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magnifique
I finished the re-writes on the story I wrote earlier in the month and I’ve sent it out to a market. I have to keep rolling the dice. I watched the terrific low-budget French horror film, Maléfique (2002), today. I saw the film originally at the London horror film festival, FrightFest a number of years ago, where the director, Eric Valette, gave a Q&A afterwards. The film made a lasting impression on me, so I was delighted it got a DVD release. The lads behind FrightFest have shown considerable foresight and have established their own DVD label, FrightFest Presents. Maléfique is the second title in their catalogue of horror flicks.…
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respect the early masters of the genre
Yesterday, much to my delight, I got delivery of The Val Lewton Horror Collection (region 1 only). For those of you unfamiliar with the man, Val Lewton was appointed head of the Horror unit in RKO in 1942. He proceeded to commission a series of films that only had to conform to three rules: 1. The budget had to be under $150,000. 2. The film could not run more than 75 minutes (each film was shown as half of a double feature). 3. The title of the film was supplied by Lewton’s supervisors. The obvious 4th rule that is not normally mentioned is that it had to be scary. Horror…
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one to keep an eye (of the devil) on
Often, there are subjects that I want to tackle on this journal, but the press of time doesn’t allow me the opportunity. Over the coming weeks I hope to tackle a few items that have been on the mental back-burner for some time. For instance, I’d want to mention a horror flick I saw at the end of October, when TV channels were dripping with slasher pics and creature features. On TCM late one night I caught the beginning of a film called Eye of the Devil (1967), and made a snap decision to watch its entirety despite the fact it was going to cost me the next day. The…
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creepy films
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about horror. For the next meeting of my screenwriting group I’ve agreed to discuss the horror genre, and show a classic horror film. Since this is for the purposes of writing, I picked a film that would be well-known by everyone, had a script online that everyone could read in advance, and I decided that I’d go with a movie that was not based on previous material (book, comic, short story, etc.). If we’re trying to flex our writing muscles to generate new concepts I figured we might as well look at how an original idea was developed for the screen. So, I chose…
