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Reports of the death of British film are of course always grossly exaggerated. While large scale productions tend to result in a preponderance of costume drama or forelock tugging royalty pictures, at the low budget end of the scale, we are still adept at producing great horror cinema that can stand up with the output of other countries. Here are some recent movies that make the point…
Wakewood
We’ve always had a talent for rural terror. The American’s have the backwoods – with the attendant cast of toothless hicks, inbred terrors and cannibal clans – we do well with olde religion and witchcraft. Wakewood is a rather unique offering that takes the central idea of Pet Semetary and places it a country village where the old ways still hold sway. Essentially, if your child dies, Timothy Spall with revive them, but they certainly won’t be the same.
Outcast
At heart, this a Werewolf flick and a very interesting one at that, featuring one scene of abject terror in which a social worker has her memory wiped by a Romany curse that proves that buckets of gore don’t linger in the same way as an original idea. Outcast deals in our urban blight, introducing a monster into an area where the poor have pretty much been abandoned to their fate.
Eden Lake
Horror exploits. Sometimes it shines a torch on a issue by scaring us into thinking. Other times it plays on our prejudices to make a buck but it isn’t horrors job to change the world so moral objections are moot. Eden Lake is a Chav-sploitation movie pure and simple and as an exercise in Last House On The Estate shock and awe, it does its job with admirable spite and indecency. If you’re a nice middle class person who fears that the tracksuited masses are about to rise up and steal your plasma TV and kill your kids, then Eden Lake has been custom tooled to stick a pencil in that particular open wound and wriggle it about.
Monsters
Sci-fi terror on a micro-budget, Monsters is a game changer that shows the world that imagination trumps bank balance every time. Take a couple of actors, film a road trip into an imagined alien contamination zone in Mexico on the hoof, get back to Blighty and fill in all the special effects on a commercially available computer for a fraction of the bloated costs that a major studio would expend. The result is a kind of indie road movie meets Close Encounters triumph of Sci-fi horror that will hopefully inspire many more people to get out there and make great cinema.
Mum & Dad
In typically British fashion, we took the US birthed Torture-Porn genre and added a new layer of grim, kitchen sink reality, setting the movie in a unkempt suburban house under a flight path. To cut a long story short, this is about a family of sexually deviant sickos who are always on the look out for vulnerable people who are far from home who they can abuse and kill for their own twisted entertainment. It’s a tough ride but it shows that the UK can take a stylistic trick from another place, re-purpose it and make it uniquely British.
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