| FORCES OF DARKNESS
the gathering
For a man with a severe head cold who has just spent an October Sunday standing around in the drizzle, Brian Gilbert is in a remarkably good mood. The only hint that he might not be on top form is his voice, which is an octave lower than usual and has a distinct croak to it.
Just as surprisingly, Gilbert isn’t complaining about the climate, which can be distinctly variable in the place where he is shooting - the Isle of Man, a beautiful but frequently desolate island in the middle of the Irish Sea. Since Waking Ned was shot there in the late summer of 1997, the island has played host to a whole series of British movies.
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He’d known about the script for The Gathering for a couple of years, Brian Gilbert tells Sam Connolly. But it was having Christina Ricci (above) on board which ensured that the film would manage the mixture Gilbert wanted: something that was both scary and provoking.
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“We’ve been amazingly lucky with the weather,” Gilbert says cheerfully, driving back from the day’s location. “The days when we needed grey, it was grey; and then we had a bit of sunlight when we needed that. The Isle of Man has its own unique weather system. Indeed, weather it has in great abundance! But it wouldn’t be making a film if it wasn’t sod’s law every day!”
The film Gilbert is making is the main reason for his good mood. A supernatural thriller called The Gathering, it stars Christina Ricci and starts out in Glastonbury. Famed of late for its annual (or almost annual) music festivals, Glastonbury holds a special place in another kind of English mythology. A local oak is rumoured to have grown from one of the thorns in the crown that Christ wore on the cross, but the area’s real mystic connections reach back far beyond the Christ-ian era into a series of much less benign legends - things which are, as Gilbert puts it, “Celtic and ancient and weird and unsettling”.
The story of The Gathering - an original screenplay by Anthony Horowitz - starts with the unearthing of a first-century church near Glastonbury which turns out to contain a rather sinister mural. Cut to Cassie, a young American backpacker (Christina Ricci) who is involved in a car accident while travelling through the (fictional) village of Ashby Wake. She accepts help from the driver and her family, and gets drawn into their lives. In the aftermath of the accident, she begins to hallucinate and starts to believe that terrifying strangers are following her…
Adults of the corn: the ‘gathering’ of the title
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“It’s definitely a genre movie,” says Gilbert, “but exactly what type of genre it’s hard to say. We’re calling it a supernatural thriller. But what I like about it actually - and what really sold it to me - is that it’s a British horror film in the way that The Wicker Man and films like that were. I mean, it’s not green smoke and bats flying around…”
Gilbert first came across Horowitz’s screenplay a couple of years ago, but was busy working on other projects, including his long-planned Churchill movie. Then, earlier this year, his regular producing partners, Marc and Peter Samuelson, showed it to him again. By then, he says, “it was quite a different script. A lot of serious investment and development [had been put into it] by Granada and people who were really concerned with getting the script right. They’d worked quite hard. Marc and Peter had, I know, and so had Anthony: he’d rewritten it many times. It’s a movie that is driven very much by an original idea and concept. It’s a very strong story but, as always with stories, to get it right can take time.”
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