Kiwi horror, Death Warmed Up

Each week we ask an artist or performer how their most famous work happened. This week it’s Kiwi filmmaker David Blyth, who co-wrote and directed Death Warmed Up (1984), said to be New Zealand’s first horror.

"The film had so many knifings and bottles in faces and cyclists having steel rods pop out through their stomach."

‘Yes, it’s pretty much the first horror. It’s the first film that had copious amounts of blood in it - we had blood splattering out everywhere - so definitely the first Kiwi splatter film.

‘‘What I was really fascinated with in making Death Warmed Up was the whole area of cryogenics, which is freezing people’s brains and bodies to bring them back in the future when medical science is at a better level.

‘‘I was fascinated with the whole cryogenics world, which was just coming into its own at that time - this is in the 80s - and the idea of being able to cheat death is one of the themes of my films.

‘‘So that was sort of the premise - in Death Warmed Up you have a situation where they’ve found a way to bring people back to life. Even though death is meant to be final, science is searching for a way to get around that.

‘‘It was a little bit of a shock for the reviewers in New Zealand. They’d always seen American versions of these kind of films, whether it be Friday The 13th or whatever, and suddenly to have a Kiwi version with familiar Kiwi faces - locally a lot of the critics were quite disturbed by it, but overseas the film was met with great success.

‘‘To this day, I still have many young filmmakers who get in touch with me on Facebook, who saw Death Warmed Up on VHS and it inspired them.

‘‘It’s an unfortunate tragedy that the original negative of Death Warmed Up was burnt by accident down at the National Film Unit in Wellington, by an intern going into a bunker and cleaning out the wrong tins.

‘‘So we don’t have any complete 35mm prints - and that’s led to a 20-something-year problem. Because the film had so many knifings, and bottles in faces, and cyclists having steel rods pop out through their stomach and all the rest of it - every country, and every distributor, did their own censorship.

‘‘Which means we’ve ended up with a situation where the movie now has 32 cuts where we had to put little bits of VHS in. Because I found a full uncut version at a DVD shop sale where they were getting rid of their VHS tapes - so it wasn’t even a new copy, it was a well-used VHS copy that we had to take 32 little bits out of.’’

– As told to Shaun Bamber