Alix Turner
All three had mentioned both Broadway and the city of Nottingham, but I wanted to understand better the relationship between the event and the venue: is Mayhem a Broadway event, or is it simply the venue for your event, I asked them.
“It’s kind of both,” Meli answered, and I’m glad she was the one who stepped up to this question. “Mayhem is its own thing, but also we all also believe Mayhem wouldn’t be as successful if it wasn’t hosted at Broadway. The relationship we have with Broadway is very important in what Mayhem is and how it operates. Broadway is a very generous host in many ways and the team there really believes in Mayhem, and really supports the festival. But I can’t really imagine Mayhem in its shape being anywhere other than Broadway, but Mayhem is not governed by Broadway.”
Steven had mentioned going out to find the films they wanted to show, and even from the beginning the program included retrospective titles as well as new ones. I asked about the process of finding and selecting their program.
“There’s like a pattern of films,” said Chris, “of archive films, cult classics, and brand new films that we put in front of an audience either for the first time, or first time for them. And it’s trying to find the best across a broad range. We dropped the ‘Horror’ from our name after a while, so Mayhem covered ‘horror, science-fiction, and cult cinema’, which gave it some breadth and space to explore. It also meant we could take people off the beaten track. There are two types of audience we’re catering for: the person who has dropped in to see one film, and one film alone, having picked it out of the program because either they’ve heard about it or because it’s utterly mysterious; and the people who are going to be there for three or four days, to commit to the whole journey. They want variety and want to be surprised; so we look for variety and we look for themes.”
I guess the person who comes along for the latest Nicolas Cage film will grab a handful of other titles that grab their interest too.
“Absolutely,” said Chris. And it was definitely time for Meli’s contribution to the conversation, as her key role in recent years has been in the programming.
“I think it’s also important to add rep titles to any festival program,” she said. “For me, I think a catalog of films that have come before can be so important. There are a lot of people who go to festivals as an education: they want to go there and see Suspiria for the first time, for example. It’s true of any genre: people love seeing films on the big screen that they’ve never watched before. Being able to offer those experiences as well as allowing people to discover new films is important; and for young people as well as those who are not so young: no one can see everything in their lifetime, unfortunately. We try to curate those ourselves, not just respond to publicists’ emails about what’s available; we always keep an eye out for what’s being reissued, but it’s very much curated in the sense of working out what do our audiences want, what do we want to put on for them? And we’ve tried to do a balance of well-known titles—so we have shown things like Suspiria—but also things like Viy, and I don’t think many people had heard of a Finnish witch film, and it’s important to have discovery and rediscovery in the program.”
Steven added his insights about the programming process: “Essentially, for the past seven years, we’ve been going to Cannes in May and that’s usually our first chance to have a look at what films are on the cards for the next few quarters of releases, and also to talk to sales agents and distributors. We’ve got a good relationship with UK agents and distributors who we’ve worked with, and so we can contact them and ask ‘what have you got?’ or look out for them at the market in Cannes. So we try to see about 25 to 30 films each at Cannes, some of which will end up in the Mayhem program, and a lot of which won’t; sometimes they come out before us, or they go to a distributor who doesn’t want to work with us, or we can’t afford them; all sorts of reasons. And once we get back from Cannes, we basically again contact sales agents and distributors to ask what they have for us to look at; and we spend a couple of months watching screeners. Then we have a process through which the three of us go through an Excel sheet with our yes/no/maybes to score the films and get to a program we’re all happy with. But again, sometimes we can’t get films that we want; there were five or six films this year that we couldn’t get, for whatever reason (the money or the deal wasn’t right, or they were saving them for a bigger festival). We’re lucky sometimes with films that show Sitges or London Film Festival, which are around the same time as us, we can get just afterward, because they’ll have premiered there, and we can get them straight afterward.”
Couldn’t help a Devil’s advocate question at this point: surely Steven wasn’t telling me that some of the films I saw at their last festival were “plan B” titles? “No, no!” he stressed. “Everything we show, we love. It’s more a case of there are films we can’t get, so when we find out that, we move on to something else. What you’re seeing are the best films we can show you. So I guess what I’m saying is in terms of the programming, it’s not just a matter of picking from a catalog; it’s a series of quite involved discussions. Obviously for the sales agents, they want the best deal possible for the films, and to get them in front of the biggest audience they can; they might want their premiere to feature at a bigger festival. So that’s the process: a lot of watching of screeners, then talking to whoever is repping them.”
“There is also some compromise,” added Meli. “If there were no boundaries, the festival would be twice as long and we’d be showing so many more films; so in some ways, it’s good to have people telling us ‘no’, for whatever reason. But also there is compromise amongst us, in that we only have x amount of slots in the festival each year, but there are many, many films we love each year and cannot show them all. So when we are in a situation where there isn’t someone external telling us no, one of the team has to concede; these are just conversations we need as a group, about how our audience might respond, or how to create a good balance in the program to make people stay for four days, or ideas we’ve not tried out before. So there is a lot that goes into it, but definitely no ‘B list’ as such. Oh, and we also have a rule that we’ll never show a film that one of us absolutely hates: that would be a ‘no’ immediately.”
“There’s no film in our program we won’t stand beside,” said Chris, firmly. “We only have fifteen or sixteen slots and look at hundreds of films to fill them, so it’s a long, drawn-out process. Once we have our long list, a short list steadily takes shape, and that’s where curation takes place, of getting titles in and arranging them in an order that works for the audience as well.”
I couldn’t help a little Devil’s advocate prod following something Meli had said: if things don’t feel much different after the last dozen years, how do they avoid doing the same old thing each year? They clearly keep going and going for a reason; so why?
“It is the gems,” said Chris firmly. “When you look back, you can see the path we’ve chosen to wander down: stuff like getting Gareth Edwards to come up and talk about not just Monsters but the beginning of his great career, a masterclass in how others can make a film like Monsters. We’ve had make-up classes, Mark Gatiss talking about what scares him; Nick Roeg presenting his most brilliant film in a beautiful environment; live script-readings; all kinds of beautiful gems, patterned across our journey. And it’s been brilliant to pull these things off. Sometimes it’s something small, like thinking to myself ‘I really liked this film, but will an audience?’; like Hundreds of Beavers, will they find it as funny as we did?”
I recall how nervous the team was when they brought out One Cut of the Dead; wondering how they were to get people into it, and then it happened.
“Right!” said Chris. “How do we get people to stop leaving after twenty-five minutes when the end titles come up?”
“Again, part of that is that we watch films like that on screeners,” added Steven. “And One Cut of the Dead wasn’t then what it is now: we saw it before it had the reputation. And also you can’t say anything about a film like that without spoiling it: you can just say ‘hang in there,’ which makes people think it’s going to be awful!”
(I recalled how difficult that remarkable film was as a reviewer.)
“The personality of the festival hasn’t changed,” Steven went on, “but the scale of it and our ambition has grown. But I also think it’s about sharing things with the audience, and as I’m sure you know, over the past ten or twelve years, there’s been a real boom in horror, indie and mainstream; and horror now, compared to where it was twenty years ago, is at a completely different place, with various strands of it, making it much more interesting. There weren’t many horror films coming out back then, in comparison, especially from here in the UK. Now, there’s so much that we’re seeing really interesting films every year, always something that will challenge us: every year, we see something that makes us ask ourselves ‘Is that Mayhemmy?’ and we have to revise what our idea of Mayhemmy is, and find ourselves discussing our scope yet again. That’s challenging to us: as the genre expands and brings in new flavors, we have to adapt and change our concept of what horror is too.”
There’s certainly a concept of ‘horror adjacent’ these days, and titles that horror fans might enjoy that aren’t horror at all; fans are broad-minded after all.
There must be lessons to be learned from all the growth my guests have mentioned, so I asked: if I were to start a film festival in my city, what kind of lessons should someone like I—utterly new to it—bear in mind?
“Just do it,” said Chris, and I got the sense he really wanted me to.
“I do think that’s true,” said Meli. “But you also need to be genuine and be patient. What I mean by that is ask yourself why do you want to start an event like this? You know, you can’t just go ‘Oh this is the thing that will make some money at the moment’: people won’t come to that. If you’re a genuine fan, and you like what you’re doing, you’re more likely to get people to support your idea. And the thing about being patient is this: Mayhem started as a short film event, with just one slot; it only moved into Screen 1 in 2013 and even then, it wasn’t the whole festival; it took nine years to get into the bigger screen for the whole event. You have to nurture your event: nothing is an overnight success. But I think it kind of is like ‘just do it’. You asked earlier why we keep going: for me, there’s little else that I enjoy more than seeing other people’s reactions to something I have enjoyed. If you see something you love, and then get to share it with a big group of people who also love it, it’s an amazing feeling; such a privilege and a luxury: that never gets old.”
“Going back to One Cut of the Dead,” said Steven, “I went back into the screen for the last twenty minutes, just for that experience, to see all those pay-offs land; and seeing the reactions to that was so satisfying, the film works so well. It’s brilliant, a fantastic experience.”
Chris had another angle: “And when you’re programming, there’s that point where you discover something that you love that all three of us love, and that you decide to put in front of an audience and hope they’ll love it too. But it’s been some really remarkable films, like this year’s Loop Track, when you can’t wait to find out what people think about it; it was such an unusual film, that could be about anyone. Lamb, too; but I don’t mean just films with twists, or that are hard to promote: also films that are genuinely trying to do something with an audience, in terms of storytelling.”
“In terms of putting on your own event,” said Steven, going back to my question, “I think audience is the key thing. What you can’t rely on is going to a venue, booking a film, and expecting an audience to turn up. You need to make sure there is some connection with the audience; how will the venue conduct their marketing? With Mayhem, we did flyers and used a lot of word of mouth to build up the festival; but you can’t just rely on putting it on the venue’s program: your event will appear amongst fifty other things.”
“Especially nowadays,” added Meli. “It’s like people are so easily distracted by other offers, whether in person or online. You definitely have to think of your audience.”
Steven had some faith in me: “If you were to do this, Alix, you have a network of people into horror. You can get the word out about it, and the local audience may be people you can find online who you haven’t met in person. The event will be an opportunity to find out where each other is in your city. You don’t know who is there until you have an event to draw them, but it’s really a matter of utilizing your networks; and putting out the word…And don’t worry too much about spamming your audience by mentioning it every day.”
Twenty years of this favorite event was clearly providing such a lot of insight, but I asked my guests to look inwards as well as behind them with two questions: had they learned any particularly hard lessons along the way? And what had been their favorite memories?
Chris had a lesson to offer straight away: “Always have a Plan B! Actually, you can’t always have a Plan B; sometimes you just have to trust that everything will come together. I’m a panicker, always nervous about things not working; but touch wood, you can come up with strategies to plow through and get on with it. We’ve had films break and disastrous moments like that, but there’s always been a solution. There’s a good team here, always resourceful.”
“Part of that is about having a reservoir of goodwill in your audience,” said Steven, “which goes back to the audience being the key to everything. If the audience trust you and like you, and think you’re with them, if a film breaks or there’s some other screw-up, they’ll forgive you and know you’re doing your best. That’s part of it. In terms of other lessons, we have a budget set by Broadway every year, which is for programming and you’ve got to stick to it, and that can be quite tough; it can mean tough decisions, or it can mean negotiating with people about whether you can have a film or not. There have been times when the cost has been simply too high and so we’ve had to put it out of our minds and move on: you can’t do everything, but within limitations, you can still put together a fantastic program.”
“I’d say the hardest lesson is that sometimes you need to draw a line,” Meli offered. “We’ve had situations where we’ve asked for a film, and they’ve taken a long, long time to get back to us; at some point, you have to just say ‘no’: you can’t keep the conversation open indefinitely, because there’s a deadline to finalize the program, and there are potentially ten other films we could put in that slot. Sometimes, that can be a title we really wanted, but setting boundaries is crucial, otherwise, negotiation will just go on and on. My entire programming career is aligned with Mayhem: when I got my job at Broadway, that was my first job in films, so all of it has been a learning curve on the job for me; I’d never run a festival until I got on board with Mayhem, and started producing it from year one or two. We’ve got such a good relationship with Broadway though that we’ve luckily enough never hit any very hard lessons. Perhaps I’ve just jinxed us for the twentieth!”
“I’ve got a couple of favorite memories,” said Steven, turning the conversation positive again. “Obviously, the Nic Roeg event; I got to interview him in St Mary’s Church, a massive gothic church in Nottingham. Meeting him and having that opportunity was amazing. He was in his eighties at that time, and I did wonder if he’d be up for it, but he did a fantastic interview, and it was a great event. The other one was the first Hammer event we did: The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula, read live on stage; it was the first time we’d done something like that, and speaking to the audience afterward, I remember someone said it was like watching a film when they closed their eyes and listened. We had a fantastic cast, great narrator, and soundtrack; it really worked. Oh also, we did an orchestral soundtrack to The Unknown, the Todd Browning silent classic; and it felt magical to introduce a film that was nearly a hundred years old to our modern audience, with a brand new soundtrack: every element of horror and weirdness pulled out of that film and presented for a contemporary audience… that was a fantastic event.”
This had me kicking myself—yet again—that I discovered Mayhem only a few years ago.
“We’ll try to put on some other similar events again, I’m sure,” said Steven.
Chris had a favorite memory to share: “I really loved putting on Monsters 2: Dark Continent,” he said. “Joe Dempsey had appeared as a wayward youth in One for the Road, and there he was starring in a huge sci-fi horror actioner, alongside Johnny Harris. Then midway through the Q&A, Johnny just took it on himself to explain how method acting works to a member of the audience who had asked about it, and it was amazing!”
Meli had two favorite memories, but one had already been mentioned; that is, the Nic Roeg event. “That was my first year as staff,” she said, “and I had to ring his house, which was huge, and it was a lot. Also, the other favorite event wasn’t part of the festival, but it was The Human Centipede 3 UK premiere that we did; it was kind of unreal on so many levels. Tom Six was there, and Dieter Laser came with his wife. They kind of surprised people who were in the lounge watching films 1 and 2 before the actual premiere, and it was just a good time, they were lovely to chat to. Obviously, we do things outside of the festival, which I like to talk about too: we’ve had so many amazing guests and amazing events outside the festival, which is worth remembering.”
“That was a weird day,” recalls Steven. “We went for a curry in the curry house next to Broadway, and we were there with the Centipede team, again absolutely lovely people. I always have this theory that people who work in horror are so lovely because they get all the wrongness out of them and up onto the screen; and the people you’ve got to watch are those who make romantic comedies because they keep all that inside. Meeting these people, having a lovely meal, great conversation, and then watching The Human Centipede 3, which is one of the wrongest things.”
“And the fancy dress!” added Chris. “People crawling on all fours, with inflatable sex dolls. That’s when Broadway was at its most welcoming; they were as charmed as we were by those guests.”
“I was talking to someone the other day,” went on Steven, “who asked me what I did, and he said ‘I can’t understand the mindset of people who want to go and see violence on screen, bloody murder and things like that happening.’ I had to tell him about the catharsis: violence exists in the world and putting it up on the screen means that you can process it in a way that is in a fictional space. But it really reminded me that there are some people who just do not get horror, and the idea of a horror audience as people who really just love to see someone get battered with a hammer: but that’s not what a horror audience is. When you come to events like Mayhem, and meet the audience, that’s when you realize horror is doing something else for these people. We have people who work in very challenging jobs, and they come and are able to process things about violence, about darkness, in a friendly environment with friends, rather than having to live it.”
Says the man who made one of the nastiest films I’ve seen!
“But I’m lovely,” claimed Steven; “it’s all out there.”
Chris and Meli were both shaking their heads (and smiling) at this point: “he’s got us both hostage in different rooms in his house,” said Chris.
Wonderful talking to them all. I hope some of you reading this will attend the coming festival, their twentieth edition. Weekend passes are available now from Broadway Cinema.
