Content :

The Inbetweeners

Pushing Daisies

Once

Battlestar Galactica

Chuck

Preaching to the converged

White Girl

Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles

Be Kind, Rewind

Michael Clayton

No Country For Old Men

Mad Men

Journeyman

2007 on the big screen and small

Top 25 Time Travel Stories

The Rules of Seduction

The Nines

National Novel Writing Month

Portrait of Jennie

Red Planet Prize

Dexter

Screenwriting matters

The secret history of British film

Californication

Agents

Superbad v the feMANists

Atonement

Paul Laverty

My weekend with the podcasters

Edinburgh Film Festival 2007

A bummer of a summer of British film?

Wouldn't you just die without Mahler

The great British screenplay

Seinfeld

Steps back in amazement

Cheltenham Screenwriters' Festival

28 Pirates Later

How to arrive late and leave early

Blog off and leave me alone

Screenwriter : comic reader

The 50 Greatest TV Dramas

Spiderman 3

The Holiday

Perfume

Porn: The Second Coming

The Innocents

Battlestar Galactica

My highlights and low lights of a moviegoing 2006

The Queen

Pan's Labyrinth

Casino Royale

Little Children

My fave screenwriting podcasts

Random thoughts about character

Trouble in paradigm

Children of Men

Lost on Broad Street: Diary of a Multi-Strand Collaboration [External link]

Dramatica: the DNA of story?

Writing partners

EAVE: uni for film producers

Writing for Hollyoaks

The loneliness of the long-distance copywriter

Access issues for theatre writers

 

The Innocents


InnocentsWhen the Curzon Cinema in That London announced a screening of the excellent and much overlooked Brit film The Innocents, I had to grab a chance to rave about a little known classic.

The Innocents is one of those films you see as a kid and it leaves an indelible mark on you. Then you catch it again as an adult and expect it to be naff, but no, it still scares the absolute shit out of you. And not in the 'BOO! GOTCHA!' way of so much horror, but in a really uneasy, creepy, hairs on the back of your neck doing a little dance all on their own kind of way.

It's an adaptation of the Henry James short story, The Turn of the Screw, of course, directed by Jack Clayton and beautifully shot by Freddie Francis, with a writing team composed of the formidable talents of William (I Confess) Archibald, Truman Capote and John Mortimer.

A chilling little classic that everyone should see, with a script that is brave enough to leave us to argue for ourselves about what just happened.

If, like me, you don't live in That London, go hire it or buy it anyway and see how a real ghost story should be made. And if you're lucky enough to have a local cinema screening it, hammer their box office door down for tickets and drag everyone you know along.

Oh, and that Rebecca's not bad either.