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| Nicholas Vince in I Am Monsters |
Nicholas Vince went from being a monster-obsessed child to playing iconic monsters in his work with Clive Barker in Hellraiser and Nightbreed. Fulfilling his childhood fantasy never quelled his enthusiasm for monsters and horror. Aside from acting, Vince has published the short story collections What Monsters Do and Other People's Darkness, and in 2019, he took to the stage for his one-man show I Am Monsters! Now, he has turned his stage show into a film, where he speaks candidly about his personal and professional life.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Vince discussed the horrors of Thatcherite Britain and its lasting legacy, his love of intelligent horror and the struggles confronting cinema.
Paul Risker: I caught a monologue by James O'Brien recently where he spoke about how decisions by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, allowed Rupert Murdoch to grow his media empire. It left me thinking, once again, about her dreadful legacy. As you were involved in horror during the Thatcher years, what impact or indirect influence did she have on horror cinema?
Nicholas Vince: It's going to be interesting to unpick Thatcher's impact on horror. I wonder if AIDS itself [was impactful]—this terrifying disease, which was very much of the body. The guys who suffered from it had skin lesions and so on, and the wasting away was horrific.
A lot of what Thatcher stood for was 'greed is good', which you saw in The Wolf Of Wall Street and other films. Obviously, there was Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the United States. They had very similar views on the world, including their economic policies, and how this was a disease of the gays and therefore, let's not fund it properly and so on. The lasting impact again is economic and the whole philosophy that we went through with Boris Johnson in this country comes straight out of Thatcherism. It's not too far a push to say that Trump comes straight out of Reaganism and Reaganonomics. They're very close and are lasting.
I was amazed that when Thatcher died, they spent more time [in Parliament] singing her praises than they did Winston Churchill. So, she had an amazing impact and to describe her attitude towards gay people, there's that lovely phrase: "Pretend family relationships." There was Clause 28 that became Section 28. This was what we were going through. Your love was not as valuable as somebody else's love — the heteronormative love. So evil!
When she died, there was a sudden surge in the purchase of the song Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard Of Oz, but it's kind of how you felt because she really didn't like gay people. She unleashed a lot of suffering on people.
PR: And the impact on horror?
NV: It's interesting because a lot of the films one thinks of from the 1980s were American horror films. If I think about Hellraiser and Nightbreed, the ones I was involved with, as far as I remember, Clive definitely didn't like Margaret Thatcher. He met her once and that's a story for him to tell. They were at a literary lunch where he was a guest, and he was sitting next to Margaret Thatcher. I can't remember the details of the conversation—you'll have to ask Clive that. But in terms of Clive's work, the transgressive nature of the sexuality within Hellraiser is very clearly the antithesis of what Thatcher stood for.
What I always found, and this has nothing to do with Clive, but going back to what we were thinking about, the number of gay men who secretly supported Thatcher astounded me. That was very strange, but I think they just liked this very strong woman who said this is what it is — greed is good, and you're going to have a very happy capitalistic lifestyle. There were gay men who responded to that. It was all about image; it was all about possessions. It wasn't about community, and I think Thatcher at the time said there was no such thing as community. This relates to Nightbreed, which is a film about a community of monsters.
One of the interesting things about Nightbreed is that Clive refers to the tribes of the moon. In other words, there are a lot of tribes that manage to get on well enough with each other that they have this place, and that's interesting. Again, it's the complete antithesis of Thatcher and Reagan, Trump and Johnson. And honestly, to a certain extent, Keir Starmer and the Labour Party are all about them and us. They're all about punishing weaker people than yourself.
Is that purely a result of Thatcher? I think it's probably as much as anything to do with the human condition. Shakespeare was talking about similar things. These are old themes and definitely swings some roundabouts in terms of who gets on top, and fascism. And I'd say Thatcher was a fascist.
I remember thinking at the time that my parents fought a war against people like this. This is something I mention in one of the episodes of I Am Monsters! This is something we all need to be aware of and Nightbreed really talks about community versus fascism.
PR: Was it your original intention to turn your one-man show into a film?
NV: No, the stage show itself came out of the fact that I was the patron of the London Horror Festival, which at the time was the longest running and largest festival of live horror performance. In other words, you used to sit in fringe theatres very close to the performers, which is an amazing experience.
I'd watch these one-person shows, and I'd think, 'I could do this. I've got some stories to tell.' I also wanted to explore what it is to be a monster, what we mean by monsters and acknowledging the monstrous in ourselves, which is about compassion and understanding. There is a phrase of Carl Jung's that I took for the title of my second volume of short stories, Other People's Darkness. He talks about how, by looking at your own darkness, you can understand other people's.
So, I had all those ideas in my head and then, during lockdown, Mitch Harrod, who runs the Soho Horror Film Festival, was doing a home horror festival because nobody was going out. He asked me if I'd take a few extracts from the show and just do it straight to an iPhone. Sadly, these are now lost, but that was the genesis. Then, I was fortunate enough to know Paul Butler and Stuart Spark from Dark Rift Horror, who I'd worked with on Book Of Monsters. I got on well with them and admired the way they worked, and I thought, 'Okay, let's have a go at this.'
PR: The werewolf and the vampire, alongside other classic movie monsters, are useful metaphors that say something profound about human nature. The werewolf, for example, can even communicate experiences of mental and emotional health. These archetypal monsters are extensions of ourselves.
NV: You made some good choices there. There's also Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde with the duality and also the effect of drugs. I talk about intelligent horror, and I think we're talking about the same thing. Going back to the AIDS crisis, there was a lot about vampires and blood because it was passed through the blood. That was examined in a couple of films.
I like what I call intelligent horror, which is more than a series of jump scares. An example is A Nightmare On Elm Street, which is intelligent because it asks a fundamental and a terrifying question about what happens if you can't escape the monster when you go to sleep? It's there waiting for you in the dark, in your dreams. That's a terrifying concept, and yes, monsters represent our darker side, but also, as I say in the film, our humanity. I think the monster is so woven into our fabric as human beings.
Buddhism talks about greed, anger and stupidity, and on the other side, courage, wisdom, and compassion. These are the six forces that are constantly fighting inside of you. If we act on greed, anger, and stupidity, we can do some monstrous things.
Then, the stupidity and belief that you are not connected to other people, and the stupid way we have dealt with our environment and our attitude toward the petroleum industry — this is the kind of horror that turns me on. These are the films that I find interesting, and those are the ones I'll happily sit for 90 minutes and watch — usually with the remote control in my hand just in case it gets too scary. Anyone who knows me knows, I'm a wimp [laughs]. I jump a lot when I watch horror films.
PR: Horror is prone to being seen as a silly genre, even when it's addressing intelligent themes and ideas.
NV: It's interesting because another one that springs to mind is The Mist. That is really about putting everyone in the same supermarket and seeing what happens. Well, the religious fascists appear. It's just extraordinary, and I don't think I could ever watch that again. I watched it once, and I watched it to the very end, but I find it so disturbing. The monsters are outside, but it soon produces the monstrous inside.
Some horror films are silly and immature and are just great fun. Also, you have young filmmakers starting out, and a thing I love about horror is somehow you can do it on a low budget, and it can be incredibly effective. It's very hard to do a low budget romantic comedy, I'm told, because somehow the audience expects better production values. This is why so many filmmakers start out in horror — the audience is quite happy to accept lower budget films and lower production values. Horror is great, and the horror community is wonderful.
PR: There's a sense cinema is facing an existential crisis because it's no longer the dominant art form. How do you view the way horror, and more broadly, cinema have changed over the decades?
NV: Let's start early on. Thomas Edison's, Frankenstein, was one of the first horror films. You start with the studios like Universal and you go through more independent filmmakers like [John] Carpenter, but horror is very seldom, if ever acknowledged by the Oscars. Then, you have the democratisation of filmmaking because suddenly it becomes very cheap, and you can make a decent film using your iPhone.
Even now, with the cost of cameras and the fact it is digital, there are still limits, but you don't have to worry about the length of film you've got left in the can. And you don't have to worry about getting it developed — it can be done on a laptop.
It's weird that the most successful franchise at the moment is probably Terrifier. Now I do not wish to sound like I'm criticising these filmmakers, for whom I have a huge amount of respect, but I do not regard it as intelligent horror. It just seems to be slash, shock, splatter punk, whatever you want to call it. It's not the kind of thing that I enjoy watching, because I tend to find those films misogynistic. It's incredibly popular, and it has done so well in the cinemas, and that's the interesting thing — people are leaving their houses to go and see Terrifier, more than they are these big tentpole films like Marvel and DC. Those are really struggling now, as are a lot of big films because the whole system is set up so if you spend 116 million just making your movie, you're then expected to spend another 116 million on advertising. The math is crazy, and you need to make two and a half times what you spent. You're talking about 250 plus million and those kinds of numbers don't seem to be happening at the box office, except for say Terrifier.
I think the independent stuff you see at FrightFest, Celluloid Screams and Grimmfest are what's interesting. Now I don't know how much money those filmmakers make on their films. These are labours of love and calling cards for many of them, because even on a low budget film, it's really hard to get your money back, and piracy is a huge problem, particularly for an independent filmmaker. If your film suddenly appears online, you're done. You're never going to make your money back.
There are many struggles, but there are some wonderful filmmakers producing really interesting stuff, particularly in independent British horror.
The Limited Collector's Edition Blu-ray of I Am Monsters! is available from Dark Rift Horror.
