Elizabeth Montgomery in an early episode of “Bewitched.”

Witchcraft has an iffy history in film and television. When I first started doing my Firefly Witch stories, one thing I reacted against was the standard image of the pop-culture witch. Leaving aside the blatant “wicked witch” portrayals, it’s still hard to find anything remotely accurate, let alone sympathetic. It’s not impossible, though.

One of the earliest films about witchcraft, which unfortunately took the devil-worship position, is the unique Swedish/Danish film Haxan. Retitled Witchcraft Through the Agesin English, this one-of-a-kind 1922 silent film depicts witchcraft the way history describes it, then explains how witches were tortured by the Inquisition. It’s impossible not to be horrified by the treatment of the unfortunate women, and to feel sympathy for them. It’s not really a narrative film, yet it’s not a documentary, either. An indication of its strangeness is that the best-known version in English was narrated by William S. Burroughs.

In 1942, Veronica Lake played the witch Jennifer in the romantic comedy I Married a Witch. In the 1958 movie Bell, Book and Candle, Kim Novack plays Gillian, desperately in love with James Stewart. On TV in the 60s, Samantha Stevens (Elizabeth Montgomery) dominated Bewitched(okay, Agnes Moorehead dominated it, but still…). All these characters, though, labored under the kind of strictures common at the time: Gillian and Jennifer lost their magical powers when they fell in love, and Samantha had promised not to use hers to help her husband’s career.* At the time, witches had to be de-powered to allow the “natural order” to assert itself.

Kim Novak in “Bell, Book and Candle”

These comedies also embraced the common trope that one is “born” a witch; that somehow, the special powers are inherited rather than learned or earned. It’s even possible to read it as saying witches are not actually human, but a different species. But the idea of “innate powers” is a thread that runs through most witchcraft movies, with a couple of notable exception.

In the 70s, one of the most accurate depictions of genuine witchcraft appeared in the seldom-seen George Romero film, “Jack’s Wife (1972). Also released under the more exploitative titles Season of the Witch and Hungry Wives, it’s about a woman who’s drawn into witchcraft as a remedy for the ennui of her suburban life. It’s a blatantly feminist film, and treats the main character’s involvement with magic as empowering. It’s also very much of its time, which means it gets a little arty-for-art’s sake at times.

Jan White in “Jack’s Wife,” enmeshed in the symbolism.

The other notable exception, the character of Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, brought the idea that witchcraft was a learned skill into the popular imagination. Unfortunately, it’s also depicted as something addictive, and an entire story arc was devoted to its detrimental effects on Willow.

The rise of feminism and the idea that women were, I don’t know, actual people capable of doing something other than supporting men changed depictions of witchcraft. The Witches of Eastwick (1987), a pretty dire film from a critical standpoint, did at least show that women supporting each other could defeat even the Devil Himself. The Craft(1997) starts with the idea that outcasts working together can be strong, but then degenerates into standard horror.

My favorite positive depiction of witchcraft is 1998′s Practical Magic. Based (extremely loosely) on Alice Hoffman’s novel, it shows two sets of sisters, younger (Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman) and older (Dianne Weist and Stockard Channing), using their powers to protect their family. I confess that I have a total crush on Sandra Bullock’s character (not, I hasten to add, on Ms. Bullock herself).

Sandra Bullock in “Practical Magic.”

Together, these movies and TV shows present a very distorted view of witchcraft filtered through society’s concerns. That’s fine as far as it goes–witchcraft can be used as a metaphor, just as anything else can be–but to me, it never captured the true (okay, wait for it…) magic of Wicca/Paganism/the Craft. It was never shown as joyous, rarely as empowering, and certainly never as the religion it truly is. When I began writing my Firefly Witch stories, I wanted to put as much of that back as I could and still tell interesting, dramatic horror/fantasy stories.

If you’d like to check them out and decide for yourself how well I did it, go here. And if I’ve missed an important example, please tell me in the comments.

*I reference this show in my short story “The Darren Stevens Club,” in the first Firefly Witch collection.

George Lucas and Elvis: Echoes from 1977

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Alex in corruption, creativity, criticism, Elvis Presley, fantasy literature, filmmaking, home, movies, music, originality, pop culture, science fiction | 1 Comment

Thirty-five years ago, two things that fundamental changed my life happened in the same summer.

In May, Star Wars was released.

In August, Elvis Presley died.

The arrival of Star Wars turned the thing that everyone in my small town mocked, that had gotten me teased and beaten up, into the hippest thing in the world. Spaceships, aliens and robots were suddenly cool. Everyone went to see the movie, and multiple times, too. I learned a great deal of the dialogue by heart, something my kids have made me promise not to demonstrate when their friends are over. I collected everything I could find about the movie, desperate to understand what made it so awesome. Even then, I knew I wanted to be a creator, not just a consumer. My friends all wanted to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, but I wanted to be the next George Lucas.

On the other hand, Elvis was something that was practically in the water. We lived an hour north of Memphis, and so I’d heard Elvis all my life. The album I recall listening to the most (and we’re talking vinyl album here) was 1970′s Elvis in Person at the International Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada. It included live and rather self-mocking versions of his greatest hits, along with covers of the Bee Gees hit, “Words.” Yes, Elvis covered the Bee Gees. He was a fact of life for me, and when he was gone, it created a vacuum that, to this day, occasionally strikes me anew with its poignancy. It’s not that I don’t understand what happened–believe me, I’ve read enough books about him to grasp the tragedy that his life became–it’s that his fall was so immense, and so thorough, and happened so young (he was only 42 when he died) that its full scale takes a long time to be fully appreciated.

As I sit here listening to Elvis (specifically, to the awesome collection Greatest Jukebox Hits, the CD I’d recommend to anyone looking for a one-disc sampler of what made the King so great), I suddenly wondered what George Lucas thought of Elvis’s death back then. Did he glimpse his own future in it? Because except for the drug abuse and dying young, he’s pretty much done the same thing.

Consider:

Like Elvis, George is financially successful, even now. Elvis packed arenas until the day he died.

Like Elvis, George’s later work is derivative and shallow compared with his earlier breakthrough creations.

Like Elvis, George’s original fans consider themselves betrayed by what he’s become*.

Like Elvis, George refuses to listen to critics. Elvis had manager Tom Parker always preaching the easiest, least challenging path. George was his own Colonel Tom.

Like Elvis, George is willingly insulated from the outside world by his wealth and position of power.

And, the most obvious,

Like Elvis, George has become physically fat and morally complacent.

Both men are legends. Both men changed the world. But if he’s not careful, George will become as big a punchline, as big a joke, as Elvis (consider the recent Gotye parody).

And both men, ultimately, brought their sad status on themselves.

*This didn’t really happen during his life, true. But once he died, and we began to really assess what he’d given us in those last years, the backlash was, and is, enormous. That’s why fat, Vegas-era Elvis is such an easy punchline.

Review: Road to Hell

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Alex in Albert Pyun, Bulletface, Cynthia Curnan, Eddie and the Cruisers, filmmaking, Jim Steinman, Michael Pare, reviews, Road to Hell, Streets of Fire | 2 Comments

There are a lot of film parodies, but not so many films that function as commentaries. Offhand, the best known example might be The Freshman, in which Marlon Brando both spoofs his Godfather persona and simultaneously creates a new, ironic character.

Road to Hell, the new film by Albert Pyun, is a commentary film, in a sense. Michael Pare plays Cody, a riff on Tom Cody, the character he played in Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire. There’s also a pair of characters named Ellen, the original of which was played by Diane Lane in the Hill film. And although the film stands on its own, its fannish shout-outs to the earlier film give it a special sort of resonance to fans.

Not that the films are that similar. Streets of Fire was a big-budget flop, a kind of music-video adventure set in a timeless city that was half 1950s, half 1980s. It celebrated innocence: guns were fired but no blood was spilled, punches and kisses were exchanged but no real damage was done by either. Jim Steinman contributed a couple of his trademark overwrought songs. I loved it, and still do, but I can also see why others wouldn’t: it requires a special mind-set to step into that world and accept its stylizations.

Pare (l) and Kramer.

Road to Hell is like the hallucinations of someone with a fever who’d just watched Streets of Fire and perhaps read too many “true crime” novels. Working against a green screen, Pyun creates a surreal desert landscape in which this version of Cody collides with a spree killer (Clare Kramer, with great demented eyes) and her girlfriend (Courtney Peldon). The heart of the movie takes place in and around a broken-down jeep, where violence is ever-present among the three, although you can’t quite be sure how it will manifest. Cody is waiting for one Ellen, but it’s ultimately the other Ellen he finds.

The actors–it’s essentially a four-hander–are uniformly good. Kramer (a Buffy alum) is totally uninhibited, and Peldon is surprisingly subtle as her sort-of accomplice/girlfriend.

But the real surprises are the veteran Pare and the newcomer Roxy Gunn. Pare, whose career as a leading man never quite took off after his debut in Eddie and the Cruisers, shows every mile on his face as this alternate-universe Cody whose skills as a soldier and killer have become his whole life. I’ve always been a fan of Pare’s, one of those actors who does his best even when the whole film is against him, and here he’s subtle and affecting (as well as shockingly brutal). He shifts with ease from being iconic to pathetic and back.

Pare (l) and Gunn.

Gunn, making her debut, is a real find. In a time when all young actresses tend to blur together into one generic face, she really stands out. An actual musician (that’s her singing, her band The Roxy Gunn Project performing, and she wrote some of the songs), she has a natural ease onscreen that makes every moment seem real. In a movie where the main landscape is faces, she has one that conveys everything her character is thinking and feeling.

So I enjoyed Road to Hell for what it is: a riff on a movie both I and the filmmakers clearly loved, filtered through Pyun’s own unique aesthetic (which you can experience in a purer form in his recent Bulletface). I’m glad Pare got a chance to really chew into a part, and Roxy Gunn’s debut is magical. Will the general public like it? I don’t know. But then, it’s not every movie that includes both disembowelings and rock concerts, severed heads and love ballads. If you enjoy this sort of mash-up, done irony-free and with its own agenda, you’ll probably dig it. I sure did.

You can read my earlier interviews with Road to Hell director Albert Pyun here, and screenwriter/producer Cynthia Curnan here. Yes, I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a while.

Interview: Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Alex in filmmaking, interview, writing | Leave a comment

Sterlin Harjo at Sundance in 2007

Sterlin Harjo is an Oklahoma filmmaker with two extraordinary feature films under his belt. His first, Four Sheets to the Wind, is about a young man struggling to connect to the world after the loss of his father; Barking Water tells of two elderly lovers on a last road trip. Both are set against the background of Oklahoma Native Americans (Harjo belongs to the Seminole and Creek Nations), but they’re not special-interest films at all; they’re universal stories about feelings that we all have, against a unique and vivid cultural background.

Here’s the trailer for Four Sheets to the Wind:

One of the things that impressed me about the films was the tightness of the stories; it’s one thing to do a tight script, it’s another to do a tight one that feels loose, the way reality feels loose. Both Harjo’s films seem to have a leisurely pace, presenting the unhurried minutiae of the characters’ lives, but by the end it all matters and it all has weight. It’s also significant that, whether due to budget or aesthetics, the movies are filled with the look, sounds and locations of real life.

Here’s an example of the kind of realistic detail you won’t find in mainstream commercial cinema. In Four Sheets to the Wind, a character is awakened by a noise; now, strictly speaking, it could be any noise, from a barking dog to a coffee maker. But Harjo uses a truck’s squealing fan belt. Most mainstream filmmakers would have no idea what this sound even is, let alone what causes it, or what its presence says about the socioeconomic position of the family. It’s a tiny real-life detail that conveys an awful lot in a simple noise.

See the trailer for Barking Water:

Sterlin was kind enough to answer some questions for me about his approach to writing.

AB: Your two feature films have the common story element of people struggling to communicate. In Four Sheets to the Wind, Cufe is desperate for someone to really listen to him, and in Barking Water, Frankie and Irene are trying to repair a lifetime of miscommunication. Why is that theme of such interest to you?

SH: Not sure. There are a couple of themes that I deal with: communication/language and death. They always seem to find there way into my work.

I know you share a cultural background with your films’ subjects; how much of the actual stories also come from real life?

A lot of the characters are based on personalities that Im familiar with. Cufe in Four Sheets is based off my cousin, with a little bit of me in the mix. All the films have scenes or stories that have been adapted from real life. That’s really the only way I can write. That’s why my stories are culturally specific and set in Oklahoma.

One element that gives your films such impact is that, for the most part, everything is underplayed. There’s not a lot of histrionics, which is one reason the climax of Barking Water is so powerful. Do you know it’s going to have that tone from the moment you envision a story, or does it arise out of the material?

I always take the low key route. I just like subtlety. I am always striving to be truthful. I love how older Indians in my family tell stories. It can be about anything… about nothing, but the way they tell it makes it compelling. I love the films of John Cassavetes and Jim Jarmusch. Very different filmmakers, but neither care much for false reactions or theatrics. Both seem very real, in very different ways.

You mentioned Cassavetes: his films feel like they’re improvised, yet they’re not: pretty much everything is scripted. How do you use improvisation in your films?

I do improv, like Cassevetes, in rehearsal. But most everything is written.

One of my favorite comments about writing comes from screenwriter/director David Koepp, who was urged to eliminate the heavy Chicago accents in his film, Stir of Echoes: paraphrased, he says that the more specific you are with your characters’ reality, the more the audience will see the universal in them. As a reader/viewer, I’ve found that to be true, and I try to embrace it in my own writing. What do you think about that idea, and how does the concept apply to your work?

I agree. I think the more specific you get the more universal your story/film is. I always try to write from the characters perspective. Not the audience perspective. Because if you create a world where people can go into they will get into the film more.

Currently Harjo’s work is regularly featured at This Land, an Oklahoma-based arts project that includes a TV series of short documentaries (I’m partial to Indian Elvis). I appreciate him stopping by to answer some questions, and look forward to his future work.

Interview: Kim Dryden, co-director of Appalachian film “Over Home”

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Alex in filmmaking, interview, movies, music | 1 Comment

My introduction to Appalachian culture, which figures so strongly in The Hum and the Shiver, really took place in the late 1990s. Prior to that, I’d looked on the Smoky Mountain region of Tennessee with some of the same distant awe as anyone else. Tennessee is a long, narrow state, and I grew up on the whole other end from the mountains. But in 1998, I first attended the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. And it was there that I first encountered the work of Sheila Kay Adams, storyteller and ballad singer.

Storyteller and ballad singer Sheila Kay Adams.

Sheila Kay has spent her life performing, and preserving, the ballads she learned sitting knee-to-knee with family and friends in and around Sodom, NC. In many ways she’s the last of her kind. And now filmmakers Kim Dryden and Joe Cornelius have begun work on a film, Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County, chronicling both Sheila Kay’s life and the history of ballad singing in general.

Follow this link for a preview of what they have in mind.

Kim Dryden was kind enough to answer some questions about the project.

Me: In this era of instant communication, what for you is the continued value in the ballads and Sheila Kay’s way of teaching them?

Kim: The ballads are important for several reasons. I think they are stories that are universally relatable, and therefore appeal to a very broad audience. What’s more, while they were originally brought here by Scots-Irish immigrants, I feel they’ve truly become an important part of the American musical heritage, much like jazz. Because of that, they ought to be protected fiercely, not just by those like Sheila who grew up with them as part of their birthright, but by the general public, including universities, museums, etc., as well. That’s part of what we’re trying to do, is get down on record, in visual format, what this tradition is all about. Finally, I think the ballads are most important for the way they bring people together. A big part of what our film explores is the idea of balance between the culture that once nurtured the tradition of ballad singing versus the music itself, and asking what is more highly valued in places like Sodom Laurel. It’s so interesting to me that although the old time way of living is dying out, ballads are still hanging on, even thriving in some ways. I think this is in part because of people like our characters – Sheila, Saro, and Damien – who not only sing these old songs, but work to give them context, a new community in which they matter.

The way Sheila teaches these ballads, knee-to-knee, is very important to that idea of community building. Being face to face with someone, spending time with them in their homes and in their lives, gives such a deeper meaning. I think this method is more important now than ever in this day of instant communication. It takes a really dedicated person to seek out someone like Sheila and put in the sustained effort over weeks, if not months or years, to learn from her in a meaningful way.

I first encountered Sheila Kay as a storyteller. How do you explore that role in the film?

Kim Dryden setting up to interview Sheila Kay Adams.

I also found Sheila first as a storyteller, through the NC Storyteller’s Guild’s website. Ballad singing is so much a part of storytelling. We’ll explore this idea in our film by using the ballads, with emphasis on the lyrics, as a narrative device to transition and set mood/tone. Sheila is, more than anything, I think, a storyteller, both on stage and off. That’s how she communicates with others, and so naturally it’ll come across on film as well.

Which ballad speaks most directly to you? (My personal favorites are “Shady Grove” and “Omie Wise.”)

My personal favorite is “Pretty Saro.” I absolutely love the lyrics, and was so incredibly moved by seeing Cas Wallin sing it on Youtube. It makes me wish I was alive then to see that. I also really like “Over Home,” although that’s a new one. The lyrics really speak to me, hence the name of our film.

Thanks to Kim for taking the time to talk to me. You can follow the progress of Over Home at the project’s Facebook page.

Film review: “Dawn of the Dragonslayer”

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Alex in fantasy literature, filmmaking, movies, reviews, Uncategorized | 13 Comments

First, a digression: the SyFy Channel, much like MTV before it, has done considerable damage to the very thing it first embraced. Now the phrase, “A SyFy Original Movie” elicits the same sort of laughter as Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and for the same reason: you hear it and you know you’re in for a bad movie. And SyFy is content with that: after all, if audiences are laughing, that means they’re watching. So we now have an entire subgenre, the SyFy movie, with casts either culled from past cult shows or featuring newcomers with the talent of an infomercial audience plant; the same generic Eastern European scenery represents everything from Tennessee to Sherwood Forest; and the scripts…well, they’re as bad as my first drafts (which is pretty bad). And don’t even mention the special effects. And this is where most of our low-budget, independent fantasy films now come from.

All this makes Dawn of the Dragonslayer, an indie fantasy film directed by Anne B. Black (and not, let me be clear, connected in any way with SyFy), that much more extraordinary and interesting. It couldn’t have cost much more than most SyFy movies, yet the things that don’t depend on money–talent, the desire to do good work, and belief in the project at hand–nudge it into the realm of real cinema. It’s low budget, but not low rent.

The story begins when Will Shepherd, a…shepherd, leaves home after a dragon kills his father. He seeks to serve as bondsman to Lord Sterling, with the aim of being elevated to knighthood. Sterling’s holdings have been devastated by the plague, and only he, his daughter and a few worthless servants remain. Will and Kate Sterling fall in love, a union threatened by class distinctions, a vile rival knight and the reappearance of the dragon.

Kate (Nicola Posener) and Will (Richard McWilliams)

To be fair, there’s a certain dourness to the film that prevents it from being as much fun as it might. But it gets so many other things right, especially compared to what’s normally found in indie fantasy films, that it’s easy to overlook this. The film was shot on the west coast of Ireland, and thus has an unexpected scenic beauty. The acting, especially from leads Richard McWilliams and Nicola Posener, is solid and at times inspired. Further, while both are attractive, they also look suited to the story’s time and place (no pouty false lips on her, no gym-rat abs on him). The lack of scale–a cast of less than a dozen and virtually a single setting–is used to the story’s advantage, not as something to be ignored with a cynical wink and nudge. And Panu Aaltio’s music is lush and romantic.

I did a lot of research on dragons for my own dragon novel, Burn Me Deadly, so I appreciate them when they’re well-done and get probably too annoyed for my own good when they’re bad. This dragon, for the most part, is pretty good. Most importantly it seems an organic part of the film’s world, visible through the mist in the distance or just behind the clouds, blending in or flitting out of sight. At the climax we get our first good look at it, and while it’s a little over-designed, it never loses that sense of belonging to this time and place. There’s a brilliant shot of it lying dead* on the rocks, waves crashing around it.

The dragon itself.

My only real criticism is the dearth of humor. Will is a serious young hero, and the film takes its cue from him; a lighter touch might’ve made the film move faster. And I must say I prefer the original title, Paladin, to its rather generic replacement.

Still, from the first epic shot of Ireland’s coast to the final romantic image, it’s clear that real love and attention was put into Dawn of the Dragonslayer. There’s a film here bigger than its budget, and I hope it finds an audience.

Watch for an interview with director Anne B. Black and producer Kynan Griffin, appearing here soon.

*Come on, that’s not a spoiler; the film has Dragonslayer in the title and you expect a dragon not to be slain?

What lives in Blackheath Woods?

Posted on June 22, 2009 by Alex in Ciaran Foy, faeries, filmmaking | 5 Comments

I’m fascinated by the fae. Not the Tinkerbell kind of fairies, Disneyfied out of all ambiguity, but the elemental, primitive spirits believed to exist in pre-industrial times. They don’t often make it into popular media unprocessed for mass consumption, but occasionally one slips through, as in this brilliant short film by Ciaran Foy:

(apologies for the Portuguese subtitles; it’s the only copy I could find online. Posted here with the filmmaker’s permission.)

I spoke to Irish filmmaker Ciaran Foy (seen below directing actress Katie Keogh) about this film, after reading that it originated as a reaction to the 1997 film Fairy Tale: A True Story.*

Alex: What about that film specifically inspired this very different, and much more brutal, take on the fae realm?

Ciaran Foy: I think it was the whole prissy tone of it. You know, the prim and proper upper class English girls wide-eyed in awe at the “ever so beautiful” and benevolent Faeries. It just felt wrong to me. In Ireland the Faerie or Sidhe (shee) race are not depicted like that at all. Quite the contrary. There are many parts of the country that still very much believe in their existence and one thing you do not do is disturb, anger or insult the Sidhe. In fact they are quite feared. In folk belief and practice, the Sidhe are often propitiated with offerings. With this in mind it was thought best never to name them directly, so they were referred to in euphemisms such as “The Good Neighbors,” “The Good Folk,” “The Little Folk,” “The Gentry,” or simply “The Folk,” in the hope that if humans describe them as kind, they are more likely to be so.

In other words I wanted to take the Victorian cliché of little girls and angelic faeries and make it clash with the Celtic myth. Essentially taking something esbablished in the public conscious, and turning it on it’s head.

Was the belief in faeries part of your experience growing up?

I grew up in Dublin city, so on a day to day level, no. But we had relatives in the countryside where it was very much part of the experience and whenever we went to visit we would hear about it. There was a small bridge on the way to my aunts where it was considered bad luck if you didn’t say, “Good morning faeries,” whilst going over it. There was a farmer who lived near them who claimed that three of his sons had died because they had “been messing” at a faerie ring. Another local woman would always leave her front and back doors open at all times, to allow the Faeries a path way through. It’s just part of the vernacular. The faeries are to be feared. The Bean Sidhe or Banshee (which means, faerie woman) was someone who you heard wailing before a death would occur. The person who didn’t hear the wail was usually the victim. They say the doomed DeLorean car factory in Lisburn was warned it was being built on a faerie mound, etc. So relating faeries to notions of benevolence and innocent frolicking was just not heard of! You have to remember, occurrences like the burning of Bridget Cleary were scarily common in the 19th century. Ideas get passed down and in isolated communities they tend to remain in one form or another. In researching [his new film] The Shee, it was made obvious to me that there are still pockets of the country where these beliefs are staunchly held. And to suggest to them that their beliefs are just silly superstitions is like suggesting to a dogmatic Christian that their beliefs are but the same – some people will even get angry at you. So it’s still there.

That all said, the believers tend to be from older generations, so it’s possible this may be the last or one of the last generations of believers. The world is becoming a smaller place.

Was the design of the faeries dictated by the time of year in which you filmed, or was it the other way round? What else influenced the design?

Well the design of the faeries was by Olwen Kelleghan. She’s amazing at coming up with psychologically freaky designs. I asked her to create a faerie that was vicious yet felt real. She did a number of sketches and one of them was like a cross between some twigs, an insect, and a concentration camp victim. It was horrible yet felt very organic. I’d never seen anything like it on screen before (this was way before Pan’s Labyrinth) and I wanted to use it. One integral part of the design was that they had these rotting autumn leaves for wings. So in a static state they would look just like leaves while resting on a tree. In fact, for the final shot in the short, I initially wanted Melissa to back away and we would reveal a full tree behind her that was literally ‘brimming with faeries’ – we just couldn’t afford to get it done. So the design of the faeries came first. We shot in April and just graded to be autumnal looking.

Are you faeries intelligent and therefore vengeful, or do they attack Melissa instinctively?

Hmm… I’ve never been asked that before… I guess they are mostly instinctive, as I wouldn’t imagine you could ‘reason’ with my faeries. The same way if you disturbed an ant hill, you would expect instinctive attack. But that said, do you consider ants intelligent? Well, they builds cities, farms, raises animals, and organize themselves into a complex society complete with social ranks such as nobles, soldiers, workers and slaves. I guess it depends on ones definition of intelligence.

Do you feel Melissa deserved her fate?

Yes and no.

Yes, in the sense of the fable like ‘fairy tale’ feel of it. Like the best of the Grimms Fairytales – a character learns a lesson the hard way. “Do what your Mother says” – Melissa doesn’t. “Don’t mess around with things you don’t know about,” “Looks can be deceiving,” etc. I also cast a young actress who had a kind of humorous brat like quality to her – so we would be able to stomach her demise that little bit easier!

No, in the sense that she is just a curious child who innocently follows a faerie. But that’s also the point in a way. The best deaths in horrors, certainly the most shocking ones, happen to characters who don’t truly deserve it.

Many thanks to Ciaran Foy for taking the time to answer my questions. Watch for his upcoming film, The Shee, in the near future.

*Full disclosure: I have a soft spot for this film. Then again, I also have a soft spot for Godzilla Vs. Megalon, so take that under advisement.

Interview: Lisa Stock, director of the Blood Groove trailer

Posted on May 3, 2009 by Alex in Blood Groove, filmmaking, Lisa Stock | Leave a comment

I first encountered the films of Lisa Stock, and Lisa herself, at WisCon in 2008. She was promoting her short films and multimedia work (such as the phenomenal Through the Cobweb Forest), and I was absolutely astounded by them. When it came time to do a video trailer for Blood Groove, I knew I wanted to work with a real filmmaker like her. Luckily, she was willing to bring her considerable talent to what could easily be a mere commercial. In the process, she did indeed turn it into a lot more than that.

Alex: You approach visual arts as a deliberately mythopoetic form. How were you able to bring that to bear on the Blood Groove trailer?

Lisa: One of the things I like about the book is that it doesn’t fall back on the ages old vampire cliches. In fact, one of its characters spends a portion of the book dispelling those myths. And I use that for the opening of the trailer in the trial scene. You’ve created your own archetypes in Blood Groove and I tried to pick up on those – while bringing in elements that were meaningful to me. Take for instance the museum (I’ve worked in two museums before). I won’t give away what happens here in the book – but it’s a perfect mythic place for so many reasons – past and present face each other, there’s discovery, initiation, sacrifice – all themes we deal with on a daily basis, but like to analyze in a different context.

What aspects of the novel seemed to lend themselves to a visual interpretation?

As Fauvette was discovering the world anew – so was I. Love this character! And seeing her world come to life was instrumental to the trailer I wanted to create for the book. Not only how she viewed the world (the sun, the paintings, the warehouse), but how we viewed her as well. And there are two very different Fauvettes in the trailer. She too – is very mythic to me, very visual. At once, she’s a damned soul dragged up from Hell, and Persephone risen from the Underworld. And of course, just on the fun side, any chance we get to put dough and cumin in someone’s hair to make it look like she hasn’t washed in a year – I jump on it! LOL!

Was it difficult having me over your shoulder, metaphorically speaking?

Not at all. Believe me, I don’t say that about everyone I’ve worked with – haha! I need to keep in mind that when I’m creating a video for someone else, I representing them and their work. So, there are some ideas I need to let go of. Nothing major though this time, if at all – you and I were pretty much on the same page. And it was really nice that you let me use my creativity as much as I wanted. That isn’t always the case. However, the most important thing to me is that the person I’m working with be truly happy and comfortable with the final video – so they can put it out to the world without reservations.

This was your first book trailer; what about the project surprised you most?

Yes! Thank you for trusting me with my first book trailer. It was fun to work on. What surprised me the most was how the trailer sort of jumped out at me while reading the book. I guess I figured I’d have to write something huge – the manuscript you sent me being over 400 pages – and then whittle away and whittle away and make agonizing decisions about what to cut out of the trailer script. But again, I think it was the archetypes you created standing up and making themselves known. And it really was only a couple of drafts before I sent the script on to you for approval. And that was surprisingly nice! We’ve really only touched the surface of the story in the trailer. We’ve given your readers the motifs that are present throughout the story, but all the juicy details they’ll have to discover on their own!

Thanks to Lisa for taking the time to talk to me about the trailer. It can be found on this blog here.

Film Review: Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Alex in filmmaking, folk music, Hum and the Shiver, isolation, music, reviews, storytelling, Tufa | 5 Comments

Way back in the early years of this century (being able to say that makes me smile), the spark of the idea that would become the Tufa struck me at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Also at that festival, I first heard Sheila Kay Adams at one of the midnight sessions, in a huge tent on a warm summer night. So her stories and music, and my fictional Tufa, have always been spiritually, if not literally, entwined.

Sheila Kay Adams

Sheila Kay is a traditional ballad singer, a woman who has dedicated her life to making sure that these old songs survive into the next generation. Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County is a documentary that takes us into her life, and shows how she’s passing on her traditions to the YouTube and iTunes generation. I first mentioned it here, when I interviewed director Kim Dryden during the film’s post-production.

The poster for “Over Home,” designed by Saro, who appears in the film.

You can watch the trailer:

and additional clips can be found here.

Sheila Kay learned these songs the old way, “knee to knee” on front porches from relatives who still gathered to share songs and stories when other more urban families were beginning to turn away from each other, to television, radio and other forms of passive mass communication. “They did not call them ballads,” she says in the film. “They called them love songs. And the gorier they were, the more I liked them. And if they mentioned cutting off heads and kicking them against the wall, I was all over it.” These were songs that came originally from Ireland, Scotland and other Celtic countries, brought with the first settlers and maintained intact among the isolated hills and hollows of Appalachia.

This is old stuff, literally and figuratively, if you’re a fan of my novel The Hum and the Shiver. But unlike my fictional Cloud County, the Madison County of this film is a real place, and the people you see in the film are genuine. Most compelling of the newcomers is sixteen-year-old Sarah Tucker, who bridges the traditional and the modern in a way that gives you real hope for the future of this music (and music in general). The scenery is expansive and beautiful, as are the Smoky Mountains themselves, but the most fascinating landscape of all is Sheila Kay Adams’s face as she talks about how music helped her persevere through personal tragedy.

Over Home is currently making the rounds of film festivals, and hopefully will soon be available on DVD and streaming. If it comes to a festival near you, definitely check it out (and if you have any pull in festival scheduling, I heartily recommend scheduling it).

Guest blog: Dale Short on his film Recovering Racist

Film Review: Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County

Witchcraft Through the Ages (of TV and Movies, that is)

George Lucas and Elvis: Echoes from 1977

Review: Road to Hell

Interview: Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo

Interview: Kim Dryden, co-director of Appalachian film “Over Home”

Film review: “Dawn of the Dragonslayer”

What lives in Blackheath Woods?

Interview: Lisa Stock, director of the Blood Groove trailer

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