawn in by a random poster for a film you’d never heard of. These days it’s all digital or on-demand.

There’s not even any video shops anymore! There’s less physical promotional material. There’s bus shelters and the tube, but yeah, the big cardboard cut-outs that everybody used to get hold of. I’ve got memories, everyone’s got memories, of being in video stores and being enticed by a very shocking video cover. I’ve got in front of me a book called The Art of the Nasty, which I actually helped produce, I did the PR for it a long time ago. The Art of the Nasty is all about how the covers for these films eventually brought about the films’ demise because the covers were sometimes more shocking than the films. The whole point was to get people to watch the films. I suppose before the Internet all you had was in-your-face, shock tactic imagery. That’s all you had to make people want to watch things. They were allowed to get away with a bit more. Like Driller Killer was very graphic – a drill going into someone’s brain. The thing is, after doing some research, I don’t think it’s fair to say covers then were better. There are covers now that are really well done. Somebody said to me they watched Silent Hill based on a well-designed, freaky video cover of a girl without a mouth. I suppose, though, they’re never going to be quite as lurid as the video nasties. 

Now one thing we’d love to touch on for some of our readers is BITS. What do you think made that show so popular and how was it for you?

BITS was a rollercoaster – that was crazy.

Crazy good or crazy bad?

A bit of both. It was just really crazy. So it was just me, other Emily , and then a director and a producer. There were five people doing the whole thing, and the one thing that every single journalist said was: “Do you even play games?” It was like every single time we’d be saying yes, how there was no one else who could do it. We played all the games. We didn’t always have that much time as there were one or two shows a week, but we had to do everything. So it was quite an all-encompassing job. We would be up until 3 or 4 in the morning most of the time, getting back on set at 8 in the morning. This is something I’ve taken into my horror hosting, whatever video game we were reviewing we would represent that in the whole style and set-up of the links and presenting. If we were doing a racing one, there’s probably some clever little skit that would dress us up as a race driver and running round. We couldn’t believe we were getting paid to do it all. It was quite good fun but it also involved being really physical. We’d always end up with them just saying, “Right, it’s the end of the day, we need to film you guys being crazy and wacky. Here’s a boiler suit, here’s five cans of paint. Can you just cover each other in paint and we’ll film it.” It was like that every week. It was just crazy, running around, falling over, dressing up, food fights, pizza fights, everything. It was brilliant.

And switching back over to horror, you’ve recently written, produced and starred in the short film Selkie. It did a couple of festivals last year, so when are we going to get to see it?

I know, I know. I think we should release it soon. We’re still entering it into festivals so I’m not sure if I can put it on YouTube yet. I’m sure we can, but it’s still doing festivals. We were in a festival in Kansas and I’m hoping maybe to get BIFFF in April in Brussels. I want to just release it soon, but we’re trying to get more of the festival circuit first. I wrote it, I didn’t direct it, but I was very involved in the whole process. I was quite surprised in how much work a short film was. Even though it’s shorter, every process involved in a feature film is the same in a short film, technically. So it’s still a lot of time and money, surprisingly enough. I think if I did another short film then it wouldn’t be anything like Selkie. It was just a sort of love letter to my hometown of Hastings and the fishing community down here. And like I said, I love tentacles. There’s no tentacles in it, but it’s got the whole sea creature thing.

So can we expect to see you doing more writing in the future then?

Maybe. I didn’t write the actual screenplay for Selkie, I wrote the story. I came up with the idea, then my brother turned it into an actual 10-page screenplay. I think I’m a good ideas girl but I don’t know if I have the discipline and the structure and everything to properly write. There’s more to it than some people think. But I’m going to carry on with my Horror Channel stuff. I love doing that, and then I’m hopefully doing another horror film soon-ish.

That would be Shed of the Dead?

Yes, that’s it. I’m not sure what I can say about it at this stage. They’ve confirmed me and Kane Hodder, and I think that’s shooting later in the year. That’s really exciting. There’s not a schedule in place yet, but I’ve been cast.

And lately with the likes of the Soskas, Jill Sixx and Jessica Cameron, women are starting to get more involved in the dirtier side of horror. Do you feel that women are starting to be taken more seriously in horror these days?

I love the Soska sisters, we’re always in touch. Every February there’s Women in Horror Month. It’s largely an American thing but it goes across the whole world for the month. I just love the whole idea of women in horror. I think women in horror are having a massive moment, which is what the Women in Horror Month is celebrating. It’s a tricky one, because women have always been in horror, but it was generally always as the victims. I suppose now there’s a lot of people stepping behind the camera. I don’t think it’s fair to say that women have been shunted from the industry and that men have never let us do it, because that just simply isn’t true. I’ve always felt that being a woman has given me a real edge in the horror industry. I’ve been welcomed in by all the men in the industry. And the films themselves are a lot more appealing to women because we’ve moved on from the whole misogynistic slasher. I’m not putting them down but they’ve had their moment; we don’t make those films anymore. So there’s lots of reasons for it. The industry has woken up to the fact that a percentage of the audience that could be watching their film has been largely ignored. So I think horror is just more enjoyable for women now. Women now aren’t prissy, they don’t walk around saying they only want to watch chick flicks. Loads of women love horror. The audience now at FrightFest is likely 60% male, 40% female – it’s really evening out. Greg Day told me recently that the FrightFest that’s just been had the largest amount of female film directors in the short film category. I’m not sure exactly why that is but there’s lots of reasons. It’s not making feminist horror, it’s not like we want to turn the tables on you bad men out there and we want to kill men. It’s nothing to do with that, it’s still about being bloody, it’s about being thrilling, it’s about being shocking, but the characters are a little more 3-dimensional now. They’re good films with very, very strong female central characters that are absorbing to watch and probably very absorbing to play. So I think women are definitely enjoying being a driving force behind the genre, and we make just as nasty films as are made by men, but I think they have a little more depth and darkness to them. And American Horror Story, I know that’s not by women, the characters written for people like Jessica Lange, it’s just a dream to play any of those characters. The women in American Horror Story are really well written.

So as well as Shed of the Dead, what’s next on your plate?

At the moment I’m just doing the Horror Channel and lots of little personal appearances at conventions like Memorabilia NEC 13 minutes, which is a little long – short films shouldn’t be too much longer than 10 minutes, really. I don’t know if I’ll do another short. It was a lot of work, but this one was a labour of love. But I’m continuing with the Horror Channel as it’s getting bigger and better.

And if you did get involved in another short then would you consider directing?

I would like to think that I could possibly do that in the future. The thing is, I think that directors should have some technical knowledge. They need a bit of knowledge about everything. They know cameras, they know lenses, they know everything, and can ask people to do exactly what they want.

The Horror Channel’s Apocalypse Season runs from April 4th to April 24th, and following this interview Drew Cullingham’s SHED OF THE DEAD has confirmed Bill Moseley, Michael Berryman and Brian Blessed to join Emily and Kane Hodder.

Writer/producer/director JEREMY BERG sees his latest movie, the alien infused THE DEVICE, released in the UK on March 23rd. The film centres on a small group who discover a strange alien sphere and then find things taking a turn for the worst. We got to speak to Jeremy about the film, his own thoughts on alien existence, and what other projects he’s got on the horizon…

STARBURST: For those not familiar with The Device, how would you describe the film?

Jeremy Berg: Well it’s a sort of horror film, an alien abduction film, but it’s done very much in the style of the classic X-Files television show. A little more low-key psychological thriller. It’s one of those things where you watch the film and you’re supposed to question whether it’s happening or if this is not happening, and there’s some clues along the way. And that way I had a lot of fun, as it’s not such an in-your-face gore-fest, it’s more like a haunted house story or a ghost story.

So where did the initial concept come from?

The concept came from a kernel of an idea I had which was basically a group of friends go out to the woods and find this object that may or may not be of earthly origin. It was a very small idea to begin with that we kind of grew into what The Device became. The reason I wanted to do something with that idea was because I thought it would be fun to explore how finding this object would change these people and change their relationships with one another. So it basically came out of that idea – an interesting place within that concept.

And was it always the plan to make the actual sphere a key trigger in the film’s story?

Yes, it’s very much like the incident that sort of sets everything up. You see the situation of these characters, the reality of this situation and what these characters are up to, then finding this object takes everything in a new direction that they weren’t prepared for.

The film is an intimate tale in regards to focussing purely on only a few select characters.

It’s totally true because if you had too many characters then you wouldn’t be able to dig into their relationships. We’re able to with a smaller cast. That sort of interplay with the characters and how it changes them, to me, was one of the things that was really enticing, digging into their relationships and learning how those people really were because I wanted to see the reality of that situation might be, how it might affect people in real life if something like this were to happen.

You’ve mentioned The X-Files, but were there any other films or TV shows that served as inspiration here?

A lot of the classic horror films, like Rosemary’s Baby is a big inspiration for me. That film is really good at getting under your skin and being creepy even though you don’t really know what’s going on. I really love that film. I love The Shining and films of that nature. I love it when films create a mood, and the mood is sort of what affects you and gets under your skin more-so than anything that they’re showing overtly on the screen.

The Device is more about the changes in mood to the central characters than just focussing on the alien presence. Is it a case that the films you mentioned were more of an inspiration than the straightforward alien films that many may expect?

I think that what’s interesting to me is I love all kinds of movies and all kinds of horror movies, but sitting in the house and watching something, there’s definitely a broad range of film genres that I find entertaining. When you’re actually making a movie, you have to really think about what you want to spend years of your life really digging into. To me, as a director, the challenge and the important thing is to try and see if I can replicate that mood. That was one of those things that you have to really bring together with cinematography, with music, with acting. You look at something like The Shining, it’s just amazing at creating a mood. Even from the beginning, even if you haven’t seen the movie, you don’t know what’s going to happen, you definitely feel this culpable sense of wrongness with the situation. You can tell that everything is going to go wrong. You don’t know what’s going to happen or when it’s going to happen, but it’s going to. Roman Polanski in general – he did Rosemary’s Baby – in all his films, he’s wonderful at capturing a mood from start to finish.

When people see The Device on shelves to buy, many will just see it as another alien abduction movie. That’s a crammed subgenre, so what did you strive to do in order to make the film stand out from other similar films?

That’s a good question. For me, I’ve always been interested in alien abduction stories in the real world. I find them fascinating. They’re one of the only monsters that actually could be real, you know? There’s something that’s very frightening about alien abduction, and also frightening because in so many of the stories you’re absolutely helpless; sort of with no power to resist this. There’s a lot of alien abduction stories out there, and some very good ones, but what I’ve noticed is that it can be really difficult with a writer to be contending with that idea that you’re helpless when these creatures come down and abduct you and do whatever they want with you because it takes away the characters’ ability to initiate anything or to be proactive. I wanted to explore the idea of what this actually might do to these people in real life if they were in this situation. But then the device itself, the object, also gave me a way to try to make the characters proactive in their situation and not just be victims but to try to do something. Obviously, it spirals out of control and gets out of hand very quickly, but that’s sort of what I wanted to do with the subject matter.

The other similar films that are out there, are there any particular favourites of yours? A lot of people have compared The Device to The Fourth Kind or Under the Skin, so are they something you looked at?

I actually haven’t seen The Fourth Kind, so I can’t comment on that one. I love a lot of movies. I really love Communion the book, but the movie doesn’t completely deliver on the book. I feel like the movie of Communion has parts that really deliver, so I loved those moments. And Fire in the Sky is just overall probably the most terrifying alien abduction movie. That’s a little higher concept than The Device; ours is a little more low-key, like a lot of The X-Files tone shifts when we deal with alien abduction. But I really do like those movies a lot. Under the Skin, that’s a really interesting one. I did really enjoy that movie and I did enjoy the ambiguity of it – it’s much less abstract. I do find the visuals of that film to be really compelling.

We guess it’s safe to say that you’re a firm believer of “the truth is out there” and that there’s life on other planets?

I certainly am. I love alien abduction stories and my fascination with them is that my mother had a close encounter. She wasn’t abducted or anything like that but she did see some UFOs actually landing. She has one of the more compelling stories about seeing UFOs and having one of those encounters. So I think that growing up and hearing that story led me to reading about other stories and just definitely being fascinated by that. I’m definitely a believer and that’s one of the things that made doing this film really attractive to me, exploring that idea a little bit. I do think it’s fascinating that this phenomenon could be real and how horrifying it is.

And we have to ask, what was your mother’s experience like then?

It’s really interesting because it was my mom and my dad in a car together, driving home. They were on a road trip and it was night time. There are actually pieces of the story that fit into the story that Rebecca tells in The Device, though obviously the story is dramatised and taken to the next level. She came over a hill and saw three UFOs sort of landed, and they happened to drive by them. She’s a very open minded person, she’s into a lot of new-age thought and ideas, just open to the possibilities. So this situation, for her, was probably the most terrifying thing she’d ever encountered. Ask her about it and she’d talk about how otherworldly the experience was. It’s trying to wrap your head around what these things were and how they made you feel, just something that she can’t really comprehend because you have no basis for relating to it. So those are the things that I think about, that these things are more terrifying and these beings are from another world and they exist but you can’t even relate to them on any level because they’re so different that you have no basis for trying to understand them. I think that’s one of those things that make it really horrifying.

So were there any alien beings or was it just the vessels that your mother saw then?

Yeah, it was just the vessels. She wasn’t abducted or anything, but they definitely saw these vessels that were… she described them much like in some other stories where maybe they have their own glow. They had like a greenish hue to them. They were just very otherworldly. You definitely put it in a different context when it’s somebody that you know so closely. I also think that there’s a lot of abduction stories out there. It’s interesting reading them. I don’t believe they’re all real by any stretch, but it’s interesting to read them and piece together what you think the truth of it is and to see the parallel of these stories.

With yourself and your work as a filmmaker, are there any directors that you like to try and pull elements from?

Growing up I was just a usual kid and the things that really attracted me were the more big blockbusters like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. But I also grew up on a lot of horror films as well. I was watching horror films from a way too young age, too. I was too young to be watching the films I was watching, but at the same time I had an older brother, seven years older than me, who would go and rent movies. He would rent horror films and I just couldn’t keep myself out of the room. It terrified me but I also wanted to watch the movies, I was attracted to them. So I saw a lot of horror films from a young age, things like Alien, which is probably one of my favourite films of all time. There were the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, Friday the 13th, all those films. Then as I got older I started to branch out into other forms of movies. For me, it was watching Seven Samurai. Watching that film is what made me branch out even further and make me consider working in the film industry as a director.

You’ve written and produced films as well as the ones you’ve directed, so where do you see your career going from here?

I definitely have a love of many different genres and I want to continue directing. I want to try my hand at a lot of different genres and keep improving, just getting better. I love writing, it’s something I’ve always done even before deciding to be a filmmaker. I’ve always written in some capacity so it’s the medium that I feel most comfortable with. I’m also just a really visual person and I love filmmakers and storytellers who are very visual, so that’s something I want to try to keep achieving with my directing. Working at these lower budget levels, you have to make do with what you have. To that extent, I’m very proud what my crew and I were able to accomplish with what we had. I think that we definitely go above ourselves. At the same time, to talk about one of the genres I might like to attach myself to, I still love horror and I definitely have horror ideas that I’m wanting to explore and get made, but at the same time I also love a lot of genre pictures. The one thing I’m writing right now is more a crime thriller. It’s not a horror at all but it might be something like Terrence Malick’s Badlands. I love suspense and I love tension, so there’s things that I’d like to explore as I move forward in my directing.

With The Device, it’s obviously not a multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbuster. How did you deal with the restrictions in place in terms of the budget, the sets, etc?

A lot of it is budgetary, right? We’re not like big Hollywood filmmakers so we have to kind of make do with the budget that we can get at this point. And so far, we’re doing a good job of getting bigger and bigger budgets for the films that we make. The Device was really very small and it was about trying to hide the limitations, especially working with special effects. We made a practical alien suit. For us, it’s trying to make the suit scary. They did mysterious and tried to not show it for what it is, which works for my style. I think one of the brilliant things Ridley Scott did with Alien was he kept the alien in the shadows. To an extent, that works for me in general, but with the budget restrictions you definitely have to consider that as a practical move as well. Me, I tried to hide the alien in the shadows as much as possible because what you don’t see is the most frightening. And a lot of the restrictions came down to time. We didn’t really have a lot of time to shoot. Time is money, and the more money you have then the more days you can have. That’s a nice luxury to have. We’d rather have more time than less but you have to use what you can get. Then on top of that, the last thing would be equipment. So long as you have a camera and a strap pod, you can make a movie. If you don’t have a lot of equipment you sometimes have to bring your vision down a scale a little bit or find a way that you can get what you want without all of the equipment that you might like to have.

And what are you working on next?

My production company and I, the October People, we’re just continuing to make movies. Last year, we produced a movie called Valley of the Sasquatch with John Portanova. He’s a big Bigfoot fan, so this for him was sort of his directorial debut and a love letter to classic ‘80s creature features. It’s more fun and it’s something that he’s passionate about doing. So we have that doing festivals right now, and then we’re also producing a feature from a writer/director named Elias called A.

Is that with Tristan Risk?

That’s the one, yes. We have a casting call for that and there’s people we’re talking to. That one is going on and we’re pushing that forward. That’s the one. Tristan Risk is involved and we’re currently producing that. We’re really excited to work with her.

The Device is released on DVD on March 23rd. Be sure to keep up with Jeremy’s upcoming projects by visiting www.theoctoberpeople.net or www.facebook.com/theoctoberpeople.