HORROR
A DEMONIC, MURDEROUS bride. A mad, murderous cannibal. A manacled, probably murderous man-baby. And half of the British film industry having the time of their lives. It’s hard to think of another piece of cinema that is so unabashedly affectionate for 1970s horror films while also being so damn funny.
Certainly in 93 seconds. Edgar Wright’s Don’t is a mini-miracle.
Wright was in Los Angeles in 2005 when Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, both Shaun Of The Dead fans, told him about their planned Grindhouse double-bill, inviting him to make one of the fake trailers for the intermission. The idea came to him quickly. In the 1970s, when US film distributor American International Pictures would buy the rights to European horrors, they’d promote them with trailers that offered no semblance of plot, removing all dialogue to disguise the fact that a film might not be in the English language, and gave them grabby titles. Jorge Grau’s zombie epic No Profanar El Sueño De Los Muertos (Do Not Speak Ill Of The Dead), for instance, became Don’t Open The Window. “What’s funny about that,” says Wright, “is that it’s not like there’s a big window scene in the movie. So, I thought it would be funny to make an American trailer for a Euro horror film, and just strip it right down to Don’t.” The mini-opus was on.
In early 2007, with Wright editing Hot Fuzz, he brought many of the same crew together for Don’t. He wanted to “throw in the kitchen sink of everything that’s ever been in a horror film. And I had this idea for every set-up to have a different actor.” Stuart Conran, who did the incredible prosthetics for it, sums it up with a rundown of his work. “I did the make-up on Michael Smiley, making him pretty unrecognisable as a mad axeman,” he says.