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Stalking Shadows
Stalking Shadows
Stalking Shadows
Ebook163 pages2 hours

Stalking Shadows

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A director of music videos suffers three weeks of amnesia after a witch auditions for a role in his debut sci-fi horror film.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 7, 2015
ISBN9781516323616
Stalking Shadows

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    Stalking Shadows - Peter Englebright

    Chapter One

    My situation brought to mind something from my youth.  Me and a friend were walking along a path with woodland and stretches of open grass on either side of it.  Up ahead some distance away we could see three boys of similar age to us.  We were maybe fourteen or something.  We could see them setting up a firework.  They lit it and ran away.  They didn’t casually move away – they ran like The Devil was on their heels.  It made us nervous.  Just how big an explosion was this going to make?

    Wait a minute, I thought to myself.  Have they pointed that thing at us?  They really ran from it like it was going to destroy the ground around it.  This must be a big one; and kids were sadistic enough to try and maim each other for fun. 

    My friend pointed out that they looked over their shoulders at us as they ran off.  That didn’t instil great confidence in us.  We were a considerable distance away on the horizontal, and fireworks are not things that have good aim.  Still, we thought it was best not to risk taking a firework in the face.  We decided to run away ourselves.

    Like cowards we ran off the path onto the grass.  I can’t remember if we heard it go off, or if we just stopped once we thought we were safe.  Anyway we turned to see nothing happening in the clear daytime sky.  No noise of note and no visual pyrotechnics.  How silly we felt running away from that pathetic little thing.  We looked at each other and laughed.

    A similar feeling of disappointment, but without the amusement, was now upon me.  For fifteen years I’d been in the film industry, and this one should have been my calling card to get a real job as a director of a feature.  Then almost at the last minute they cancelled it and took it away from me.  It was a music video for a really good, really odd six minute song.  The track had an actual solid story for once.  Not only were the lyrics coherent as a story, but it was based on a novel.  Proper substance.

    Then for some reason the band decided they didn’t want to film a literal visual interpretation of the subject matter.  Instead they wanted steadicam tracking shots moving through library stacks.  It was not exciting stuff that a man of my talents should be doing.  Too many years clawing my way up through the ranks doing small jobs on film sets to get bigger jobs had been wasted.  So far my contacts and experience had only advanced me as far as directing adverts and music videos.  I had stalled.  The aim was always to make features, but the offers never came and I failed to generate any projects of my own.  I was too valuable in my place making commercials.  They liked me in that role and had nothing to gain from letting me go further.  I was paid too much to throw off their shackles and focus my attention on what I really wanted to do.  It was a velvet cage.  As each year ebbed away I became more entrenched as just another hack ad and music video director.  I saw myself as such in my own mind as well.  I never got to direct an actor giving a great monologue or a fully formed performance.  The most I ever asked of an actor was to look silly while saying two lines of dialogue about how great a product was.

    The commercials were all pretty bad.  Some nice images here and there but nothing of any value.  The two car ads I did were okay but the format was so limited it really only showed off how good the cinematographer was.  These adverts were done purely for the money.  They were artless.  I got to be creative with the music video side of my work.  At first I enjoyed hanging out with the bands and getting to play with cameras all day long.  That was good for about six or seven years.  Then I became bored filming these cool but usually meaningless visuals.  I wanted to tell stories.  Complex stories with characters in them.  Very rarely did a song come along that allowed me to do anything like that.  There was never any dialogue so how complex could any of these stories be?  I felt like a storyteller and yet for fifteen years I never told a story worth telling.

    I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing – making feature films.  Heck, I hadn’t even done TV.

    When I got the commission to shoot this video for After School Chess Club’s single, I told my wife Linda that it was going to be my last one.  It would set me up nicely as my showreel to demonstrate my abilities to potential producers.  With this video I could show that I had the ability to tell a story, and that I wasn’t another idiot video director who didn’t know what a coherent plot was.  My hopes were pinned on it as a way to launch my film career.  The real career I was aiming for. 

    Then the stupid women pulled the plug on it.  Now I had no showreel that would interest a real film producer.  What they had me doing was abstract nonsense that only demonstrated I had an eye for a good composition.  Big deal.  All my other work showed that already.

    ––––––––

    In my hotel room, after a long day shooting bookcases, I phoned Linda.  I was travelling around for six days to capture as many libraries as possible.  It was not thrilling footage.

    Linda picked up and I poured out my frustration to her once again.

    ‘So what’s next?’ she asked.  ‘Another advert?’

    ‘I can’t go back to it.  I’m forty years old.  It’s becoming a now or never thing.  If I don’t get a feature made soon it’ll never happen.’  I hadn’t burned any bridges.  I hadn’t publicly announced I was never making another music video, but I had talked a lot more than usual about moving into features.  ‘No one wants me to make films.  I can’t rely on anyone giving me the chance.  I’m thinking I need to produce one myself.’

    ‘What does that entail?’

    ‘It means I can’t wait around for someone to hire me to direct a film that will actually get made.  That’s not going to happen.  I need to generate the film project myself.  From the ground up.’

    ‘How do you do that?’

    ‘By finding a script no one else knows about, but everyone will want to make.’

    ‘Tricky,’ she deadpanned.

    ‘Indeed.  No small order.  Or a novel.  Or getting someone to write an original script.  Or just getting a famous actor to star in something I own the rights to.  And then I go to the money people and force them to open their wallets.’

    ‘Can you do that?  Do you have those sorts of contacts?’

    My contacts were extensive after so many years, but they were mostly low-level.  It wasn’t like I could walk into the executive offices at a major studio, but I knew my way around some of the smaller independent film companies and production houses.  ‘Yeah.  I think so.  I know some of the smaller operators.  As long as I don’t try to do anything expensive.’

    ‘So how do you get started?’

    That was a good question.  How do you create a film out of nothing?

    ––––––––

    The library shoot ended.  A slow motion car crash that lasted three minutes had to be edited to the start of my three minutes of bookcases.  I didn’t get to film the car crash but I was given the footage to cut for the music video.  Then I was to edit even longer versions of both halves for the band’s live performances.  They would project these images over themselves as they played.  They had other films for their live shows but I had nothing to do with those.  A second music video was also shot by me for a song called Bianca and Cordelia.  It was a super simple three minute static medium shot of the lead singer drinking a cup of tea without any editing.  Nothing to get excited about.

    At lunch I met with my contact Raymond Carswell.  He was a script reader.  It was his job to read awful amateur screenplays and the occasional professionally written one.  It was often hard to tell the difference between the two types.  He then wrote comments and reviews on them to a set template.  He was paid to do this by production companies – the people who worked at them were too lazy or busy to read the scripts themselves.  For every fifty duds he would read one good screenplay.  If he was lucky.  ‘Good’ might be stretching it a bit.  Okay or better than average might be more accurate.  For a small backhander, and the occasional paid lunch, he would give me a photocopy of the few decent ones he came across, along with his coverage notes.

    I used this information to try and nose-in on any promising projects.  Only once did I get attached to a movie this way.  It spent six months in script development before being dropped.  Not one of the other good screenplays he had given me had been successfully turned into a film. 

    This time I wasn’t interested in the scripts he could give me.  This time I wanted to ask if he’d read any books that he thought might make for a good movie.  It wasn’t his area of expertise.  He didn’t cover novels as part of his paid job.  The reason why I wanted to ask him was because I thought his job would sharpen his mind to any cinematic potential he might find in his ‘for pleasure’ reading.

    After the pleasantries had been completed, and one new screenplay handed over, I asked my question.  ‘Out of pure curiosity Raymond, have you ever read a book that you thought might make a good movie?’

    He took a moment to consider this.  ‘No one’s asked me that before.  Let me think.’  I didn’t detect any sarcasm in his words.  ‘It’s not my genre but I did read a horror novel last year.  I really liked it.  And I thought to myself as I was reading it that it would make a good movie.  Maybe too talkative though.  Not enough action.  It’s more sci-fi really with horror only in the second half.  What was it called again?’ he asked himself.

    Horror was good.  I liked the genre and it was a cheap, low quality threshold way to get to bigger things.  There were so few decent horror pictures that all you had to do was make something competent and the rabid genre fans would lap it up.  Science fiction though made me nervous.  Not for commercial reasons.  Just for the money side of it.  Sci-fi could easily look silly if not well financed.  It was expensive to make invented worlds and technology look good.  Probably half the reason Alien and Blade Runner worked so well was because they devoted almost all their time, energy and money into making them look so good.  They were expensive movies.  I couldn’t expect to have that sort of money at my disposal if I ever got a movie made.

    The title came to Raymond.  ‘It was called something like These Days Won’t Last For Ever.  It got really good reviews so I took a chance on it when I found it cheap.’

    ‘So it was good?’

    ‘It was pretty decent.  It wasn’t great or anything but it worked.  It was quite powerful in places.  Had a very odd structure though which might not work so well in a film.  The first three quarters were just eight or so people trapped in a big but not massive spacecraft going to Jupiter or somewhere.  It was all talk and repairing equipment and stuff.  It sounds bad but the characters were really well drawn.  It was funny.  Trust me, it was interesting.  And then in the last quarter one of them cracks psychologically and starts killing people with an axe.  Cinematically you could reduce the talking stuff and make that the first half.  Then the stalk and slash part could be the last forty five minutes.’

    ‘So it’s a slasher movie in space?’

    ‘It’s a bit more than that.  The first half has no violence.  It’s just character building.  Not bad, generic slasher movie characters saying bad dialogue.  If they can get good actors and a decent scriptwriter then this

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