“When I was about five, everyone else at school was heading in from playtime,” recalls Josh Merritt. “And I saw a black jaguar in the distance, just staring at me. An actual big cat. This was in Itchingfield, in West Sussex…”
At 33, film-maker Josh is at the younger end of the Haunted Generation spectrum, but a lifetime of fortean experiences (“My dad was obsessed with alien artefacts”) have fed into movies with a distinctly uncanny æsthetic. His latest short, Breathe, employs the residual trauma of 1970s Public Information Films to tell a story of toxic parenthood. Stuck in a claustrophobic bunker since childhood, a man called Emri (played with impressive physicality by Tigger Blaize) is trapped alone save for the authoritarian broadcasts of a post-apocalyptic TV service.
“A big reference for me was a Public Information Film called , from 1974,” explains Josh. “The camera pans through a burned-out house, and you can hear has been produced by Simon Moorhead, whose TV credits include the notorious 1984 BBC drama . And a suitably austere synth soundtrack is provided by Chris Sharp, whose albums as Concretism have featured regularly in this column.
