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Of the horror resurgence the world has seen over
the last few years, is there anyone making anything you’ve found particularly inspiring? American stuff doesn’t really interest me these days. I like Oz Perkins, and there’s a couple of American independents making really good stuff, for instance the Adams Family. I watch a lot of films from different countries. South American horror is amazing. I saw a political horror film, Sorcery, or ‘Brujería’. It’s about German colonists in Chile, in the nineteenth century being battled by indigenous witches. It’s like The Battle of Algiers with witchcraft. A stunning film. Asian horror, stuff from Indonesia, from Eastern Europe. There’s a new British film from an animator, Robert Morgan, named Stopmotion which is unbelievably scary. Gave me nightmares. It’s not really a horror film but Luna Carmoon’s debut Hoard is also absolutely unmissable. With a longstanding admiration for South Korean cinema, I am compelled to agree. There’s a lot of great stuff happening, but as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t happening in the U.S. I said that at the premiere there. I was asked what inspired me, and everybody laughed and clapped when I answered “Everything except American cinema.” There’s so much incredible non-English language coming out now that I just have no interest in American cinema at the moment. The U.K premiere is at the Glasgow Frightfest at the beginning of March, and in the beginning of April, I’m headed to the U.S. for screenings in New York, New Orleans, Kansas City and Los Angeles. It’ll have a theatrical run over there and it comes out here and in the UK a week later on the 19th of April, and then on VOD, and then it will be on one of the streaming services, I’m not allowed to say which one yet. What comes next for Paul Duane? Is there some kind of cooling off period after you finish a project, or do you get right back on the horse? I was trying to get a new film shot this year but I couldn’t get the lead actor I wanted, so I put it aside to write a new script called The Something. I wrote the first draft in October and the second in February. I hope to get it finished by the end of February, it’s a leap year, so that’s an extra day. It’s another creepy cosmic horror movie, a little more ambitious, a little more expensive. It has a kind of Stuart Gordon, From Beyond or Re-Animator vibe to it. My US distributor XYZ Films want to do more films with me, so hopefully I will get to make this big, nasty psychedelic horror movie, set in Donegal. The film has quite a lot of ‘hooks’, little things that make it stand out from the thousand ‘Cocaine Bear’ clones we’ve been enduring. The fact is the digital cinema revolution has put the means of production into the hands of many more people. I’m not a fan of this nostalgia for film. It’s great, and stuff shot on film looks fantastic. Stuff shot digitally can look fantastic too, and I think it’s much more important that more people can make movies. This, however, also makes it more difficult for your own film to cut through. I think if a film does cut through, it has to have something very specific and very obvious about it, which is why I built in so much in this film that people can latch onto. One of the issues I have with ‘genre cinema’ is that there tends to be a lot of filler that comes out, films that are a bit like ‘The Babadook’, or a bit like ‘Let The Right One In’. I want to rise above that. I don’t want to be paying homage to someone else’s film, I want to make a film people will pay homage to. That’s what you should be aiming for, in my opinion. All You Need Is Death plays in the Irish Film Institute on the 19th of April. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Paul Duane, actors Charlie Maher and Nigel O’Neill, musician Ian Lynch of Lankum and hosted by filmmaker Emer Reynolds. @paulduanefilm 19