Mark Kermode (60:11)
So the ensuing story then involves Justin on the one saying, you know, listen, can't you hear that when he's playing, he goes backwards and he's saying, you know, kill everybody. And she's saying, don't be ridiculous. And while she's saying, she's googling hidden messages in nursery rhymes, hidden messages in Baa Baa, Black Sheep. And this is all just, you know, folk tale nonsense. But gradually maybe it becomes something else. Now, you will be unsurprised to discover that this actually began life. It was originally conceived as a radio play. Okay? So it was obviously, the audio was the big thing. And you and I are both obviously huge fans of radio and I have a real thing about recorded voices. Apparently the film is also. It was recorded in. The film was made in the writer director's childhood home, which explains a lot about his kind of personal connection to the. To the story and also the fact of the connection about her tending to her. To her terminally ill parent. So the film won an audience award at the Fantasia International Film Festival last year. Then it was picked up by a 24. And so far, on the original budget of half a million, it's taken 15 million. Now, bear in mind, money has been spent on it because that's how these things work. But it's, you know, it's done very well. I really liked it for a number of reasons. The first one Is. And I think it has the kind of stripped down, let's make the most of the least philosophy of films like Blair Witch Project, which still to this day, people don't remember how scary Blair Witch was when it came out. I have a friend who is now an actor who was a film critic when she saw the Blair Witch Project in Cannes. And there is a film of her literally having a panic attack on the street afterwards because she'd never been so scared in her life. Or more recently, during lockdown, there was that film Host, in which the whole thing played out over a zoom call. You know, so really sort of stripped down resources. Secondly, in the mother daughter stuff with the mother in the bed apparently dying, there is some kind of connective tissue between that and a film which I talked about before called Relic, which is a horror movie, but I think is a brilliant film about dementia. And we talked about this at the time. Many people of our age will have experienced. Will have had an experience of a loved one with dementia. And it's a very, very hard subject to talk about. But there is a. There is a kind of slightly connective thread there. And the third thing is, look back. Masking is bunk, right? Okay, yeah, of course it is. Of course it is. And, you know, for proof, there's that. That very good documentary, Dream Deceivers, which is the documentary about the Judas Priest trial in which it was alleged that they had put back masked messages in their music. And the trial concluded, this is just silly. There is no evidence at all that saying something backwards. The brain, it just. It's not. And anyway, the messages aren't there. However, I was really fascinated for. There's a guy called Konstantin Raudive who kind of pioneered this thing called evp, electronic voice phenomenon, that he would record silence, and then he would listen to the silence, and he would start to hear voices in it. And the more he listened to the tape, he'd hear little tape noises, and the tape noises would then reveal themselves to be voices. And Bill Blatty, who wrote the Exorcist, became very, very interested in this because Bill was convinced that these were voices of the dead attempting to communicate with the living. And in Legion, he writes about these voices. And I spent one really, really strange afternoon with Bill sitting in his upstairs attic, as opposed to his downstairs attic, listening to these tape recordings he had made that he used in Legion. And what happened was you just hear. And then you play it again, and then you'd hear the. And you'd listen to it again and again and again. And again. And suddenly the would turn into a voice. It would say something, it would say a word. Now, what was actually happening was that your mind was putting order on chaos. Like when you said you heard that thing and you said, is he saying who won the war? Right, that's what I thought it was, yeah. No, but that's fine. Because once your brain hears something and it wants to impose order on it, and that's pretty much how EVP works. It's just a noise, but your brain. But once you've heard it, you can't unhear. And with Bill, there was this case in which he had all these things in which there were quotes that he uses in Legion, but there was one he said, I've never been able to decipher it. And he was playing it, and he was playing it, and he was playing it, and he said, I'll play it to you, see whether you hear anything. And we were sitting with our hands on our headphones like this in Bill's attic, and I heard as clear as day, my name. I heard it said this thing said Mark Kermode. And I nearly jumped out of my skin. And once I said to Bill, that's my. Because he'd recorded these in the 1970s, way before he and I ever met. And he went, yeah, that is what it is. Because it isn't. It was my brain imposing order on it. But I've got a real fascination with this. And this is a. It's a creepy idea. It's a really creepy.
