So what brings you to London?

Ostensibly I’m over here for the paperback release of Horns. The truth is that I come from old Maine stock and we don’t believe in vacations. You’re supposed to work from sun-up to sundown, and if you want to study your Bible by candlelight for a little while before bed that’s OK, and any sign of overt happiness is frowned upon because it usually means something’s not getting done. So I don’t really know how to take a vacation, so what I did was arrange this, but spread a thin crust of work over the surface so it seems like I’m actually here for a purpose. I did some media for Horns yesterday and I’m doing some press today and a reading tonight, and then I’m kinda goofing off for a few days with some friends I know here. I’m trying to work out how much time I’d have to spend in here before I could call someone a ‘bloke’ without getting a roll of the eyes. It’s just a great word to say. It feels good in your mouth.

The other thing is… I don’t know what it is about London, but I come here once or twice a year for about a week, and I walk around, and by the time I go home I’ve got about ten new story ideas. It’s a terrific place for me in terms of energy. Ideas aren’t everything – they’re not even the most important part of writing – but it’s still nice to have bunch of them in your back pocket.

So what is the most important part of writing?

Um, I think it’s having a certain level of cognitive dissonance between the work you put in and the result you get. You need to be able to sit there for six hours a day, and at the end of the day be able to walk away and let it go. You have to have a kind of blissful acceptance that you might spend two months writing a hundred pages and then throw the whole thing away in a single day. In the book I’m working on now – which is coming together great; I’m going to read some of it tonight at Waterstone’s – there’s this one part that’s about 180 pages long, about the bad guy. And I re-wrote it about three times and thought about it very carefully, and I think it’s a really good piece of work, and I decided about a month ago to slash the whole thing. I decided I’d written it for me. I was trying to find that bad guy’s voice and how he talks to people and why he’s the way he is, and I had to write it over and over again before I understood him. But in terms of actual story I think it’s better not to have so much of him right in your face, because it’s like seeing Jaws when he was a baby, eating fish. Less is more. It’s like, you want to be careful not to make the Hannibal Lecter mistake, where he was at his absolute most frightening in red Dragon where you only had him for about fifteen pages, and then in Silence of the Lambs he was almost as scary and just as great, and he’s still only in about 45 pages… It’s when you had a whole book about him… What, mommy didn’t love him and daddy didn’t understand and that’s why he’s bad? Suddenly he’s not frightening anymore – he’s just this loser!

Hemingway always said you have to kill your darlings. I don’t know if you always have to kill them, but I do think this has happened in every single piece of work I’ve ever done that was longer than like 20 pages, where I had this one scene I couldn’t wait to write and that I felt was the emotional heart of the book, and I would write the first draft and that scene would be in and I’d love it, and then at some point in the third or fourth draft I’d realise it’s the one scene in the book that doesn’t really matter; it’s the one scene totally holding the book back because it became something else. I don’t know if a lot of writers obsess over ‘The Concept’. I’m a firm believer that it’s important to have that nice fat hook: to have that concept that people can really get excited about. But by the time you’re finished, what you have is usually very different from what you initially imagined.

What’s your work routine?

I don’t religiously do six hours a day, but I set myself goals. With this draft – it sounds like I’m making processed meat – but I will process ten pages a day. If I get them done in two hours, great. If it takes me six hours, OK. If it takes me eight I’ll do it, but I try not to work that long because I think there tends to be a fall-off. I do work on the weekends though. Maybe not six hours, but I don’t like to let something go because then I’ll waste a day trying to get back up to speed. The other thing is, if I haven’t worked at all I feel restless and kind of out of sorts, and I’m grumpy with people, so I don’t feel centred and like myself until I’ve got my work out of the way.

Horns’ protagonist Ig is very vividly realised; is there a lot of you in him?

I think a lot of people when they hear ‘write what you know’ think that they’d better make their main character themselves, and I’ve always tried to avoid that. My main characters tend to be different from me. Judas from Heart Shaped Box was radically different from me: I was just like, what would it be like to be a heavy metal musician who’s had a thirty-year career? And Ig from Horns is also very different, although we have some similarities: there has to be something to grab on to. I come from a well-off family; my dad is a well-known guy the same as Ig’s dad; Ig’s family are musicians where mine are writers… So there’s some overlap. But Ig has a passion for books about building houses out of recycled materials, he’s big into volunteerism and he’s very devout and goes to church. I’m not very religious, and if I did have a religion I’d probably worship the same snake god that Alan Moore worships. It’s worked out pretty good for him. I think I aspire to do good, but for the most part I’m pretty happy to download movies and use my free time in the most selfish way possible. And Ig is braver. He does stuff like the courageous naked ride down the hill. I never would have done anything like that. I’d have been too worried about scraping my knees.

How far along is the movie adaptation of Horns?

Shia LaBeouf is going to play Ig in the film, and Keith Bunin who’s written a number of episodes of In Treatment is doing the script, and it’s ploughing forward so we’ll see what happens. I think Shia’s a great lead for the part. He can kind of play that kind of innocent Jimmy Stewart sweetness, but I also think it’d be really fun to see him with the shaved head and the horns walking around in a blue dress. I’ll be as involved as they want me to be, and I won’t be underfoot if they don’t want me underfoot. I’ve done my version of the story, and I’ve talked to them about ideas – I had a couple of suggestions that I thought might streamline a film. But at the end of the day I’ve done my version and the movie has to be something different. Films fail either when they treat the source material as if it doesn’t matter, or when they become too reverential to the source material. You want to find a middle path where a film can breathe and be its own deal.

I’m not sure it’s as unusual as it used to be for an actor to be attached at such an early stage of development. Shia read the book and was excited about it and thought it was a part he could play and that people haven’t seen him do. I think he wants to make that transformation. Maybe it’s even a metaphor for his whole professional outlook: he’s played so many clean-cut nice guys that he wants people to see that he can be the demon if he has to be. I think a lot of actors – especially actors who can open films – have started to do this: getting excited about about something and looking at how they can put a package together.

What happened to Locke and Key? The TV series seemed like a sure thing.

I’m not sure anything’s a sure thing. Launching a TV show is probably the hardest act in the entertainment business. In the case of Locke & Key we came up with a pilot, which Mark Romanek directed, Josh Friedman who was the showrunner on Sarah Connor did a great script, they pulled together a terrific cast, and they made something really scary and emotionally intense. BUT, Fox has three slots for new dramas, they had eight pilots, and they picked the three they wanted. But I’m not sure… I feel fairly certain that the pilot will see the light of day at some point, and I’m not certain that we’re done as a TV show. Locke & Key as a comic book has a lot of the same elements that you see in shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad and Walking Dead and Battlestar Galactica: dark, fantastic, with a grim edge… And the thing all those shows have in common was that they were on cable. So I think it’s possible that we may find someone at SyFy or AMC or TNT who’d like to give the show a shot. And if that happens I think we’d be very lucky, in that it would be a case of the show finding a more natural home than one of the big networks. It’s very difficult to imagine Walking Dead on CBS, so we’ll see. I think we have a good shot. I think there’s room for the pilot to be a theatrical film of some kind, although you’d probably have to throw a few more million dollars at it and add half an hour. But I also think it’s possible that a cable channel will throw another $5m and another half hour at it and make it a two-hour pilot. I’ll say this: we’ve had interest from some cable channels, and one cable channel has been MORE than interested… That gives me hope, but until someone actually buys twelve episodes, we don’t have a show.

And is Heart Shaped Box still happening as film? Wasn’t Neil Jordan attached to direct at one point?

That’s one of these movie stories where it’s in terminal development. Neil Jordan hasn’t been on it in a long time but I still keep seeing reported on a regular basis that he’s doing it. The book came out a while ago, and he wanted to do it, but they didn’t have a script that they liked and then there was the writer’s strike, and Neil just decided to go back to Ireland and make something different. So that’s what he did, and his attachment with the picture ceased. Some other names have been involved. If Heart Shaped Box suddenly goes into development it’ll be because an actor says they would like to play Judas Coyne. Then we might see a team come together around it. But it’s stalled at the moment. I have a short story called Twittering the Circus of the Dead, and that’s actually further along than Heart Shaped Box because there’s so much energy behind it. It has a director, and Manderlay wants to produce, and they’ve got a plan and all the pieces are flying together.

It’s interesting – I’ve now seen two sides of the business. There’s Heart Shaped Box, where there’s this spinning of wheels and this development process that continues and continues and continues. But when something does happen, it’s with such suddenness, it’s almost like everyone’s like racing behind going ‘Agh! We’ve gotta get this done!’ With Locke & Key it was amazing how all the elements collapsed together in just a few months and suddenly they were filming the pilot in Pittsburgh. It was such a remarkable difference from the way Heart Shaped Box has staggered along. So if something does happen with Heart Shaped Box it’ll happen all of a sudden!

A director named Todd Lincoln is behind Twittering the Circus of the Dead. You won’t have heard of him. He’s something of an up-and-coming it-director. He’s done a lot of short films that are kind of upsetting and weird, and he’s directed his first feature [The Apparition] which is a horror film coming out in early 2012, and this is going to be his follow-up project. He’s exciting. He’s kind of like if Wes Anderson wanted to make horror films. He’s a really cool guy!

Are you wary of films of your work, given your father’s experiences?

No, not at all! I think my dad has had nothing but good experiences! Because even the bad films are great. Horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction to a degree, the only thing that’s better than a good movie is a really bad movie. I love a great scary film, but I’ve also seen awful things that I’ve really loved. Like, what’s a good one, Howling 2! That’s such a gas. They show the shot where Sybil Danning takes her blouse off 32 times in that film. I counted. Actually it’s not a blouse, it’s like a leather bustier.

You know what’s a great, hysterical film? Children of the Corn. ‘Outlanderrrrrrr! We have your wooooooman!’ Who doesn’t love that? So yeah, you always hope you’re going to have a great film, but I’m sure if someone takes one of the books or one of the stories and makes something horrible, I’ll still probably love it.

Horns is out now in paperback from Gollancz.

Who can take a sunrise...?

Unleashed in 1992, and based on a Clive Barker short story from a decade earlier, Candyman was a murdered slave, still haunting New Orleans as an urban legend come to life. Daniel Robitaille was a more ambiguous monster than many of his contemporaries, and made an immediate horror icon of Tony Todd, the character actor who put flesh on his bones. Todd has since become a mainstay of the Final Destination and Hatchet franchises, but with Hallowe’en approaching, he’s more than happy to reminisce about the role that made his name…

How did you land the role of Candyman?

I owe a great debt to two Englishmen: [producer/original author] Clive Barker and [screenwriter/director] Bernard Rose. Bernard had seen me in [TV movie] The Ivory Hunters (1990) and insisted when they came to casting Candyman that I was the right guy for it. I was just starting out. I’d done Platoon and the Night of the Living Dead remake, but I think the studio were nervous because Bernard didn’t even want to even audition anybody else. They were like ‘Are you sure? Maybe Sidney Poitier wants to do this movie!’ But he was completely loyal. The director’s the captain of the ship. If he wants something he should get the freedom to choose. Fortunately he chose me! I wasn’t expecting any kind of longevity from it: I’m just an actor for hire. But Bernard insisted that the movie would change my life. In a lot of ways it has, but the fortunate thing was that it didn’t define my life.

Do you sympathise with him?

We didn’t want to make him just some generic bogeyman. Bernard and I wanted to make sure he was steeped in a kind of gothic American racial history, especially as the story had been transposed from Liverpool to Cabrini Green. We mutually decided that he was an artist, and from that came the idea of the painting, and once we had that, we knew it was going to be Phantom of the Opera. Once I had all that, I knew how to make him human, in spite of the fact that he’s a ghost. Having grown up in America just as the civil rights movement started, I could completely relate to him.

What did you enjoy most about playing him?

I knew he was unique. Once I read about the bees – this was before CGI of course – I knew he would live infamously or not-so-infamously in cinematic history. The idea that they were coming out of this person just said to me that he was this powerful, demented force of nature. But I loved his elegance too. We wanted him to walk with pride.

Did you ever wear the costume off the set?

No, I never wore the coat out in public, but I do get to travel a lot based on this character and spread goodwill.

Any crazy fan encounters you can tell us about?

You get all sorts. I did a lot of Star Trek so I’ve encountered some pretty antisocial Klingons. But most recently I was down in Houston, Texas and this woman came up with this enormous grin on her face and said she had something to show me. So I braced myself, and she lifted her sundress and on the inside of her right thigh was a tattoo portrait of my face. Every now and then I need a reality check! I guess it would have been worse if it was on her bum. It’s a little weird. I don’t think I believe in putting people’s faces on your body. And she wasn’t the smallest woman: I just hope it doesn’t stretch over time!

What’s your favourite Candyman moment?

I love the parking lot sequence in the first film: the first time you see the character. I think it’s very well shot: very Hitchcockian.

What do you think explains his enduring popularity?

The weird thing is that he’s only actually on screen for ten or twelve minutes, but he’s talked about every single second of the film. Less is definitely more: he grows in the audience’s imagination. I also think there’s a lot of heart and soul to the first two films. Other, subsequent horror films may have been more financially successful, but they don’t have Candyman’s depth.

Will he return?

There have been attempts to do another one after the not-so-good third one, which was completely compromised from casting on down.

The problem is that three different people own it but they can’t come to an agreement, which seems incredible to me. Whenever an idea comes up, one of them won’t sign off on it. It’s unfortunate. I’ve just had to let it go.

What’s your favourite horror movie?

I was profoundly affected by Rosemary’s Baby. I love that film. There’s not a drop of blood in it; it’s purely psychological. I love films that are purely atmospheric like that. I love the old Universal movies too. Horror’s treated like the bastard stepchild of the movie industry, but it’s actually always been the genre that saved Hollywood from total ruin.

What scares you?

I don’t like that moment you get when you’re still sleeping but it feels like it’s real life and you can’t quite wake up. That few seconds is really frightening. Intolerance bothers me. And women with tattoos!

Do you want to know the truth, though? Children’s horror, even if it is scary, won’t scar your child for life. You, the parent, the adult, are more likely to get scared and scarred. Want evidence? Okay: I get more scared by children’s horror now than I did when I was a child. It’s not that the books are getting scarier – some of them are, but most of them are just following the same patterns – but that I think too much like an adult. There’s someone in the house. This could actually happen. What would I do in this situation?

That last one? Mostly nothing. Mostly I would be powerless. The type of horror that children face in books can only be dealt with by children. All the wild fantasies that are constructed around the idea of terrorising children do a few things: they help the child become more imaginative, fear being one of our most motivating experiences; they reinforce the idea that the child isn’t helpless all the time, by making the hero a child; and they allow the reader, the child, to face up to fear early on, before the onslaught of second level education, social cliques, bullies and the nastiest of the nasty teachers in the world.

What is wrong with a child being prepared for fear? Honestly, what is wrong with that? I’m not the bravest person in the world, but I survived first days at two institutions in which I knew nobody but my brother. Do you know how terrifying it is to go to a new school and not know anyone? It’s less scary than, say, Mr Mumbles tapping on your bedroom window, but it’s a much more lasting fear, and one that can put children – and even adults going into third level education – from actually getting out of bed.

Your child is a wimp? That’s because you’re shielding him from the world. Children need to grow up. Children need to read. That’s not a subjective statement: the reading levels of children, especially those in England, unfortunately, are going down over the years. Making a child afraid to read by telling them the book is too scary for them is the exact opposite message any parent should be sending out.

If a child gets scared, you console them. Parents can’t be there to stop children becoming frightened all the time. It’s literally impossible. So why would they insist on getting involved at the basic level of books? It’s counter-intuitive to the child’s development to take away new experiences from them before they have a chance to be dealt with. Instead of fictional horror keeping a child awake at night, a parent’s words of warning will keep them from reading.

It just requires a bit of tact: you don’t let your child stay up until midnight reading or watching Cujo. Actually, you don’t let your child stay up until midnight at all (or at least not on a regular basis – New Year’s Eve seems to be the only real exception on this side of the lake). Until your child gets to secondary school, you don’t let them read adult fiction at all. After that, what they read is in the hands of their English teacher.
So, back to the big question: should children read horror? Most definitely. So long as the book is appropriate for the age group – and publishers won’t print something that’s not – it can, and should, be read. All the adventure that children need in stories is present in horror, with the added adrenaline rush to make the books that little bit more exciting.

So really, what are you waiting for? Recommendations? Three obvious places to start: the Invisible Fiends series by Barry Hutchison, Darren Shan’s children’s books and, with a wider range of mild to terrifying horror, the Goosebumps books by RL Stine.

Ian Ogilvy

Witchfinder General has had a bit of a renaissance in recent years, although it’s come up consistently all through my life. Film students have always written about it and done their theses on it, so it has come up over the years. I suspect the interest was always there, but there are more forums now for people to be interested: things like Facebook and messageboards and all these autograph shows, one or two of which I’ve been to. I haven’t seen it very recently: perhaps in the last five years. I can’t imagine what it looks like on Blu-ray; is the original quality of the film up to that?!

There was much less money on Witchfinder than on some of its contemporaries like the Hammer films, although I think that’s one of its strengths. It doesn’t look like it was made on a shoestring, but it wasn’t a wonderfully comfortable film to make. We were out in the wilds of Norfolk, shooting in an old aircraft hanger, rather than a studio. It was summer, but it was summer in Norfolk…

It’s bleak and brutal, but it wasn’t unremittingly gloomy in a sort of Swedish way; there’s a lot of exciting stuff in it. Michael always said we were making a Western. He thought it would be the closest he ever got to making one. Michael was extraordinary, because he was so young, but crews liked him, which is always a good sign. Once they realised that he knew what he was doing, he would earn the respect of a hard-bitten crew very quickly. He’d been making movies since he was about 14, and he had the most encyclopaedic knowledge. He could tell you who the second assistant director was on any movie. If you wanted to know anything at all about any movie ever made, you asked Mike Reeves. If you didn’t have any interest in film you’d have thought his conversation was quite boring! The legend is that he once hand-cranked a print of DW Griffith’s Intolerance, studying every frame. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. But he certainly understood the language and geography of movies.

We weren’t at school together, but were introduced by a mutual friend when we were 15, who knew that Mike wanted to direct and I wanted to act. We met in one of those endless coffee bars that were around in the fifties on Kensington High Street, and I went and stayed in his mum’s house with some other friends of his and we made this movie. I think tiny clips of that still exist; they’re very scratchy and black-and-white, and they’re silent. I lost touch with him for a while after that, and went off to drama school and did some early television and some stage work, and then my agent called me one day and asked if I knew somebody called Mike Reeves, who wanted me to be in his film. So we had a renewed acquaintance, after several years. He learnt from his first film (The She Beast, 1965), which was completely dreadful, and then the second (The Sorcerers, 1966), which is better, and then there was Witchfinder, which is the one everybody talks about. I’m in all of them!

My dealings with Vincent Price were actually very few and far between, because a lot of the time when I was shooting, Vincent wasn’t even around. The few scenes I had with him, he was very nice. The only one that was a bit difficult was the famous one in Orford Castle, when I’m killing him with an axe, and he was a very miserable, unhappy man by then. He was determined to be uncooperative. He’d had it with Mike, by that point. He didn’t want to wear any padding, and Mike wanted me to hit him as hard as I could with this rubber axe, which I said I wasn’t going to do. And we had a huge number of set-ups to do, and very little time, and we couldn’t go back, so we had to get what we could get. It was a tricky night, all a mad rush, and not helped by Vincent being dour and glum in the background.

Mike didn’t like directing actors at all. He liked casting right. He always said he didn’t know anything about acting, so he used Don Siegel’s trick – Don Siegel was his great hero – who believed that if you cast a thing properly you can leave the actors alone. But Mike found he was unable to leave Vincent alone. Mike’s directions tended to be just “Can you do it faster?” but with Vincent, it was always “Can you please not do that?” It was always in the negative, which is a little off-putting for actors.

Vincent was actually very, very nice… when he was happy! All you had to do was keep him happy and he was the most charming man in the world and he’d entertain us with wonderful stories. We were staying in this very nice old country hotel in Bury-St-Edmonds, and he had the “Dickens Suite”, because supposedly Dickens had stayed there. And in the evenings he’d be surrounded by people because he was so friendly and amusing. He really could be a delight. Just not on the set of Witchfinder General…

Witchfinder General is available now on Blu-ray from Odeon Entertainment. Buy from Amazon now.

Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. Image copyright New Line Cinema.

Robert Englund, star of nearly a hundred movies, eight of which make up one of the biggest horror franchises of all time, turns out to be a garrulous and entertaining interviewee. Far from being touchy about his horror-world typecasting niche or unwilling to discuss Elm Street, he adores his career, loves all his films equally, and is still having a blast in the film industry after more than thirty years. He’s thoroughly down-to-earth and engagingly enthusiastic about a body of work which, to be frank, has often not reached the widest of audiences. A case in point: he’s just been shooting Strippers vs. Werewolves…

Do you ever wish for bigger-budget projects?

I think for these kinds of movies a big budget is often a hindrance in some way. Well maybe not a hindrance, but there was certainly quite a backlash a while ago against ‘big’ horror movies: they became really quite unpopular, whilst little ones like this kind of just kept on doing their thing. I remember, as long ago as the early nineties, having to defend The Silence of the Lambs to Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, because they were really slamming it. And those kinds of high-profile horror-type films still tend not to do well, or at least, are perceived as not doing very well. They make their money back, but they generally don’t perform spectacularly or get well received. Hannibal and Red Dragon, for example. That Omen remake. It’s like that grunge backlash against the big, classic rock bands. Horror does better when it’s bubbling under. It’s a niche. It doesn’t like the limelight.

Do you mind being in that niche?

I kind of go through phases. Not so much anymore. I used to. I did a lot of stuff before I became known for horror. I did a lot of small films in the 70s, in all kinds of styles. I worked with all kinds of people when I was just starting out: I was incredibly lucky. I got to co-star with Susan Sarandon and Henry Fonda (The Last of the Cowboys); I worked with Bob Rafaelson in a film where I co-starred with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field (Stay Hungry); I was the narrator of Big Wednesday, the wonderful surf movie that John Milius made with Gary Busey; I did a lot of TV… The seventies was really a great time in Hollywood: a much less hierarchical time. You could live by the beach for practically nothing, and there was a real kind of ‘scene’ which has kind of gone now: Jaws and Star Wars changed everything. I’ve had Mark Hamill and Gary Busey passed out on my sofa at four in the morning. And it was a better time for experimental and independent movies.

Were you always a horror fan?

I always was. I kind of got snobbish about it when I first started out in theatre. I put it to one side and forgot about it and pretended it was behind me.  But I think it was always there really. I remember when I was a really little kid, like maybe five or six, I used to go over to my grandparents’ house with my parents, and they had this coffee table book of photosets from Life magazine. And I used to get there, and go up in the bedroom and like, take off my little jacket, and then I’d go and find this book, which had this section on like the great Hollywood monsters. And I remember it had these beautiful pictures of Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein, and it had this big section on Lon Chaney, the ‘man of a thousand faces’, all like really glossily illustrated, and with all these descriptions of his make-up processes; like the way he would use the membranes from eggs and drape them over his eyeball to give himself a milky eye. Stuff like that. And I was just obsessed with this book. So I think the seeds of my later career were sewn right there. I think on some level that’s what got me acting. The roots of my career are right there. I even played The Phantom of the Opera!

Tobin Bell has made his name with the Saw films, but he’s still on record as saying he doesn’t really approve of horror…

I love Tobin. I think he’s a great actor. I’ve been a fan of his since I saw him in The X-Files. He’s like me, he’s been around for years, but the truth is that without Saw nobody would know who the fuck he was. I know who he is, because I’m in the industry, and actors notice other actors like that, but to the general public… pfffff. A lot of actors have that kind of attitude, like horror is beneath them, or its distasteful or whatever. But they always turn out – because this is where the money is.

The thing is, a lot of actors fail in these roles. You can’t take them lightly or be snobbish about them. You have to really embrace them or you’ll fuck up horribly. Look at Robert de Niro in that thing with Dakota Fanning (Hide and Seek), or that terrible Frankenstein movie. He’s awful in both of those movies, and he’s Robert De Niro! If horror can defeat someone like Robert De Niro then you’ve gotta start thinking that there’s more to some of these roles and movies than just slumming it for the money. You can’t just coast.

And on the flipside of that, if you play it absolutely right, you can make a really great impression, even if the movie you’re making isn’t all that hot. What’s that thing with Jennifer Lopez? The Cell? Even Jennifer Lopez made a horror movie! But that movie belongs to Vincent D’Onofrio, because he goes after that role so hard. He’s so totally committed. He owns that film.

I’d never knock horror, because of the opportunities it’s given me. I’ve been all over the world, to Italy and Germany and the UK, and Northern Europe and Sweden, and it’s all because I’m Freddy Krueger.

Any more plans to direct?

Not right now. The last thing I directed was a movie called Killer Pad in 2008, which is a little comedy with a great bunch of kids. It had horror elements, because it’s about this kind of Faustian pact that these frat boys sign to get the pad of their dreams, but there was a lot of kind of American Pie style gross-out humour too, which I love.

I had a lot of fun doing that, but directing is kind of not my forte, I’d be the first to admit.  I’m good at casting and art direction, and script and camera stuff, but special effects and suspense… less so. I found that out on the first film I directed which was this thing called 976 Evil that I did in 1989. I had a really bad experience with that one because it was taken away in post-production and edited by this guy who came from like commercials and music videos. They cut out a lot of the exposition that I thought was really necessary, and just went for the gore, which I thought was a total mistake that weakened the movie.  Editing a movie is like making a sculpture. You kind of chip away at this big block of material, but its tough because you don’t want to discard anything right at the start, because you might need it again later. I think the studio on 976 Evil got rid of a lot of stuff early on that it turned out they needed, but they didn’t care enough to put it back in. The film really doesn’t make much sense as it is now. But the annoying thing is that it did all right! They even made some sequels, although I wasn’t involved.

Killer Pad was a lot more satisfying. I had a lot more control. Not final cut exactly, but I was very much more involved with the producing side as well as the directing – as I had been on Freddy vs. Jason – so I got to stay much more on board in post production.

Speaking of Freddy it’s an obvious question that you must get asked all the time, but what did you think of the remake?

They remake everything now. I tried to be philosophical about it. Jackie Earl Haley is a great actor. But it was disappointing that it killed a couple of other ideas. We were talking with Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell about doing another Freddy vs. Jason thing with Ash (from the Evil Dead series), and then for a while it looked like we might do a Michael Myers thing, and John Carpenter was involved. But that all fell through. What I was actually really excited about, was that we got close to doing a prequel with John McNaughton, who made an amazing sort of sub-documentary horror movie called Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. Just extraordinary. So you can imagine what he would have brought to that kind of project. It would have been very down and dirty, and gritty. It would have been the story of Freddy and his origins. It would start with his horrible child murders, and there would be the police investigation, with the corrupt cops and the bungled investigation that nevertheless gets him arrested. Then there’d be a kind of courtroom drama element, and the story of the horrible lawyers that get him acquitted. And it would end with the Elm Street parents taking the revenge that we all know about. There was some of that in the remake, but not like we were planning. That would have been a big one.

Other than Freddy, you’re probably best known as Willie, the friendly alien in V… 

I’ll tell you, the only fan of mine that’s ever creeped me out was a V fan. I’ve met all kinds of people that really love Freddy, and that doesn’t bother me at all. I meet them at signings and conventions and they’re just great. I’ve never had a bad experience with a Freddy fan, although the guys with the huge tattoos I think are kind of odd – these beautiful, full-back Yakuza tattoos of Freddy. But I see a lot of cool stuff that I’ve never seen before. Someone recently had an original poster from the original run of Elm Street that has me in the James Bond gun barrel. That must have been some kind of bootleg – Eon would never have licensed it! And I meet Asian fans who have these enormous circus-sized posters with me devouring Patricia Arquette, and they’ve been painted over and added to with amazing artwork and colours. Just beautiful. But yeah, anyway, this V fan was a girl who turned herself into me.  She taped her breasts so that she was completely flat-chested, and she permed her hair to be like mine, and she would turn up all over the place, wherever I was appearing. She was a little alarming. I encouraged her with her writing though. I think she’s doing alright now…”

Do you enjoy conventions and signings and the publicity trail?

Absolutely. I especially enjoy doing interviews like this on the phone. It means I can wander round the house in my underwear…

Argh!

Strippers vs. Werewolves is currently in post-production.

When BioWare released Mass Effect back in 2007, it was widely heralded as the best new franchise of its generation, but what many players didn’t initially realise was that the game allowed the player the choice of selecting a female character. This was far from being a gaming first, but it was a pioneering move: never before had a third person shooter had such a prominent female lead, that differed from the male default in looks alone.

Commander Shepard, whether male or female, had almost exactly the same dialogue, actions, and options. A tough woman officer, she didn’t have to put up with any sexist jibes, slithering compliments, or toned down action. But femShep, as she is affectionately known, appeared in none of the promotional campaigns or box art for the series, leaving some players unaware of her existence.

Imagine then the excitement when BioWare announced that femShep would be appearing alongside her male counterpart on the box art and promotions for Mass Effect 3. Female fans were delighted, hurray for BioWare! But wait. Apparently in favour of the “one step forward, two steps back” approach, BioWare then decided to put femShep’s appearance to a vote. A general vote. For all Mass Effect fans. Including the 82% that play as the male character. Including the vast majority of Mass Effect players that are male. That’s right folks, they put Commander Shepard, hero of the galaxy, in a fucking beauty pageant.

Shep5  (left), a predictable winner.

Shepard is a kickass hero, a top soldier in the Alliance, the first human Spectre, and a leader who commands respect from her large and varied team of loyal recruits while having no qualms about disobeying orders should they go against her ethics. All this, along with the fact that nobody comments on her boobs, her butt, or shares any of the numerous tasteless jokes about strong women, makes femShep a rare playable character indeed.

Quite possibly, BioWare realised none of this when they created their game. Other, more role playing based, games have long allowed the player the choice of a male or female avatar, but the game has often differed hugely based on what you pick. Women characters often get more revealing outfits, their aesthetics are sexualised rather than the regular to buff set up of the male equivalent, and interactions with NPC’s (non-playable characters) are tinkered with to remind us that our avatar is just a little lady.

Certainly if we look at the other female characters in Mass Effect we can see that they haven’t done quite so well as the Commander. While the first game escaped this entirely, Mass Effect 2 featured: Miranda, who has been genetically designed to be as attractive as possible, though not as far as we can tell, genetically designed to wear the revealing catsuit she prefers; Morinth and/or her mother Samara, who’s wise counsel (and genderless race!) is somewhat tempered by her distracting bosoms; and Jack, who goes the whole way and just covers her nipples. The women from the first game (Tali, Liara, and even Doctor Chakwas) are in stark contrast in their less sexualised portrayal.

Eyes up!

As any player can tell you, those women with more clothes on throughout the games are just as sexy as those with less; however the difference between the games is striking, and perhaps an indication of the way things were developing. With all these hyper-sexualised women around her, did we really believe Shepard would be untouched? Well, yes. There was no reason to think BioWare would touch a character that had been so popular, particularly when there was no indication that the male Commander Shepard was up for review. Which he isn’t.

Nope, maleShep remains the same as he’s always been, without any need for him to flex his pecs and pout for the camera to allow us to choose which beefy hunk of man looks best. Because looks, after all, are only all that matters when it comes to saving the galaxy if you are a woman.

I don’t care much which femShep won the beauty pageant. I have no feelings on the winner being blonde and pale beyond the usual sigh that stereotypical beauty standards have once again prevailed. Commander Shepard can be blonde if she wants to, that part on its own certainly doesn’t matter, but the method of choosing is very suspect indeed. The next round of voting to decide on her hair colour decisively does not appease me. Every other character in the game franchise, including the male Shepard, has been designed and chosen by the game creators. Now, on this one female character, the powers that be have decided the public will decide. A democratic vote – who could argue with that?

Well, I can. And I do. Changing the aesthetics of the character at this stage seems like a desire to move away from having a rough and tough femShep, a Shepard nobody was complaining about, and towards having a more sexualised female character. A realisation that putting a female avatar that wasn’t hyper-sexualised on the box art meant a missed opportunity to get more sales based on sex appeal. And by putting it to a public vote BioWare have essentially absolved themselves of any of the blame – you’re complaining about the sexualised femShep? But you voted for her!

Vote for hair colour next, for genetic perfection à la Miranda.

Perhaps our expectations were simply too high: BioWare is often touted as being a more progressive games company, when a lot of it might just be a happy coincidence. True, they did happily slap down those complaining that Dragon Age 2 discriminated against the poor little straight while male gamers due to the inclusivity of the title, but a lot of fans are in agreement that this kerfuffle has pretty much cancelled out their brownie points.

But hey, maybe it’s all just good business sense. Can’t argue with that. But I can complain about not having the default female Commander Shepard up there alongside the default male Commander Shepard. Sure, as always we can edit our femShep, or import our previous one. But we all know that the ones on the box, and the ones in the promos are the avatars most gamers stick with, and the characters that most people recognise. Having your avatar sexed up isn’t something most male gamers will ever have to contend with. Commander Shepard was just too damn realistic for marketing purposes and she had to go. The version that the majority of gamer boys lusted over is now the new face of femShep.

Without femShep on the box art, fans would have known no different. With a promise of equal representation, everyone got very excited. It was a pretty cruel bait and switch, and I’m sure I’m not the only female gamer now feeling a little deflated about the franchise as a whole.

“You can either fight at my side or get crushed under my heel. But you will not stand in my way.”

Date: Sunday 16th August 2009

Place: A fruit farm in deepest Kent

Present: AD Lane, 16 crew members, 4 actors, 11 extras, 1 actor’s girlfriend, and me

The weather could not have been better: the sky a deep azure blue, and the sun glistening on the newly applied fake blood. A number of inhumanly pale farm labourers pick apples for their co-worker to sell to equally sickly-looking passers-by. Another labourer, in a boiler suit, gazes into the distance, the smoke from his cigarette swirling around his head and momentarily masking his peeling flesh.

And Vincent de Paula, Director of Photography, glides slowly past with his camera.

This is the first time AD Lane has sat in the director’s chair since graduation and you might have expected him to look a little nervous. Instead he seemed totally at ease, chatting happily with crew, and cast during the breaks, and introducing himself to each and every extra to ensure they felt comfortable. This is my only experience of a real shoot but I was struck by the overwhelming calmness of the proceedings. I had expected the long periods of hanging about, whilst equipment was set up, or cast walked through their part, but I was surprised by how polite everyone was even during the actual filming. It was all please and thank you and there was the most delightfully gentlemanly discussion between Director, Assistant Director and Director of Photography at the end of filming before the Assistant announced, almost apologetically, ‘I think that we have a wrap.’

Maybe this was the reason why Antony brought the filming in under budget and in less time than expected. Another might be the commitment of everyone involved. You only had to listen into a tiny part of the chatter to realise that everyone there was a zombie freak. Take the young couple who had driven over two hours from Hertfordshire just to be extras. They get married in early September and yet they found time to take part. They get married in September and yet they have already invested £450 in the film and want to invest more when they know how much they have left after the honeymoon! And they didn’t even want a speaking role; they just wanted to be part of a zombie film. Now, that is true dedication and you have to believe, with that sort of support, Antony can’t fail.

So what of the trailer itself? I’m sworn to secrecy, and anyway I didn’t see the morning’s filming. But I can tell you it will feature the film’s heroes in Leslie Simpson and Efisia Fele (otherwise known as Fangoria’s Penny B Dreadful) along with the cigarette smoking zombie, Frank Jakeman. Antony is hoping to get it out in time for Hallowe’en, preferably previewing it at a festival and you can be sure that it will raise more questions than it will provide answers. The intention is to keep the punters guessing right to the film’s release.

I’ll let you know when the trailer is available, but if you want to get a preview then you will have to dig into your pocket and sign up to one of Antony’s producer packages (www.theindywoodproject.com). You too could be a zombie then, since all producers will be invited to be extras in the film itself. Oh, and don’t think you need to be a zombie freak to be involved either. It turns out they really are a very friendly bunch with more than a slight penchant for Nice biscuits!

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

While GI Joe technically has its roots in the Vietnam War, the current version of the Real American Heroes was started in 1982, when Hasbro launched a toy line featuring a team of GI Joes and their arch-nemeses, Cobra.  In an unprecedented marketing move, a Saturday-morning cartoon and Marvel comic book were launched alongside the toys; while some cross-promotional marketing of toys, toons, and comics existed before that, it really served to introduce the modern area of toy promotion.  Legend has it that comic writer Larry Hama created Cobra, which proved to be an essential part of the success of both the cartoon and the toy line.

After this proved a huge success, Hasbro repeated the formula two years later, remaking and repackaging old Japanese robot toys and again having Marvel comics writers develop a backstory explaining the nature of the toys and their conflict.  In an interesting parallel, both series’ comics outlasted both the toy lines and the cartoons, and both helped to show that under the right creators (Larry Hama for Joe and Simon Furman for Transformers), licensed media was capable of producing comics equal to a lot of what the “big two” were producing at the time.

With this parallel history and shared corporate roots, hypothetical discussions about the winner of GI Joe and Transformer battles quickly became a matter of debate for playground sages everywhere; Marvel eventually gave in to demand and produced GI Joe and the Transformers, a four-issue crossover series.   After the type of initial misunderstanding typically found in comics stories, the Joes and Autobots teamed up to stop an allied Cobra and the Decepticons from dominating the world.

Page from GI Joe vs Transformers - Image Comics, Sep 2003

Aside from the comic crossover, the only other crossover between the two occurred in the Transformers episode Only Human, where a thinly-disguised Cobra Commander transforms several Autobots into human form.  As Cobra Commander was voiced by Chris Latta, the same actor who voiced Starscream, this was an easy crossover to accomplish.

The crossover series was a huge success, and when the rights to both series passed onto later publisher, such as Dreamwave and Devil’s Due, the idea of crossing the two series over went with them.  Those crossover series have, as a rule, featured gorgeous artwork, such as the Jae Lee-drawn WWII series, but horrendous storylines, such as the US military building an “organic robot” named SerpentO.R. from biomechanical samples of Megatron.  These series have also uniformly been financial successes, and the current license holder for both, IDW Publishing, has expressed interest in revisiting the concept as well.

All of which brings us to today.  Both properties seem remarkably prescient: Transformers with is war over control of limited fuel resources, and GI Joe with its fight against international terrorism.  Combine that with the often rose-coloured nostalgia of the current generation, and you’ve got a recipe for success as guaranteed as the accuracy of blue lasers.

The Rainbow Orchid

JE Towey talks to cartoonist and author, Garen Ewing, creator of The Rainbow Orchid.

At some point in our childhood, or perhaps only in our mythical childhood, didn’t we all spend winter Sunday afternoons, curled up beside a roaring log fire with tea and toast and an Asterix or Tintin book, doing our utmost to ensure that the warm butter dripping down our chins didn’t sully those precious pages?

Now Egmont, who still publish the Tintin books, have taken a punt on a young Briton, called Garen Ewing, to bring us The Rainbow Orchid, a new take on that experience. I thought you’d like to know what makes a 21st century cartoon artist do such a thing. So, off I went on my travels down Southern England’s A roads once more, to find Garen and have a chat.

Now, the first thing you discover about Garen is he’s a gentleman. My car was reporting an external temperature of 28.5 degrees when I arrived; Garen offered me a choice of cold drinks, ushered me to a comfy sofa in his front room and opened the conversation with the kind of selfless questions that immediately puts someone at ease.

And there is something quintessentially gentlemanly about Garen’s attitude to his art too. He combines a quiet confidence in his graphical abilities with an almost unnerving modesty about his command of colour. Indeed he confesses that the limited palette used for The Rainbow Orchid was a product of his own uncertainty and a suggestion from his wife to keep to the Dulux Heritage range of colours! For my part, I don’t care how he got there. The combination of simple, but assured, line drawings, and flat, muted colouring is what gives The Rainbow Orchid its exquisitely enchanting quality.

But, please, don’t be misled by all this talk of colour palettes and enchantment, nor even the title, The Rainbow Orchid. For this is not some saccharine tale of fairies or cutesy magical flowers. This is a fast moving adventure tale, with action and intrigue, mystery and suspense, a plucky young hero and a beautiful heroine, an ancient, priceless sword and a mythical plant.

The story opens in the 1920s at the home of Sir Alfred Catesby-Grey and immediately the reader is plunged into a Conan Doyle world of wealthy amateurs living in elegant London terraces. Young Julius Chancer, Sir Alfred’s assistant, has just returned from an eight month assignment to recover the manuscript of a lost Purcell opera; an assignment, we learn, that has been fraught with the kind of difficulties and danger a modern audience would associate with the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Mummy film franchises.

The filmic references are not out of place. Garen is a fan, particularly, of the early silent films, whose combination of story-telling imagery and written titles, bear more than a passing similarity with comic books. He cites an example from Chaplin’s 1931 film ‘City Lights’ where Chaplin plays a tramp who falls for a blind flower girl, as illustrating how Chaplin, as both writer and director as well as actor, uses emotion and gesture to tell the story. It is a technique he uses to great effect in his book: he seems to take particular delight in the use of eyebrow gesture, for example. (A particular favourite of mine is the sequence of scenes where one of the secondary characters gets his hand stuck in a Phoenician vase.) And this interest in early films is, he confesses, one of the reasons for setting the story in the 1920s.

All of this is, of course, a far cry from the vast majority of comic books currently available. US, superhero and manga comic books all make use of a bold and vivid colour palette. They shout at the reader, especially when depicting action and violence. Garen shows violence too, but he uses restraint and economy of line. There is, for example, a subtly simple panel showing a fist ramming into a man’s jaw and making his head vibrate. The violence implied by a few, apparently, casual lines is breathtaking and far more memorable than the Wham Bam violence with which we are all more familiar.

Talking to Garen, though, it is clear, that the differences do not just lie in the subtlety of line and colour. There are huge differences in how the books are conceived and created too. Garen is wedded to the idea that a comic book should be the product of one creative personality. This concept came to him over twenty years ago when he was pitching his portfolio at a comics festival, and realised that he could never achieve what he wanted if all he did was make drawings for other people’s words. So he builds up his books, bit by bit, partly with a script, partly with a few sketches until he has a firm hold of what is happening in each scene. This is a far cry from the more usual, almost production line, process where even the art content is broken down into pencil, ink, colour, etc and each is carried out by a different person.

I could go on a lot longer telling you more about the story of The Rainbow Orchid or outlining Garen’s biography. But there really is no need. You see, another aspect of Garen’s gentlemanly nature is his generosity. Take a look at his web-site. There you will find excerpts from Volume 1 and 2, fascinating video footage of Garen creating one of the strips, chunks of biography, links to interviews and reviews and a members section where you can sign up for newsletters and the opportunities to win original art work. Have a browse and I think you will see what I mean.

All that’s left for me now is to tell you that Volume 1 of The Rainbow Orchid is to be published on August 4th. Volume 2 will follow early next year, and Garen is soon to start work on Volume 3. So pop that date into your diary and make sure you get a copy. And if the cover alone doesn’t make you think of hot buttered toast, then you must have had a pretty miserable childhood!

Is this going to be a treat or what? Take English literature’s most surreal author and apply cinema’s most surreal director. Then add two of the spookiest actors in Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter for good measure. Forget cute. Forget fluffy. Carroll was never like that in the first place and the director of Nightmare before Christmas and Sweeney Todd is hardly likely to fail him. Just take a look at the concept art and you’ll get the picture. Only Burton could make roses look stuck-up and smug like that. Only he could turn a masterpiece of Victorian gardening into a threatening morass of riotous vegetation. But I digress…

Written by Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast and Lion King, among others), the script opens with a 17 year old Alice (played by 19 year old Australian actress, Mia Wasikowska) attending a swanky party on Victorian estate. Faced with hundreds of snooty upper-class suitors, she runs away and finds herself following a talking white rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) down a hole and into the Wonderland she last visited 10 years earlier.

The story thereafter sounds like it will be a mixture of both Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Alice follows the Rabbit and her size keeps changing as in Wonderland. But she meets with the major characters from Looking Glass, including Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas), the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the Red and White Queens (Bonham-Carter and Anne Hathaway). The Mad Hatter (Depp) of course appears in both stories anyway.

The filming, which took 40 days, was completed in December and since then Burton has been merging the live action with CGI and motion-capture creatures and turning it all into 3-D. The completed film is due to premiere on 5th March 2010. Can you wait until then? I’m not sure I can.