Exclusive: Kim Newman Talks Video Dungeon, One Thousand Monsters, And More
Journalist and film historian Kim Newman has been writing about horror films for most of his life, and his newly released book Video Dungeon collects large portions of his reviews of some of the weirdest and most obscure films the genre has to offer. I’ve met Kim in person a number of times at events, and I was delighted when he kindly agreed to grant me the following interview to help promote Video Dungeon.
In addition to reviews, Kim is also a prolific author of fiction. His novel Anno Dracula won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel in addition to picking up a number of other accolades, and he has also written stories set within the Warhammer Fantasy universe under the name Jack Yeovil. If you’re a fan of the Anno Dracula series, you’ll be pleased to know that the newly released One Thousand Monsters is also discussed in this review.
You can read my review of the excellent Video Dungeon here, and be sure to purchase a copy of the book on Amazon while you’re at it. You can also learn more about what Kim is up to on his official website.
Dread Central: How did it feel to finally collect decades worth of reviews into one volume?
Kim Newman: This isn’t quite that… I first assembled everything I had ever reviewed and found I had enough material for twenty books, so we opted to do something that I hope is the first of a series. I picked ten sub-genres, from found footage to sharksploitation, and concentrated on films that hadn’t been widely reviewed (few recent theatrical releases) and were hard to find anything on. It’s very much the start of a process.
DC: In addition to a few mainstream releases, a good number of the reviews in the book are of smaller less known films, like we mostly cover on this site. Even though not all of them are masterpieces, do you enjoy giving a voice to films which are not usually covered by larger publications?
KN: The point of my Empire column has always been to cover films that would otherwise be ignored… and also to find a way of reviewing films that exist in some way beyond the limitations of regular criticism (I don’t do star ratings, for instance, because they’re even more useless when applied to this sort of thing than to mainstream cinema). That doesn’t mean entirely abandoning the notion of quality (or entertainment), though I do find myself stretching sometimes to spot the odd redeeming factor – a decent performance, an unusual plot development, a weird coincidence – in films that would otherwise just sink into a morass.
There are tons of very similar movies in most sub-genres, so you end up looking for the tiny differences and distinctions that make this strangers-wake-up-in-a-basement or that Bigfoot-on-the-rampage even slightly different from the others.
DC: As you’ve been writing about horror for most of your life, can you talk about how you feel the genre has evolved over the years?
KN: I’m not sure it evolves, though it changes… in many ways, horror is cyclical, in that each generation needs to discover or rediscover it (or, at the moment, rediscover IT) and have their own versions of the oft-told tales of ghosts, vampires, curses, and masked slashers.
DC: I have to admit that I really liked the illustrations in the book at the start of each section. How did these come about?
KN: We decided early on not to fill the book with stills, posters, etc. – it would have bulked out an already long book and made it more expensive, plus a lot of these films don’t have much in the way of illustrative material. But I wanted some pictures, and Martin Stiff of Amazing15 did these apt, cool images. Martin has done all my Titan covers (including this one) and always surprises me (the silhouette on the spine which you at first think is Leatherface is a lovely touch). I love the simplicity and resonance of his full-page encapsulations of sub-genres… I hope you can run one or two with this interview.
DC: Your next Anno Dracula book, One Thousand Monsters, is being released on October 24. Could you give fans a brief idea of what to expect?
KN: It’s set in 1899 in a district of Tokyo set aside for monsters and involves some of the characters from the first Anno Dracula novel – and the recent comic book miniseries Anno Dracyla 1895 Seven Days in Mayhem – getting mixed up with traditional Japanese creatures and figures from J-pop culture. I try to do something different with each of the AD novels, and this one is mostly narrated by Geneviève Dieudonné, the series heroine, who tells a bit of the backstory about what happened during Dracula’s sudden rise to power as well as dealing with the current plot. More Anno Dracula is planned.
DC: Lastly, I always think it’s worth asking film critics which films they hate but which everybody else loves, and which films they love but everybody else hates?
KN: Films I hate which are unaccountably sacred texts – Top Gun, Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann), The Goonies. Films I love which aren’t even on the grid enough for other people to hate – The Ghost Goes Gear, The Commune (Peter Watkins), Grave of the Vampire.
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