Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 308

Re:View – ‘FIN’ (‘The End’)

Just what we need – another post-apocalypse movie – or is it? Taken fromthe novel by David Monteagudo and adapted by Jorge Guerricaechevarria (Day of the Beast,Accione Mutante) and Sergio Sanchez (The Orphanage,The Impossible), this Spanish production has gold-plated credentials and asks a larger philosophical question – what if we knew we would simply cease [...]

The Most Uncool Music In The World

I’m often asked in interviews what music I play when I’m working. I usually provide a list of the things I’m listening to today, which in this case would include Daft Punk, Caro Emerald, Wim Mertens, some soundtracks including ‘Dans La Maison’ and ‘Steamboy’, De-Phazz, Tape Five, Murray Gold and John Barry.

The one type of [...]

Re:View – ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’

JJ Abrams not only kicked life back into a moribund franchise with his reboot, he brought it back to Gene Roddenberry’s original premise. These are people aglow with wellbeing who show enormous positivity about the world and its universe. Partly set in futuristic London and San Francisco, we see how cities will one day function, [...]

High Noon On The Village Green

This is a very London story. For the past four decades, the concrete undercroft at the unlovely Southbank Centre has been the home of skateboarders and graffiti artists, making it one of the oldest skate parks in the world. It’s always been an oddly safe and charming version of those dead areas you get under [...]

The Return of Art Deco?

The reviews for ‘The Great Gatsby’ may not be quite what its director Baz Lurhmann had in mind, but perhaps the book is unadaptable, as a great many good books are. And Gatsby is good, although in my opinion now overrated, feeling like a beautifully written but slight tale that Evelyn Waugh would have sharpened [...]

Hammer In Your Ear

Hammer Chillers is a new horror anthology series that will premiere in June 2013. It’s going to be available first as 30-minute weekly downloadable audio episodes from the Hammer website, and then the collected series will also be released on CD, with special bonus material.

A quote from the press release – ‘Writers for the first [...]

The Twenty-Second Test

As regular readers know, this blog is a little obsessed with stories of all kinds.

Very broadly speaking, there are two types of tale – the ones with subject matter or hooks that you want to read no matter how badly they might be written, and ones on any subject by writers who could not create [...]

Trip Out Out In London On May 16th

What, in all honesty, does a fiver buy you?

It doesn’t quite cover the cost of a pint of lager and a packet of nuts.

But on May 16th you can turn this fiver into something cool.

Back in 1992, TRIPWIRE started out with a mission to become the UK’s leading comics/ genre magazine. Its emphasis on British [...]

How Much Is An Idea Worth?

Tucked away in a section of the New York Times yesterday was an article about a service causing a lot of controversy in Hollywood. In the same way that the number-crunchers of ‘Moneyball’ found a statistical way of making a baseball team win, a company called Worldwide Motion Picture Group offers data-driven script evaluation, breaking [...]

The City’s Hidden Depths

As Bryant & May embark on their eleventh full-length mystery, I’m amazed it’s taken them so long to settle on Clerkenwell for a location. It seems the neighbourhood has flitted in and out of most of my novels, but has never taken centre-stage before. It should have done; the Clerkenwell House of Detention is one [...]