Ray Liotta batted right-handed in the movie while the baseball player he depicted batted left. To find out more, click here. The budget was so small that one of the agreements I'd made was that I wouldn't put any licensed music on it because we couldn't afford to, but Blanck Mass were really good about it. You don't necessarily see lots of surreal things, but your perception is fucked. (Roger Ebert also mentioned the films of Stewart and director Frank Capra in his four-star review.). FS1 | FOX | FOX News | Fox Corporation | FOX Sports Supports | FOX Deportes, ™ and © 2020 Fox Media LLC and Fox Sports Interactive Media, LLC. Still other rumors claim it was Costner himself. In the third, a blind musician must perform his songs for an audience of the dead. That was important. We were trying to sit a little outside of the language of normal cinema. There's a real pleasure in language in the film as well. Most folk horror on this list typically deal in rural communities practicing in pagan or satanic rituals that they keep hidden away from the world, but with Witchfinder General, the titular villain commits his atrocities all in the name of God, subverting much of what folk horror is based in. I think that's what comes across. (Totally the most underrated line of the movie, by the way.). BW: Shock Corridor was shot in 12 days. A Field in England is a trip and one I delight in taking over and over and over again. A lot of those movies were quick. Slavic history is littered with legends of witches and demons, so it makes sense that one of the finest movies about this subject matter came from that corner of the world. Yeah, that’s a pretty cool movie too about a devout Christian disgusted by a Scottish island for practicing pagan rituals. He's the radio basically. Sightseers is like that as well. What was it that made you want to set a film during the English Civil War? Some films that finished ahead of FOD in its weekend totals: Road House: See No Evil, Hear No Evil; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; No Holds Barred; Ghostbusters 2; Batman; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Dead Poet's Society; Karate Kid III; Lethal Weapon 2 and Weekend at Bernie's. The Ending of ‘The Matrix’ Explained October 17, 2020; ... A Field in England (2013) Set amidst the English Civil War, A Field in England is an uncomfortable fever dream of a movie. Well, I’ve just been informed that I’m supposed to be writing about 1973’s The Wicker Man directed by Robin Hardy and starring Edward Woodward. There can be big sets and a lot of lamp tweaking but it doesn't help to make the basic movies. One is that we shot it fast, 12 days, so there's not a lot of time for pissing about. Once we saw the actors lurching about in the hats with the guns we realised that these characters would have been the same guys that would have had to run off to America to escape persecution. Cromwell wasn't the person most expected to rise up through the ranks. From the book by Ronald Bassett, and pulling from the stories of the real life Matthew Hopkins, the film stars Vincent Price as the titular sadistic general murdering anyone he deems a witch as he travels across the countryside of East Anglia. Like Affleck and Damon, you can't see them in the movie. Though the Graham timeline in the film doesn't exactly match with reality, the story itself is 100% legit: A player named Moonlight Graham got in one game for the Giants before moving to Chisholm, MN and becoming a beloved doctor in the town. BW: Yeah, and the fast cutting as well. Liotta says that when people come up to him commenting on the "gaffe," he replies, "none of these guys came back from the dead, either.”. Munch, munch, munch they go and the universe opens up to their dastardly imagination. Playing Possum: Matthew Holness's Other Dark Places, Angel Of Death: Reframing Montgomery Clift At 100, Never Come Back: Reclaiming Roots In 'Monsoon' And 'Residue', Peep Show: Why Bette Gordon's Variety Is More Than A Feminist Vertigo, All Hell Broke Loose: David Fincher's Se7en And The Medieval Morality Play, Southern Journey, Revisited: An Interview With Rob Curry And Tim Plester. Not to give too much away, but just after Whitehead's experience in the tent there's that almost Popol Vuh-esque keyboard drone... BW: That's 'Chernobyl' by Blanck Mass, the only bit of licensed music in the film. Was Hanks a serious contender to play Kinsella? It's a very messy period. Salinger had two characters named Kinsella appear in his works. You shot the film very quickly – 12 days. There’s a haunting burning man finale that’s quite memorable, but I still think the Cage one is funnier. Do Not Sell my Personal Info. Following this long line is the latest film from the director of Sightseers and Kill List, Ben Wheatley. I was editing every night in the hotel and we were looking at this long take going, “Fuck, this is fantastic, but what music can go with it?” Andy Stark, the producer, is a big music fan and he put that track on over the footage and we just went [gasps sharply] and had to go and pursue them. Kevin Costner was the first choice to play Ray Kinsella but producers initially didn't even pitch him the movie, convinced he wouldn't want to follow-up Bull Durham with another baseball film. BW: I really like the bit when Whitehead's talking to Friend [Richard Glover] and giving him his CV and putting on a weird posh accent that he didn't have before. Were you ever worried about the trippiness of the film getting in the way of the story's clarity? This article is part of our ongoing series, 31 Days of Horror Lists. It might be true but I've found no primary source to confirm it, so am guessing it's one of those viral things in which the same rumor has been told so much that it gets accepted as fact. There's a milieu which the film references. Often while in theaters, I found myself covering just the corners of my eyeline, made innately uncomfortable by wide open shots of wooded horizons and dead grass, all of it heightened further by dissonant musical notes. Then, when the crops got too high, a raised platform had to be built for Costner so he could remain at the same level above the corn. The first was one of Holden Caufield's classmates in The Catcher in the Rye (Richard Kinsella) and the other was Ray Kinsella from a short story published in Mademoiselle. Folk horror has experienced a resurgence in recent years. He believes himself to be vital to the company, but in reality it's the company that's vital to him and his feelings of self worth. BW: Just reading about it. I'm the New England man. Local beliefs and superstitions shape human behavior in increasingly dangerous ways leading to an ending that mesmerizes even as it opens the floor for discussion and interpretation. Intrigued by the stat line of one game with no plate appearances, the author jotted down a note to include Graham in some future writing. It lost the first two to Driving Miss Daisy (oof) and the last to The Little Mermaid (we'll allow it). Unique perspectives on the daily sports topics that matter most. It is difficult. With this in mind, the Boo Crew — Chris Coffel, Valerie Ettenhofer, Anna Swanson, Brad Gullickson, Rob Hunter, Meg Shields, Jacob Trussell and myself — formed like Voltron to bring you this list of great folk horror movies. It was filmed around the time his mother was ill and he associates it with that difficult time. While the salaciousness of the film is undeniable, especially for the time of its release, it’s given an air of class thanks to Price’s turn as Hopkins, breaking from his career legacy of campy performances to create something that is both ruthless and terrifying. Robinson initially wanted Jimmy Stewart to play Graham, but the legendary actor hadn't appeared in a movie in seven years and would never again. One of the characters uses the word 'envelope' which we found out doesn't get into the dictionary until about three years after the Civil War. Field of Dreams is based on the book Shoeless Joe by W.P. (Valerie Ettenhofer), One of the most striking aspects of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List is how much the film tangles its own folk horror ideas. (Meg Shields), While folk horror is most commonly applied to films hearkening back to ye old English traditions and beliefs, this list shows that every language and culture has its own fears, tales, and local horrors. And… wait, what? If you love what we do, you can help tQ to continue bringing you the best in cultural criticism and new music by joining one of our subscription tiers. The other character's reactions to him are very interesting. But the amount of thought going on in the country at that point - everybody radicalised and marching and starving and not knowing what's going on - was fantastic. Unlike slashers and other common horror sub-genres, folk horror isn’t a singular thing. That's what that singing is. The idea developed out of that. Producers wanted to use the same name for the film but the studio thought people would think it was about a homeless man or hobo. Viy is a surreal piece of rustic horror that generates maximum thrills from a minimalist approach, and it deserves to be celebrated. Field of Dreams never hit No. The only thing I can say with confidence: It wasn't James Earl Jones. My secret agenda being to get to work with large amounts of people. The only film I can think of recently that's gone for that intensity has been Valhalla Rising. I mean, I wouldn't want to speculate on how “experienced” you are... BW: [laughs] Yeah, your perception is so fucked on mushrooms. Movies like The Witch and Midsommar have enjoyed mainstream success, while gems like November and Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse have impressed in their own right despite not receiving as much exposure as their more famous counterparts. It's going, “Look, you can make a movie, it's not as complicated as you might think.” It's hard to make the film good, but the mysteries of it are what we're trying to pull the veil away from. In that period there were a lot of these characters. Salinger. That is what the film is trying to get at; that someone like O'Neill [Smiley] could have come out of that field and run the country. That felt to me like an experience I've had on mushrooms. Those kind of movies that haven't been made for donkeys years, like Eraserhead, where you end up going, “This is wilfully strange”. Kinsella found the name of Moonlight Graham in a copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia given to him as a Christmas gift from his father-in-law. Keep the party going with more entries in our 31 Days of Horror Lists! I don't know why more cinema isn't like that. I think the thing that maybe carries through is the cowboy-ness of it. There are murders plaguing a small community, and as the story unfolds blame is laid at the feet of an outsider even as black magic, exorcisms, and supernatural visitations haunt the surrounding forest. (Rob Hunter), People love to poke fun of Nicolas Cage and Neil LaBute‘s adaptation of David Pinner‘s 1967 novel about a police officer investigating the alleged disappearance of his daughter on a weird-ass island, but I sort of love it. As Adam Scovell  — who wrote an entire book on the subject — notes, the term, which was coined by Blood On Satan’s Claw director Piers Haggard, fluctuates so often that it’s difficult to canonize. At 88, novelist John le Carré continues to turn out books that writers of any younger age would kill to publish. But Salinger was dropped and replaced with the fictional Terence Mann after after lawyers determined Salinger could sue for being portrayed in a "false light."