Hellraisers 5 & 6

Post-production is currently underway on Hellraiser: Inferno that gives the Chatterer Cenobite a millennial make-over by make-up artist Gary Tunnicliffe and Pinhead roughly ten minutes of screen time – the same as he had in the original movie. The word-of-mouth is very good on the dark, character driven story which is being compared to Seven.

Highlander / Prophecy scripter Gregory Widen and Scream 3 scribe Ehren Kruger are currently finessing the Hellraiser VI screenplay which follows the fates of those who have tampered with the Lament Configuration box and met their bloody ends by the Cenobites’ Order of the Gash.

But if Hellraiser: Inferno does badly at the box-office, expect this idea to disappear along with all the countless other Clive Barker projects.

Shock around the Clock Again
Fantasm is dead. Long live ‘Shock Around The Clock’. Yes, the legendary festival that Stefan Jaworzyn and I initiated in the 1980s at the Scala and Electric Cinemas will be making a spectacular comeback this Summer at London’s Prince Charles Cinema at a date still to be confirmed. Jaworzyn will no longer be involved (he is now out of the industry he helped change with Shock Xpress magazine) but I, Jonathan Ross and The Cinema Store are getting together to present a weekend of all the latest Fantasy and Horror from around the world.

No titles have been confirmed yet but readers of this magazine and customers of The Cinema Store will be kept informed and the idea is to showcase all the good titles currently on the world Horror festival circuit like Ring, The Nameless and Night Train. One of the movies we do want to show is Cut, the Australian Scream starring Molly Ringwald and Kylie Minogue, that’s causing shock waves Down Under at the moment. In that, Ringwald plays an actress returning to complete a Horror film she starred in fourteen years earlier that was halted after a murder on the set. The Prince Charles is a great cinema, similar in atmosphere to the Scala, not the stuffy snobbishness of the NFT, and it’s our hope that ‘Shock Around The Clock 2000’ will be the event of the year.

An Eye for Horror
For the last two months I have really been living an incredible dream. Since starting work for the Point Sound & Vision company on two documentaries on Mario Bava and Dario Argento, my favourite directors ever, I have been travelling around the world interviewing everyone I’ve ever wanted to meet about my favourite subject – Italian Horror.

Both are being directed by Paul Watson from the amazing amount of interviews we acquired, plus film clips, behind the scenes footage, rare television interviews, informal home movies, and in Argento’s case, all my archive material, and in Bava’s, the stuff Tim Lucas allowed us to have that he’s not using in his forthcoming 1100 page tome on the maestro. Both programmes are being made for showing on Film Four, then Channel Four, in Britain, and for American Movie Classics in the States. Each will be tying the programmes into a major retrospective. The DVD rights are currently being talked about too. The Argento programme sports the title An Eye For Horror, and there’s the complete list of the people we interviewed for it in this issue...