GHOST STORIES
On set of the — HOLY SHIT WHAT’S THAT? — British horror that — OH GOD, IT HAS NO HEAD! — could be the scariest film of the IT’S BEHIND YOU!
Ghost Stories writer-directors Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson on how to turn a West End hit into a good old-fashioned British horror
1 __ LEAVE IT FOR A FEW YEARS
Andy Nyman: “One of the things that made the play work as well as it did was the clichés of horror films on stage — we hadn’t seen that before. What felt complicated to us was taking things that had come from horror films and putting them back into a film without feeling like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that before.’”
Jeremy Dyson: “We wanted some distance from it. We deliberately said: ‘Let’s park it for a bit.”
2__ Keep the production as British as the films that inspired it
Dyson: “We came of age at the dawn of VHS and Friday night horror double bills on BBC Two: old ’40s films, Hammer and Amicus, all the great early ’70s British horror films. That wonderful run of pastoral horror: Witchfinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man.” Nyman: “The DNA of this is just so English that we wanted to find an English production company [Warp Films] who make brave, interesting work. ”
3__ Hire old people who know how to make old films
Dyson: “[SFX supervisor] Ian Rowley has literally been in the business for 50 years, so he’s done everything. His library of knowledge of what works