HOMEWARD bound this weekend after a week at Cannes Film Festival, Stephen Hall is a multi-award winning filmmaker whose speciality is horror. Clearly, he’s good at putting the frighteners on us, winning €10,000 last year in Canada’s Horror Black Film Festival with his short ‘Sinners’.
More gratifying for this sunny, charming man was having at least 100,000 DVDs of the film distributed through the subscription service Rue Morgue and the website Bloody Disgusting.
Cannes is the platform with its Short Film Corner. Limerick-based Hall was out there with ‘SAFE’ and a strong band of Limerick filmmaking brothers, with Kevin Kiely Jnr/ Paddy Murphy’s ‘The Cheese Box’ selected also.
“I am going to network the hell out of it,” he grinned, talking to Limerick Post as he embarked.
Hall and producer Paul Thompstone got through the selection funnel with ‘SAFE’, seven minutes of fright shot in Cratloe Woods with actors Zeb Moore (Richard Harris International Film Festival) and Adam Moylan, all for The Riviera.
There’s a strong smack of comedy to phantasmogria. Worship by its global cult is more endearingly geek than weird. Hall wrote, shot and directed the apocalyptic fable, Thompstone produced it.
“High concept” is the mission, working technique, storylines, lighting and actors to max out impact.
Back in February at Dublin’s Screenvention, the Shannon-born Hall won Best Film for ‘Dinner Date’ which centred on a zombie girlfriend.
There’s much more in the can, literally, as “through posting up on digital media, a producer, Daithi Magner, who was production designer on ‘Spider Hole’ made in Kerry, has come on board for a feature film that I am hoping to make in Limerick. We want to pull in a couple of old horror stars, familiar names to people but I don’t want to name them yet in case we don’t get them”.
This movie outline has a Jack the Ripper type sent to the gallows, who comes back to haunt and violate as before. There is no doubt about it, this city has Victorian and medieval backdrops to do justice to location shots of mystery and menace.
An LIT graduate in Video and Sound, Hall is churning out bite-size horror fillers for magnate Eli Roth’s Crypt TV online. The first of three already made was ‘Sitters’ which went viral, nudging towards 300,000 viewings on facebook and million plus ‘likes’.
Inevitably his collaborations are getting bigger, having directed Gerry Stembridge’s ‘Day Off’ for RTE with actors Joe Mullins (Glassland) and Dawn Bradfield (The Clinic).
Next up?
The jump to expensive feature-length film making, as soon as possible for the ultimate Cannes can-can in and out of Limerick.
