Writer by Night

MovieBar (almost) Fail...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:52:01 PDT

Last night we claim dangerously close to an epic fail. Since we changed the venue to the Caroline setting up has been a breeze so I was in no hurry to get started last night. We ate in the pub (their burgers are amazing by the way) and then I casually wandered upstairs to switch everything on. Only for some reason the projector can't find the DVD player and I have no idea why. This happens to be the only night that the pub's owner hasn't been there and Brother Pete (who is better at technical stuff than me) wasn't due to turn up until later. So I start panicking and we spend half an hour turning things off and on again in a desperate attempt to make it work. Finally I speak to the owner on the phone and we get it working. Fine.

Then I realise I haven't brought the pens for the quiz. After a super-busy weekend I'd been a bit rubbish at getting everything ready so it was inevitable I would forget something. So I call Brother Pete who is on his way and ask him to look out for emergency pens. Of the things I could've forgotten it wasn't that bad, it just added to the gradually increasing sense that things were not going to go to plan tonight.

Then there was another minor issue - I think copying 200 copies of Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw (please sign up to the mailing list at www.jennyringo.com) had killed my DVD drive and the DVD I'd put the trailers and an intro to one of the films on wasn't working. Pete managed to get it to work in the end, but again it wasn't helping my growing anxiety.

So everything is working, we have pens, we're ready to start. Just in time too - it's 8pm which is when we generally kick off the night and screen the first film. So why is no one here?

Aside from the four of us running the night there were 7 other people there. In a room that seats 60. This did not look good.

Most of the 7 had already been waiting around for half an hour (as they turned up at the advertised and correct time of 7.30pm!) so I couldn't really keep them waiting. I tried to act like this was normal and did the introduction to the first film as if it was a full room. Luckily a couple of minutes into the film, more people turned up. A lot more people. By the end of the film we had somewhere between 30-40 people in which is closer to our regular numbers. And from then on everything ran smoothly and it turned into a really good night. Which is fantastic, but I really could have done without the stresses at the beginning.

Anyway, next month is the Halloween special, which I don't have to worry about because loads of people will be there. I hope. Seriously, if you are in Brighton or anywhere near on Monday 31st October you should definitely come along to the Caroline of Brunswick. Preferably at 7.30pm. We will be showing short horror films all night and dressing up in daft costumes and awarding a prize to the best daft costume. I already have some fantastic and genuinely scary horror shorts lined up so I seriously recommend you check it out.

As always we'll be posting the rundown of last night's event on the MovieBar website in the next few days.

Jenny Ringo website and stuff...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 15:12:42 PDT

We have a shiny new website, designed by the awesome Richard Badley (Factoid -Rich also played a witch in the film!) -

www.jennyringo.com

There you can also sign up to receive the newsletter, which you can also do on the right of this page>>>

Why would you want to do this? Because we will be letting people know how and when they can see the film as well as providing updates on the sequel as it develops.

So this weekend I was at the Entertainment Media Show in London in a desperate attempt to get people to see the film. There were various reasons I thought this might be a good idea, but I suppose the main one was this -

Most filmmakers submit their films to festivals, where they are screened and win awards and make people famous (see my previous post on this subject). I've been to film festivals. For the most part the people who go to film festivals are other filmmakers, usually those with films screening on the same bill. Obviously I have nothing against filmmakers, but I didn't make Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw for them. I made it for people like me. The non-filmmaker me, who is an obsessive fan of films and music and stuff.

I figured this was an ideal way to get my film to the people most likely to enjoy it. Hopefully, some of those people will enjoy it enough to want to see more and by the time we actually finish the sequel we may even have some kind of audience already waiting for it.

So I booked the table, made 300 copies of the film on DVD, printed some posters and fliers and came up with a plan to give the film away in exchange for e-mail addresses. That way I can hopefully keep up some kind of interaction with people despite the fact that there won't be a new film for quite some time.

Here's how it went down...

Saturday

Got up at 5.30am to get the train from Worthing to Clapham and then on to West Brompton. This bears no significance to the wider story, I just want to point out how early it was and that as far as I'm concerned getting up at 5.30am really is suffering for your art. Met Rich on the train as he had very kindly agreed to help out, which was awesome as I would have been stuck behind the table all day otherwise. Andrea had already set up the table the night before so when we got there we just had to grab a coffee and get started.

Then John Hurt walked past and said 'Good morning!' and I kind of waved in a rather starstruck fashion. And I imagined an alternate reality in which I walk past John Hurt on the way to work every morning, which would be awesome.

Shortly after 9am people start turning up. I didn't think anyone would be that interested first thing in the morning - I assumed they would all be in a hurry to get to the guest signings. We actually did really well in the first couple of hours and had managed to give away 20 DVDs by 11am. I'd only brought 100 copies along and was starting to wish I had more. Our strategy at this point was to wait for people to glance down at our table then ask them if they wanted a copy of the film. At this point most people would either run away shaking their heads or move in closer with a suspicious look on their face. Then we would explain what we were doing and 99% of them would sign up to the list for a DVD.

Another friend, Joel, turned up to help. With 3 of us there this would be a breeze. Then things really started to slow down.

A couple of things made it difficult. The positioning of our table wasn't great - we were at the opposite end of the hall to the main talk area. The most popular guests were in the middle somewhere. Other than browsing to kill time, there was no real reason to come to our end of the hall. Added to that was the more serious problem of low attendance that day. I was basing my experiences on the last event I attended in July where you could barely move down the aisles because there were so many people. This one was looking a little dead.

We struggled on through lunch time, then Joel tried a new tactic - shouting 'Free DVD!' at people walking past in the manner of a super-enthusiastic carnival barker. It worked surprisingly well. By the end of the day we'd given away 87 copies of the film, met some really interesting people and found ourselves struggling not to shout 'Free DVD!' at strangers on the train home. It had been a lot of fun, if not quite the success I'd been hoping for.

Sunday

On Sunday it was Producer Andrea's turn to help out. We got up at a slightly more reasonable hour as the earliest train from Worthing wasn't until ten past seven, which also meant we didn't get to the table until 9.30am. It was already busier than it had been on the previous day. David Tennant had really pulled the crowds in.

We had another advantage - Andrea was brilliant and jumped right into the 'Free DVD' routine with surprising effectiveness. She should totally be on The Apprentice. Within an hour we had given away the thirteen that remained from Saturday and had made a dent in the 100 copies I had brought along for the Sunday. By 1pm we had no DVDs left and I was wishing I brought along a lot more. I'd left another hundred at home because I'd run out of labels and I wasn't sure we'd be able to shift them...oops.

Meanwhile a couple of people who picked up the film on the Saturday came over to tell us what they thought. Even though I had been hoping this would happen I was suddenly incredibly nervous. What if they hated it? What if everyone hates it!?! They didn't hate it. They gave me some constructive criticism but on the whole really enjoyed it. Which is a good sign.

Overall I had a fantastic weekend and getting out there and putting my film in people's hands did feel like a more positive step than sending it off to festivals/competitions and waiting for a response. It was a bit of an expensive experiment (though I could easily have spent more entering a handful of film festivals) and I'm not sure I'd do it again without some way of making at least some of the money back, but that's something to think about for the future. For now I'm more interested in whether the people who have it like the film or not.

So 200 people now have copies of the film, which is loads but not enough. The next stage of my plan is to figure out a way to get people to see it online, without just sticking it up on YouTube. I'll let you know how that goes...

Jenny Ringo at the Entertainment Media Show this weekend...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:00:18 PDT

I had the idea back in July at the London Film and Comic Convention. A failed 'Britain's Got Talent' contestant had set up a dealer table and was selling autographs, and as we walked past Brother Pete said 'Anyone could set up a table. You could come here with Jenny Ringo.'

I'm not sure he was serious, but this Saturday and Sunday I'll be at the Entertainment Media Show at Earls Court giving away copies of Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw on DVD and trying to get people to sign up to our mailing list. This mailing list...

I have no idea whether this a good idea or not but I'll report back on how it goes. If anyone reading this is planning on going along this weekend I'll be there both days so please pop by and say hello. You can find full details on the website for the event here.

I will also be showing off our awesome new poster courtesy of Darren Berry (who also shot and edited the film!)...

Dream Festival...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 06:33:17 PDT

So for the first time ever I have a finished short film that I'm really happy with. It's not perfect, but it's better than anything I've made before and it's the first film that I feel really represents the kind of stories I want to tell and the type of characters those stories are about. So I ask myself, what now? What does one do with a short film?

Why enter it into festivals of course! Film festivals, where independent no-budget films are shown all over the world. Where influential rich industry people crowd into screening rooms to snatch up all that fresh, juicy new talent. The first step on the road to fame and fortune. Not really 'film' festivals at all - more like DREAM FESTIVALS.

When I screened the film at the beginning of the month a friend mentioned that the submission deadline for Cinecity - the Brighton Film Festival was coming up. Best of all it's free to enter for Brighton-based filmmakers (which I'm not technically but considering I used to be and the film was shot entirely in Brighton and Hove I figure I'm okay). Great, I pop a copy in the post and wait to hear back. And if it doesn't get accepted, fine - submitting it was no problem at all. And I think to myself 'I'll enter my film into every festival if it's this easy'.

Then I find out that the deadline for the London Short Film Festival is also on the horizon. They showed a couple of Brother Pete's films a few years ago. I'll definitely enter this one. The submission is via Withoutabox. That's fine, I set up an account ages ago in anticipation of this very moment. So I fill out the forms for my film and submit it. There's a fee for this one, but because I'm submitting early it's only £10. Yes, I am now paying someone to watch my film which seems a bit backwards, but I appreciate they need to cover their admin costs and it's not all that much really. No problem, I pay the fee, pop a DVD in the post and wait to hear back. And I think to myself 'I'll enter my film into a great many festivals if it only costs £10 a time'.

But two festivals isn't enough. Not if I'm going to get everyone to see my film and become rich and famous off the back of it. I need to enter more! So I start trawling through the other festivals on Withoutabox. And there it is, the festival I've been looking for. The British Horror Film Festival! My film is definitely British!! And it's a horror film!!! And the deadline is in 4 days!!!! I'm totally entering this one.

And then I get to the fee, which is £60. That's £60 for someone to watch my film and decide whether they like it or not. And if they don't like it I've paid £60 for someone to not screen my film. And, as a friend warned me on Facebook, they may not even tell me they don't like it.

Okay, maybe it's a one-off. Maybe there are some other festivals out there that I can afford to send my film to. I check almost every upcoming UK festival in the listings. The prices generally range between £30 and £60. If I'm going to enter as many festivals as possible, or even just the relevant ones, I'm going to run up a cost equal to or perhaps greater than the cost of making my film. And for all I know the film may not be accepted into any of them.

Before anyone tries to explain to me that film festivals cost money to run I should point out that I run a film festival. It's called MovieBar and takes place on the first Monday of every month at the Caroline of Brunswick in Brighton. It doesn't cost anything to run aside from the few quid we spend on daft quiz prizes. Mostly it just costs time. There are six of us involved, and we put the time in because we enjoy it. And because I think it's really important that these films get the chance to be screened for an audience. We don't charge for entry on the night, we don't charge for submitting films and we don't have any submission guidelines. We don't show everything and I'm really bad at getting back to people with a decision but we do watch everything that comes in and at least when we don't show something no one has lost any money over it.

From running MovieBar I've noticed there are two types of short films - those made with money and those made without money. Some people are lucky or talented or determined enough to get funding, some people decide to go ahead anyway with whatever they can scrape together. Those in the latter category are unlikely to have money left over to enter festivals and it becomes further proof that you need money to make it in the film industry. That principle works fine in the feature world - even if you make a film for nothing you need a distributor to put money in so you can get it to people. Ideally it then makes the money back. The festival circuit seems like the short film equivalent of distribution and marketing in the feature world. The difference is that short films do not and will not make any money back.

Despite all that, I hover over the 'Submit Now' button for the British Horror Film Festival for some time before finally deciding against it. And I think to myself 'There has to be a better way to get people to see short films...'

Jenny Ringo Plans for the Future...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:47:43 PDT

This is one of those blog posts where I'm not really going to say anything of anything substance because all I've got right now are vague ideas of things I want to do and I'm a bit wary of writing them down in case you all come back here a year from now and say 'What happened to all that cool stuff you were going to do?' And with a tear in my eye I remember the man I once was, before my hopes and dreams were stripped away by the killer space robot invasion of 2012...

Mostly I'm just filling space because I haven't posted for ages. Because I've been busy with plans I daren't talk about yet.

I can confirm I have started work on another Jenny Ringo script. Except it's not me doing the work this time. Someone else is writing it. It's looking really good so far.

I can't imagine too many people care about that right now, but that's the other thing I'm working on. Figuring out how to get people to see Jenny Ringo's first cinematic adventure so they'll care when I make another one. Without just putting it up on Youtube and hoping for the best. I'll let you know how that goes.

For now I recommend you check out The Organ Grinder - a weeky music podcast curated by Charlie Khan which regularly features some of my favourite bands, especially when I request them like what I did this week:

Short Film Diary - Week ???

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 17:08:31 PDT

I've lost count. I could go back and work it out but I've had a few drinks so I'm not sure it would be entirely accurate. I'll try to keep this brief.

Wednesday I went round to editor Darren's place to watch the finished version of the film and pick up a DVD copy. We went to the pub while his Mac was doing magic Mac things to get the film onto a DVD. We came second to last in a pub quiz. And when we got back the magic Mac things hadn't worked. I started to wonder if there was some curse preventing me from ever actually screening the film.

Saturday I tried again and this time came away with a copy of the film.

Saturday evening Andrea and I watched the finished film on a TV for the first time. I really couldn't tell whether it was any good or not but it was at least finished. Apart from a handful of glitches but for the sake of it being finished I'll take the hit on those.

And I just got back from screening it at MovieBar where it played to a packed room and was very well received. Surprisingly well, actually. I was a bit concerned as we were running late and it's quite a long film but everyone seemed to really enjoy it. The gags got lots of laughs, the serious bits were taken seriously, and the feedback I got afterwards was really positive.

I then did a rambling Q&A in which I tried to cover everything from the origin of the character back when I was in university up to seeing the finished film on Saturday. Luckily I had a lot of help from the various crew members who came along and from friend and fellow filmmaker Ross who did the Q part.

One thing I forgot to do was thank everyone involved. So thank you, everyone involved. We made an awesome film and I couldn't have done it without you.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do next. At one stage I had a plan to pitch it as a TV series. I also had a plan to use the internet and my fellow bloggers to build an audience. Somewhere along the way I had a plan to use the film to help me get an agent. Recently I had a plan to make another short with the same characters. I had a lot of plans, but they all seemed a long way off. Suddenly they're not so far away and I kind of need to start doing something about them.

So please check back for more updates. I'll be posting details of how you can see the film once I've figured that part out, and once we get to work on the next short I'll start up the regular film diaries again...

Jenny Ringo DEFINITELY screening tomorrow...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 10:27:49 PDT

I have a DVD of the finished film in my hand which I'll be keeping on my person at all times until the screening. I've got people coming with back-up copies just in case. We may even bring a laptop along to give us a further back-up option. There is no way this film isn't screening tomorrow. If you're anywhere near Brighton please come along to the Caroline of Brunswick for MovieBar where you will finally get to see Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw which myself and several others have been working on for well over a year. Hope to see you there.

It was a good week!

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 17:44:07 PDT

This is significant because it came off the back of a run of very very bad weeks. Here are three things what happened this week that made it a good week:

1) A script I wrote with Brother Pete was optioned this week and we were paid actual money! It's the second time I've been paid for writing this year, and the first time I've been paid for an option. I won't be quitting the day job anytime soon, and in fact I think will have spent most of it on celebrating getting paid by the end of the week, but it's a good start!

2) I just got back from seeing Jason Webley and Birdeatsbaby in Brighton. I've written about Birdeatsbaby before, they are really really good, you should check out their website and sign up to the mailing list and stuff. I can't believe they're not mega famous now, but when they are I will be one of those annoying people who talks about seeing them before they were mega famous in a frustratingly superior way. They've had a line-up change since I last saw them but they sound better than ever, and maybe even a bit punkier (which I'm not sure is an actual word) than before. Here's their new video:

Birdeatsbaby - Through Ten Walls from birdeatsbaby on Vimeo.

Jason Webley is awesome. I first saw him supporting Amanda Palmer a few years ago and he was awesome then too. I would link to the blog post I wrote back then, but I just read it back and it's a bit rubbish so I won't. It's mostly me saying things are awesome, so you can see how far I've moved on from there. Anyway, this is going to sound really annoying but you do kind of need to see Jason Webley live to appreciate his awesomeness. He gets the audience involved through a mixture of being nice so you feel obliged to join as to not hurt his feelings and at the same time not giving you the chance to think about it. And by the end of the show you've got your arms around strangers and you're shouting at the top of your voice and every else is doing the same thing and it's brilliant and it's what all gigs should be like but very rarely are. It's hard to capture that on video, but here he is playing in a quarry:

3) Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw is screening at MovieBar on Monday the 5th of September at the Caroline of Brunswick in Brighton. This didn't happen this week. I'm including it here because what did happen this week was that I met up with Darren who edited the film and we drank a lot and started making plans for another film. Kind of a sequel. But there's a problem with this plan. No one has seen the first film yet.

I started making Jenny Ringo over a year ago. I made it because I wanted to do something my own way. This screening was supposed to be the most important part of that, but because it took so long and I got involved with other things it became something I just had to finish and I kind of forgot about how much I wanted people to see it. And now I've remembered.

I will make the film available online eventually at which point I'll be bugging the world about watching it, but right now I'm only interested in bugging Brightonians and those nearby. Because we're only just finishing off the film and getting to this point has been quite hard work I don't have a trailer I can show you. You'll just have to take my word for it that you should see it. It's not perfect, I don't think I'm a great director, but I am a good writer and most of the people who worked on it were really good at what they did too so there's a lot that's really good. Also it's got magic. And monsters (at least one anyway). And a possibly ill-advised musical number. And I'll be doing a Q&A afterwards so you can watch me fumble awkwardly over fun questions like 'What was all that about then?'

You can find out more about it here along with details of the other films we're showing that night. You should totally come along. I'm probably not going to shut up about it until it's over.

Classic Horror in Brighton...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:06:08 PDT

So last night I went to a screening of House on Haunted Hill and Asylum at the Komedia in Brighton which had been organised by Scare Sarah and Cyberschizoid as part of their Classic Horror Campaign. I'd seen both films before but as always with these things I'd forgotten how good they are.

As with most William Castle films House on Haunted Hill is the perfect film for an audience as this is clearly how he intended them to be seen. Elisha Cook daring us to stay in the house for a night at the beginning of the film does a good job of drawing you in when you're watching with a bunch of other people. It's never particularly scary but some of the jumps are still effective, and ultimately I don't think Castle would mind that some of the more extreme moments provoke laughs rather than screams these days. The film is a lot of fun and I imagine that's exactly what he wanted it to be.

Asylum is a film that gets more awesome every time I see it. The opening story about the wrapped up body parts coming back to life is still really disturbing, and reminded me of some of the best aspects of Japanese horror films. But the final story about the little robot Herbert Lom is still by far the creepiest. As with all portmanteau films the weaker sections slow it down a bit, but generally this remains one of the best Amicus films and represents British horror at its best.

But by far the best thing about the evening was the audience. I've been to the cinema a lot over the past few weeks and at risk of sounding older than my years I'm really struggling to cope with cinema audiences these days. It seems pretty standard now that people won't really settle down to actually start watching the film until the first line of dialogue is spoken, and then if you're lucky the film will hold their attention for long enough to stop chatting until at least the halfway point. I just get the impression that the majority people don't really go to the cinema to watch films anymore, and that's what made last night brilliant. There was a respect for the films that I was really starting to doubt even existed anymore. Everyone there wanted to see the films and everyone, as far as I could tell, was having a good time.

Horror films were made to be screened to an audience, so if you like horror films and would like to see some really awesome horror films as they were meant to be seen I seriously recommend you check out and support the Classic Horror Campaign by checking out their website and going along to their screenings if possible. The next one is on Sunday 4th September at the Roxy in London where they're showing Horror Hospital and Black Sunday. And personally I think Black Sunday is one of the most beautiful black and white horror films ever produced so is definitely worth seeing on a big screen.

More revelations about, er...Hellraiser: Revelations...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:46:29 PDT

Something was bugging me about that last post and I've decided it was a pretty poor effort for my triumphant return to blogging. I really did want to blog about how the trailer for Hellraiser: Revelations made me angry because it looks terrible and I was going to write a whole rant about that. Then I backed off a bit because I didn't want to come off like a typical internet critic, complaining like the world is going to end because someone has made a film I don't like the look of. In the end I went for somewhere in between, which is probably worse.

After I posted it I watched the trailer again to check the link was working and realised I'd maybe been a little unfair. The spirit of the film seems to have more in common with the first film than the sequels which in a way should be celebrated, or least the intention should be celebrated if not the execution. The real tragedy isn't that someone made a bad film based on a really really good film (they did that with films 6, 7 & 8 in my opinion) it's that Dimension didn't care about the story/franchise enough to give the filmmakers enough time and money to make a decent film.

Then I remembered my university days and decided if I was going to be negative about this I should have some research to back it up rather than a gut reaction to the trailer. Here's what I found out.

Firstly I was heartened to hear that the man himself, Mr Clive Barker, wasn't so happy about the idea either:

http://www.horror-movies.ca/2011/08/clive-barker-new-hellraiser-movie/

Then I found a review of the film, which interestingly mentions the fact that Dimension decided on a sequel as a cheap way to retain the rights to the franchise so they can go ahead with their remake (when they eventually stop fucking around). Here's the review, which I think is actually fairly balanced and does point out that the filmmakers tried to do something in the spirit of the original...

http://cenobite.com/blog/?p=131

Here's Doug Bradley's opinion...

http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/39274/hellraiser-revelations-doug-bradley-speaks-out-will-not-be-returning

So Doug did turn it down, ultimately based on the shooting schedule and the budget. This makes sense. If you have a script, a shooting schedule and a budget you can make a good guess as to what the final product will look like and it clearly wasn't looking good. But fair play to him, he does wish them the best of luck with it.

Then I found the whole saga here...

http://www.clivebarker.info/newfilmsb.html

...which also has full details of the remake and the various directors attached which I fumbled through in my previous post.

But the part of that last link that struck a chord was the statement from Gary J Tunnicliffe about his script for Revelations. Partly I put myself in his position - if I'd been asked to write a Hellraiser film, would I turn it down based on the fact that there wasn't enough money? No, I'd try to do the best I could with it and hope people could see through the limitations. And he closes with these words...

'...keep an open mind, try not to judge us too harshly until you see the final result... fingers crossed, we might just surprise you.'

So yes, I still have reservations, I think what Dimension have done with it is a pretty terrible way to treat a much loved franchise and they now need to do something really special with this remake if they're going to get the fans back onside. But I will see the film and perhaps over-optimistically I am looking forward to being surprised.

I know I disapprove of people criticising films before they've been realeased, but...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 05:42:45 PDT

I'm usually pretty good at reserving judgement until I've seen the thing I'm actually judging. Usually. But I have to admit my heart sank when I saw this trailer...

Here's a bit of history (which I haven't bothered to research properly so it's history as I vaguely remember it). Dimension were trying to remake Hellraiser for ages. Hellraiser is one of my personal favourite films of all time. Still, I am an optimist and I knowing that people won't leave things alone if there's a possibility it can make them more money I could see the logic. The straight-to-video sequels had become progressively less interesting over the years (I really like number 5 but it's downhill from there). Mostly they were made up of unproduced horror scripts that they shoehorned the Pinhead character into so they could attach it to the franchise ('they' being Dimension). Again this makes good business sense, but it also resulted in some dull and fairly confusing films. So it needed to either be rebooted or stopped altogether. Personally I would've opted for stopping, but...

A couple of things actually got me quite excited about the remake. First Clive Barker signed up to write the script, specifically stating that if they were going to do it anyway he'd like to at least have some control over how they did it. Secondly, one of the directors attached at one stage was Pascal Laugier, director of Martyrs which is probably the best horror film I've seen in the last ten years. He was the perfect choice. What makes Martyrs great is that it's a horror film that's about something. It tells a proper story with themes and interesting characters and ultimately asks some tough questions. It's a film that's impossible to forget. Which is also what I loved about Hellraiser.

I don't think Laugier and Barker were ever attached to the project at the same time but in the end that didn't matter. They both ended up quitting. A couple more directors may have been announced but ultimately it looked like the remake was dead and maybe that was for the best. Then Dimension announced that they would be making another sequel instead. And that's where the trailer comes from.

I don't think it's necessarily fair to criticise the trailer before seeing the film and I'm sure everyone involved tried their hardest to make it work on what looks like a minuscule budget. The writer, Gary J. Tunnicliffe, has been involved with Hellraiser since the third film as part of the make-up effects crew and later became the principle make-up effects artist for the sequels. In a way he's the perfect person to write the script, and for all I know the script could be brilliant. It is at least a straight Hellraiser film and not an old script that they've reformatted for the franchise. Also, Tunnicliffe's self-produced Hellraiser fan film No More Souls is actually pretty good...

So despite the fact that there's clearly no money behind Hellraiser: Revelations can it really be all that bad? One obvious thing makes me think yes, it can be. There's no Doug Bradley. If you're still with me I'm assuming you know Doug Bradley's role in the films. While he got less and less screen time with each new film his performance was always spot on. There was something otherworldly about the way he played Pinhead. Hearing that voice always sent a shiver down my spine and it was creepy without ever being over-the-top. It's only now, seeing someone else perform that role, that I really appreciate how much Pinhead belonged to Doug Bradley. He was Pinhead. And now he's not anymore.

For all I know Doug could have turned the role down or maybe even wanted to do it but couldn't for whatever reason. But the thing that really disappoints me about this and about the way the remake fell apart is that whoever is making the decisions has a complete lack of understanding of the elements that made Hellraiser work. One of those elements is Doug Bradley. Ideally you shouldn't be making a Hellraiser film without him, only I appreciate films don't really work like that. But if you don't have him you rewrite it, you take Pinhead out, you do something else. In a way I would even have been happier if Gary Tunnicliffe had played the role again as he did in his short - that at least would've shown some respect to the franchise. In a way I would rather see a fan film than a half-hearted attempt to make some more money from optimistic idiots like me who'll pay to see anything with Hellraiser in the title.

Still, it exists, I'll probably see it anyway and maybe it won't even be that bad. But please don't let them make any more. I'm not sure my soul can take it.

I should at least thank them for giving me something to blog about. I've had a tough few weeks recently and I was considering giving up on the blog until I saw that trailer. Hopefully I'll have something more positive to write about next time.

Jenny Ringo is still screening...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 02:34:26 PDT

It's going to be a close call but the sound mix for Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw is very-nearly-almost-there and should be finished on Monday. Which means we've then got a week to make any last changes and get it onto a DVD in time for the screening on the 1st of August. That's the theory. I still have visions of someone rushing to the screening with a freshly burned DVD copy, desperately trying to get there in time to screen it before MovieBar finishes at 11, because that's usually how these things go.

Anyway, I'm determined to get as many people along to this one and not just because we're showing my film - it's the first MovieBar at the new venue and I want to make a good impression, which means bringing loads of people in. So if you are in Brighton on Monday 1st of August please come along to the Caroline of Brunswick at 7.30pm for MovieBar. All the films were showing that night are really good and there's a diverse mix so there should be something for everybody. Hope to see you there!

I've got a few half-written blog posts about stuff that's happened over the last few weeks but can't quite find the time to finish them due to BIG CHANGES going on in real life. However there is one thing I do need to mention and luckily Brother Pete covered it in way more detail than I ever could on his blog.

A few weeks ago I helped Pete film a music video for a Flogging Molly competition starring his girlfriend Charlotte and a puppet. It was hard work and came with the usual short film technical problems (Are we supposed to be filming this in widescreen? Oops, start again...) but after a mammoth effort on Pete's part he finally got it finished in time, only for the film to be rejected for not meeting the organiser's ridiculous technical requirements. As Pete points out, they wanted an HD, high quality, broadcastable video for free and we didn't have the equipment (i.e. the money) to pull it off. And when we all buy HD cameras and super-computers to run the editing software someone will decide that HD isn't good enough and we all need to be shooting in 3D. And somebody somewhere is making a lot of money from the crushed hopes and dreams of aspiring filmmakers...

But Pete has posted the video on YouTube so at least you can see it. And I also recommend reading his blog about making here.

Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw SCREENING!!!

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 15:16:05 PDT

So the short film I made last summer that I was blogging about every week until it dropped into post-production hell; the film that took just over a month to shoot and nearly a year to edit, add music and sort out the sound; the film based on a character I've been writing about since I was at university; the film that was my shot at making a script my way; the film produced by my wife and made with the help of some of my best friends; THAT FILM...will be screening on Monday 1st August at MovieBar.

If you've forgotten about it already then there are a few months worth of production diaries here.

Does this mean that it is finally finished? The wait is over? People will actually get to see a completed version of the film? Surely if there's an actual screening and I'm making a big deal about it then it would be logical to assume that the film is finished. Well...not exactly.

Last Friday I saw the film with it's current sound edit and to me it sounded about 70% finished. Apparently it is not quite 70% finished but more like 50% finished, but it is definitely closer to being finished than it has been. I have been assured that it will be done in time. I have been assured I won't look like an idiot if I announce it all over the internet because it's definitely going to be ready for the screening in August. So here I am, announcing it all over the internet. Well, mostly here and on the MovieBar page.

If you are in Brighton on the 1st of August please do come along to MovieBar at its new home in the Caroline of Brunswick. I will be there to interview myself about the film and we're showing lots of other cool films too - you can see the full line-up here.

If you can't make it watch this space - there will be more screenings and eventually everyone will be able to see it somehow...

All you need is a bloke with a sniper rifle...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:57:48 PDT

So last week I was ill with a cold meaning I had two days off work to watch films. One of those films was The Losers, which I enjoyed and is better than The A-Team film. But it did occur to me that the only really essential member of the team was the bloke with the sniper rifle who doesn't say much. Pretty much every mission ends with him taking out the main target or saving everyone else or being generally awesome at the last minute. In fact, everything they accomplish in the film could've been achieved with the sniper dude and maybe one other guy to do some running around. Two guys could've done the work of the six characters they have in the film. Now I could use this as an example of poor characterisation in the script - funnily enough the character do all have their own story arcs and are generally quite well developed, they just forgot to give them any real purpose in the plot itself. Or I could try to argue that this was done on purpose, as a comment on over-population and rising unemployment resulting in jobs being created when they are not necessarily required. But I'll mostly likely just leave it at that...

I have been busy! I have been helping Brother Pete make a film with a puppet:

Not quite like that. He blogged about it briefly here and I'm sure he will provide further details soon.

I have also been helping to run the Brighton Filmmakers Coalition. If you are in Brighton and want to find out more we meet every Sunday at the Marwood in Brighton at 6pm. People come along and talk about what they're working on and what they need, all of which I found incredibly useful when I was making Jenny Ringo.

Speaking of Jenny Ringo, there's a rumour that the sound design/editing will be finished this weekend. I have heard such rumours before but hopefully this time they will turn out to be true.

Rich Badley has posted a rundown of the June MovieBar here. He kindly didn't mention the fact that the 'technical gremlins' were actually a result of Brother Pete and I getting sidetracked by using the projector to play Resident Evil 5 on a massive screen, instead of testing the films like we were supposed to be doing. Oops.

The Italian Blog - Part 1...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Mon, 30 May 2011 04:16:47 PDT

Back in April a director I've been working with took me to Morbegno in northern Italy to show me locations for a film he wants me to write. I kept a diary while I was there, just haven't had the time to write it up until now...

Monday 11th April 2011

It's 5.30am and I'm at Gatwick airport about to take a flight to Milan. It's a journey that actually started around 9 years ago when I replied to an ad in Shooting People from a director looking for a screenwriter. It still feels weird using real names of people I'm going to be talking about in great detail so for now I'll call him Jeff...Jeff Director. Jeff had come out of film school with a very well shot horror short that he wanted to adapt into a feature. I had just come out of university with a scriptwriting MA and was starting to adjust to the fact that the highly paid job offers weren't flooding in as a result of my newly gained qualification. I also hadn't written anything in months. I had an office job (the first of many) and was struggling to fit writing around the 9-5 schedule. I'd been writing on a full-time basis for a year during the MA, mostly in the daytime. I had yet to make the transition to Writer by Night. Yes, this is also a bit of an origin story.

Jeff's film was kind of Rosemary's Baby without the baby. An out of work actor moves into an apartment block and discovers the residents are all part of a Satanic cult. It was well shot and referenced a lot of films I loved. So I agreed to do it and went ahead with a draft.

Working on that script taught me how to manage writing with a day job - basically scrap any romantic notion of WRITING and just go ahead and do it, wherever and whenever you can. Having a deadline and someone to write for made that possible. It was a terrible script but it had its moments and Jeff liked it. When we met for the first time in London I found that he'd actually commissioned 3 writers from those who responded to the Shooting People ad. They'd all written a version of the script. I felt bad for the other writers who had put the same amount of work in for nothing - an early indicator of how writers are generally regarded as disposable in this industry. But at the time I was just glad he liked mine more than the others.

I worked on the script a bit more and met Jeff a couple more times to discuss it. Later I started working on another film for him - a biopic about two fictional actresses; a kind of reworking of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? At some point a producer got involved, Mark. Mark is a whole other story. Jeff had a third project, a semi-autobiographical piece he'd written himself, that Mark wanted to produce. They asked me to rewrite it and the idea was that after this one they would make the other two. Mark passed some other work my way - he had the rights to a couple of books by infamous underworld figures that he wanted me to adapt. Like his work on Jeff's projects, these projects would eventually be abandoned. But I did get a couple of nights out drinking in London at Mark's expense so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

I gave up on Mark before Jeff did. He was someone who wanted to try everything and film producing was a passing phase; a phase I sensed was coming to an end because things hadn't immediately gone his way. By the end he had failed to accomplish anything at all towards getting any of the films made. I have met many more producers like Mark since.

Jeff had a couple more projects he wanted to work on and I feigned interest, but I was making new contacts by then and I felt I'd put more than enough time in for free. I let those last few projects go and moved on.

The next time I heard from Jeff was when Ten Dead Men had been released. I was e-mailing everyone in my contacts list to tell them about it - half 'please support my film and British indie film in general by buying my DVD' and half 'Look what I did!'. Jeff replied and said he'd been working on a feature in Italy, where his parents were from. He mentioned another project he was thinking of doing and asked if I had any ideas. I said I'd think about it, which was my polite way of saying I wasn't interested.

Then last October Jeff got in touch again. His feature had been finished and got a release in Italy. He wanted to do the same again, only he hadn't been happy with the script of his previous film so he wanted a different writer. I agreed to meet to talk about it, although I was sceptical. This was, after all, just a few months before I decided never to work for free again and I was already thinking along those lines.

Jenny Ringo update...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sat, 28 May 2011 04:38:21 PDT

This has been a long time coming. I reached a point where I stopped posting updates because I would've just been listing the number of phone calls I'd made that week to get things moving. Then I promised to do more video diaries but I got busy with writing and couldn't really justify spending three hours on a Saturday filming, editing then uploading a daft video when I was being paid for actual work. But I've made a bit of progress over the last few weeks and hopefully I can say we're close to finishing without having to retract that statement in the next post.

Warning! Incoming tenuous train analogy!

So every morning I get a train from Worthing to Brighton which involves changing trains at Hove. A few weeks ago there were some problems on the line and the connecting train from Hove was delayed. Hove is about 25 minutes walk from where I work and about 10-15 minutes on a bus. But it's only 5 minutes away by train and the next train was only delayed by a couple of minutes. So the most sensible option appeared to be to wait for the train. Only when the couple of minutes was up the train was then delayed by a further 2 minutes. This continued to happen and the whole time I'm thinking maybe I should walk or get a bus. In the end I waited for the train and ended up being half an hour late. If I'd known the train was going to be delayed by that much when I'd arrived then I would've walked or taken a bus, therefore not being as late. But I didn't know because the train was perpetually 2 minutes away.

Still with me? That's what the last few months of working on my short film have been like. Since January it has seemed like we've been perpetually a couple of weeks away from finishing. But things come up, people get busy, and it gets put off. I know what it's like working on creative projects for free. Those projects will always be the ones that get put to the back of the queue when paid work comes up. Back in March I told a production company who weren't paying me I would get a rewrite finished by the end of that month, but then I got a paid assignment and ended up only finishing the unpaid rewrite last week. Other things get in the way too - personal problems, family crises, medical issues; things that you would maybe work through if you were being paid but put a definite stop to unpaid work. Without getting into specifics, that's why it's taken so long.

Getting back to my train analogy, had I known it was going to take this long back in August I would have looked at other, possibly less convenient options. I don't think walking was ever an option - this would be the equivalent of me buying my own Mac, learning how to use Final Cut and doing the whole thing myself which would a) take ten times as long b) not be anywhere near as good and c) be unfeasibly expensive. That said, I certainly wouldn't attempt something like this again without being able to review the footage on my own system. One of the things that's made this whole process incredibly difficult for me is not being able to see the film or tinker with it myself. Maybe it wouldn't have helped, but at the moment it doesn't feel like it really belongs to me and I would've like to have felt like I at least had a little more control.

I could have taken a bus. I knew other people who could help and was going to use someone else initially for the editing, but working with them would have been a lot less convenient in terms of location. I've always had the option of looking for other people as the process has slowed down but the idea of transferring all the files and explaining what I want to someone I've maybe never met before seems like it would take forever. Plus I've seen people try this before and what inevitably happens is that the new person hates what the first person did so suggests changing the whole thing, stressing that it will only take a couple of weeks. 6 months later and you're in the same position again.

It's not taken forever really. A friend recently finished a film of similar length and scope which took two years to be completed. I know shorts that have taken longer. We're only just past the 1 year mark, but even then that's 1 year since I decided to start making it. We didn't start filming until late June. But it feels like it's taken a long time. I think this is partly because of the momentum we had at the beginning. A film shoot always carries its own momentum - there are always reasons to get it done quickly, like the changing weather, or locations that are only available for a short time, or actors having to go do other things. But for a few months at least we managed to carry that momentum through to post-production. The film was edited in record time and I honestly thought at that stage we were only a week or two away from completion. Then people started to get busy, meetings with the key crew became more sporadic and most of my work on the film became about phoning people constantly to sort out the next meeting. Which gets a bit repetitive after a while.

The other thing that makes it seem to me like it's taken forever is the projects that have been started and finished since I started this one. Mark Moynihan started blogging about his film Little Things back in August 2010 and finished the film in March 2011 (you can watch it here). Perhaps more ridiculously, another friend started shooting an actual feature while I was filming the short and managed to have the film finished for Cannes. Features are a bit different though, especially when there's money behind them. There's a definite deadline with features, hence the saying that films are never finished, just abandoned.

On a related sidenote, I've recently been working my way through the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels (which wasn't a particularly satisfying use of my time) and found a really interesting documentary on the DVD for the third film. The best DVD extras are the ones where films have gone wrong and those responsible are honest about why it went wrong. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 is not a good film, and arguably would never have been a good film even if it had gone to plan, but the documentary did make me feel for the director Jeff Burr. He wanted his own way and he wanted to do something a bit different but every available creative whim was blocked by the executive producers who wanted the film to come out on time, within budget and with an 'R' rating. And yes these things are all reasonable requests, but they hired a director who wanted to experiment then denied him the opportunity. Plus Burr comes across as a genuinely nice bloke while the executive producer on the doc seems like Satan himself. Ultimately Burr was fired, only to be re-hired when they couldn't find anyone to finish the film.

This is one of the good things about short films. There is room to experiment. There is no real pressure. There aren't usually any serious disagreements. But at the same time with no definite end point (other than me saying when I want it finished by) you can get into situations like this where the process is ongoing for longer than seems necessary.

So to get to the point, earlier this week I did manage to meet up with the sound designer and sorted out where we are. Everything is done apart from recording around 70 sound effects which then need to be edited into the soundtrack. That sounds like a lot but most of them are small domestic things that should be pretty easy to record. We've agreed a deadline of mid-June. After that everything just needs to be synced-up to the film and we should be actually finished, ideally by the end of June. Unfortunately I have now reached the stage where if someone suggests some worthwhile but time-consuming tweak that will improve something that 90% of people won't even notice I'm saying no. I really just want to get it finished now and I am really hoping I don't have to write another post like this in the next couple of months.

Feed the Birds...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sat, 14 May 2011 03:58:23 PDT

...is a forum for screenwriters set up by Piers Beckley back in February 2010. You can find it here. There are lots of screenwriting forums/facebook groups/twitter cults (should that be 'trends' or something?) around, but I find them all a bit overwhelming. They usually consist of a huge number of writers talking about what great work they are doing and occasionally telling everyone else how to write. Sometimes someone will ask a question like 'Can I use camera directions in the script?' and will be treated to a flurry of patronising responses.

Feed the Birds feels a lot more civilised than that. It feels like a few writers kicking back after a hard day of writing to chat about whether certain writing schemes and opportunities are worthwhile, their concerns with an upcoming meeting, even what they saw on TV last night. Yes, these are things discussed on other forums but here it feels a lot more intimate, much less imposing and has a collaborative spirit rather than a ruthlessly competitive one.

Only it's a bit too intimate at the moment. There are over 100 members but only a handful of those seem to be active on the site. I have to admit I'm somewhat guilty here myself, having chosen to observe the chatter on the site from a distance without actually participating for some time. But I've started to appreciate the need for forums like this one, not to get advice or to promote my own work, but to feel part of a wider community in what is generally a very lonely business.

Piers recently hinted that he may close the forum due to a lack of activity. I think this would be a mistake, because in a few months someone else (possibly me) will come along and say 'You know what the internet really needs? A new screenwriting forum!'

People are forever coming up with new things on the internet, but sometimes I think we should just make better use of what we already have.

So if you are a writer or interested in writing then I seriously recommend you sign up to Feed the Birds. I'll see you there.

The Bishop of Battle...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sat, 07 May 2011 17:01:32 PDT

My Mass Effect addiction culminated in me scouring the galaxy to find one remaining rare item to complete a side-mission that had no bearing on the actual plot of the game. And as I punched the air in celebration of finally achieving nothing of any real importance I was reminded of this sequence from the 1983 film Nightmares in which Emilio Estevez has a similar problem. Someone has helpfully posted the whole thing on YouTube so you can watch it below. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I was surprised to find that despite it looking very 80s the story hasn't dated too badly. For the first half it kind of plays like an educational video on the dangers of over-indulgence in video games before it goes crazy with some pretty awesome Tron-esque effects. I never saw the rest of the film (I was always told this was the best story so never bothered) but I'm kind of curious now.

Some stuff what people I know are doing...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Thu, 05 May 2011 12:56:48 PDT

First of all if you are involved in any kind of creative pursuit at all you should watch this immediately...

Ira Glass = awesome. For more awesomeness you should listen to This American Life. Especially if you're a writer.

So MovieBar was on Monday and Rich Badley has posted the write-up on the website here along with a few of the films and some photos of me in a hat talking to people who aren't wearing hats:

With the exception of a few glitches during the clip from Cyborg everything ran pretty smoothly. The pub even has a better sound system now so the speakers don't cut out anymore which is a huge improvement. It was a quiet one due to the bank holiday but there were still about 20 people in total which is enough to justify doing it outside of my living room (it's not very entrepreneurial of me but secretly I prefer doing it for 20 people. Lord Sugar would not be impressed). This did make the unintentionally hilarious post-apocalyptic trailers we screened seem rather self-indulgent but they added some humour to a night of predominantly serious films. Plus I like the juxtaposition of showing these trailers for epic ridiculous exploitation films against thought-provoking, micro-budget short films that are often on the whole much better-produced. It's all art at the end of the day, but I like to remind everyone that sometimes art features robots and dinosaurs.

I've forgotten what my point was, but on the subject of robots and dinosaurs I also spent an excellent evening with the MovieBar crew watching a double-bill of Yor, the Hunter from the Future and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn projected onto my living room wall. Yor was excellent and everything you would want from a film that features robots and dinosaurs. Metalstorm was not good. It was a low budget take on 80s 3D classic Spacehunter: Aventures in the Forbidden Zone - which is a good film. Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn was also shot in 3D but the filmmakers used this technology to strap a camera to the front of a tiny car to film lots of desert roads and to have inexplicable close-ups of trees. The hero spent most of his time squashed into the cockpit of the tiny future car with Tim Thomerson, occasionally stopping to have surreal naked dreams. And Jared-Syn wasn't even destructed. The best thing about that film was definitely the trailer:

So onto cool people doing cool stuff - Simon Messingham's play Disco is on at the Fringe Festival in Brighton next week. Simon has been blogging about the production occasionally here. Also my wife is stage managing so it will be an incredibly slick production with awesome props. It's on at the Funky Fish on the 11th, 12th and 13th next week, then the 19th and 20th the following week. You can find further details and buy tickets here.

Also next week actor and MovieBar regular Nick Bartlett will be playing the title character in a stage version of Get Carter which will be on at The Hove Centre (at Hove Town Hall) on the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

I am still writing the dead ninja script. Normal service will resume once that's done. Possibly. I am also addicted to Mass Effect so normal service may need to wait until the window between me finishing the first game and getting hold of the second one...

Placeholder blog...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 05:44:39 PDT

At the moment there are loads of thing I want to blog about but don't really have time. I should really blog about why Jenny Ringo is taking so long, but am kind of hoping it will be finished before I have to. I have a couple of overdue bad scriptwriting experiences to get off my chest that I hope I can write in an amusing way (rather than coming off extremely bitter like I usually do). I have a note-book full of stuff about Italy. I would really like to blog about games more, particularly about why Vito Scaletta is one of the best video game characters ever created from a narrative perspective. I don't really have time for any of that right now, so instead this is a kind of 'I'm still here' plus 'Here are a couple of things I would mention at the end of a blog about something else' post.

It's MovieBar on Monday and Brother Pete has written about what we'll be showing here. Please come along if you're in Brighton and interested in seeing some awesome shorts and meeting cool filmmaking-type people - I could do with getting a good crowd for the next couple of events. Then there will be big changes and announcements and stuff. Also, if you're not Brighton-based but are interested in short films you should check out the website anyway as Rich Badley has been posting the details of past events along with the actual films themselves where available.

Also, Ross Boyask has started a blog about Warrioress, the fantasy/action film he has been working on for the last few years (which I did a bit of writing on). Check out the blog here - I imagine there will be some pretty interesting stories on the way!

I am spending the weekend writing about dead ninjas. If I get that finished then maybe I'll blog about some of that other stuff next week...

The best thing to do on a sunny day...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 01:58:47 PDT

...is sit in a darkened room with a beer and a bunch of horror fans watching a classic horror double-bill.

This was the screening of Night of the Demon and Vampire Circus arranged by Scare Sarah and Cyberschizoid as part of their Classic Horror Campaign. It was an awesome event at an excellent venue full of fantastic people and I hope they do more of them. Check out their trailer:

So in my last post I was raving about how good Night of the Demon is, when I actually hadn't seen it for a few years. It was even better than I remembered. I think next to The Haunting it's one of the few examples of a near perfect horror film. Every scene has moments of pure genius, including the seance scene which I'd completely forgotten about - it's a perfect mix of humour and scares and sums up everything the film is about. Here's the scene I'm talking about (if you skip to about 1.30 that's where the awesomeness kicks off):

It also struck me that despite the appearance of a gigantic demon, the film can still be read as a study on the power of belief as well as a supernatural horror film. There's nothing to say the supernatural events in the film are actually happening outside what the subject has been made to believe is happening and the film walks this thin line between reality and the paranormal rather well.

My only criticism is that Peggy Cummins doesn't have enough to do, but for me she'll always be Annie Laurie Starr so I can never quite see her as the damsel in distress.

Vampire Circus is a quirky and odd vampire film with some of the most innovative vampire-killing techniques I've ever seen on film:

There is lots of awesome hair, a bizarre dance routine and a dwarf clown who rips his own face off.

On a side note I met some very cool people at the screening including horror author A.M Esmonde who has also talked about the event on his blog. Check out the trailer for Terminus, a short film he produced based on characters from his books:

And on a non-horror note, I also got chatting to his brother Wayne who plays guitar with Welsh rock band V0id. I've since been listening to their latest album Zer0 and it's pretty awesome - they're kind of like Feeder but a bit rockier.

In other news I've been having various Jenny Ringo meetings/conversations/drinking sessions recently and will post a full update soon. It's looking like we're getting very close to being finished, although there may still be quite a bit of work to do on the sound.

Now I'm spending the rest of the bank holiday weekend finishing the other rewrite I was supposed to do in March and not playing Bioshock. And if I get time I'll start writing up the epic blog about my trip to Italy a couple of weeks ago...

Classic Horror Campaign...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 15:29:33 PDT

Fellow bloggers Cyberschizoid and Scare Sarah have been running a campaign to build awareness of classic horror films with the aim of bringing those films back into favour. Specifically they hope to convince BBC to restore their late-night classic-horror double bill. To help promote their cause they have arranged a screening of their own double bill of classic horror films - Night of the Demon and Vampire Circus. The screening takes place at the Roxy Bar And Screen, 128-132 Borough High Street, London at 3pm on Friday 22nd and costs a very reasonable £5. You can find more details here.

Night of the Demon is without doubt one of the greatest horror films ever made. It's creepy, it deals with black magic in a way that's effective and believable, the cast are awesome (including Peggy Cummins from my favourite film of all time Gun Crazy) and it's based on a MR James story. If you haven't seen it you should definitely come to the screening, because then you also get to see it with a group of like-minded horror fans which is always fun.

As for the campaign in general, I think anything we can do to raise awareness of classic cinema is important. When I was a student it felt like classic films were everywhere. Half of my degree was studying film so it was always there and always important. When I was being a proper student i.e. sitting on the sofa during all day smoking and drinking too much in an effort to cure my hangover from the night before there would always be some classic or other on TV to help take my mind off numerous existential crises. But at the moment I'm long out of university and don't have a TV aerial and while my Lovefilm list is dotted with films I feel I should've seen but never have those classic movies just don't seem as big a part of the world at large anymore. What I mean is, I rarely get into conversations at work or even with my filmmaking peers about old cinema. Sometimes someone might mention something from the 70s but generally that's about as far back as people go.

And then occasionally I meet a real connoisseur of classic cinema and am made to realise how few of the great films I've actually seen. Or I see something like Rififi (a recent example I saw for the first time recently) or Roman Holiday (which I watched again yesterday and always forget just how good it is) and I rave about them to everyone I meet like they're the hot new films that only came out last week. I'm going off topic here a bit, but my point is there are great treasures in the history of cinema and anything that celebrates that, like the Classic Horror Campaign, deserves to be supported. Which you can do by signing their petition and going along to their screening next week.

THE HARDEST SCRIPT I HAVE EVER WORKED ON...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 06:31:02 PDT

So I'm at the end of a ridiculously busy month. Except I'm not, I'm at the beginning of the month after the ridiculously busy month by which time everything was supposed to be finished. It isn't. I've still got a couple of script polishes to finish. And I need to finish (well, really I need to properly start) the other rewrite I was supposed to be doing last month.

The biggest reason things didn't go to plan was that the script I got paid to rewrite turned out to be THE MOST DIFFICULT SCRIPT I HAVE EVER WORKED ON. Here's what happened. I was approached to fix the dialogue as English isn't the first language of the director who wrote the original script. It was written in English, just the grammar and sentence structure was off in places. Fine, that should be easy. Only when I read the script I noticed a few problems. Well, I'll be honest - I found the script a real struggle to get through. The first Act was okay, but after that it just kind of meandered towards the end. It was just a bunch of scenes. At one point when I got into rewriting it I was really struggling to work out the plot so I wrote a breakdown of the scenes in the original draft and wrote down exactly how the plot moved forward in each scene. It hardly moved at all. It almost seemed to be going backwards. By the 3rd Act everyone was the same as they were at the beginning and nothing had really changed. So I suggested some fixes.

What started as just fixing the dialogue turned into an epic rewrite. The first Act was deceptively easy. I could use a lot of the original material and it was just a case of reordering some scenes, adding a few new ones and rewriting the dialogue. But the second Act needed a complete overhaul, and the more I changed the more original material I had to write. By the third Act the original script became irrelevant - all my characters were in different places now. I was writing a completely new 25-30 pages. It was slow progress, and I spent at least a week going back over what I'd already written and trying to figure out where to go. The issue was I hadn't planned anything. Usually I'd have the whole script and structure outlined, but I'd been relying on the original script to do that for me. Which it couldn't do because I'd changed everything. So I went back to the drawing board, planned it all out, went back and changed bits earlier on to make my newly planned 3rd Act work.

I finished it at around 2am Friday morning - the second time last week I'd been up that late writing on a school night, which might explain why my driving lesson after work mostly involved me driving onto the pavement. Now I'm concerned that what I've produced is a completely difference script and not at all what I was asked to do. I know it's 100 times better and I hope that will be obvious, but given the director had trouble seeing the problems with the original draft I think convincing everyone else this is the better version may take some perseverance But I'll worry about that next week.

MovieBar was last Monday and Rich Badley has done a full write-up with links to all the films here.

This was the third one I've run and a bit of an odd one this time. On the one hand it was fantastic - we showed some great films and had brilliant guests. I got to catch up with some old friends and met Jobbing Scriptwriter himself Phill Barron who wrote some very nice things about the event on his blog. At the same time we were sharing the pub with some very loud groups of people who refused to keep quiet which made it a little frustrating. I think it may be time we found another venue, which seems like rather a lot of effort but if anyone knows of anywhere in Brighton that might be suitable please let me know. It needs to be a pub, otherwise it will stop being MovieBar and just becomes Movie, which was the name of a surreal detective game on the Spectrum with bouncing dogs:

Ideally we need somewhere that either has a separate screening room or is somewhere we can take over completely. I have a meeting with one place next week but I could do with a few options.

On a random note, Brother Pete has written a very well thought-out review of universally hated film Sucker Punch here. I haven't seen it so can't comment, but I'm all in favour of positve reviews and especially those that rally against the general opinion of the entire internet.

And while I'm mentioning random things I've been listening to Creeping Alopecia by Laura Moody a lot since I heard it a couple of weeks ago. It's a perfect mix of awesomeness and insanity and I love it:

Next week I'm going to Italy to meet a director of another project I'm working on. He wants to show me some locations. I am excited and also slightly apprehensive as it may all be a bit weird. I will keep a diary and post it here.

The Film I Always Go Back To: Queen of the Damned

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:48:27 PDT

I got an invite to a blogathon organised by Kid In The Front Row. The subject was a film I keep going back to (i.e. a film that isn't necessarily my favourite and could even be pretty bad but that I keep watching regardless). Being about a week away from finishing one of the two rewrites I said I'd have done by the end of March I decided there was no way I'd have time to write about a film that's not very good. But then I started writing it in my head anyway so here goes. When you're done reading this one head over to Kid In The Front Row to read his post on You've got Mail and to check out the films everyone else chose - I imagine there will be quite an interesting selection!

The Film I Always Go Back To: Queen of the Damned

Queen of the Damned is not a good film. In fact it's pretty terrible. You don't have to convince me, I'm not going to argue that it's an underrated classic because it really isn't. Part of the reason I like it so much is because of how much I disliked it when I first saw it. I was at university in Norwich. Posters for Queen of the Damned were everywhere but if you had missed the posters you would know about it anyway due to the tragic death of Aaliyah who played the Queen of the title. And if you had an interest in the increasingly popular but annoyingly named nu-metal genre you would have seen the music video for Cold by Static-X a hundred times:

Not through choice, it was just that MTV2 seemed to be playing it on a loop. I was a huge fan of the increasingly popular but annoyingly named nu-metal genre and had therefore been reading about the film and the Jonathan Davis soundtrack for months. I should also point out I was not a fan of Anne Rice, hadn't particularly enjoyed Interview with the Vampire and had no interest in reading the source material (I did eventually read Queen of the Damned out of curiosity - the film was better). Mostly I was interested because of the music.

So I took my future wife to see the film. We hadn't been together that long and were still figuring each other out. We watched the film, sat through the credits, left the cinema in silence. Neither of us dared say what we thought in case the other really liked it. I can't remember how it started, I think there may have been some cautionary testing of opinion; statements like 'that was interesting' and 'hmm...yes...well'. I probably talked about how the music was good in an attempt to justify making her sit through it. But at some point we realised neither of us were particularly impressed and we spent the next few hours discussing every ridiculous moment and plothole. I think we talked about that film more than we've talked about anything we've seen since. We bonded over its awfulness. In a way it was the perfect date movie. But my fascination with this film didn't end there.

Queen of the Damned became the first film I owned on DVD. My first DVD ever. It came in one of those cardboard cases they don't use anymore. I didn't even have a DVD player, but I had briefly moved in with my parents again after university so could watch it on theirs. It was bought partly as a joke because I thought the director's commentary would be funny. It wasn't particularly - just Michael Rymer talking about the differences between the film and the book. It was actually based on two books meaning a fair amount of adaptation took place resulting in a pretty boring commentary. Still, I owned it now. Not that I would ever watch it again...

The first time I rewatched Queen of the Damned was when I was living on my own in Chelmsford. I think I had just come in from a Friday night out and decided to watch a film. At that time of night and with that much beer in me the Fukasaku box-set I was working my way through didn't quite appeal so I looked elsewhere. What would be the perfect film to watch drunk on a Friday night? Queen of the Damned, obviously. I've probably done the same thing about five or six times since then. It's become a film I'll always have time for. I don't do much repeat viewing these days - I have several shelves full of unwatched DVDs so I'll generally choose something new. But if my eye catches Queen of the Damned as I'm scanning the shelves I will always, just for a moment, consider watching it again. I could watch it right now.

So why do I find a film that I readily admit is terrible so appealing? I think it's a few things. Partly I think it's the intention. I think the idea of a vampire rock band is awesome, but the Anne Rice mythology just complicates it and makes it messy. If it had simply been the vampire rock band story it may have worked, but the epic back story, the community of vampires and even the Queen of the Damned herself - none of that really works. But the idea was good and the filmmakers had good intentions.

I also think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it reminds me of my wife and of an unintentional milestone in our relationship. Thinking about it a lot of the times I've ended up watching it have been when she's been away. But there's another reason too, and here's where I do exactly the same thing I did on the night we first saw it and try to use the music as justification.

As mentioned above I was a huge nu-metal fan. At the time a lot of other people were too. I got into it a bit late really - I was in my early 20s and most of the fans tended to be in their mid-to-late teens; my younger brother's generation. Those few years make all the difference at that age. And one of the reasons I eventually stopped going to nu-metal gigs was because the average age in the room started to make me feel like an old man at the age of 25. My generation was supposed to like proper metal - Metallica and Guns n Roses and Slayer. Twiddly guitar solos that went on forever. Or proper goth stuff like Type O Negative and Sisters of Mercy. This new stuff was supposed to bother me like it bothered most metal fans my age. It was silly and childish and featured a lot of angry white men jumping around and occasionally rapping. But it didn't bother me. I embraced it. I had found my punk.

I haven't done what most metal/goth fans do which is to denounce everything they ever liked in their younger years when they hit 30. I still remember the reasons I liked the music and have retained an appreciation of most of it. I still genuinely believe, as I have said before, that the first Slipknot album is an avant-garde masterpiece. It's an album of noise and anger. It's nonsensical and really tough to listen to. It's the best kind of art - the kind that doesn't have anything for you to hold onto, you just have to experience it and see how it makes you feel (to this day I still don't understand how Slipknot became so popular with very young kids, but I guess it was because they wore silly hats). I felt the same way about Slipknot as I did about Velvet Underground and The Residents. Other bands had a similar aesthetic - Glassjaw, System of a Down, odd Korn tracks if not whole albums. I found them impenetrable but also fascinating and inspiring.

Queen of the Damned was a celebration of some of the things I loved about nu-metal. It didn't really work because it got a bit confused in the process. The film naturally used goth iconography and characters (done badly - I've yet to see a realistic goth character in a film, but at least here they weren't used as something to make fun of) but that didn't fit the nu-metal soundtrack, or the fact that Lestat joined a nu-metal band. The one thing that did fit was having Jonathan Davis sing the songs. I wasn't a huge Korn fan, but there is something undeniably otherworldly about Davis' vocals that perfectly suited the character. If a centuries old vampire joined a band it seemed to make sense that he would sound like Jonathan Davis. Nu-metal also seemed to form part of the characters and story of the film. The idea that Lestat had always been a musician and that his music was the result of a variety of influences from all over the world works as an analogy of the origins of nu-metal. You could even argue that the central relationship in the film between Stuart Townsend/Jonathan Davis and Aaliyah represents the amalgamation of metal and hip hop that characterised most nu-metal bands.

But there was another parallel with nu-metal too. Around the same time that the film was released the popularity of nu-metal had started to shift into the mainstream. I didn't really know anyone who shared the same passion for the music, I just tended to drag understanding friends to see bands they'd never heard of and watch from the back as I disappeared into a mosh pit. The only awareness I had of its popularity was through music magazines and the odd occasion I went to metal clubs with my brother and his friends. And the impression I was getting from the magazines was that a major backlash had been brewing from 'true' metal fans. Older metal bands were coming out of the woodwork and being celebrated for their oldschool simplicity. Kerrang printed a poster of a grave stone with nu-metal inscribed on it, predicting the death of the genre by the end of the year. New bands that sounded like old bands were becoming the 'in' thing. Even a band as ridiculous as The Darkness was taken seriously for a moment, treated as the saviour of modern metal. This was happening outside the metal world too, with bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes making popular music sound like someone had raided my dad's record collection (and I mean that in the best possible way - my dad had an awesome record collection).

The backlash was unleashed the moment that nu-metal entered the mainstream. Two bands really brought this about - Papa Roach and Linkin Park. Both bands had top ten hits in the UK. Suddenly everyone liked nu-metal. My flatmates who had made mocking my taste in music a regular pastime were now borrowing cds. Kids were wearing Slipknot t-shirts. Obscure US bands I loved were now popular enough to play UK venues and festivals. It didn't last, and the damage it caused to the nu-metal genre was irreparable.

The hardcore old-school metal fans sneered at the sudden rise and fall of nu-metal, like they had been proved right and nu-metal had always been manufactured throwaway pop. The music press adopted the same policy, and after a while the metal clubs followed. I bought less music, went to fewer gigs and stopped going to clubs altogether (it's worth pointing out at this stage that the nu-metal backlash was, as far as I'm aware, predomininently a British phemenonmen, which is perhaps why most of the bands are still around today). As we often do, we just simply decided one day that we were above it all.

To bring this back on topic, I think there's a parallel between what happened to nu-metal and the narrative of Queen of the Damned. Lestat challenges the underground vampire society by coming out; revealing their existence to the world. He is attacked and publicly torn apart for his efforts. In the real world bands like Linkin Park and Papa Roach revealed the existence of nu-metal to the world at large and, in the UK anyway, were subsequently torn apart by their peers. For me, I think that's what Queen of the Damned is really about.

None of this really makes Queen of the Damned a better film, but it does go someway to explaining why I feel such a connection to it. It reminds me of a time when I was really excited by music, of bouncing around in mosh pits, of watching MTV2 for a whole afternoon because they were only playing stuff I liked, of buying music magazines every week and spending my meagre wages from part time jobs on cds instead of essential supplies. That's why Queen of the Damned is the film I keep coming back to

Dark Future...

whatwritesatmidnight@gmail.com (Chris Regan) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:57:02 PDT

Way back in February 2008, not long after I started writing this blog, I mentioned a project I was working on called Dark Future. Sometime in 2007 the director of the project, Glenn Salvage, had decided to put together a trailer to generate some interest in the film. At some point near the end of last year the trailer was finished (long story). It had its first public screening at the Moviebar launch in February this year. And now, courtesy of Ross Boyask who edited the trailer, it's online for everyone to see:

I'm not sure whether there's any life in the project attached to this trailer now (it's been a long time and a lot of zombie films have been released since) but you never know. I'm glad it's out in the world anyway - a lot of hard work went into producing it from all involved so it deserves to be seen. When we showed it at MovieBar I had a whole list of things I was going to talk about regarding the making of the trailer, but we showed it quite late in the evening and I was running out of steam so only mentioned half the things I was planning to say. Now it's online this is the perfect opportunity for a long, involved blog post telling the whole story...

...only I'm still supposed to be finishing two scripts by the end of the month and right now I'm halfway through one and a quarter of the way through the other. So I need to get back to work...