Now playing on TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE The Podcast: The Demon Huntsman by Ashley Thorpe, Directed by Glenn McQuaid. First presented on January 11 2010 as the final episode of Season One, Huntsman stars Michael Cerveris and Owen Campbell, Aidan Redmond  and Joel Garland, and is dripping with atmosphere. A true TALES classic. McQuaid and Thorpe discussed the tale in a recent sit-down.

Campbell, Garland, McQuaid, Redmond, Cerveris

Glenn McQuaid
On re-listening to THE DEMON HUNTSMAN, I was really impressed by the sense of location that comes through in your writing, not just the natural ambiance but the geography, geology, and folklore too, it’s clear you have a great fascination for your home turf of Dartmoor, when did you become aware of the horror genre’s obsession with it too?

Ashley Thorpe
Dartmoor and its myths have long been an obsession of mine. I’ve been surrounded by those tales and their tellers for as long as I can remember. The ghosts, myths and legends of Devon seeped into my personal mythology from an early age and their blend of horror, folk and fairy-lore have influenced much of my work. I remember hearing many of these stories when I was a kid, sat listening wide eyed in terror as an elderly couple my parents used to take out to the pub sat and recounted these things. I especially remember being terrified by the tale of ‘The Hairy Hands’ and spent most of the journey home across pitch black moorland staring at the wheel from the back seat waiting for these horrible things to seize my Dad’s hands and wrestle us off the road.

Being so in love with Dartmoor and all its devilish tales I was especially excited as a child when I saw ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’ and realsing it was set ‘in my backyard’. My favourite part of ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’ was always the telling of the cruel master who first fell foul of the spectral hound. Subsequently hearing that that squire was based upon Lord Cabel of Buckfastleigh made it twice as thrilling. That was – and indeed still is – a big part of the magic for me. That you can visit an old churchyard, a stately home, an ancient cross and there is a tale intrinsically linked to the place. The prehistoric stones and soils of Dartmoor are alive with these stories. Endless inspiration.

Glenn McQuaid
I love that your Dad is partly responsible for your interest in horror, my own Dad used to make up a bunch of horror stories that really sparked my imagination as a kid. He once told me that a monster lived in an old abandoned boat on a river we’d drive past daily. Do you think these early introductions to the fantastic and the macabre are what set us off down this path? Because I’ve tried and I can’t quite bring myself to write a nice romantic comedy.

Ashley Thorpe
You know I genuinely think that ALL my adult obsessions were sown in childhood. I suppose I was actually quite lucky in a way because the 1970’s, especially in England, was a very strange off-kilter era. You literally couldn’t escape the ‘weird’. It was everywhere. Electronics were just being embraced so although there was a strange throw back to folk-roots in horror we seemed on the cusp of a new digital ‘synthy’ age. Child friendly Sci-Fi on TV was Tom Baker era Dr Who, very gothic, unashamedly scary for young kids. You had Donald Pleasance voicing the ‘Spirit of dark and lonely water’ between afternoon cartoons, a reaper watching children drowning in flooded quarries. The Yorkshire Ripper on tea time news. Sapphire and Steel and Hammer Horror double bills on TV at night. Public safety films hosted by celebrities who have since been outed as sexual predators. It was a time of great cultural darkness yet a of a pioneering artistic bravery actually. It was certainly a time that moulded me. Well, I say lucky, but I suffered from night terrors from infancy up until I was about 15 and it really wouldn’t take much to trigger these things off. I may have a lovely night out watching fireworks on Nov 5th but I can remember coming home and glimpsing the beginning of Hmmer House of Horror’s ‘The House that bled to death’ on TV while eating a bag of chips and that was me fucked for that night.

And you know people have asked me whether I’ve ever considered writing anything other than horror too. I remember telling someone once an idea I had for a children’s book about a tribe of mis-shapen creatures that chase children home across the rooftops of their street if they venture out after dark, and they just looked at me in horror.

Glenn McQuaid
We had very similar childhoods in terms of the deeply weird popular culture we were soaking up. Looking back on it, it still seems completely off kilter and experimental, it’s all aged very well. Did I ever tell you the first video recorder we owned came free with a copy of The Wicker Man? I didn’t stand a chance!

Getting back to The Demon Huntsman! You’re a filmmaker known for your unique imagery, how did you find the experience of letting go of visuals and concentrating solely on sound to tell a story?

Ashley Thorpe
‘The Demon Huntsman’ is still one of the things I’ve done that I’m most proud of. I must admit, when you first asked me if I’d like to do it I said yes blindly without any genuine idea of whether or not I could actually do it! I said yes because I thought it was a wonderful project and I’d be a fool not to be part of it. However, although quite challenging, strangely it was quite a freeing exercise. The story itself came together very organically and it was brilliant fun knitting together the various myths into this overall tale, but the best part was definitely being able to almost paint with words and the soundscape. There’s something so primal about the experience of being told a tale and having it augmented with sound to further stimulate the imagination makes it a very exciting experience not just for the listener but also for the artist. I do tend to imagine sound when I animate and will often add textural sounds once a shot is complete to see if it’s creating the vib I want. I’m very obsessive when it comes to my images, almost like a mad minaturist, so it was a strange experience to be able to paint something really quite epic in scale through sound and let the listener work into the details in their imagination. It’s such an immersive experience. It’s like they say ‘ the pictures are always better on the radio’.

~

And Don’t forget to buy Ashley’s Masterpiece Borley Rectory, produced by McQuaid and Fessenden
https://www.nucleusfilms.com/index.php?seo_path=borley-rectory-blu-ray

Tonight, Thursday, January 30 from 6PM to 8PM
Forbidden Planet 832 Broadway between 12th and 13th Streets, NYC

T-SHIRTS! ($20) POSTERS! (5$) PHOTOS! ($10) BLU-RAYS! ($20)

CELEBRITY SIGNATURES (priceless)

Entertainment Weekly: Mother Nature gives some oil company employees a very cold shoulder in this Arctic-set film. Ron Perlman, Connie Britton, and James LeGros lead the cast in director Larry Fessenden’s eco-conscious horror fable.

The Last Winter is now available on the IFC Films Unlimited streaming service.

Read Full List HERE

Written by Fessenden and Graham Reznick for Supermassive Games,
this BAFTA winning game stands the test of time!

#1: UNTIL DAWN

Until Dawn’s core appeal is that it gives us enlightened genre aficionados a chance to put our money where our mouth is and finally demonstrate that we would actually be able to hack it in one of those slasher flicks we know so much about. Everyone has watched Halloween, I Know What You Did Last Summer, or Friday the 13th and ruminated on how they would be a much sharper protagonist than those making dumb mistakes on the screen. Always mocking these fictional characters for their errors – like investigating suspicious noises, tripping over in the woods, and failing to pick up defensive weapons – we’re under the impression that our survival instincts are above reproach and that, if we ever found ourselves in a comparable scenario, we wouldn’t falter. 

Supermassive Games’ interactive horror movie invites us to test out that theory, by making us responsible for a group of prospective murder victims so dated and stereotypical, that you almost expect it to be foreshadowing some kind of Cabin in the Woods meta-commentary. There’s the rich mean girl, the arrogant jock, the class clown, the awkward bookish type, the aspiring model, the pervy weirdo and, of course, the token final girl. To a certain extent all these characteristics are inflexible and set in stone (it’s not like you can transform the athlete into an engineering major, or make the unbearable comic-relief actually funny) but what you can do is influence their actions, within the parameters of the given personas of course, to facilitate desired outcomes. 

For example, you could fan the flames of a hormonal dispute to create entertaining drama, you could deliberately lead one of them to meet a grisly end at the hands of a wood chipper, or – if you want to be super boring about it – you could try to keep everyone alive until the credits roll. The game won’t admonish you either way, meaning that you’re free to pull the strings however you see fit. It’s almost like you get to direct your own horror movie, tallying up the ideal kill count, indulging in your preferred clichés and, at one point, even dictating what form the scares will take. I personally enjoyed discovering just how many gruesome death variations there were for each character, as some of the elaborate fatalities proved to be exceptionally imaginative. 

Experimenting with all the different branches is what’s so engrossing about Until Dawn, because it legitimately feels like an open-ended narrative. People can die at the drop of a hat (due to either an obscure decision that was made hours ago or something as insignificant as a failed QTE) and whole environments can be skipped over if you don’t forge the requisite path. Granted, it’s not an especially frightening game – and those sections wherein you sluggishly potter around looking for glistening objects to advance the plot can get a little wearisome – but that doesn’t detract from the overall experience. Because getting to be the puppet master is just way too much fun. – Harrison Abbott

See Full List and Review HERE

Frankenstein: 10 Movies With An Original Twist On The Horror Classic

The most recent release on the list is independent horror darling Larry Fessenden’s 2019 take on the monster. In his 1991 debut feature No Telling, Fessenden dances with the idea of a Frankenstein-like scientist, and now almost 30 years later, he tackles the subject matter head-on. Depraved follows a man stricken with PTSD as he tries to cope by working in a laboratory and sewing a human together. Possibly the lowest budgeted film on the list, there is a meta-layer to the filmmaking with it being a do-it-yourself sort of effort. It’s a strange, and interesting film that can be seen streaming on Hulu right now.

Read List HERE

Other Horror Movie Remakes Rob Zombie Should Direct

… his appreciation for that era of cinema might lend him to be an excellent choice for another Dark Universe movie like Frankenstein, which was originally directed by James Whale in 1931 and starred Boris Karloff as The Monster.Though there have been modern interpretations, such as Larry Fessenden’s Depraved in 2019, Zombie would certainly bring more horror (and blood) to the Monster’s tale. It would be even more fascinating if he cast someone like Ken Foree, with whom he’s collaborated previously in The Lords of Salem. The actor’s 6’5″ stature would be imposing and bring some smart social commentary, as Frankenstein’s monster is traditionally played by white actors.

Read Article HERE