Director Simeon Halligan Guides Us Through The Blood Lands
Matt Boiselle
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We here at Dread Central were lucky enough to recently snag a few moments to speak with Simeon Halligan, the director of the recently released The Blood Lands (formerly called White Settlers), starring Pollyanna McIntosh. A few different topics were covered so grab a seat and read on!
DC: Simeon, can you set up the film for us?
SH: It’s a movie about a couple that move into an old farmhouse in Northern Scotland, so they move in, but they are warned, and the house is located on the site of a battle between the Scottish and the English. The body of the film takes place on the first night when they actually move into the house and they’re terrorized by something that we don’t know just what it is yet, but something starts to freak them out in the house, and soon they come to realize what the threat is. It’s a tense cat and mouse thriller.
DC: So, where did the idea for the film come from?
SH: It was a script that my producer Rachel Richardson-Jones had been aware of for a couple of years from a guy (Ian Fenton), who now has become a good friend and colleague of ours – he’s also directed some short films, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to make this film from his script, and for a while we were really trying to rush it, and eventually we persuaded him. We’d finally gotten some money together to make it, and it was going to be pretty damn tight, it wasn’t going to be big budget, but we could get it made – so he agreed. So that was the start of our working relationship with Ian, and it turned out to be a really great start. He worked very closely with me to develop the screenplay from the drafts that had been written up, and the script was descript about how the action was going to be played out around the exterior of the farmhouse and the forest surrounding it. We had to try and find a location that would match that as best as possible, so we had to modify geographically what takes place in the piece.
DC: Tell us a little about the filming itself.
SH: Well, the filming was a little pressed for time – we had three weeks to shoot the movie, and it was pretty intense. We were out in the middle of nowhere, and the farmhouse was pretty isolated, so the crew was away from civilization (laughs). There were some places, but they were miles away, and the film isn’t all that violent as I was looking to build more off of the tension instead of a gore movie, but there are a few scenes that are pretty physically intense. Pollyanna McIntosh’s character really ends up giving as good as she gets in terms of how she fights back against the antagonists.
DC: You’ve had your hands in production design, art direction, writer, producer, and now director – which one of these facets of your creative style are you most proud of?
SH: It has to be directing – I’ve always loved directing, and I’ve always been very drawn to the visual side of filmmaking, and because I come from an art background – my parents were both artists, and that’s the reason why I got into design initially, and then set design and production design. I’d always been into directing, so I started making short films years ago, and then I thought that I had to make something bigger, so back in 2009 I made a movie called Splintered, and I certainly feel that directing is my forte, and I love design as well. Writing is an area that I like, but I’m very much a visual director, and I really love the process of developing scripts with writers. I’ve got a film that we’ll be shooting at the beginning of next year, and I have written the screenplay for this one as well as work with the writer of the novel. I’ve always been a fan of intense thrillers by directors like Hitchcock and De Palma, and growing up I watched a lot of horror, so that has always been a favorite genre of mine.
DC: After the release of The Blood Lands (review), what can we expect to see from you in the future?
SH: We’ve got about two to three projects in development, and they’re all sort of vying for first position – one thing looks to be dropping back a bit – we’re trying to raise the finances for it and that is proving to be the biggest hurdle to get over. So, I think this movie called Habit is one that we’ll be shooting next, and it’s set in the seedy underbelly of a city and focuses on the massage-parlor world, prostitution, etc., and what you think is going on really isn’t. It’s much more horrific. I’m really excited about it, and it’s really a departure for me, kind of arthouse horror/drama. It’s character-based, and I’m really proud of it. In addition to making films, I also run Grimmfest, which is one of the UK’s leading horror film festivals – it’s happening on the 1st of October this year, and you can check out Grimmfest.com for all the info.
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