Mike Hodges is the director of the canonical crime film classics Get Carter, A Prayer for the Dying, Croupier and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Having just published his debut novel, Watching the Wheels Come Off, he reflects on his relationship to storytelling on the screen and off. Mike Hodges, you’ve had a prestigious career [...]
Category Archive for ‘Guest Posts’ 
The Architects of Scare Season
Oct 29, 2010 in Film, Guest Posts
For the past seven years, the Saw films have existed synonymously with all that is most terrifying about Halloween. This year, as millions of horror fanatics prepare to flock to Saw 3D for their annual Halloween weekend scare fix, Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunston, writers of Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI and Saw 3D, [...]
Insulting Your Intelligence (“Just gimme some noiriness”)
Oct 28, 2010 in Books, Film, Guest Posts, Television
I sometimes wonder if the popularity of noir isn’t largely due to the fact that no one seems entirely clear on what the hell it is. Not that a busload of perfectly smart people haven’t ventured a definition or two. A great deal of thought is expended on virtually a daily basis trying to pin [...]
What Ya Readin’ for?
Oct 25, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts
The best explanation of the difference between nonfiction and fiction, I feel, is that nonfiction’s primary purpose is to convey information, whereas the purpose of fiction is to evoke an emotion in the reader. I think great books work on an emotional level. Fear is an emotion, a very powerful emotion. Perhaps people read thrillers [...]
Why I Want to Fuck J. G. Ballard
Oct 22, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts
So I can have his babies, that’s why. Though I am reliably informed that for various reasons this may no longer be possible, if indeed it ever was . . . which is a pity, because I’ve been a big fan of Ballard’s since the late seventies, when I first came across The Atrocity Exhibition. [...]
Boris Vian’s I Spit on Your Graves
Oct 21, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts
Boris Vian introduced Miles Davis to filmmaker Louis Malle, resulting in Davis’s haunting score to Malle’s 1958 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (released in the US as Elevator to the Gallows or Frantic). He drank and chatted with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the late-night cafe society of the romanticized Saint-Germain-des-Prés and even wrote the [...]
When Businessmen Attack: A Pair of Simenon Hard Novels
Oct 20, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts
Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” has to be one of the first existential short stories ever penned, if not the first. In it, the title character shows up to work one day at his law office, and when a stack of papers is set before him, he refuses to engage in his task of copying, muttering [...]
The Box and the Key
Oct 19, 2010 in Film, Guest Posts
For a good five or six minutes after the movie ended there was a notable silence and everyone just sat there in expectation of there being more to come—a final scene which would explain what we had all been watching for the last 2½ hours. Needless to say, such a scene never arrived and so [...]
Music to Die For
Oct 18, 2010 in Guest Posts, Music, Writing
Remember that Monty Python sketch? Michael Palin exclaiming that although he was an accountant he really always wanted to be a lumberjack? Well, when I was young I wanted to be an accountant. Or, rather, an accountant is what I thought I would be. But in my dreams I was front man in a great [...]
Thrilling Crime
Oct 14, 2010 in Film, Guest Posts
Image Entertainment’s 14-disc set of all sixty-seven black-and-white, one-hour episodes of the NBC series Thriller (1960–62) officially hit the streets on August 31. Why should you care? Because Thriller provided several of the best telefilms-noir nobody has ever seen. Existing in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock—who actively sought to undermine what he rightly saw as [...]
