TERROR TACTICS
Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman on how they’ll finally scare you senseless…
If you want to know how the thrilling, chilling anthology horror movie Ghost Stories was conjured into existence, you have to go back, way back, beyond the 2010 stage play that initially scared up a big success for writers/directors Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman.
“We bonded when we were 15 years old, at the dawn of the video age,” says Dyson of the pair’s long friendship. “It was the first time there were video recorders in your home so you could tape things off the telly. The BBC would do their horror double bills and we’d tape every one of them, gobble them up, internalise them. That was our education. Ghost Stories was plugging into that period of our lives when we were formed creatively, and it celebrated everything that we loved.”
The movies they feasted on ranged from Val Lewton’s shadow-soaked suspensers of the 1940s (Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie) to the raw savagery of America’s nightmare
movies of the 1970s (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes). But Ghost Stories, in which skeptic professor Phillip Goodman (Nyman) reopens a file containing three hauntings that might just be the real deal, is most closely aligned to the eerie episodes served up by British horror houses Amicus and Hammer, and the BBC’s
A Ghost Story For Christmas series based on the writings of M.R. James.
“As ropey and as kitsch as some of those early Amicus films are, they’re beautifully crafted and made and lit,” says Nyman, for Ghost Stories makes glorious use of traditional techniques – widescreen framing, focus pulls, sepulchral lighting and pin-sharp sound design – to ratchet up the terror. Dyson, best known for The League Of Gentlemen, nods. “There’s a grace and a beauty in those films that we were reaching for,” he says.
The three tales star Paul Whitehouse as a night watchman guarding a derelict “nut house”, Alex Lawther as a teen driver navigating some creepy woods and Martin Freeman as a businessman awaiting his first child. Guilt is the motor, and the stories chime, echo and mirror one another until a chilling coda entwines all three as tightly as a wreath. It sure is spooky stuff, but do the guys feel that modern audiences, savvy as they are, make for a tougher audience?
Dyson’s having none of it. “I think people are the same [as they’ve always been],” he states. “A lot of it is psychology and it’s millions and millions of years old.” Nyman agrees, saying, “There’s loads more product, a lot of which doesn’t really work, but when one hits right…” You can sense his relish. “People are people are people, and what’s always scared us, always will.”
ETA | 13 APRIL / GHOST STORIES OPENS THIS SPRING.