Celluloid Heroes

Craig Wallwork on movies, vampires, movie vampires, and, like, one book..

A note before we begin: I will be back in a couple weeks or somewhere thereabouts and (maybe) then I shall talk about that new story I have up on that other blog, & (if they’re comfortable with it) the real people who let me kill them in it; for now I’ll just say Baer & the folks at Nine Story Hotel loaned me a couple of dynamite characters and I wore them OUT Here. And I’ll probably have plenty to say about how annoying Lana is (always) being, and the strange feelings I’m having about Lestat, and that doc about the model cult, and the end of Jackass, and Widow’s Bay, and the Summer Reading Program at the library, and The Things I’m Writing, and the neverending sense of impending doom -and hopefully between then & now I’ll get to see Backrooms.

For now, if you’re just tuning in and don’t already know what’s happening, please enjoy this interview with my bff, author of the Tom Nolan series, as well as The Skin We Feel Most Comfortable In, Human Tenderloin, some things that I’m definitely in (some of which were written before we met), and most recently, the excellent, very bloody novel, Instruction Manual to Being a Vampire (order Here ): Craig Wallwork.

The Interview

Amanda G.: Do you have a dedicated space/device/notebook/folder/app/etc you always put story ideas or notes into to sort of keep the process or ball rolling with keeping in touch and in tune with all tuning forks or planets or whatever, or do you just start fresh with an idea or concept and set right to work on each thing right away? Do you always know what your Ideas are for?? I ask because I do not usually.

Craig Wallwork: You must love junkyards, right? The cemetery of broken dreams and lost loves. Like every car was once loved, yeah? People cared for them. Fucked in them. Gave birth in them. Died in them. And then they end up in a wasteland of rust and broken mirrors. In my hometown, the scrappers would let you climb into those cars to pick at their remains. Some of these cars were stacked three high like Jenga bricks waiting to topple, and you’re leaning in through the broken window with a screwdriver trying to dismantle an air vent while tearing your skin on a rusty car door. That’s a long way of saying that I treat my work the same way. It’s just ideas stacked on ideas in my head, and there’s a wasteland of them ready for cannibalising. I walk around the debris and uncouple a sentence here, dismantle a motive there, and unscrew an idea when I need one. But it’s all in my head. I never outline. I never jot down lines of dialogue. The only thing on the laptop is the manuscript. The rest is a mental junkyard.

AG: Why the fuck do you STILL not believe in ghosts? After all this whole life?

CW: It’s not that I don’t believe. It’s that I’ve not yet been convinced of their existence. It’s strange this has come up because I was talking with work colleagues about this very thing today. One of them went on a supernatural show where the two hosts visit various haunted venues. The episode he featured in took place in a haunted castle, and he is convinced to this day he heard approaching footsteps behind him. I mentioned that thing we were talking about, audio pareidolia, a kind of Rorschach of sound where the mind makes sense out of the nonsensical. But he was like, No, I heard footsteps! Then my other colleague recounted the time when he visited cemeteries as a teenager with his friends to hold séances. They were all sitting at a grave and this single carnation flower in a pot dipped its head as if it was bowing. They all saw it at the same time and ran out of the cemetery.

I was like, But was it windy? And he said it wasn’t. Maybe there was a spider inside the pot that moved and caused the flower to droop. But he claimed the head only dropped, not the stem. Considering this was a shared experience, I was struggling to find the science behind it. And had I been one of those kids, maybe my opinion would be different today. But until I see something with my own eyes that I can’t explain, I’m more inclined to lean toward natural occurrences than the super kind.

AG: What are your two main characters’... no! Not favorite movies. Least favorite movies! And guilty pleasure repeat watch. For daddy and daughter. And don’t get mad at me for saying it pervy like that, you know I can’t help it.

CW: Don’t you ever stop being pervy! Both characters in the new book meet for the first time in a cinema showing Hunger, the 1980’s vampire flick starring David Bowie and Susan Sarandon. This would suggest Herwig, the priest, enjoys movies about vampires. As for his favourite, I think he’d be old school European. Daughters of Darkness. Fascination. Something gothic and saucy. So he’d hate non-traditional and contemporary movies like Day Shift, and Renfield. The nameless woman would probably hate the Twilight saga. Yeah, she’s more, Humanist Vampire Seeking a Consenting Suicidal Person, Addiction, El Conde, and Abigail. Their guilty pleasure, easy-The Lost Boys.

Yeah, I can imagine them sitting on a couch together with a glass of blood and watching the Frog Brothers spray holy water on David and his friends.

AG: What are the best last couple movies you’ve seen? And best rewatch of the last couple months?

CW: Sovereign with Nick Offerman and that Good Boys kid, Jacob Tremblay. That movie took me by surprise. It was recommended by Vincent Grashaw, the film director. I’d like to say he recommended it directly but I read his LetterBox review and jumped straight in. Vincent did Bang Bang and What Josiah Saw. Very cool guy. So yeah, Sovereign. Maybe I was too emotionally invested in it because Tremblay reminds me of my own son with his quiet vulnerability that breaks my heart. It’s the story of two fathers, two sons, all in opposite ends of the law and moral thinking. It is about anti-establishment, skewed principles, and living outside the conventions of rule. It is also about ethics, doing the right thing, discipline, and making the world a better place. There are flaws on each side, and you question each father repeatedly. But what is clever is how close both fathers are alike in their thinking -they are indoctrinating their kids to behave and conduct themselves in extreme ways.

I just watched 20th Century Women too, which sits between Running With Scissors and The Ice Storm in its style, cultural referencing, nostalgia, and sentimentality. The title suggests this is all about women, and it is, but at the centre of it is Jamie, a young boy navigating life and love, and whose mother believes that for him to grow into a man, he needs a man to guide him. Instead, what Jamie gets is Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning who talk to him about feminism, punk music, orgasms, menstruating, and that sex and love are sometimes mutually exclusive.

As for a rewatch - well, probably Sinners. I didn’t get the hype when I first saw it. And I still think the first half is better. I’d like to have seen a version of the movie without vampires. Like one where just the clan turns up to the Juke Joint and gets massacred... spoiler, obviously, that happens, but in my version it’s more Mudbound, The Piano Lesson, and Peaky Blinders.

AG: If you could go back and see a movie for the first time in theatres, what would you see?

CW: Babylon, the Damien Chazelle movie. That’s one I wished I’d seen on the big screen. Like the jazz music that plays throughout the movie, Babylon has this crazy, disjointed, free-falling beat wrapped around scenes of debauchery and hedonism. From the moment that elephant shits over Manny’s friend, you’re on a cocaine journey where Brad Pitt is Clark Gable, and every shot that features Margot Robbie is frame worthy. There is so much noise you can’t help but feel it in your bones. It divided audiences and critics on release, but for me it is gorgeous and bleak, funny and sad, it is the Coen Brothers and P.T. Anderson thrown back to the 1920s and everyone is handsome and pretty, and mascara runs in equal measure to champagne. Robbie is sublime and her dialogue cuts through the celluloid like razorblades while Pitt gets his own cracking lines where he paraphrases Terminator and Gone with the Wind. There is nudity, blood, and disgrace. There are fallen angels and rising demons. It is a love story, but not about people, but movies. I adored it, partly because it captivated me with its charm and energy, but also it was like being at the best party in the world, where the beginning is so very wild and full of expectation, and as time passes, it’s not only the sky that gets darker, but the hearts of the many and lonely.

AG: Which if your books or stories would make the best film adaptation?

CW: The most accessible and easily adaptable books would be the Tom Nolan trilogy. They would make a great TV show, sort of True Detectives meets The Silence of the Lambs. Though it’d take a brave and visionary director to create the ending to the first book, Bad People. What I’d love to see though is The Instruction Manual to Being a Vampire. That nearly got picked up by a film company. They reached out to my publisher asking about rights a year before the book was due for release. We hadn’t even found an editor at that stage. So we sent them the manuscript and waited a long time for the call. When someone is keen on snagging a book for adaptation, they are very attentive and often reply within a day. In the infancy of most things, you are a commodity, a golden cow ready for milking, but fast forward six months, and you’re an old nag heading for the knacker’s yard. Least that’s how it felt for me. I tried desperately not to get excited, but there were moments while waiting for that rejection where I imagined things playing out differently, and hey, maybe I would be there in the cinema with my daughter.

AG: What’s the best (OR what’s your favorite) book I-to-film adaptation? What’s the worst? Do you think there are too many adaptations at this point? Are novels just being used in place of treatments or scripts the last few years?

CW: That’s a great question. The heady and debauched days of the 70s where directors called the shots are long over, so the best way to secure bums on seats, or the safest way, is to either adapt a bestselling book or make a sequel to a popular franchise. So for the past decade we’ve seen this tsunami of superhero adaptations and cosy reads being brought to the screen. Even indie favourite A24 have started to veer from their low-key roots into the more mainstream.

The way I see it is, great movies do not need big stars. They just need great scripts and great crews. But big stars bring in revenue, and the more revenue you have, the more films you can make. Netflix broke the system, but we’re slowly turning the tanker around because physical media is taking off again. People want to hold discs in their hands. They want to see the cover work and read the spines on the shelf. I miss the days of video stories where you’d spend hours looking at the artwork and reading the back blurbs. I miss the smell, the vibe. Taking the effort to travel to the nearest video store required energy and commitment. It meant something. And because you put that much effort in, you weren’t leaving without a movie.

Now it’s all just a click away. Everything is too accessible now, and because we can watch any movie we want at any time day or night, our concentration is suffering. It’s easier to stop a movie ten minutes in because it’s a little slow and choose another. And because our minds wander, script writing is changing. Exposition is more a chorus now, repeated periodically to help keep viewers up to speed with the narrative. Today, sitting through a three-hour movie is deemed a herculean task, whereas what it should be is a gift to be immersed in the storytelling.

As for best movie adaptations: Fight Club and The Shawshank Redemption are just amazing. Maybe Jaws too. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all incredible books, but the adaptations are just wonderfully done and add to the prose, not take away. As for the worst? I remember loving The Sicilian by Mario Puzo, and I watched the adaptation with Christopher Lambert. Wow. That was bad.

AG: So it’s safe to say you’re an appreciator and collector of physical media?

CW: Last year we moved home. We’d been living in this pretty cottage in rural Yorkshire, a place we’d been renting from family, and last year we were told the family wanted to sell it. To be honest, it was only supposed to be temporary, a place to settle for a spell, gather our breath, and move on. That breath took 17 years. Because we only ever saw it as a transitory home, we never invested in it. We painted the walls, but we never replaced the carpets the tiles on the walls, none of that stuff. We dich’t even buy much furniture even though we had the space.

Around the time we moved in, I started to collect books. First editions. Signed. Arcs. Uncorrected proofs. Limited editions. But because we had no shelves or a bookcase, I had to look at them once or twice, then put them into padded envelopes and box them away in the attic. For 17 years I never saw those books. Last August we moved into a new home. It’s much smaller, but it’s ours. And because it’s ours, we started to invest in it. One of those investments was a bookcase. I swear, it was like Christmas morning opening all those padded envelopes and seeing those books again.

I forgot about a lot of them, like my signed first edition of Mark Richards’s The Ice at the Bottom of the World. Or my Demon Theory signed and annotated by Stephen Graham Jones, which he gave me because I dropped off a Conan the Barbarian book at his publishers in Soho when I visited New York. But my favourite is a true first edition of The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. What makes this special is that inside is a church pamphlet denouncing the film, claiming that demonic possession is not make-believe. That the film is likely to make you ill. That it will shatter your emotions and leave you in a permanent state of fear. And that you have responsibilities to others, because by watching the movie you’re helping to damagé, afflict, and ruin the lives of others. The irony is, that by producing the pamphlet, the church is helping sell tickets for a movie about the devil These were probably handed our before people when to see the movie, and one was kept and then defaced with writing. I’ll include a photo of it because it’s just great. And there was a promotional author photo in the book too by Tippi Hedren. You don’t hear the name Tippi much, so I like it even more.

I also collect movies. Steelbooks, limited editions, Out of Prints. My biggest obsession of late is building up by Criterion collection. I’ve not got many because the titles released in the UK are limited to what is released in the US. But I have Dr Strangelove, Here Comes Mr Jordan, Grand Budapest Hotel, Mudbound, Being There, The Big Chill, Night of the Living Dead, and Cold Water. My last investment was Mystery Train by Jim Jarmush which I haven’t seen for decades.

AG: My son is practically an adult. Your daughter is practically an adult. Does that make you feel a thousand years old? It makes me feel a thousand years old.

CW: Last week, my daughter asked if her new boyfriend could stay over for the night. They’re both 17 years old. My colleagues joked about me polishing the shotgun when he arrived, but I’m trying to avoid being too authoritarian a parent, but also not too permissive. So my wife and I consulted and we agreed to the sleepover. They shared the same bed, and while that might go against the values of your readership (note from AG: I resent the implication that my readers have values), what I must remind myself is that this year she is an adult. I no longer see the little girl in her red wellington boots being chased around the garden by our chickens. I no longer feel the bird bones under her skin, her sugar-laced breath against my face as I carried her from room to room. I see now the woman she will blossom into. Her face is settling into expressions that are weighted by world issues. But her eyes remain forever child-like, bright and wide, and filled with acceptance. It’s not about being too tolerant and easy-going.

Being a good parent is about trust. We’ve raised her to understand the meaning of accountability, and that if you have love, life isn’t so difficult to manage. She has love, rivers of it, from her family and her boyfriend. And she understands that the foundations of any family can fracture quite easily without trust.

For this reason, she’s blessed, as is my son who is stumbling awkwardly into his teens. His limbs are stretching, his freckles fading. He likes it when he gets a cold because it allows him to hear the older voice puberty will bestow on him. But no matter how much his bones grow, or his skin thickens, he still hugs me and says that he loves me each night. So yes, I wear more wrinkles around my eyes and my joints ache on rainy days, but I look at my children and see everything I was, and for a moment, all my pains go away.

AG: When we’re trying to communicate with the rest of the world, or trying to build a bridge between anything we make and anyone that has eyes and brain and heart, do you feel Kelly (Boyker, poet, editor, and prettiest girl of all time) in the room with us? Not like in an actual ghost sense but in the sense that thru our relationship with her and Menacing Hedge she tangibly touches everything we say and do when it comes to sharing work or discourse around writing and helps us maybe look at the soft or the better parts of ourselves, and in a way we get to have her Ghost with us all the time, being Haunted by her in that way? Do you believe that’s how ghosts feel maybe, like tangible influence? Do you feel haunted by her, or by anyone else, in the way I’ve just described? Do you take comfort in the idea of a haunting, the way i always do?

CW: That’s a beautiful way to frame it. Yes, I think we influence, touch, change attitudes, beliefs, dilute worries, ofter strength and joy, imbue creativity, balance mindsets, or through our hauntings tender moments where the living reflect and smile. Kelly was a unique and beautiful person that drifts into my mind from time to time, and though I only knew her, like I know you, through email or photos, she remains a welcomed tenant in my head. As I get older, I am trying to evict those who have added little to my life, so that each room in my brain is filled with good people who will continue to serve me well. And I take little bits from each one.

From Kelly, she reminds me that I had something worthy of note, and that it should be celebrated. Her gift to me was awareness and belief. She made me aware of possibility, and that I should believe in myself more. Recently, I’ve been suffering with feelings of cowardice. My father was a tough man. He didn’t take shit from no one. He didn’t lack confidence and was always well liked. When he died I was given his gold necklace. I don’t wear jewellery, save for my wedding ring. So I put it away in a box until such a time when I could pass it to my son. But the other week I found it and started to wear it. I know deep down that his spirit isn’t infused in that gold, but since I’ve been wearing it, I have seen a positive change in my behaviour. Whenever | lack the confidence to do something, I run my fingers over that necklace and I see my father so clearly in my head, and I know he’d do it all differently. If we haunt, whatever that means, then he is haunting me, just as Kelly haunts me. But they are good ghosts. They push me to better myself and the world around me.

Isn’t that a beautiful thing.

AG: Instruction Manual sold old its first print run. I was finally able to order. Luckily I’m your favorite and already read it long, long ago. Were you expecting the good reception you’ve received?

CW: The book selling out surprised me. I don’t know how these things work. It’s all a mystery to me. We pushed hard trying to spread the word, and I guess people thought it was worth a chance. But there’s a level of expectation that comes with that, and as I sit here in the infancy of it all, I get a little worried that people will find the book too different, that the bloody carrot I dangled wasn’t really worth chasing. That maybe the vampire purists will hate it and want to drive a stake through my heart. Then I read comments like, This is the best vampire book since Salem’s Lot, and I’m like phew, great, it’s working. But only time will tell.

I can’t get too carried away with praise. I think it hinders creativity. The best work is done when you think you don’t have anything left in you. That this is the last book you’ll ever write. That’s when you put everything into it. If there’s a demand, that people want more from you, and you believe in all the hype, then it can dilute what you’re trying to achieve. For me that’s to change people. However small that change is, if it happens then I’m happy.

I’ve developed a system long ago whereby I’m driven by the idea, not what others say. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love knowing I’m doing something right, but it’s not the reason I sit at the laptop. That’s driven by a need to exorcise the story within. The only thing that stops me writing is a lack of ideas. Good ideas. If you see no new books by me, the well of inspiration has finally run dry.

I will also say there’s a stillness that follows the finishing of a book too. After you commit that last line, a great weight is lifted. But the nicest part is that the voice in your head, the one that’s been narrating this story to you for months, it quiets down and things just level out. I get a sense of relief. For something who suffers with anxiety and depression, those moments are golden.

Craig Wallwork is the three times nominated Pushcart author of the Tom Nolan detective series including Bad People, Labyrinth of the Dolls, and The Ghost of Stormer Hill. He is also the author of the novels The Sound of Loneliness, and The Instruction Manual to Being a Vampire, as well as the short story collections, Gory Hole, Quintessence of Dust, Human Tenderloin, and The Skin We Feel Most Comfortable In. He lives in Yorkshire, England.