Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

The place of Blythewood Studios in the pantheon of film greats is unassailable… What do you mean, you’ve never heard of it? The studio behind such classics as Sword of the Demon, Castle of the Lost, The Devil’s Circus and The Squeamish? All great movies… The history of Blythewood is related, alongside four novelisations from its archives, in the new Studio of Screams, out now from PS Publishing. Four acclaimed horror novelists and old friends Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, Mark Morris and Stephen Volk have teamed up for a very special book, with historical and interstitial material provided by film historian Stephen R. Bissette. The creative quintet got together on Zoom to discuss the project with Paul Simpson.

NB The following transcript has been edited for clarity

Paul: Whose idea was this originally?

Steve Volk: Shall I start?

I was always a big fan of John Burke’s Hammer Horror Omnibus, a big fat paperback that I got as a kid – probably older than a kid but for argument’s sake, let’s say I was a kid. Too young to see the films yet, I would think, because they were all ‘X’ in those days; crazily they turn up as morning entertainment now but they were adult fare in those days. We couldn’t actually see them, so anything we could grab a hold of that gave us the frisson that Hammer Films promised was a bonus. [The book] was one of them and I think for a lot of us, if not all of us here, that paperback, it gave you a chance to actually see those films in your mind’s eye.

That was the key thing. You could actually read these four novellas based on the Hammer films and you could invent them or interpret them in your own mind. That kind of excitement of seeing the films in my mind before seeing the film kept with me even though I saw all those classic films as we all did.

Then it occurred to me lately, in the last few years, wouldn’t it be good to do something like that John Burke Hammer Omnibus but make up our own films? In other words, we invent a studio that never existed, kind of in parallel to Hammer or Amicus, in the 60s maybe into the 70s. What kind of films might they have come up with that we would have enjoyed back then?

It was a kind of meta retro idea and I think I first talked about it with Tim or Mark, I can’t remember; maybe fired it off as a concept to both of them at different times. They were both enthusiastic and said “yeah I’d be on to write one”. Then we all thought that Chris was the obvious candidate to ask next and he was very enthusiastic about it.

Two things happened then. My original title, which was The Blythewood Horror Omnibus, cumbersome though it was, said what it was on the tin. Chris came up with a much snappier Studio of Screams and also had the great idea of bringing in Steve 2…do you mind being Steve 2?

Stephen Bissette: Steve 2 is fine thank you

Steve Volk: I grandly assumed that I was Steve 1.

So Steve Bissette entered the fray and had the wonderful idea of having a wraparound story a la Dead of Night or any number of Asylum portmanteau films. That seemed to fit with it: a mingling of a kind of portmanteau linking story and fleshing out the history and background to this fictitious studio that we’re all playing in the sandbox of really.

Chris Golden: Mark is actually the one who told me about it initially, when he was here as a guest of honour at Necon 2016. It was July 2016 we were up in Ogunquit, Maine and when you told me about the idea I was very excited.

We talked about how Steve Volk’s idea was that this is a real studio, that we should treat it as something that’s real and present it to the audience as a real thing. And as soon as we talked about that. immediately I thought Monsieur Bissette is widely known as a legendary artist in the comics field and as a teacher but to me and the people who know him best he is also known as one of the finest film historians but also horror film historians that we encounter anywhere, with his intimate knowledge of horror film in general and the perspectives that he brings to those things.

At one point we talked about whether we were going to do individual books that would be sold as a set and that Steve [B] would do an introduction to each one of those books, giving the real history of Blythewood and those individual films and putting them in historical context with real films. But then, when we started to talk about them all being in one book, the idea that Steve’s material would not only be a fictional non-fiction with the history of the films and the studio but also be a story in its own right began to take hold.

I just feel like that’s the cherry… or maybe not even the cherry, a cherry is too minimal… it’s the icing on the whole thing because it adds to much depth and texture to what we’re all doing.

Steve Volk: I think the cherry on the icing is Graham, isn’t it really?

Everyone agrees

Stephen Bissette: Graham Humphreys’ cover is just…

Tim Lebbon: Steve is the icing, Graham is the cherry.

Steve Volk: I’m hungry now, do you mind if I go get a hot cross bun?

Paul: So long as you’ve brought enough to share.

Steve Volk: I do actually but I’m going eat them all.

Mark: So just to interject slightly into what Chris was saying, if I told you at Necon, that means it’s had quite a long gestation period. I’m pretty sure it was 2016, so we’re talking about a gestation period of 4 and half years from Steve’s initial idea to publication.

Paul: So, during that period how did you assign the stories? Did you each have an idea of what sort of story you wanted to write or rather what sort of film you wanted to novelise?

Steve Volk: We weren’t aware of other people’s [stories]. I thought at the beginning that we didn’t want to crosspollinate much in a sense because I thought the intriguing thing about the idea is you let the author do exactly what they want from their perspective and their love of the kind of films we all talk about and kind of aspire to in this project. I didn’t have much idea beyond the titles of what other people have done, to be perfectly honest.

Mark: I think the only thing we did do is that  we just gave each other a general idea just so that we weren’t all writing vampire stories or whatever.

Steve Volk: We did work up a paragraph each in a document that we’d share with each other, with an intriguing title.

Chris: To just stay away from each other’s territory.

Stephen Bissette: I first heard about it when Tim was at one of the Haverhill Massachusetts Halloween book fair that you put together with Chris. And I met Mark in your kitchen then, It must have been in connection with Necon? That must have been my last NeCon then

Steve Volk: You were in the kitchen, were there any cakes in the kitchen?

Stephen Bissette: There were cakes and some really good… well, I won’t talk about what Connie had prepared for lunch but it was really good.

Paul: But Steve B, did you know where you were going to go with the fictional element – we’ll call the history of the studio the non-fiction – within your portmanteau story before you’d read what the others had done and did you need to ask them to do anything to make that fit?

Stephen Bissette: My part was very odd to work on because I not only had to wait until I had everybody’s individual contribution but then they had to maddeningly wait for months until I had digested them all to sort out what framing device I thought might work narratively.

Steve V is very much right, I was working from the example of the Amicus anthology films that I had grown up with. I was very familiar with Dead of Night, the 1945 Ealing film, but I was thinking more in terms of Amicus films, because those were made in the same time period as the novellas that Mark and Chris and Tim and Stephen had written, the early 60s to mid 70s period. It took me a little while to wrap my head around how I might tie in a fictional studio history.

I think it was left up to me too what order the stories would go in. Part of what played a role there is I was born in 1955 so I grew up watching the Hammer films and the Amicus films as they came out. I was very aware, once I’d read everyone’s novella, what content issues would have barred a certain film from existing in the mid 60s or late 60s and what content would have been appropriate for a British film being made in 1972 or whatever.

That really is what determined the order I ultimately suggested the novellas go in. The final decision was up to the group and all each of you saw was my interstitial that related to your novella correct?

Chris Golden: I read them all

Stephen Bissette: Right Chris, because I ran them past you first. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t, pardon my French, fucking up! I also wanted to make sure that I was fitting the writer’s preconceptions of their casting choices. I know a couple of you corrected me and I was very thankful for that.

I also wasn’t sure how far to push the game. It made sense that Peter Cushing might have appeared in a given film but I really had to come up with an ingenious way that a producer would have tempted, say Oliver Reed into being in The Squeamish by Stephen Volk.

Another part of it was, I had to come up with a sting in the tail for the entire project. I won’t give away what the sting in the tail is, but it was very gratifying to read the email from Steve Volk the morning I sent it to him and he said he didn’t see it coming. So, either he was brown nosing me or it was true. I don’t know which.

My model was Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, the first of the Amicus multi-story films which had a very satisfying framing device with Peter Cushing playing a character called Dr Schreck. My other favourite was the last Amicus portmanteau film which was From Beyond the Grave, which also had Peter Cushing, playing an antiques shop dealer. Each of the stories there hinged on if the protagonist of the short story had ripped him off somehow, stolen an item, shorted payment, they suffered the ultimate moral consequences. The twist in the tail in From Beyond the Grave is Cushing thought the protagonist of the last film had pulled something on him but when he actually counts the money, it’s the correct amount, so it’s the only story that has a “happy ending”. I wanted to come up with a twist that was even better than that

There were two other factors I’ll mention. Because I didn’t want to have to keep going back to Mark, Chris, Tim and to Stephen to check things, I set up two experts that I would work with.

One of them is Kim Newman – and I disagree with Chris Golden’s very kind assessment at the top of the interview (laughs). Kim Newman could beat my ass in every freaking contest about horror movie trivia that anyone could come up with. Kim became my go-to guy to double check the facts that I strung in. The fiction I interwove had to make sense to an expert like Kim Newman who also is a great novelist and short story writer.

The other expert was a friend of mine, Al B. Wesolowsky who is now in his 70s. Al is a professional archaeologist and it was Al who helped me cook up and make credible the archaeological underpinning to the entire framing story involving Blythewood Studios. Al really helped me fabricate that in such a way that it was believable, that it had as many real world touchstones as the fake history of Blythewood Studios. If it made sense to Kim Newman, a horror movie expert, particularly expert with the British film industry, and it made sense to Al B Wesolowsky a professional archaeologist, I was fairly confident it would work for the gathered authors here.

Paul: Steve, you said you came up with the idea of the studio: was it called Blythewood at that point? And if so, why?

Steve Volk: You know, I’ve no idea why, It’s just a name that… The wood part obviously rhymes with Pinewood. I kind of remember there’s an actor called Peter Blythe who used to be sometimes in Hammer films, I don’t know if that was the conjunction.

But weirdly I read a book the other day that mentions Blythewood University. Anyone come across that? And it was the exact spelling I’ve used so whether it’s a case of cryptomnesia that I’ve filed away this name and it just popped out as something that sounded a bit like blood, a bit like a scythe – Blythe – and then “wood” is an echo of the studio type name. It just sounded right and I think we all, when we’re writing, things pop up and they just sound right.

Do you think we should talk about our individual stories in the order that they are in the book?

Paul: That’s exactly what I was going to come to next. The first one in the book is Mark’s Sword of the Demon. For all of you, what were the inspirations or films that you particularly like that your stories homage? And what were the challenges of working within the parameters that you’d set yourselves for this project?

Mark: Obviously I wanted to do something that was very much in the style of the 1960s Hammer Films, nothing too salacious, nothing too gory. Just something with that kind of feel to it.

I had several Hammer films in mind when I was writing mine, I had She which is the kind of explorer part of it all, I had Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires and I had Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. And the Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb aspect was just this idea of something cursed and a creature or something basically taking out the members of the archaeological expedition one by one, working its way through them.

With Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, if Hammer had the monopoly on Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, all the classic monsters, Blythewood would have to come up with its own monsters.

One of the things that really struck me was I thought Hammer had never really done a proper demon story so I wanted to do a demon story. Then I just tried to look into what interesting things I could do with a demon.

When I was very young I lived in Hong Kong for four years and I’ve always been very interested in Chinese culture so I thought, wow, a Chinese demon would be quite cool. I just did some research into that and came up with this creature, the Yaoguai. I ran some Google images of it and just looked into the creature that it is then worked my way through from there.

I liked the idea of the demon being trapped within a sword. I think that was maybe one of the first images that just popped into my mind and I liked that idea. The rest of it just grew from there.

My favourite Hammer film is The Reptile and I think that influenced it in the sense that that was probably one of the very few times that Hammer have come up with their own monster that’s not a classic monster. I always try to capture that atmosphere of The Reptile or certainly the way I responded to it the first time I saw it. It’s got this very eerie atmosphere and I always try to evoke that.

As with all things it was just a kind of mishmash of influences. It was bringing lots of different ideas from different movies together and trying to make them new and different and then just having this sort of Chinese cultural element which I thought would just give it that extra pizazz.

Paul: You did the novelisation of the Matt Damon film The Great Wall two or three years ago. Could you use much research from that? I seem to remember reading the novel and you fleshed out quite a lot of the demonology in that as well.

Mark: The thing with the movie novelisations, as Chris and Tim will tell you, is that you usually have to stick very rigidly to the script. So there wasn’t a great deal of research I could do. I looked into the Great Wall and I looked into a couple of things, but it was only very peripheral. Really you’ve just got to stick with what they give you.

It’s funny that you mention that now because it never occurred to me, I don’t think, when I was writing the novella that those two things are related.

Paul: Literally it was the first thing that came to mind as I read the first three or four paragraphs! Moving on then the next one is Tim’s Castle of the Lost.

Tim: Unlike Mark I wanted to be salacious and gory. (Laughs) Mine would definitely be an X certificate story, I think Steve B would agree. It’s a bit rude, it’s a bit bloody.

I live in a part of South Wales where I can’t go out my back door without tripping over a castle or a country home. I actually had a castle in mind when I was writing the story and that’s Caldicot Castle where I once spent the whole night doing a sponsored ghost watch with a bunch of friends.

Stephen Bissette: Oh I wish I’d known…

Tim: Caldicot’s got two main towers connected by an encircling wall; one of the towers is derelict and fallen down and the other one, you could almost live in, much as the castle in my story.

So, we spent a night there. One of the guys took his guitar and we took lots of drink and spent the whole night not sleeping, just basically prowling around this castle locked up apart from us having a ghost watch. We didn’t see anything unfortunately, although there were some spirits involved (laughs). That was my setting really.

I like horror stories set in the countryside more than set in suburbia or urban settings, and I also like the idea of “never go home”, as they say sometimes, so my idea is based around a soldier who comes home from the war and goes back to his family home where lots of terrible sort of satanic worshipping has been going on. His family have vanished, so he goes home with his wife and very young baby and he tries to make the old family home that he left in a bit of a huff after his parents were being a bit scandalous, his own. He wants it to become the perfect family home. And needless to say it doesn’t quite go according to plan.

I’m not really sure which films I had in mind. One of my abiding memories of watching a film when I was eight, nine or ten on a Friday night, I think it was either… well, one or both… it was Curse of the Werewolf and The Beast Must Die. Curse of the Werewolf was the Oliver Reed film and I seem to remember – it’s years since I’ve seen it – a big country home in that film and he’s stalking the woodland outside the home.

I’m not sure there’s any one film that influenced my writing of it, it was just the whole sort of atmosphere I wanted to try and take on. The local village where the villagers are a bit suspicious of them all and all that side of things.

I probably went a bit over the top on the oral sex and gore maybe… I don’t know. It might have been censored (laughs)

Paul: Steve B, am I right in thinking it’s in that one where you make a comment in the outro about the various different cuts they had to make for the censors?

Stephen Bissette: I was thinking too of when I was growing up we would buy these movie novelisations of the Hammer films, such as The Man Who Could Cheat Death, the American edition. But there was one company called Monarch Books, who did some Hammer adaptations such as The Stranglers of Bombay and my personal favourite The Brides of Dracula, where they would add sex scenes in these novelisations. Really, for the time, the early 60s pretty explicit sex scenes: they’d have sentences like ‘He drove the lance of his manhood home’.

Steve Volk: That’s a great title

Stephen Bissette: Your novella Tim, kicks off with a very graphic orgy scene

Tim: Yeah. They say write what you know, don’t they…

Stephen Bissette: And I thought immediately I could come up with a buffer, so I have our film studio mogul Laurence Blythewood explain to the narrator that the novelisations often feature material that either appeared in the screenplay but was cut from the film or that they spiced it up for the novelisation. I was specifically thinking of these Monarch paperbacks.

The Monarch paperbacks were beloved to my generation because our parents would never check them. They were our first sex novels: Gorgo, a British monster movie and Reptilicus a Danish monster movie were the most sexually explicit of all of them. And my Mom was never gonna check Gorgo or Reptilicus novelisation so Tim you pushed that button for me…

Tim: Oh good.

Stephen Bissette: …whether you were aware of it or not and that’s why I made that reference you’re asking about.

Paul: It just jumped out that there were certain things that you’d picked up from the “novelisations” that otherwise might be overlooked.

Stephen Bissette: It was also another thing: it was an aspect of British film history as well. Here in America we had been told erroneously that Hammer made spicier versions of their films for Asian markets and international markets. It actually wasn’t Hammer, it was the producer team that did Jack the Ripper and The Flesh and the Fiends which was the bodysnatcher movie.

Steve Volk: Monty Berman? [and Robert S. Baker, who went on to make The Saint with Roger Moore]

Stephen Bissette: Yes! Exactly. They were the ones who would add footage with topless barmaids and so on for the international market.

Steve Volk: Quite right too

Stephen Bissette: Yeah and now in this wonderful age of DVD and Blu-ray, finally all of us all around the world can see it.

Paul: Chris, you’re up next with The Devil’s Circus.

Chris Golden: Obviously the title is an homage to Vampire Circus which ironically, of all of the Hammer films that I love is probably the one that I saw the latest. Steve will correct me but I don’t think it was played much, if at all, on the channels when I was growing up in America. We saw many Hammer films on our local affiliate stations but we didn’t see that one – at least I didn’t.

So it wasn’t until a decade or so ago when it came out on Blu-ray in the US that I finally saw the movie. What I love about it is it’s sort of like all of the stuff that I love but as if I had taken a lot of drugs. It just sort of washes over you.

The Devil’s Circus does also take from things like The Reptile and The Gorgon. I don’t want to tell too much of the story but basically the idea is that there’s a circus passing through the European landscape and children are disappearing in the wake of the circus passing. And our two protagonists are brought together by the search for missing people.

What was really the influence on me aside from the fact that I wanted scary clowns was I wanted to hit the same nerves as weird things like Freaks and The Man who Laughs and a lot of the eeriness of those informed what I was thinking and doing at the time.

I’d also just seen Lon Chaney in the silent film The Unknown which inspired me to want to do something set in a circus environment but also for me, one of the big things was that even though so much of what we see in the Hammer films especially takes place technically outdoors, it’s [filmed] in a studio. You watch the films and it’s clearly in a studio and that’s part of the charm of it.

I wanted to write something where in my mind at least, everything I was writing could be taking place on the same sets that you would have found in those movies. Because weirdly even though you’re supposed to be outside, there’s a sense of claustrophobia for me when I watch those movies: they’re outside but it still feels tight. Still feels like I can’t breathe when I’m watching those scenes.

Steve Volk: That’s just being in England!

Everyone laughs

Chris Golden: There’s a scene on a bridge by the stream, and even the scenes with the circus are all meant to feel a little bit claustrophobic even though a lot of it is outside. One thing that amused me is when I did indulge and forget that I was trying to write something that would be a film of that era. I don’t want to give anything away but there was a moment at least that special effects at the time could not have accomplished and Steve B explained in his interstitial piece how they accomplished that effect in the movie, which I think was great.

Stephen Bissette: That was one of the fun aspects of doing the interstitials. Mark invented this Chinese demon and I had to come up with a, to me, believable way that that demon would have been fabricated by a low budget producer like Lawrence Blythewood.

Same with Tim’s story, I chose a location – I wish I’d known about your castle Tim – but the one I chose was one I thought hadn’t appeared in movies or TV and was functional given the landscape you described in your novella.

And Chris, with yours, it was even more fun because I was totally familiar with those circus horror films you were referencing and coming up with the special effects was part of the fun of how they might have done. How they would have pulled it off for no money.

Paul: And we conclude the book with Mr Volk, The Squeamish. A very Volk title

Steve Volk: I guess the genesis for my story The Squeamish was: I’ve always read books about Hammer Films and the history of Hammer and I was reading about a certain person at the BBFC, the British Board of Film Censors, who was quite anti-horror films and very anti-Hammer in particular. I was reading this book and came across the letters that she would send to Hammer saying, ‘I really don’t think that we should see the knife going into the flesh at this point so please eradicate that from your negative,’ and things like that.

That struck me as a really interesting character because we all come across people in life who just don’t get horror and they will never get it. You can explain it till you’re blue in the face but there’s something inherent that they don’t like, they never will like – and the idea of that person being in charge, being on high and giving rulings about creative work that she doesn’t really understand or get immediately felt like something that had a lot of dramatic friction.

What I wanted to do is have it be about making a horror film really and surreptitiously being about what is horror and why do we want it? Why do some people want to make it? Why do other people want to stop other people making it? That kind of argument really.

I introduced what we would now say is a young director – there’s always a clash between young and old in Hammer anyway – so I was thinking Michael Reeves and that era of Witchfinder General or The Sorcerers and this clash between two people. I wanted it against the background of a film, so I thought it would be nice if it was quite a traditional mid-60s film and I always dreamt of the idea of “What if I had been there when they were making the Christopher Lee series of Dracula, when they were doing Scars of Dracula and Taste the Blood of Dracula. What would it have been like if someone turned around and say ‘OK, you do the next one’?” That would have been the most fantastic thing, so I thought, why don’t I just dream up what I would have done, had I been asked to do that.

So I came up with this scenario called The Mortal Sins of Dracula which is the film that my Michael Reeves type character is making. I wanted it to be somewhere between Taste the Blood of Dracula and Black Narcissus, set in a kind of nunnery high in the hill tops of the Carpathian mountains. It’s basically Dracula amongst nuns.

I thought that was a fun idea, so that’s the film within a film but it’s really about the clash between the woman from the English Board of Film Censors, which is what I call it, and the tyro director played as I picked it by Oliver Reed. I won’t give the story away but let’s just say for argument’s sake, she descends into a nightmare.

It’s about those who get horror and those who eventually get got by horror; that’s the easiest way of summing it up. But rather than good and bad characters I think there’s a feeling hopefully towards the end of: Who’s the hero? Who’s the villain of the piece? They both need each other and they’re both just as bad or just as good as each other really. But it was fun to lay out that landscape and play with it and then hand it over to Steve B to say ‘How do you think they would have made this?’ That was fascinating.

Paul: What was the biggest challenge for you each? Was the biggest challenge in writing these stories within the word count that you were working to, novella length rather than full novel length, and also keeping it to the idea of it being a novelisation which has a certain ring to it. Or did you just ignore that?

Tim: It was a couple of years since we’ve written these novellas now but I think I pretty much ignored it. I came up with the idea of the story, and having written a few novelisations anyway, I imagined how the script would look and tried to transcribe that, but because there’s no real script anyway that was, I suppose, a pointless exercise really.

I don’t think it presented any big challenges other than it being a period piece really. I tend not to write period pieces in most of my work. Most of what I write tends to be pretty contemporary or near future. Most of my near future stuff is in a world we don’t recognise anyway so not too much research. So probably the only challenge for me with this was having to research it a little bit more than usual really, just stuff like modes of transport and clothing and things like that. Nothing extreme, I don’t think.

Chris Golden: I think the biggest challenge for me was to keep my focus, in the sense of trying not to add all of the other elements that appeal to me from those films. To keep it focused on what the story was instead of adding extra. It would have been longer, obviously. That also made it easier because keeping that focus meant you could just follow the beats of what the film would have been, try to create the story arc

I was tempted to add a lot more crazy shit and I tamed myself to just keep the focus on the story of these two protagonists, what they’ve lost and their investigation into the Devil’s Circus.

Steve Volk: To be honest I think, like Tim said, it’s a bit difficult to remember but I remember thinking that I really wanted it to feel like a novelisation of a film. We can do novellas that are really, if you boil them down dramatically, half hour dramas. I don’t know how everyone accomplished this or even aimed for it – but I wanted mine to feel as if you’d seen a 90-minute drama.

I wanted it to feel there’s that much narrative in it. I suspect what I did was try to structure it certainly into three acts with a progression of scenes in the way I would a screenplay really, which isn’t necessarily the way you would with a novella. In order to achieve a kind of filmic feel to it, even though one has fun with language and ideas within that, I wanted it to feel, just in the way that sections cut against each other, to have a filmic idea of cutting between scenes. Really working at the idea that you’re visualising and hearing what’s on the screen, as you’re reading this story. I don’t always do that because I go in and out of my characters’ viewpoint as well, and there’s more than one viewpoint, as there would be in this particular film.

It’s not a rigid thing and also I used short-ish scenes. I remember thinking, “Well you wouldn’t want too elaborate a description here, you’d want to get in and get out kind of thing.” Be last in the room and first out, as they say of screenwriting.

I really wanted to maintain the tone of it possibly having been on the screen at some time.

Mark: There are a couple of things I think, basically what Steve said. When I was writing it I just tried to visualise every single scene as a Hammer type 1960s British horror movie. Every single scene that I wrote, even the dialogue, I tried to imagine actors saying those words on screen. I tried to keep that vision in my head the whole time, so almost like watching the movie as you’re writing it.

The only other thing is that, obviously in my story there are quite a few Chinese characters and I know that if this had been made as a 1960s British horror movie, Hammer movie, they’d have had a lot of those Chinese characters probably played by English actors made up to look like Chinese guys, apart from the few background characters who may have been Chinese actors who were around in London at the time. So there was that trying to keep that balance between not being offensive but also keeping true to the period. Having Chinese characters that you would maybe see in a film like that at the time and also trying not to offend anyone. I think that was the main challenge for me.

The rest of it comes quite naturally because I think most of us are used to writing novellas and novelisations and sticking very rigidly to word counts. So that wasn’t a real problem, I think we’ve all probably got quite an instinctive feel for how long something should be and we tend not to let it run out of control.

Steve Volk: I think that’s a good point. It’s true of mine as well: you’re writing something set in the… I can’t remember if Steve 2 and I decided it was 1967 or ‘68 or later than that..

Stephen Bissette: I actually suggested bumping it back because I felt like the censor wouldn’t have allowed a film to be made until the 70s so..

Steve Volk: It’s quite fun to go back and play with ideas of idle sexism, office politics and things like that and visualising films from that era and trying to capture the kind of characters in those films and just thinking – “My God, so many things have changed.” (laughs) You’re kind of examining it and casting an eye over it as well as showing it. I think that was a kind of subtextural aspect of this whole project really, which was certainly quite interesting to me.

Paul: Though, if you’re writing anything that’s period, you’re going to be filtering your 1890s or your 1960s through a 2020 filter. We can’t help but do that, otherwise it’s going to feel absolutely wrong.

Steve Volk: Yes and then you have to balance that with your urge not to falsify what things were like in those days.

Paul: Is it the perception of what it actually was like or is it how we were told it was like? I mean we’re talking about the 60s, which none of us lived as adults through.

Steve Volk: Pertinent to this project we can still see it in the films and the way the films were written and the way contemporary characters were portrayed.

Paul: Which is a different filter in itself isn’t it?

Steve Volk: I mean funnily enough, even though it’s not a Hammer film and not related to any of the subject matter in my story, one of the things that I constantly found myself using as a touchstone for my story was Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, which was much later but that kind of idle sexism in the pub and the sleaziness of the underbelly of London, Soho and Covent Garden. That somehow was at the back of my mind even though it’s nothing to do with Blythewood Studios or Hammer or even Amicus. But it’s there..

Stephen Bissette: Frenzy was 1972, and it was shot in ‘71

Mark: All the way through when I was writing mine I was constantly thinking this is a film made in 1965. I don’t know Steve B, how you felt doing the interstitial bits whether you felt it was made around that time or made a little bit earlier?

Stephen Bissette: Yes, in fact I followed up on your lead, Mark, by making it clear that it was made before but released right around the same time as The Face of Fu Manchu which was 1965. Because I grew up seeing those films, I was thinking of The Terror of the Tongs, the 1961 Hammer Christopher Lee film. You were definitely writing in that window of ‘61 to ‘65 in terms of my perception of that period of time, not having experienced that period of time.

Paul: Steve B, for your interstitials and the portmanteau tale that you had round it, did you draw anything else from any of those portmanteau films?

Stephen Bissette: Actually I didn’t. What I drew from was through friends like G Michael Dobbs, I had met and became friends with Richard Gordon, the British film producer who produced films like Fiend Without A Face and The Haunted Strangler and right on up to the 1970s Tower of Evil. My wife Marjorie and I used to join Mike Dobbs and Richard Gordon and his brother Alex Gordon, and I was trying to capture how they spoke about their own work.

There’s something we can all glean from reading interviews with people in the film industry and I think out of all of us, Stephen Volk, you probably have the most actual experience in working with film producers and television producers and so on. They have a certain way of talking about their work, because to them their work is product. It’s sort of like making sausages and you don’t care much if the sausages are good or not, it’s whether they sell or not. That’s part of it.

So, for me, the toughest thing and what took so long which was frustrating for all the participants here, is I had to read all the novellas and the hardest thing to place was Steve’s The Squeamish is a nunsploitation film in a way right? Like a Dracula nunsploitation film.

So the challenge became, How do I plant a seed before and after Mark Morris’ novella that will ripen later in The Squeamish? How do I pick up those threads and very innocuously plant those references? It was easy with some of the stuff like Chris’s Circus horror story, there are so many circus horror movies including British ones from Circus of Horrors up to Vampire Circus.

And Tim, in your novella you had the family estate and the ancient paintings – for me that’s like the Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe films, they all have those long scenes of looking at the paintings of the demented ancestors…

Steve Volk: I think that’s what I’m doing now…

Stephen Bissette: (laughs) Well, there you go…

The hard part was trying to invisibly plant those little clues in my interstitials to set up what each of you did in your novellas and I have to say since I did get to read them all, you guys nailed it! They do play like 90-minute movies, because you have sequences that might be two sentences or a paragraph at most that in screen time would have eaten up 10 minutes in the way those films were produced and paced and so on.

I think that was the hardest thing for me: really reading deep into each novella and trying to cherry pick the reference points that I should be setting up earlier so that the reference will ring when it pops up in the later film.

Paul: You had to do a lot of foreshadowing, when the guys between them weren’t aware it was needed.

Stephen Bissette: Right. I also had to keep it believable that this was a real movie producer talking about work he had done 40 or 50 years earlier. Lawrence Blythewood is nothing like Richard Gordon but Richard had a certain way, a certain cadence when he spoke about his work and that’s what I was trying to capture and extrapolate on.

The other thing I’ll mention:When I got the finished draft from Stephen, I had also researched the word Blythewood and I found there was a Blythewood University. That’s why I made the protagonist of the framing story an academic. I thought, Stephen must have intended that so let me make sure I play off of that.

I imagine I played off a number of things that may not have been intentional in the novellas themselves but they were there, and just like when we all look back at those old movies, whether intended or not those elements are very real to the viewer of the reader.

Paul: Mark will recognise this quote “Humans – always seeing patterns in things that aren’t there”. [From the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie]

Steve Volk: I feel it’s going to be really exciting. I can’t wait to actually have the book and to read the 85% of it that I’m not involved with whatsoever (laughs) and really enjoy it as if it’s completely new. That’s going to be really exciting.

Chris Golden: I just want to say that I never re-read my own work, I never read my stuff ever. But I think this is going to be the one time when I get the book, I think I’m going to read it from front to back including mine because I want to see it all in context.

Stephen Bissette: You all should do as Chris suggests, because what you all pulled off is like the ultimate “dusk-to-dawn” drive-in movie show. When I was a teenager, I loved those dusk-to-dawn shows which would usually roll out four movies, sometimes five. And when I re-read your novellas once they were all in hand, you guys really did it: you pulled off the ultimate British horror movie dusk-to-dawn show.

Studio of Screams can be ordered now from PS Publishing.