Baileybond Film Club

Censor writer-director PRANO BAILEY-BOND takes us inside the bloody guts of her excellent Bbfc-inspired horror

PRANO BAILEY-BOND WON’T settle for anything less than the right kind of foliage. For her directorial debut Censor, the filmmaker went to extraordinary lengths to intricately, accurately deliver a slice of 1980s-set meta horror, from lovingly made VHS covers to just the right type of leaves on a forest floor. Speaking with Empire, she breaks down the forensic detail that went into crafting the film.

CASTING

Niamh Algar plays Enid, a wilting film censor who discovers a video nasty that she believes stars her missing sister. Bailey-bond describes the character as “a coiled spring”, who at the end of her character-arc transforms into “an explosion of emotions” when the trail runs cold and her world unravels. She hadn’t written the part with anyone in mind, but Algar, who Bailey-bond had first seen in Shane Meadows’ The Virtues, made her mark on the director from her first reading. “She made total sense of the scenes in a way that not everybody does,”

Bailey-bond recalls. “She tunes into the rhythm and depth of the words that you’ve written, and she has an ability to put thought on screen, which is what I needed.”

COSTUMES

Bailey-bond was determined to do away with the shoulder pads and Lycra readily associated with the era. “It was important that we were creating a world that was in line with oppressive Thatcher’s Britain, not Top Of The Pops,” she explains. With Enid, the clothes, which were synced to the production design and cinematography, change to reflect her losing grip on reality. “At the beginning of the film, there’s the sense of her being part of the furniture. Then as she makes her psychological descent into the video-nasty world, we start to see shifts in colour and lighting.” Both Algar and costume designer Saffron Cullane simultaneously came up with another visual aid to tell Enid’s story: “They both said that she should have glasses to make her a subverted superhero. She’s on a crusade to

protect society from the ills of the video nasty, but when there’s a shift in how she sees the films, the glasses come off.”

PROPS AND LOCATIONS

Each set was packed with detail, including a fully stocked video-rental store, complete with made-up VHS covers created especially for the film. “We had a graphics guy called Video Matt design all these big, fake posters and some of the covers, explains Bailey-bond. “There’s a film called ‘The Day The World Began’ that Enid picks out that foreshadows what happens in the rest of the film. It’s like an Easter egg.” The censor office in which Enid works was inspired by the British Board of Film Classification, and was built from scratch to mirror its partially underground setting. Then there was the forest, just outside of Leeds, where the film would reach its bloody climax. The crew had visited multiple woodlands ahead of time, to find just the right combination of cinematic and surreal, right down to the leaves on the ground. “There was something very apocalyptic about the floor,” she says. “I imagined those animations you watch as a kid where the world splits in two, and you’ve got a family divided. There was something that reminded me of those kinds of scenes.”

FX

Practical effects were used whenever possible, with Bailey-bond recruiting ongoing collaborator Dan Martin (Possessor, High-rise) to bring the gore. “Because I’m a child of the ’80s, there’s something so much more visceral and exciting about actually seeing that it’s there on camera,” she says. In a particularly gruesome scene, Michael Smiley’s shady film producer dies when his head becomes impaled on one of his trophies. “That man is made out of charisma,” she says fondly. “It was an uncomfortable position to be in and he was great. We had half of this award and this blood line going into his mouth so that fake blood could spurt out. So he’s actually spitting out fake blood in that moment.” This is why Oscars have rounded edges.

SCORE

“I was listening to The Fog’s soundtrack a lot when I was writing the script,” says Baileybond. “[Composer] Emilie Levienaisefarrouch and I had a love for that score, so with that, John Carpenter and Goblin, we had some references from the period.” However, the pair were not interested in making a score that felt like a pastiche. “It was about tuning into Enid’s trauma,” she says. “I remember saying to Emily really early on that deep sounds that felt like they were coming from her belly, traumatic ‘belly sounds’, felt really appropriate. She ended up using her own voice, then processing it to the point where you almost don’t recognise it’s vocals.”