AFTER A LIFETIME SPENT FIGHTING HOLLYWOOD, ALAN MOORE MAKES A FILM ON HIS OWN TERMS WITH THE SHOW. SFX VISITS THE SET OF THE BRITISH NOIR FANTASY THAT’S GOING TO KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT…

WORDS: PAUL BRADSHAW

“Pretentious? Yes, I have heard of this word.

I WANT TO ENSLAVE THE MASS subconscious,” says Alan Moore, casually taking a sip of tea. “That’s my ultimate aim. I want this to be mesmeric. I want to have people dreaming about this film.” The veteran writer is holding court in the council chamber of Northampton’s County Hall, all beard and hair and PG Tips.

It’s the middle of a cold December night back in 2018 and Moore is in the city’s old admin building surrounded by clowns, criminals, vampires and burlesque dancers for The Show – his first feature film as a screenwriter. Part Dennis Potter, part David Lynch, part Terry Pratchett, The Show is all Alan Moore: a dark noir comedy that fuses fantasy and reality to tell the story of a private detective who gets tangled up in a town’s collective imagination on the hunt for a missing talisman.

“Alien 3? Yeah, I was in that too. Pint?”

“Without giving too much away, the film is basically about a small Midlands town that is actually balanced precariously over a nightmarish abyss of dream and unreality. So it’s pretty much documentary realism really,” says Moore, never cracking a smile.

SHOW, DON’T TELL

Set in the twin worlds of Northampton and “Nighthampton”, The Show started out as a way to beat writer’s block. “I was halfway through my book Jerusalem, and I’d completely broken my mind,” remembers Moore. “I’d just done the chapter about James Joyce’s daughter and I wasn’t even able to think in English anymore. And so I thought, I know what I’ll do, I’ll go away and create a beautiful but doomed underground magazine that will exhaust most of my money.”