Meet the parents - Steve Sheil talks 'Mum & Dad'
There’s never a clear direction as to where the audience is going to be taken but one thing that’s certain is that it won’t be anything good. Lena finds herself victim to a number of nasty injuries but how much of it was based on real events and incidents concerning real serial killers and flat out nutters...? It’s here where BritFilms starts to worry for its own safety and what the inside of Steve’s head looks like.
“We didn’t do any research; it all came from my own head.”
See, told you...
If that really was the case, then how did Steve know what worked and what didn’t and did he learn anything about himself whilst getting elbow deep in torture and the visually terrifying.
“There is one particular scene, that when it came up on the monitor, everybody groaned including me. Even though I’d written, it and set it up, when it was there on screen, it was more horrifying than I imagined – but I took that to be a good thing...”
Huh?
“If it shocked me then it’ll shock the audience – it’s going to hit the spot. That’s what I always thought about, what would affect an audience the most? It’s all about that nerve reflex – what gets the audience skin crawling.”
So if you’ve got maniacs going to work on feet and teeth how hard was it to get people in on the project?
“Well we had one day where we had twenty actors booked and only nine turned up, we were getting calls from agents and they were just vanishing. When it came to finding the roles of Mum and Dad, people were like poking their heads round the door expecting to see some 7ft Satan as the director.”
But Perry Benson was the one who dared to step forward, a background man who was always a friendly familiar face in Shane Meadows films and the like swaps identities with a living nightmare and the results are...well...nasty.
“Perry brought a really scary side to the film, he’s got this image of being a cheeky guy but to be this character, he was loving it! “More blood, come on, I want more!” He was really getting into it by the end.”
It’s this role that’ll have Benson filling more screens then usual though. Not only will he be turning up at the cinema but you can also download Dad’s misdeeds or watch them on pay per view or DVD. ‘Mum & Dad’ are everywhere.
“Revolver picked it up after we showed it at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and they were sure from the start that they had this massive release planned for it. I think for a film with our kind of scale, it’s going to have a dedicated audience. It’s all about giving the audience the ultimate choice and it’s going to happen more and more I think. The fear that sort of hung over our film was that people might not go to the cinema to see our film but there’s nothing like the experience to watch it in a dark room with a massive audience – that’s sort of what you pay for anyway.”
Our guess is that any screen ‘Mum and Dad’ turns up on will have a petrified audience in front of it, Sheil has shown that British horror is fresh and new and stained in as much blood as any American horror remake that gets churned out. But what can we expect in the future from him.
“Well ‘Mum & Dad’ is going to continue into the New Year where it’s going to make its way over to the US. As for the future there are plenty of ideas floating around, but I’m working on another horror film at the moment, I’ve written the first draft so it’s going pretty well...”
So not a rom-com then?
(Laughs) Hmm, ‘Empire of Flesh’? could be a rom-com, could always break tradition.
