Matthew Holness, creator and star of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, has torn away from his comedy roots to create his first feature film, Possum. A dread inducing psychological horror that’ll make you think twice about turning your back on puppets. We spoke to him at the MAC Birmingham screening to find out about his first foray into the movies.
You started as a creative in comedy; how have you found the transition into drama, with your short A Gun for George having had a more serious/sad tone, too? Was it hard to get past that reputation?
Oh yes, I think it’s been very difficult, it’s taken a long time to be accepted doing something more serious. I’ve always wanted to write serious stuff, I’ve written short stories while I was doing stuff like Dark Place. A Gun for George was initially going to a parody of 70s crime, in the way that Dark Place was 80s horror, but actually during the filming of that I found myself drawn to the more tragic side of the subject. That side just ended up being more interesting to me, so ended up filming it more seriously than I’d perhaps envisaged. Once I’d done that, I felt like that was the mind of material I wanted to focus on. But it’s taken a long time for people to see past the comedy background. When I was trying to make a feature length version of A Gun for George, the balance of the funny side of it as opposed to the serious side, that balance was a tricky one to work out. There was pressure to go down the route of Mindhorn.
Many of your generation have moved from comedy to horror/ macabre. Alice Lowe – Prevenge, Julian Barratt – Flowers. Why do you think the two are so strongly linked?
I don’t know really! I think maybe comedians are drawn to horror perhaps because it’s sort of a technical form of writing at some level. If you’re going to write a joke, it’s about how you structure it to achieve a certain effect, and perhaps horror has a similar thing; there’s a definite effect you want to create for an audience that you’re aiming for. I always found that writing comedy was much better when you’re writing in a partnership, and it’s harder to write on your own. But writing serious stuff I couldn’t ever imagine I’d want to co-write that, so on that level they’re two very different things.
The film POSSUM, based on your short story, in part, revolves around the fear of mannequins and puppets. Why this fear?
Well, I was asked to write for a new anthology called The New Uncanny, and they were looking at Freud’s theory of ‘The Uncanny’. They asked the writers to basically look at the essay and pick some essential human fears that appear and write a story based on it. I’ve always found dummies and mannequins frightening, but I’ve also found equally as frightening the idea of ‘doubles’, of there being another version of oneself that one encounters. I knew that dummies had been done so often in horror films and stories that I couldn’t just do that, so I liked the idea of combining the two fears. All those stories, like Dead of Night and Magic, they always end up with the ventriloquist having a nervous breakdown at the end once the dummy has taken them over. I thought to avoid just going through that again, was to pick up where all those films end and stick with the puppeteer as they’re already spiralling into insanity.
People, both creative and film-goers have a renewed interest in innovative and socially conscious films. Philip, played by the fantastic Sean Harris, plays a very troubled man – were you conscious at all of the mental health aspect of the character, being such a big topic at the moment? Especially of men struggling to express themselves?
I didn’t think of it in terms of whether it was topical, I’m naturally drawn to that kind of subject matter. Terry Finch in A Gun for George is someone who’s got a lot of psychological problems, as does the character I wrote in The Snipist. I think it’s just the subject matter I’m drawn to as a writer. At some level the (other) revelations (of the film), we’re aware of those now, and the sense of institutionalised injustice was certainly something that I knew was going to be important and would be something that people would take from it. It was more about a victim and someone who’s got a lot of problems that they’re trying to deal with.
Many recent British horrors have a bleak working-class, rural feel to them - Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories or Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. Why do you think this is?
Most British horror films of the last forty-odd years or more have been what I suppose you’d term ‘Folk Horror’. It’s a phrase that’s been coined quite recently, but I feel that that’s just Britain. It’s a place of a lot of rural areas, we don’t have big, big cities so there’s going to be inevitably suburbian and pastoral horror stories. I think there’s something interesting in the folk lore, certainly of the UK, that’s ripe for drawing horror stories from; we have a great ghost story tradition. I think all those films are doing what we do well here, which is having ghost stories that come from history. There are parts of British history that are very murky and unpleasant and I think we only get to see the stuff that sell abroad and particularly the English have been very cruel bunch of people. There’s a lot of pockets of very nasty history that still exists but is brushed over. Directors like Terrance Fisher, with his Hammer films, his depiction of the English ruling class is basically one that says they’re essentially cruel. I like horror films for that, because they expose the realities of our history.
Some writers, use the film as an opportunity to change aspects of their original story that, in hind sight, they weren’t happy with. Did you?
Not really, I knew it had to expand, I knew it wasn’t enough for a feature but at the same time I didn’t want to cram so much in and dilute the essence of what the story’s about. The story’s very simple, it’s an examination of an unreliable narrator, basically prodding at their past and we get hints of the horror they’ve experienced. There was some talk during the development of it to make it slightly more police procedural in places and it was important for me not make it feel like it was a conventional plot in that sense, because I wanted it to feel realistic and wanted to disorientate the audience so they didn’t know where they were. The more you put conventional plot structure on that, the more people know where they are and the more it becomes a fiction and I wanted it to be disturbing and to unnerve people; to press very awkward, uncomfortable buttons in people’s heads.
You’re a versatile creative; writing, directing, acting. You’re also a musician, did you ever think to score the film yourself?
I used to be! I haven’t played guitar in a long time. At one point I did (consider scoring) because the thing about short films, there’s never any budget for a composer and I had to compose for A Gun for George and The Snipist because there wasn’t anything in the budget to do it. I just assumed that it would be a similar thing on a feature film, so I was sort of prepared to, and then I realised it was way beyond me. But luckily by that point, as I was starting to approach that conversation they said ‘We’ll be looking for a composer surely?’ and I went ‘Oh good! Fantastic’. It was a blessed relief to realise that I didn’t have to score it myself. It was scored by the Radiophonic Workshop, and they’re the perfect choice really because they fit the themes of the film so well coming from the period that Philip finds himself trapped in psychologically. They are the soundtrack of that era in many respects.
You’re working on another horror feature; what can we expect? Is there anything you’d like to adapt?
It’ll be an original script, it’s kind of nastier and darker than POSSUM. I kind of feel most fulfilled coming up with something original, but having said that I can imagine some things are easier to adapt. At the moment it feels like it’s an easier thing to take material that’s pre-written, TV is full of adaptations of established novels. I would love to do a Stephen King film, but I don’t know if they’ve all been done! That’d be a dream come true doing something like that, but whether or not the opportunity comes about is another matter, that’d be great.
POSSUM is now showing in limited screenings, including at Birmingham’s The Electric, the UK’s oldest working cinema. This waking nightmare is definitely one to catch, burrowing into the dark corners of your mind to eke out your hidden fears and feast on them. - ★★★★★
Matthew Holness, creator and star of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, has torn away from his comedy roots to create his first feature film, Possum. A dread inducing psychological horror that’ll make you think twice about turning your back on puppets. We spoke to him at the MAC Birmingham screening to find out about his first foray into the movies.
You started as a creative in comedy; how have you found the transition into drama, with your short A Gun for George having had a more serious/sad tone, too? Was it hard to get past that reputation?
Oh yes, I think it’s been very difficult, it’s taken a long time to be accepted doing something more serious. I’ve always wanted to write serious stuff, I’ve written short stories while I was doing stuff like Dark Place. A Gun for George was initially going to a parody of 70s crime, in the way that Dark Place was 80s horror, but actually during the filming of that I found myself drawn to the more tragic side of the subject. That side just ended up being more interesting to me, so ended up filming it more seriously than I’d perhaps envisaged. Once I’d done that, I felt like that was the mind of material I wanted to focus on. But it’s taken a long time for people to see past the comedy background. When I was trying to make a feature length version of A Gun for George, the balance of the funny side of it as opposed to the serious side, that balance was a tricky one to work out. There was pressure to go down the route of Mindhorn.
Many of your generation have moved from comedy to horror/ macabre. Alice Lowe – Prevenge, Julian Barratt – Flowers. Why do you think the two are so strongly linked?
I don’t know really! I think maybe comedians are drawn to horror perhaps because it’s sort of a technical form of writing at some level. If you’re going to write a joke, it’s about how you structure it to achieve a certain effect, and perhaps horror has a similar thing; there’s a definite effect you want to create for an audience that you’re aiming for. I always found that writing comedy was much better when you’re writing in a partnership, and it’s harder to write on your own. But writing serious stuff I couldn’t ever imagine I’d want to co-write that, so on that level they’re two very different things.
The film POSSUM, based on your short story, in part, revolves around the fear of mannequins and puppets. Why this fear?
Well, I was asked to write for a new anthology called The New Uncanny, and they were looking at Freud’s theory of ‘The Uncanny’. They asked the writers to basically look at the essay and pick some essential human fears that appear and write a story based on it. I’ve always found dummies and mannequins frightening, but I’ve also found equally as frightening the idea of ‘doubles’, of there being another version of oneself that one encounters. I knew that dummies had been done so often in horror films and stories that I couldn’t just do that, so I liked the idea of combining the two fears. All those stories, like Dead of Night and Magic, they always end up with the ventriloquist having a nervous breakdown at the end once the dummy has taken them over. I thought to avoid just going through that again, was to pick up where all those films end and stick with the puppeteer as they’re already spiralling into insanity.
People, both creative and film-goers have a renewed interest in innovative and socially conscious films. Philip, played by the fantastic Sean Harris, plays a very troubled man – were you conscious at all of the mental health aspect of the character, being such a big topic at the moment? Especially of men struggling to express themselves?
I didn’t think of it in terms of whether it was topical, I’m naturally drawn to that kind of subject matter. Terry Finch in A Gun for George is someone who’s got a lot of psychological problems, as does the character I wrote in The Snipist. I think it’s just the subject matter I’m drawn to as a writer. At some level the (other) revelations (of the film), we’re aware of those now, and the sense of institutionalised injustice was certainly something that I knew was going to be important and would be something that people would take from it. It was more about a victim and someone who’s got a lot of problems that they’re trying to deal with.
Many recent British horrors have a bleak working-class, rural feel to them - Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories or Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. Why do you think this is?
Most British horror films of the last forty-odd years or more have been what I suppose you’d term ‘Folk Horror’. It’s a phrase that’s been coined quite recently, but I feel that that’s just Britain. It’s a place of a lot of rural areas, we don’t have big, big cities so there’s going to be inevitably suburbian and pastoral horror stories. I think there’s something interesting in the folk lore, certainly of the UK, that’s ripe for drawing horror stories from; we have a great ghost story tradition. I think all those films are doing what we do well here, which is having ghost stories that come from history. There are parts of British history that are very murky and unpleasant and I think we only get to see the stuff that sell abroad and particularly the English have been very cruel bunch of people. There’s a lot of pockets of very nasty history that still exists but is brushed over. Directors like Terrance Fisher, with his Hammer films, his depiction of the English ruling class is basically one that says they’re essentially cruel. I like horror films for that, because they expose the realities of our history.
Some writers, use the film as an opportunity to change aspects of their original story that, in hind sight, they weren’t happy with. Did you?
Not really, I knew it had to expand, I knew it wasn’t enough for a feature but at the same time I didn’t want to cram so much in and dilute the essence of what the story’s about. The story’s very simple, it’s an examination of an unreliable narrator, basically prodding at their past and we get hints of the horror they’ve experienced. There was some talk during the development of it to make it slightly more police procedural in places and it was important for me not make it feel like it was a conventional plot in that sense, because I wanted it to feel realistic and wanted to disorientate the audience so they didn’t know where they were. The more you put conventional plot structure on that, the more people know where they are and the more it becomes a fiction and I wanted it to be disturbing and to unnerve people; to press very awkward, uncomfortable buttons in people’s heads.
You’re a versatile creative; writing, directing, acting. You’re also a musician, did you ever think to score the film yourself?
I used to be! I haven’t played guitar in a long time. At one point I did (consider scoring) because the thing about short films, there’s never any budget for a composer and I had to compose for A Gun for George and The Snipist because there wasn’t anything in the budget to do it. I just assumed that it would be a similar thing on a feature film, so I was sort of prepared to, and then I realised it was way beyond me. But luckily by that point, as I was starting to approach that conversation they said ‘We’ll be looking for a composer surely?’ and I went ‘Oh good! Fantastic’. It was a blessed relief to realise that I didn’t have to score it myself. It was scored by the Radiophonic Workshop, and they’re the perfect choice really because they fit the themes of the film so well coming from the period that Philip finds himself trapped in psychologically. They are the soundtrack of that era in many respects.
You’re working on another horror feature; what can we expect? Is there anything you’d like to adapt?
It’ll be an original script, it’s kind of nastier and darker than POSSUM. I kind of feel most fulfilled coming up with something original, but having said that I can imagine some things are easier to adapt. At the moment it feels like it’s an easier thing to take material that’s pre-written, TV is full of adaptations of established novels. I would love to do a Stephen King film, but I don’t know if they’ve all been done! That’d be a dream come true doing something like that, but whether or not the opportunity comes about is another matter, that’d be great.
POSSUM is now showing in limited screenings, including at Birmingham’s The Electric, the UK’s oldest working cinema. This waking nightmare is definitely one to catch, burrowing into the dark corners of your mind to eke out your hidden fears and feast on them. - ★★★★★
Interview by Tom Silverton