Coffinmaker's Blues

By Stephen Volk

"An educational joy to read, this man who knows his stuff, knows how to write and knows how to put together a well-thought-out, intelligent and incendiary article"
(Ginger Nuts of Horror)

"Blisteringly powerful...Volk draws on a dizzying number of references and shows admirable conceptual depth and density as well as a muscular and evocative style"
(SF Signal)

"Constantly insightful"
(Horror World Reviews)

"Thoughtful and eloquent"
(Matthew Fryer, Hellforge)

Amusingly scathing...Frank, honest yet ultimately hopeful and considered"
(Dread Central)

"An insider's opinion...Volk certainly knows what he is talking about, with a career in the industry that has spanned two decades"
(Rue Morgue Magazine)

"Consistently entertaining"
(Dark Musings)

"Adds up to masterclass for horror writers and screenwriters. Definitely should be shared far and wide"
(Charles Prepolec, editor, Gaslight Grotesque, Gaslight Gothic, Beyond Rue Morgue)

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786362971

Book preview

1

TALKING BLOOD

On GHOST STORIES

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7 July 2004

I’ve been thinking about it. Death is tough. Or, as the Comedy writer said on his deathbed, "No, death is easy, Comedy is hard." And ghost stories are a bugger.

I’m in the middle of writing a series of four one-hour dramas for ITV called Afterlife, so examining what makes ghost stories work (and not work) on film is something that’s been preoccupying me of late.

From the outset, the first headache for a writer is screen time. Whilst there are hundreds of memorable short stories in the genre, like The Ash Tree and O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, there are many fewer novels and full-length features. That’s because ghost stories are basically anecdotal in nature. Just as ghosts are a rare occurrence in real life, they’re best seen as a brief occurrence in the life of fictional characters, often a single incident. And as length expands, for a movie, believability stretches too.

Then there are the core dramatic questions. Who sees the ghost and why? What does the ghost want? How do you kill or get rid of something dead? How (in Hollywood) to give the hero a Redemptive Character Arc, and still keep the ending scary? (Thank you, Sixth Sense.)

The merciless photo-literalism of film does the writer no favours either. As some textbook or other said, there are no metaphors on celluloid: a tree is a tree. Which is fine until you are trying to depict on screen something which is essentially a subjective experience. And has never been photographed in reality (Victorian spirit photos excluded).

So the crucial decisions are how to show the ghost, and when.

A rubber-suited man was edited into Jacques Tourneur’s otherwise psychologically-driven Night of the Demon by a nervous producer who wanted a monster movie. Hands up who thinks it would have been better if you never saw the demon? The gamble is, if you show nothing till the last reel, you risk making the audience restless, or downright bored. The Haunting (1963) gets round this by showing almost nothing and doing 99% of the work with sound. And The Innocents achieves it, exquisitely, by showing its ghosts little by little, indistinctly across a lake, glimpsed fleetingly in a corridor, hazily back-lit atop a tower or vaguely through a window-pane at night. These devices are valuable because to let the eye rest on a ghost too long diminishes its unearthly power. The Unheimlich becomes Heimlich, as Freud would say; the unfamiliar becomes familiar, and therefore safe.

Thanks to Truman Capote and John Mortimer’s screenplay, The Innocents is a note-perfect movie. Adapted from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, it’s a film about sexual repression, and who better than a gay man from the Deep South to write about sexual repression? And Jack Clayton’s every directorial decision adds layers to that theme. The house visually echoes the church upbringing of the governess, whilst nature runs rampant in the garden, its creepy-crawliness symbolising our baser instincts if left uncontrolled.

This black-and-white classic is regarded by many as the gold standard of ghost films because every beat can equally be justified on a psychological as well as supernatural level. Both interpretations are given equal weight right to the last frame. The governess is having to choose between two mutually exclusive options: Is the world normal, in which case I’m mad, or do ghosts really exist? This creates an deeper level of intensity and integrity because, I think, it mirrors what would be our own real-life reaction to a supernatural experience; not plain acceptance, but a vacillation between denial and belief.

The Innocents is also instructive about character. It may seem obvious, but I’ve come to learn that when you’re trying to work out a ghost story script, often the ghost represents the flaw, or something lacking, in the protagonist. This is sometimes the key to working out the through-line of a script, and points you in the direction of a suitable ending, if you’re lucky.

In other words, ghosts are essentially the character’s interior life, externalised. Otherwise all you have is a ghost train ride.

Six Feet Under does it (though Alan Ball would say they’re not ghosts) and Edge of Darkness did it with Bob Peck’s daughter. Though The Eye was about a different kind of loss—of sight (the symptoms of which closely resemble the stages of grief over a person.)

Also I believe for ghost stories to work on screen, they must have a baseline of normality. Case in point, even though The Haunting (1963) was set in a big old brooding house, the director was quick to set up a small but important breakfast scene to ground us in domesticity. It reminds us of reality.

The same can’t be said of the Jan de Bont remake, with its bloatedly huge sets, PlayStation dramaturgy, and dreamy CGI cupids. The trouble with ghosts conveyed by SFX in general or CGI in particular is that they take you out of the moment. In this most fragile of genres, if the audience reacts How did they do that? even for a split second, you’re lost. And let’s face it, all the CGI in the world will not buy you the eerie frisson of those open kitchen cabinets in The Sixth Sense.

But my biggest bugbear in ghost movies is the tendency for them to regress into detective stories. Stir of Echoes was pretty frightening, until the murder mystery took over. Ditto, What Lies Beneath, which had the double whammy of boring detective story and a gossamer-floaty CGI wraith, adding insult to injury. Even the ground-breaking Ringu was diminished by becoming a find the body, solve the crime Nancy Drew mystery in the third act. And the BBC’s recent paranormal TV series Sea of Souls so blatantly painted itself into conventional detective story that in two separate stories a character said, Why are we doing this? We’re not the police. Exactly!

I’m convinced that ghost stories and detective stories actually appeal to two different parts of the brain. The ghost story appeals to our love of mystery and the irrational, the detective story to our need for logical solutions. So not only are they no help to each other, they’re actually antithetical in their aims.

One director who knows we take pleasure in the irrational is David Lynch. What, if not a ghost, is the Mystery Man from Lost Highway? Or the singer in Mulholland Dr who dies on stage but her voice lives on?

Kubrick tapped into the inexplicable in his adaptation of The Shining, bravely jettisoning much of King’s best-selling ideas for his own subtler evocation of stress and dread. Not for him glimpsed or shadowy ghosts, but ghosts in full view, ghosts that won’t go away, brightly lit ghosts not from shadow-laden Expressionism, but from Surrealism and the un-pin-downable unconscious. For reference he cherry-picked the photographs of Diane Arbus: not only the famous Identical Twins but also her Masked Man at a Ball. Interestingly, Arbus wrote in her diary that anxiety was the fear of being afraid and going to Horror movies was about finding out that what you feared wasn’t so bad. Except in The Shining, it was.

I wish the MTV generation of directors would learn from Kubrick, and Polanski, that fast cutting might make a film more thrilling, but it doesn’t make it more scary. The reverse. If you constantly have something new to look at, you can’t feel unease, in fact you feel comfortable, because the camera is always cutting away. On the other hand, long takes make the palms sweat because there is nowhere for the eyes to run. As William Friedkin once said to me, the scariest shot in the world is a long slow track towards a closed door.

Nowadays, optimistically, understatement is having a comeback. Dark Water was tremendous as a demonstration that less is more. Who would have thought that a big puddle on the ceiling could be so disturbing?

Also, after Blair Witch Project (a ghost story, despite the title) hopefully we can finally bury the illusion that these kinds of movies require Happy Endings. In this genre, uniquely, doom is good. Dark is light; the light of revelation.

At their best, ghost stories can reveal great emotional and even existential truths. The French film Under The Sand starring Charlotte Rampling is such an achingly perfect analysis of grief, it makes Truly Madly Deeply look like a Carry On film. And Nic Roeg’s magisterial Don’t Look Now, (a ghost story all but technically) is the most exact dramatisation of the battle between belief and rationalism in cinema. Its protagonist is a sceptic who refuses to acknowledge what is happening to him until it is too late. Its shocking climax says that we only learn the truth at the moment of death. The great Aha! is followed by extinction. God is a cosmic joker and we are his playthings. He fucks with our minds and then we’re gone. You don’t get that sort of idea on EastEnders, or even West Wing.

Ghost stories shine a light into the corners that other genres leave safely unlit. They play with ideas others leave well alone. What we long for and simultaneously fear. That death isn’t the end.

Which is why some of us are drawn to it again and again. As Diane Arbus said, touching the hem of the unknown. And, being me, wanting to lift it higher.

2

THE PEEKABOO PRINCIPLE

On THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HORROR

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13 October 2004

Is it me, or are all writers tortured, Saint Sebastian-like, at parties with the same numbingly predictable questions? Have you written anything I might have seen? Now I just say, No. Does a screenwriter just write the dialogue? No, dumbo, we write everything. So do you earn a living doing that? Well yes, it’s not a hobby, strangely enough. What kind of thing do you write? After a pause, Horror, I say. Invariably a look of fart-detecting disgust wrinkles their nose as if to say, and sometimes actually saying: "Why would you want to write that kind of thing?"

Why indeed? It’s incredibly difficult to persuade someone about the joy of Horror if they just don’t get it.

I had a argument once with my friend, a well-known humorist¹, who didn’t find Hannibal Lecter, that Ainsley Harriott of the cerebellum, in the least bit amusing or entertaining.

So why do those of us who love Horror, love it? Why do we put ourselves through such experiences of unpleasantness, disgust and fear when we could just as easily sit in front of a nice, idiotic Adam Sandler Comedy?

Certainly, the genre is dependent on our ambivalence. What disgusts and repels also fascinates and attracts. Maybe because on a primitive level, when something Different or Other reared its head, we learnt that we better take note, or get eaten. It’s a pull-push paradox. The pull of simple curiosity to see the forbidden. The push of fear, because what if it’s forbidden for good reason?

But the key is, watching films, we control it, so it doesn’t really hurt us. I call it The Peekaboo Principle: the toddler who covers his eyes, keeping the pleasurable fear of surprise under strict control. And gets a kick out of the game.

On a deeper level, the Freudian psychoanalyst Ernest Jones captured it best in his study On the Nightmare. Horror is about a wish and the equal and opposite inhibition of the wish. For example, the vampire myth arose from the not unreasonable wish for a dead relative to return, the inhibition being, yes, but they come back to suck blood.

But perhaps it’s essentially play. We want to try out and toy with these bizarre ideas within a safe environment, have these thoughts, passions, experiences without the real-life consequences.

As Stephen King once said, we’re not exorcising these emotions but exercising them: and that’s good. Because we all know what Papa Sigmund said about repression.

In Horror movies maybe we are testing if we can mentally survive trauma, and it makes us feel good if we can.

After all, exposure therapy is effectively used in the treatment of most phobias, even what is called flooding, an almost Clockwork Orange style approach where a patient is bombarded by that which he fears: the logic being that the body simply cannot take anxiety forever, it adapts, relaxes, releases a different chemical, and the stimulus isn’t so scary any more.

The parallel between Horror and therapy is interesting. Most Horror themes are about subconscious taboos, basic terrors, violence, sexuality, digging in the dirt and venturing into the symbolic and literal dark.

But back to Why do you write such horrible things?

Well, like all writing, it’s a journey: to discover things you don’t know. You may as well ask a travel writer, Why don’t you stay at home?

At the root of such a rhetorical question is a huge misapprehension amongst many of the public about Horror writing as an activity and we poor Horror writers as a breed. The ignorant please note (and I believe this strongly): Horror writers are not more sadistic than other people, we are more neurotic. If somebody asks me what I am frightened of, I will say I’m frightened of everything! I write Horror because I want to feel safe. I can control the world I create on paper, even if I can’t control the scary world outside.

What’s more, I’m part of a noble tradition of wimps in the profession. In Too Scared to Cry: Psychic Trauma in Childhood, American psychiatrist Lenore Terr explores what she calls Terror Tales of the Formerly Terrified.

Alfred Hitchcock, she says, never really got over being incarcerated overnight in an East End police station to teach him That’s what happens to naughty little boys. The experience gave him a lifelong fear of policemen, evident in many of his movies.

Stephen King, Terr goes on, was deeply affected as a child by finding a body near a railway track. She analyses the influence of that trauma through several of his stories including his novella The Body (filmed as Stand By Me.)

And, as an infant, Edgar Allan Poe watched his consumptive mother die on stage coughing blood. A more traumatized child would be hard to imagine. And look what he came up with.

To me, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley too wrote of her own deep trauma: the loss of a child. The metaphor she chose, consciously or unconsciously, was that of a man who gives birth. In a scene from her diary which I dramatized in Gothic, she said: I would give anything to rub our baby’s body next to the fire and bring him back to life. Victor Frankenstein defies nature by doing what only a woman should do (but Mary herself cannot), and reaps the consequences. The novel is also, of course, a parable of the dangers of Man playing God—but the monster is basically a child. (Interestingly, Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde, describes fairy-tale giants, too, as overgrown children: they dwarf adults just as children themselves feel dwarfed by grown-ups.)

Courageously, Mary Shelley accomplished the essence of Horror writing: to render not only universal but personal anxieties in raw, symbolic form. Which is why Frankenstein has become the archetypal Horror myth, persisting right through to the present day.

A myth onto which many artists have grafted their own private traumas. If Gods and Monsters is to be believed, director James Whale used the stark imagery of the WWI trenches where he lost a former lover. Thus, in the 1931 film, the resurrected, shambling Boris Karloff became the wish and the inhibition of the wish personified. The dead loved one come back to life, just like Mary Shelley’s.

Of course, it’s been documented that the bereaved sometimes have vivid hallucinations of the deceased. But strangely, or not so strangely, because we dig them out from deep inside ourselves, a lot of other Horror characters and ideas reflect disturbed and abnormal psychological states.

The hairy-handed Wolf Man uncannily reflects a condition called body dysmorphia. There’s a shame in Lon Chaney about an ugliness he can do nothing about that makes a fantasy role psychologically true.

Dracula is obviously an emblem of erotomania. Early on in the preparation of the book, Bram Stoker wrote a telling note to himself on a scrap of Lyceum Theatre notepaper: Loneliness, the Kiss...this man belongs to me. He thought he was penning a supernatural ripping yarn, but his own sexual anxieties showed though, to the extent that a recent critic called his novel a kind of incestuous necrophilious oral-anal all-in wrestling match.

Like a character from The Stepford Wives or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a sufferer of Capgras Syndrome, a defect of the recognition part of the brain, looks at his family and is convinced they have been replaced by doppelgangers, aliens, or robots. I read that one boy even stuck a knife in his father’s stomach to look for the circuitry.

Delusional parasitosis, in which patient believes they are infested by insects crawling around under their skin, seems straight out of Shivers or any number of Cronenberg films.

And Dr Peter Chadwick’s book Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective features an account of his own Exorcist-like delusions when he believed he was possessed by the Devil.

The classic Rosemary’s Baby is so powered by the engine of paranoia it is virtually a textbook on the subject. (The patient puts irrational importance on small things; increasingly thinks everything is connected to their delusional idea; won’t be swayed from it by any amount of reasonable argument; feels everyone is an enemy conspiring against them.)

Then you have Jekyll and Hyde, the poster boy (boys?) of Multiple Personality Disorder. Stevenson’s story is also a case study of hidden desires and repression, full of closed doors, locked cabinets and secret rooms.

All these stories flirt with the aberrant peculiarities of our minds, with the extremes, with madness.

What is that iconic image of the zombies from Night of the Living Dead, half-dressed, staggering across a field at night if not inmates escaped from the local asylum?

Is that our real, deep down fear? Even more so than death? Of mad people? Or of going mad ourselves? Is that the real role of Horror, in all these multifarious guises? To explore madness, and to return to a sane world afterwards?

Perhaps our greatest fear is not death or physical pain but the pain of losing our identity—the threat not to our body, but to our self, our soul.

This isn’t as outlandish has it sounds. Schizophrenia, an inability to distinguish between external reality and the force of one’s own emotional ideas, is all-pervasive through Horror movies. People are always thinking they’re going mad. And maybe they are.

This is why, at its best, Horror movies are pure cinema. The external/internal world on screen is akin to a schizophrenic experience. It allows us to be mad for a while, to cast off the shackles of sanity. If only for ninety minutes. Till the lights come up.

¹The late Miles Kington

3

AVOIDING THE FURNITURE

On ACTORS

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31 January 2005

The first table read-through of a screenplay can be utterly glorious and utterly terrifying at the same time. Glorious because it is the first time you are hearing the character come to life. Terrifying because, surrounded by twenty or thirty actors, there is the underlying feeling in your psyche that you will be found out; that some glaring flaw will become apparent, and the world will realise you have no business calling yourself a writer at all.

More seriously, from that moment, the story is no longer a piece of writing on the page. It’s imminently and irrevocably going to be real.

Actors can have interesting and surprising questions afterwards, but reacting to them is a tough challenge for a writer. Because while their worries are sometimes highly insightful about their character’s actions and internal logic, inevitably they do not understand the world, structure or theme of the story like you do. So the writer has to consider whether implementing those changes will create massive upheavals to the story in other, sometimes more fundamental, ways.

In my experience actors’ concerns can be vague, inconsistent, circuitous, unfathomable: but they’re important to pay attention to—if only to later reject. Because these are the people who will be your characters. Let’s face it, no one in the audience will have your 120-page script on their laps.

Contrary to what you might expect, the reason for read-throughs and rehearsal days in film and TV isn’t to block the action as in the theatre, (we rarely have that luxury: and anyway it’s undesirable to be that tight), but simply so that there won’t be any awkward questions arising on the day the scene is shot, when it’s too late, and there’s simply no time to deal with them.

The questions are rarely esoteric, often as prosaic as: Why am I doing what I’m doing? For example, recently in rehearsal a young actress suggested: Maybe I don’t want to be here at all. Maybe that’s the way to do the scene: I want to get out of the door without saying anything, and he forces me to stay. This was tremendously exciting to me: words on paper becoming actions and behaviour, seeing the scene improving before my eyes.

In TV, for two or three intense days the writer has to analyse this input and implement it, fast, thinking on his or her feet, whilst keeping the bigger picture in mind.

Sometimes problems boil down to who drives the scene and who reacts. Sometimes if you reverse it, it will flip the scene and make it fly.

Only inexperienced writers retreat into a position of arrogant intransigence. Professionally, you have to keep your work fluid and alive. Anthony Minghella says the stubborn writer is a myth anyway: most good writers aren’t interested in slavish obedience to their dialogue—they are interested in slavish obedience to the moments they’ve created. If good actors create that moment with different words, and make it real and vivid in the process, who cares?

There’s the old cliché of actors saying they can do that half-page of dialogue in a look. Well, astonishingly, they’re almost always right. That doesn’t mean you can cut all that dialogue before you give it to them, because you can’t; it has to be in there in order for you to cut it later. And even then be careful. A friend of mine directed a film in which an actor said I can do it with a look and after two reels through the camera, my friend realised, You know what, mate? You can’t!

(The interesting thing about cuts is that in a strange way they remain in the script, like the ghost of previous drafts, as a script gets shorter and tighter. They almost become the subconscious of a screenplay.)

However, in all this spirit of open-ness and collaboration, it’s important not to force actors into an intellectual analysis of the text. Be wary of talking it to death. Remember an actor’s skill is often instinctual—and in the end it doesn’t matter what they know about the script or their character, if they can’t convey it, it’s no bloody use to anybody.

I heard that from a director. And of course directors hate actors. Don’t they?

Well, no. Even Hitchcock never said actors were cattle. He said they should be treated like cattle: a knowing joke from the master of visual storytelling. However, even if it wasn’t a joke, it’s patently untrue. Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, James Stewart and their ilk were essential to his concept of movies, and deep down Hitch was besotted and, some say, obsessed with his stars. Only in his latter films like Frenzy and Family Plot did he dispense with stars because he wanted the only star to be himself. (He got rid of Bernard Herrmann for the same reason).

Writer-director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) said it’s not a necessity for a director to fall in love obsessively with his leading lady, it’s an inevitability—as he did with Nastassja Kinski during the filming of Cat People. Indeed, seeing your characters in costume, saying your lines, standing there like they’ve leapt unbidden from the synapses of your brain, can be a high. Pygmalion, bigtime. Frankenstein, even. And actors can definitely fit into the categories of Gods and Monsters.

All things considered, as a screenwriter, you have to believe that the things talented actors bring to the movie or TV show more than compensate for how they might mangle the odd line. A novice writer might choose not to believe that, but I suggest it’s good for your soul and your sanity if you do. The precise reason being, there is no alternative. (Other than doing a Walt Disney and drawing your lead players.)

At their best, their skill is in danger of being invisible. We see the emotion on the screen, but we don’t see the discussions with hair and make-up, with costume design getting the right look, with the production designer talking about their character’s home, the work that’s gone on behind the scenes with a voice coach, or meeting people to research a specific profession, long before they emerge from their trailer.

Another thing is focus—the ability to hit the right note every time, on call. Not just emote once, but emote out-of-sequence and in precisely the same way for continuity, for umpteen different camera angles.

But, while they deserve our applause, actors are not perfect. They can make wrong decisions too.

During one set visit years ago I watched a bunch of actors rehearsing a scene of mine. They decided to scrap three or four lines (I forget why), unaware that they would make nonsense of the next-but-one scene that followed. I tactfully pointed out their error, but it so shook me up, it was so near an obvious balls-up, which the director didn’t even notice, that I stayed away for the remainder of the shoot.

On Blue Velvet, David Lynch originally had maniac Frank inhaling helium—giving him a squeaky Donald Duck voice as he abused Isabella Rossellini. Dennis Hopper suggested that wouldn’t be Frank’s drug of choice (he should know!) and went for the inhalation routine we see in the film. In a recent interview, however, Hopper (a collector of modern art so therefore no stranger to surrealism) said he might have been wrong, in retrospect, and Lynch’s original idea might have been better. Personally, I think would have added a comic and uncanny element to the brutality, but maybe boy scout David was a little intimidated by his star.

Sometimes, too, you’re at the mercy of casting. On one film I worked on, we had a Californian actress in the lead and she wanted her character softened and less spiky in Act One, whereas a New York actress we also talked to loved that spiky bitchiness in the role and didn’t have a problem with it. Two actresses: two different films.

Then there are the problems associated with the Horror genre in particular. The fact that no decent actress will do a role that involves gratuitous nudity and butchery, if they can avoid it. The fact that Horror movies largely don’t need stars because you can make them cheaper without, and it’s easier to make a profit that way. The fact that, whilst doing a bad rom-com might take some recovering from, a bad Horror pic could shove your career straight down the toilet, so why risk it?

Having said that, if the part is good, there are a lot of actors and actresses eager to do something different from worthy social-realist Britflicks and coma-inducing frock operas. Some of them love the genre, respect