After performing his one-man show live, actor Nicholas Vince (Hellraiser) filmed an extended version, which screened at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest a couple of years ago. The Blu-ray version is set to be released soon, so we caught up with Nicholas to find out more about it…
STARBURST: Could you refreshing people’s memory about how the show came about?
Nicholas Vince: I Am Monsters! was the one-man show that I did as part of London Horror Festival, which is the UK’s longest running and largest festival of live horror performance. The show itself is really about this weird kid who loved monsters, grew up to meet Clive Barker and underwent some dramatic transformation, and because of that, ended up by playing the Chatterer and Kinski in Nightbreed. It was a meditation on what we mean when we call someone a monster? And are we ourselves monsters to other people?
What was it that made you want film the show?
It was the suggestion of a gentleman called Mitch Harrod, who is the producer of the SoHo Horror Festival. We did the stage show in 2019 but, of course, we then had lockdown, so Mitch approached me and said, “Would you mind doing some excerpts? Filming them around the house with a phone will be fine” and I was really pleased with the result. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to take the show out on the road, so filming it allowed me to expand from 50 minutes for the stage show to 70 minutes and expand on some of the stories; to add other stories in, and then just play around with film and what that means.
How do you transfer a stage play into film?
It’s not easy. I needed to honour the fact that it’s a stage play. I think the first one of the first titles you see is I Am Monsters: A Play In Five Acts, and there are cards for each act, in order to keep that sense of it being a stage show.
There are some dramatisations in the film. Were they fun to think?
There were always readings from the three books, Dracula, The Island of Dr Moreau, and The Phantom of the Opera. We had fun setting those up. And then I thought let’s put in some animation, and then one of the stories is a quite a dramatic moment in my life, and I thought me telling it doesn’t storyteller on stage, you can there’s something about live storytelling, but when you’re in film, you need to be able to demonstrate. You need to be able to show. By using little models and stop motion, you hopefully still get the impact of the original story in the actual incident itself.
At this year’s Halloween Pigeon Shrine FrightFest, you star in a film called Advent. What can you tell us about then?
My character, Richard Hill, is very interesting because he’s a professor. I was talking to Airell Anthony Hayles [writer/director] about this, and he reminded me I had achieved what he wanted to achieve, because he starts as pompous and stilted, and rather theatrical, because he’s a professor making pronouncements. Then as the story goes on, he becomes a bit more human. And what I was aiming for is this guy’s an idiot in his arrogance. I wanted to do was by the time you come to the end of the film, you really feel the humanity of the character. I think it comes back to I Am Monsters!, and this idea of the man is a monster when you first meet him, but then you realise what’s really going on, which as an actor, is always far more interesting to play.
I AM MONSTERS! is released on October 31st and is available to pre-order on Blu-ray from https://darkrifthorror.com/shop. ADVENT screens at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest Halloween on November 1st. Tickets are available here. Find out more about Nicholas and his work here.
