Movie Crime Log: Dying, Enemy, Woman

So, look, I’m about to deliver you a mixed-bag of news. Grip the arms of your chair and hang on for dear life. The bad news is, it’s 2015 already. 2014 is gone, never to return. The good news is, the year is kicking off with a Nicolas Cage movie!

In Dying Of The Light he stars as Evan Lake, a desk-bound Langley CIA agent forced into retirement by signs of early onset dementia. When his former tormentor pops up on the grid Lake decides to deliver him some good old-fashioned retribution while he still can.

Dying Of The Light has an interestingly tortured development. It was intended to be directed by Nicholas Winding Refn and star Harrison Ford, but Refn bailed to direct Drive instead. Screenwriter Paul Schrader – you know, Taxi Driver and suchlike – then directed from his own script.

But the movie was taken away from him by the studio and re-edited and mixed. The expressionist colour-scheme Schrader used was removed. The whole thing has received, as a result, a suitably tepid critical response. My earlier enthusiasm in the first paragraph was clearly misplaced. However, do make your own mind up by eyeballing this trailer.

Behold Cage’s grim countenance:

Dying Of The Light is out today in cinemas and available on your new laptop tomorrow.

Moving on.

It’s well-know that somewhere in the world, we all have a doppleganger, someone who looks just like us. Mine is Alijaz from Strictly. In Enemy Jake Gyllenhaal plays beardy Adam, who’s watching a film when he sees someone just like him in the background. Oh, the irony. He becomes obsessed with finding his double. ‘The result,’ it says here, ‘is a haunting and provocative psychosexual thriller about duality and identity, where in the end only one man will survive.’

Enemy is based on the Nobel Prize-winning novel by Jose Saramago and directed by Denis Villeneuve, the bloke who made the awesome Prisoners, so it’s probably worth the watch. Double movies are always kind of creepy. And Gyllenhaal’s mostly good in everything, these days. Except Prince Of Persia. That was totes rank.

So a few years back Susan Hill wrote a ghost story called The Woman In Black, and I think it’s fair to say it’s done quite well. It became a long-running – and trouser-browning scary – theatre production, and then a movie starring the boy wizard.

Now there’s a sequel called Woman In Black: Angel In Death which delivers up more period scares, courtesy of Hammer Films. The action moves forward to the Blitz, when a group of schoolchildren are taken to the old, sinister estate — always a good place to house some shell-shocked kids – and here must confront the dark force who still resides in the house.

I mean, really? Orphans, a decaying mansion full of scary dolls? Aren’t there any suitable B&Bs in town, or what?

The Intel: Philip Taffs

Photo credit: Dan O’Brien

We’re almost into the New Year. A new beginning. A time of optimism and hope. Philip Taffs doesn’t do optimism and hope. Not when he’s writing, at least. His dark novel The Evil Inside follows one man’s descent into hell when he moves with his family from Melbourne to New York after painful tragedy strikes. Guy Russell’s life and sanity begin to implode when he begins to suspect that his son is possessed. It’s a gripping psychological drama, as well as a deliciously dark horror novel.

I’m delighted to say that Philip is kicking off our 2015 by giving us the intel on his inspiration,  the secret of writing horror, psychic premonition — and, of course, his writing process.

Tell us about The Evil Inside…

An Australian ad creative moves to a mysterious hotel in New York with his family and slowly becomes convinced that his 3-year-old son, Callum, has become possessed by a dark, dangerous force from his past…

Where did the inspiration for the novel come from?

A psychic – who had no idea I was a writer – told me 17 years ago that I’d write and publish ‘a Stephen King-type book and go and live in America.’ I did unexpectedly go to America to work and live and a whole lot of other stuff he said came to pass…. so I just had to keep going. In terms of literary and filmic inspiration, American Psycho, The Shining, Kubrick’s film of The Shining, The Small Assassin by Ray Bradbury, Taxi Driver, Hitchcock films, No Logo by Naomi Klein and Rosemary’s Baby, the book and film.

You live in Melbourne, but The Evil Inside is set in New York – why did you set it there?

Because in 2000, I was actually lucky enough to live and work in New York for a year. I lived in the hotel, the Olcott, featured in the novel for 4 months: it was very atmospheric (as the Stanley Hotel was for Stephen King when he conceived of The Shining). After I’d returned from New York, I discovered that Mark David Chapman had stayed there at one stage before shooting John Lennon — that was another creative prod to get going and start writing.

What’s the secret of writing horror?

If I knew the secret to writing horror, I’d hire a bunch of other writers and become their manager.  Perhaps the trick is to imagine the worst but then understate and delay it – so the reader feels that something awful is impending but doesn’t know what or when. ‘Something wicked this way comes,’ as Ray Bradbury said, or ‘suspense rather than surprise,’ as Hitchcock advocated — because a surprise can only happen once whereas suspense is a delicious prolongation.

There’s also the skill of holding back information but dropping little breadcrumb clues along the way that the reader can follow back once they get to the end: Fight Club is a brilliant example of this. By the way, The Evil Inside is as much a psych-thriller as much as psych-horror, as you are never entirely sure if something is real or imagined — or who’s telling the truth.

You’ve said that you’ve been rejected across three continents before being picked up by Quercus – is it important for a writer to have a thick skin?

In my case, working in advertising for 25 years gets you very used to rejection as it happens most days. Plus I had the advantage of the psychic prediction which was always my light at the end of the tunnel. The book is actually dedicated to the psychic, Alan Pilkington – and ‘you’ll see‘ became the novel’s mantra.

Why do so many advertising men become successful writers, do you think?

Advertising men — and women — on a daily basis learn to write to deadlines, suffer endless rejection, invariably get sent back to the drawing board and are often asked to reimagine things. So they have extra resilience and are far less sensitive than writers who perhaps haven’t done it as a day job before.

Take us through a typical writing day for you?

As I have a teenager, a 7-year-old and an advertising business, there are no ‘typical days’. You write when you can. I often text myself when thoughts occur so I can refer to them later. I also often find going onto another more mundane project — or a run — gives your subconscious time to solve narrative problems. (Mondays are crap days for writing as they are for most things.)

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

That success really is up to you. Unless you have a very lucky break, finding a decent agent and/or publisher is even harder than writing the book because it requires utter determination much more than talent.

How do you deal with feedback?

It’s funny: people whom you think will give you great feedback are often disappointingly reticent whereas people whom you don’t necessarily think of as ‘literary’ can give you very fertile things to think about. After a while, you learn to recognise a great idea when you see it and dismiss feedback you disagree with: it’s all a matter of cumulative confidence. Beware other writers: they will try to rewrite it the way they see it! Whereas advice from your editor proves to be correct 90% of the time…

Who are the authors you admire, and why?

When I was younger, John Irving was my God because he seemed to make very simple writing and great storytelling cool. Now I prefer Martin Amis for his wit and dexterity; Truman Capote for his style; F.Scott Fitzgerald for his humanity; Somerset Maugham for his atmosphere; Ira Levin for his suspense; Donna Tartt for The Secret History; and recently, Gillian Flynn for her hard truths beautifully expressed. (Gone Girl is the best book I’ve read in the last 15 years.)

Give me some advice about writing…

Read. Read. Read.   Write anything for practice: articles, journalism, short stories, brochures, cereal packets – work those muscles. And never, ever, ever give up.

What’s next for you?

A suspense novel where someone turns up at a 30-year school reunion who can’t possibly turn up because…

***

So, look, The Evil Inside is published by Quercus. A Happy New Year to you, sirs and madams.

Movie Crime Log: Nightcrawler, Countryman & Snatchers

Happy Halloween to you, sirs and mesdames. Let’s hope it’s not like The Purge round your way tonight.

If you don’t want to sit in the dark waiting for the streets to clear of pint-sized zombies and sweet-toothed ghoulies, you could always get the hell out of the house. There’s a thing called a cinema near you.

And the Oscar push starts tonight. Big posters round my way have been shouting ‘A Modern Masterpiece!’ and all sorts to describe Nightcrawler, a neo noir written and directed by Dan Gilroy.

Nightcrawler has been likened to Taxi Driver. It’s the story of Lou Bloom, a misfit drifter, who discovers the world of crime journalism, becoming a nightcrawler who chases ambulances and police sirens in night-time LA. Jake Gyllenhaal’s gone and lost loads of weight and he’s making mad, crazy acting eyes for the ladies and gentlemen of the academy.

Neo noir. I like that phrase, I’m going to use that again.

The Necessary Death Of Charlie Countryman is an oddity. It’s an American-Romanian co-produciton for a start, and features Shia Lebouf –- remember him? At one point he was in, like, every film going. And now, not so much. Curiously, Lebouf briefly dropped out of the production and was replaced by Zac Efron –- but then came back on board.

Anyway, it’s kind of a comedy drama with surreal elements about what happens when you travel abroad to see your girlfriend and discover her psychotic ex-husband is still in the picture.

Now this is more like it. Someone clever has re-released the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers in key cities. So that’s London and Aberdeen and Lancaster and, er, Letchworth, and some other places.

It’s been hugely influential, of course, for its paranoid take on identity and conformity, and has remade several times. Jack Finney’s original novel ends with the alien body snatchers throwing in the towel and pissing off somewhere else after intense human resistance, but the movie ends on a more ambiguous note.

Every film bore knows it’s regarded as a metaphor for the McCarthy witch hunts or, alternatively, as an allegory for communism, although the producer was somewhat surprised at the many meanings given to it as he thought he was making a sci-fi thriller.

So, look, enjoy your evening, but if someone comes around and asks to place a gigantic pod in your vegetable patch, politely decline. And then leave town.