On a gloomy All Souls Day, 2001, five people assemble in the offices of Film Ireland to discuss the future of fantasy films in this country*. They are: Geraldine Creed, Jeremiah Cullinane, Ed King, Conor McMahon and Christopher Wicking, with Mark Venner and Tony Keily moderating for the magazine.

*No animals were harmed in the course of this discussion.

CW: I've been here for about five years, before that I was commuting from London. Given my background people would ask, "Are you here to do fantasy things?" It got me thinking about the great repository of the Irish supernatural. Even here people don't always know that Bram Stoker was Irish. I'd been working with European companies and I thought it would be a great idea to put together projects involving what we called the Anglo-Celtic Archipelago. My company, Midnight Movies, is based on the principles that Hammer and AIP were working under: to make relatively low-budget things, amortizing costs by re-vamping sets, with continuity of crew. Something like Corman was trying out West, except he was doing exploitation, rather than fantasy per se. In England there's a great snobbery about horror. It's not 'respectable'. Unlike in France where it's fantastique and regarded as surrealism I found the same attitude here.

CMcM: I was at the Sitges festival recently and the standard of short films was amazing. The atmosphere, the enthusiasm was so different. I've made horror and fantasy films because I love the audience reaction. It's something you want to come back to.

TK: By general agreement, your film The Brain Eater was the standout film of DIALDT showcase.

CMcM: Before the film got out there, the reaction from other students was, "Oh, he's making that silly horror thing." The college was doubtful when we were bringing these projects up, though to be fair, once they knew what we were doing, they were very supportive. Now everything's changed. It's the film the college want to put on the cover of their new prospectus. They're talking to the first-year students and pointing at me and this other guy who made a film about a woman who put a bomb in her stomach and blew herself up. They're saying "These guys took risks!"

CW: Maybe things are changing in general. I've heard of other fantasy projects being developed in Ireland. Maybe there's something in the air. Another problem is the question of being commercial. It's never been there in the English tradition because of subsidies, and then Channel 4. It's also true here: you don't need to make money, you just make movies. People have got out of the habit of thinking about commercially-oriented projects. You've got to love this genre, and to have a sense of history and to want to make something new. But you should be able to make money too.

EK: I agree with you 100%. Ireland should have something like AIP and Hammer. We have great locations. Conor here went out and made The Brain Eater on 16mm for a small budget. It's outstanding. If you made that in an 80 minute version you'd sell it everywhere, in territories where people are not interested in 'Irish' movies. There's also the fact that big name actors are willing to get involved again with horror and the supernatural. Until Scream, horror was pornography.

SELLING HORROR
GC: Even if you fund a horror film here, it won't be Irish, it'll be horror. At present, the deal in the States is you're selling it on the basis that it's Irish.

JC: Then again, Irish films abroad are considered a genre of all of their own. You hear people asking, "What kind of a movie is it?" and the answer is "Oh, it's an Irish movie." You could go all the way and create a real genre. Make things like Waking Ned. 'Oirish' films! Like the Leprechaun films with Colm Meaney.

TK: Being Irish was the problem with I Went Down. In America people were looking at it and going, "This isn't an Irish movie, this is a road movie with Irish people in it." It didn't make sense.

EK: If it's a good horror film, people won't care where it's made. It'll sell.

GC: It is interesting that the creator of the vampire sub-genre lived here in Dublin, and we don't have single vampire film! Chaos, which I've just made, is lo-tech futuristic, not really sci-fi. It took four years to finance. I don't think Europe is set up to deal with genre. There's also a reticence on the part of financiers to get involved in genre movies, specially horror. So a lot of filmmakers won't even embark on a horror project.

JC: I don't agree with you there. A lot of companies in Europe will finance horror. I went on a tour of Zentropa studios last year in Copenhagen, home of Dogme and Palme D'Or-winning drama. We discovered blood-spattered showers and axes buried in walls. They've set up a low-budget horror division. They have a porn division as well. It's just money, and in the end that will talk, when people see there's a market for it. And I think, as Chris says, horror has more chance with a company set up to make a number of films rather than one.

GC: Maybe it's that traditionally the places that Irish people go in Europe to look for money don't like genre. They're all snobs. Script development is just locked into this character thing. Your script has to have a certain number of 'rounded characters'

CMcM: You can have rounded characters in horror too.

TK: And blow them up!

MV: The Film Board haven't been averse to horror. I had a film project, Banshee, granted nine years ago. The Board were very excited: "Nobody's done this: banshees and the whole Yeatsian thing." But then the project just fizzled out. Nobody would put any money into it.

GC: The problem has been matching funding. It hasn't been the Film Board. The backers here are older than the average cinema-going audience. It's character-based dramas that get made here.

EK: More people should invest because of the chances of getting your money back with DVD and digital channels is much greater. And you could pre-sell video distribution rights. I mean, if they're making Leprechaun 3 and 4 and Witchcraft 11 and 12, they're making money! There's a market. If people stay in on Saturday night, maybe they want a laugh, they want to be scared…

PUSHING THE BOAT OUT
JC: I think bog-standard horror films just have no future. With horror movies, there's a relentless and extremely demanding progression that obliges you to reflect on the whole body of work that has preceded and to contribute to that. Last year I was hired in Canada to direct a Stephen King film.
A sequel to the Mangler. The financing fell apart. I hadn't even seen the original. I'd seen the big King films, The Shining, Christine. Then I met people here and in Vancouver who knew Stephen King inside out! They knew all the horror films inside out. They knew their shit! Which means that as a director you have to be spot on. If you do something that's been done before, they're all over you. From a director's point of view, it's almost a fine art form, in that it's a pure formal exercise.

CW: You certainly have to care about it, respect the genre. You can have a project, or a whole slate of projects, but you must care. You have to have ideas and a passion for horror. That's the probably the single most important ingredient.

EK: It depends on the type of horror film you're trying to make. Horror is periodically open to spoof, and that's a sign of decadence. You have to move things on to another level at that point. There's no point in hiring a director who doesn't like horror movies. The great horror films are from the great horror filmmakers.

GC: In genre, the interesting thing is that if you want to push the boat out and do something very different and interesting, you can. Ginger Snaps was a recent example of that. Kissed is another one. You couldn't see them being made here. They don't really belong to any sub-genre.

TK: Yet the censors in Britain recently refused to release Wes Craven's Last House on the Left without cuts, despite Pasolini's Saló, whose subject matter was if anything more cruel and extreme, being passed uncut. There was perceive to a highbrow bias working against genre films like Craven's.

MV: It's loosely based on Bergman's Virgin Spring.

EK: It's very disturbing. They want the disturbing stuff out. That's a fair point. Has anybody seen it?

CMcM: I have. It's a great movie.

CW: Films should be disturbing. They should challenge you.

TK: If you look at the political content or the social commentary in many fantasy films, it's amazing more people don't take them more seriously. Three recent Japanese horror films released here – Ring, Audition and Battle Royale – paint a brilliant picture of contemporary Japanese society in crisis: a dim, grey, horrifying world. Whether these films could be made here even for cultural reasons is another question. Miike Takeshi (Audition) has a long career in horror or at least crime-explo films. Maybe it'd take someone like Conor, who's lived with his genre and is committed to it.

CW: The Japanese connection's interesting. Lafcadio Ahearne went to Japan, fell in love with the culture. He lectured and published books. He's a revered figure there, largely for the Irish connection. He wrote Japanese stories adapting Le Fanu's Irish vampire figures, one of the best of which is Yuki-Ona, a sort of Japanese Banshee tale. He may have been influential in the growth of the Japanese horror culture.

MV: Chris, as a young man you were brought in by Hammer to liven things up, weren't you?

CW: They didn't bring me in. AIP were deciding to go respectable. They did Wuthering Heights. The next thing was to be Camille with Mia Farrow. So even within the company we were a small division and a sort of snobbism started to appear. Then company went under. We'd been successful so we moved to Hammer. We brought them produce, rather than being hired in. Had I known how desperate they were, I could have done more deals, directed something. There was a big difference in the way they operated. At AIP it didn't matter what you did, provided Vincent Price was happy. At Hammer they had an extraordinary machine they'd developed over twenty years, crews, technicians. Everybody'd worked on a previous Hammer films and knew what to do. There was a sort of passion among that professional body. There was a producer called Tony Nelson Keys who was always looking for new things and produced some of the best material. The problem was costs after things like Rosemary's Baby and The Omen.
The mainstream companies started making horror films and there was no way Hammer could keep up.

EK: Cable and digital offer the possibility to go back to those days.

JC: This is an interesting question. As a horror producer, would you then be expecting a theatrical release? Is there a solid future in non-theatrical?

TK: I think there will be. There has to be. Distribution is becoming so monopolised by a few mega-corporations, non-theatrical is the future of alternative.

CW: An idea would be to set up a division for horror fans, with some kind of direct subscription.

GC: But will the industry here give you money for a horror film?

CW: Maybe the industry wouldn't, but an entrepreneur from another sector might.

GC: It needs a precedent from somewhere. Then everybody'll copy-cat.

MV: Isn't that what George Romero did? He made Night of the Living Dead with money from a TV company he was involved in?

CW: Also you can't just do it as a one-off thing. You have to have ten, twelve ideas and a three-year plan. Then your library will be worth something, you have a franchise. You don't say, "Did you see that Fox movie?" But you do say, "Did you see that Hammer movie?"

GRATUITOUS SECTS
GC: They should get it right here. The training that everybody's being given is ridiculous, top-heavy. They spend money doing these reports and all they can say is "Scripts aren't developed enough in Ireland." The producers should think about the 15-25 year-olds. There's a lack of focus. It's often hard to see where the films made are supposed to fit in. If you know what you want to make, that'll help your script. Instead of getting obsessed with this development thing which takes years. It's like Peter Aalbaek Jensen, Lars Von Trier's producer said, if you can't develop a script in four weeks, send it to hell. I'm talking about these European schemes for developing scripts, and that whole funding and development system. If you talk about genre, it's a dirty word. They tell you how to make your pictures. They tell you there's a certain way of developing scripts, and that's the only way. Which is bullshit. They're snobs. One guy said at one of these European seminars that they're aiming to make coffee cake films. Well nobody who goes to the cinema wants to see a coffee cake film!

MV: These people are even adverse to a script not being presented in their way. If you want to do something different, they hate it. Their mindset is so narrow that it precludes any kind of experimentation on paper, never mind after that.

CW: You can teach certain things. But no more than if you're a painter, or a musician, you have to have an aptitude to begin with, the basic talent and passion, then you learn something. You can learn the craft. And if you're a professional writing TV episodes, or the basic mainstream stuff, there are things you need to know.

GC: I've been to these European things, whenever a script of mine got funding from somewhere. And it's like brainwashing. They get you into these hotels and you're not allowed to leave. They're like some religious sect. You have to write your scenes the way they tell you to. If you don't, you get banned. I think they're quite dangerous. If you passionately believe in a story, they're dangerous. They don't give a shit who's going to see the films. The problem with some these workshops is that they give the impression that what they're saying is law. "You can't have cripples in films." "Don't ever use other films in dialogue." "You can't use voice-over any more." Why?! They don't have the guts to do anything they really believe in. And their notions of Irish film: Darby O'Gill stuff. I went to a seminar where these two American women just told us the standard stuff about plot points and three acts and that your little stories can make it out there in Hollywood. The interesting stories get left behind.

CMcM: There's a total absence of Horror and sci-fi shorts at Irish festivals. If you take it that the short film makers will be the feature makers of the future, where are the fantasy films? On the other hand, my classmates haven't bothered going to see any of the new Irish releases. They used to. They don't appeal to people our age.

MV: I was teaching so-called problem kids out in the suburbs and they loved Accelerator. They could recite the whole thing. That was an attempt to make a different kind of Irish film. It wasn't people battling it out in a field, or the IRA. The problem is that the kids out there were stealing all the videos out of Xtravision! –

This article was printed in Film Ireland 84 (Dec 2001 / Jan 2002).