Can You Survive?

Themes and Script

Part 4 - Music

Being a fan of horror exploitation films since I was a pubescent I wanted to make sure my first feature fell into that genre, but it was imperative to appear to have climbed the intellectual ladder since those days. I had installed an internal phrase in my mind that “even smart people get the horn” and I wanted to reflect this statement. But having watched endless hours of sexy horror flicks I found that once the naked female form appeared, my attention was dragged quite happily away from the plot.

It was important to make sex appear the dominant theme and use its trickery, yet almost become uninviting and repugnant as the protagonist enters a state far darker than most, and allow the audience an uncomfortable insight into how his obsession materialises and infects his mind. By witnessing him become aroused rather than allowing the audience to be aroused with him, I felt would be more provocative and exploitative than those films I had wanked over in my teenage years.

I approached the Pasha Dogs, in particular Steve Jones, with whom I had worked with on Never Saw Wall of Voodoo, an individual I knew and trusted to get the flesh of the story built up and finally the drafts of the script. After thousands of emails to and fro, Steve embarked upon the unenviable task of putting the script together, which is something he did in lightning speed. What he produced took the film to a level that even disturbed me! It inspired me to look deeper into the project and explore areas that I had not originally planned, especially in the make-up of the Church of the Fallen Seraphim. Having been born to a family from the Sussex town of East Grinstead, I had spent many years surrounded by fringe religions and alternative beliefs, and it was a subject I wanted to challenge at some point in my film career. Personally I have always had a Kafkaesque view of religious organisations and how I felt that paranoia and fear generally rode in tandem with the promise of love and resolution. It was with glee that I realised that Steve had documented this so poetically within the script.