CULT HERO OF THE MONTH

JOHNNY KEVORKIAN

The Cypriot-british director Johnny Kevorkian died in November 2020, at the young age of 48. He made four shorts and two features, which reflects the difficulty of bringing ambitious, mid-budget genre projects to fruition in the UK rather than lack of industry or invention. The Disappeared (2008) and Await Further Instructions (2018) follow the Hammer House Of Horror tradition of smallscale supernatural activity with a Play For Today touch in illustrating social issues through confrontational drama. The former, a ghost story set on a council estate (which also turns out to be a vampire tale), was made in an era when the tabloid buzz-phrase was “Broken Britain”. Await Further Instructions, about a fractured family uniting for a Christmas dinner ruined by a possessed television set, is a horror-comic parable of the rifts exacerbated by Brexit. It’s a tragedy that Johnny won’t be around to chronicle whatever comes next.