We've already seen Kill List, so believe us when we tell you that it's one of the scariest films you'll ever see. And so it proved when the Big Screen crowd was presented with some effectively chilling clips from the film this morning during the Optimum presentation, before director Ben Wheatley and stars Neil Maskell and MyAnna Buring.
The trailer is already out there, but nevertheless got the wiggins up when presented on the big screen, and we followed that with a look at how the two central hitmen, Jay (Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smiley) take just one last job (and surely hitmen and robbers and all such criminal types should have learned by now never, ever to take a last job). Between the eerie soundrack and the creepiest tracking shots since The Shining, the (relatively) innocent scene became thoroughly freakish when their employer sealed the deal the old-fashioned way: in blood. You have to love how Gal finished with a “Fuck, that was dramatic!”, however, diffusing the tension nicely. “Is that your wanking hand?” he followed up.
“They’re just everyday guys who happen to have the job of murdering people,” Wheatley describes his (anti)heroes. “It’s kind of a hitman film, but it’s also a film that concentrates a lot on hotels. This is another hotel based scene, and this next one is actually based on something that happened to me.” He followed that with a scene wherein Jay confronts a merrily singing band of devout Christians in a restaurant.
Clearly treading carefully to avoid spoiler territory, Wheatley followed that up with a scene wherein Jay and his wife Shel (Buring) find the remains of a rabbit their cat has apparently killed in the back garden, and he decides to cook it up. Said Wheatley, “This is a bit more of the domestic side of Kill List. This is the more upbeat, cheerful side of Kill List. You’ve got the family life, being on the road, and then you have these action bits.”
Speaking of which, the third clip finds the two hitmen shuffling down an apparently underground passageway to find a dead end. They kick through, but next thing there are several figures – naked women in masks? – running towards them, hands clawed.
“These [images] come from a lot of different places: recurring nightmares when I was a kid that I wrote down. I thought if it consistently scared me it would scare everyone. Then it starts with casting, and I worked with Michael and Leane and Neil before on other stuff and I wanted to get them together on something, so I wrote the parts around them.”
Said Maskell, "We worked on a sketch comedy together, really really different, and an internet viral of a drunk falling down some stairs. I don’t know why he thought of me really. We spoke about this when we were filming the viral in Romania – in a Jacuzzi actually."
Well, trust us when we say that this doesn't look like a film born in a jacuzzi. Kill List is out in the autumn.
brightcove.createExperiences();After that, Guillermo del Toro introduced several extended clips from** Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark**, the Troy Nixey-directed film which he co-wrote and produced.
"This is a movie that I’ve been pursuing for 16, 17 years," explained del Toro. "I started chasing the rights based on the memory of the TV movie I saw as a child and that I considered the scariest movie I ever saw. This is not a gory horror film, it’s more a classic horror movie. It’s more about scary creatures. It was originally planned as a PG-13 movie, but the MPAA gave us an R-rating for pervasive scariness, which I’m very happy about.”
The scenes he showed saw the little family at the heart of the movie - young Sally (Bailee Madison), her dad (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend (Katie Holmes) - finding a hidden basement under the house that Pearce's character is renovating. Of course it's creepy and a bit gothic, and Sally hears strange whispers from behind the iron grating to one side. That was followed with two really disturbing scenes. Sally, in her bedroom, finds that her electronic talking teddy is apparently talking of its own accord - only there are creatures behind it manipulating the mechanism. Even more bizarre is the following scene where she takes a bath, only for the malign little creatures to switch off the light and creep out around the room. Check your wiggins at the door, people, or you're going to be freaked out.
**Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark **is also out later this year.