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NORMAN J. WARRENWORDS AND PHOTO BY BRUNO BAYLEY STILLS AND ARTWORK COURTESY OF NORMAN J. WARREN  Until the middle of the 1970s, British horror films tended to be camp, period rehashes of American horror classics in which hammy, top hat-wearing toffs would end up being killed by the big guys from the gore of yore such as Dracula and werewolves. Not surprisingly, that wasn’t enough to keep the youth of 70s Britain on the edge of their seats, let alone in the cinemas. Then, directors realised that if these thrillers were set in the suburbs and featured run-of-the mill characters called Derek and Lorraine, who didn’t speak like elocution coaches, people might care again. Norman J. Warren was one of the first directors in Britain to have this epiphany. He made groundbreaking cult films Satan’s Slave, Prey, and Terror in the 70s and got away with exposing Britain to unprecedented levels of gore and sex with minimal opposition. This was before the UK’s censors went crazy over American horror films like Driller Killer, and clamped down on so-called “video nasties”. Vice spent a few hours with Mr. Warren, who is nearly 70, in his west London home. His office is crammed with stacks of stills, posters, photographs and soundtracks, as well as countless bits of merchandise and old cameras. While a plastic alien loomed over us, we talked about the problems one encounters when attempting to show blood smeared on naked breasts. It was great. Vice: When you started making films, the British horror genre was broadly in the “Hammer Horror” tradition, wasn’t it? Norman J. Warren: There was horror stuff being made in Britain back in the 20s and early 30s, but then it fell out of favour with the cinema. They moved toward a “family films only” policy. Hammer were a small company making thrillers and war films. Someone suggested that they had a go at the old horror classics, and they did Frankenstein and it was a massive success. It was incredible. That huge success made British cinemas change their policy as soon as they realised that money was to be made. It was Hammer that actually opened up the door for horror in this country. But they were a pretty direct translation of the American predecessors? Oh yeah, but they did it very well. It was all very gothic and period. But it got tiring for people like me and other young fans. Hammer finally died because they failed to keep up. It was so easy for them that they just carried on making these films without thinking. They got stuck in a rut. The problem was, it was always period settings about middle-class people with a great deal of money, and it was incredibly hard for young audiences to relate to.
And you were a Hammer fan? I made an effort to move away from that stilted Hammer way of doing things, but we were still influenced by them. You can see it in Satan’s Slave. But we started transferring the stories to modern-day settings, and used the language of the time. Of course we upped the gore level, and the nudity too. We wanted to break away from Hammer—but there were no other influences to draw on. And when you are making your first film, especially when you have put your own money into it, you tend to want to play it safe. Making horror was a commercial move; I guess we stuck with the Hammer basis because we needed it to be picked up by distributors. It had to still be within their frames of reference. In bringing horror up to date, did you ever try to inject any social commentary or was your main aim to avoid the period trappings of Hammer? Not really. I mean, the films were obviously very much of their time. I mean, people might say, “It’s a real 70s movie”, but needless to say no one in the 70s wanted to make a 70s film—it was just a film. I never really had any interest in making films with social comment, I just wanted to make entertainment. We just wanted to be sure it wasn’t period. Though, as it happened, for the first film, Satan’s Slave, we found an amazing old house that just happened to actually be very Hammer in style, with drapes and antiques and so on, but that was just chance. As far as making the most entertaining film possible goes, how did that affect the plot or writing process? There were films where I pretty much worked out what scenes and events I wanted to see and worked out a story to fit them, but Satan’s Slave was more conventional, plot-wise. It holds up alright today, even though I find it a bit slow. But the main problem with it was that the plot was very complicated, and actually rather boring. So we just cut out complete scenes where people were explaining things. And a lot of the film doesn’t make sense because of those cuts. But it was less complicated, and no one ever questioned the plot. Two years later we had luckily made enough money from it to make another film. By then things had changed. We had the money. The question was, what to make? So is this when you changed your writing technique? Both myself and the producer had quite independently seen a film called Suspiria, made by Dario Argento. It had gone against all the rules: there was no real plot, it didn’t really make sense, but it had wild colours and great sound effects. It reaffirmed the idea that entertainment was the priority over detail and logic. We made a list of things we liked in other films, like girls breaking down illuminated by lightning, or cottages in the middle of nowhere that are unlocked even though no one is in. We asked David McGillivray if he could make a storyline out of the bits and string them all together. He did, and it sort of made sense, but if you look at it closely then you can’t really analyse it. With Satan’s Slave, we had been overly worried about the audience understanding it, but actually it turned out we didn’t need to be, because they didn’t care. See all articles by this contributor
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