Above is the trailer for my only narrative film this year, Green Teeth.  There has been a huge gap in my film projects recently, caused by writing a second book and having a huge chunk of time taken up with a project that fell through late last year.  Green Teeth as a project came along quite by chance when adventuring on several walks with the writer, Gary Budden.  Those who follow London’s landscape punk writing will be familiar with his work which earnestly mixes eeriness and psychogeography with a visceral sense of class and the forgotten (as well as being one of the team behind the excellent Influx Press).

Gary and I had been going on a number of walks (which still continues) around the stranger parts of East London in particular, from Tottenham Hale eventually all of the way through to Leamouth.  He had wanted to show me some of the more unusual things found in the canal ways especially; from Hackney Henge to the marshes and beyond.  It was only when in these places that he told me of his first volume of fiction that was to be published later this year, Hollow Shores.  Ideas for a film came pretty quickly after sending through Green Teeth which seemed, apart from being incredibly eerie, very much embedded in the real, social landscapes we were walking through.

It is telling that the story has since been nominated for a Fantasy Award; it has that rare mixture of the odd and real that is so, so difficult to get right.  Most of the writing I’ve seen attempt it has usually ended up sacrificing one element for the other but there’s something in Gary’s story that overtly links the two.  It is this crossover that I’ve wanted to capture in the film.  I will write more of the film’s technical elements when it is finally available to watch in October but the way I’ve attempted to achieve this same sense of murky realism is essentially to use degraded film stock.  Hopefully what comes out will be a mixture of Alan Clarke, Bill Morrison and Shirley Jackson but for now, I hope the trailer conveys some of those wyrd aims; of dredging up witches made of duckweed and rusted cans of lager on a lonely Kensal Green canal.