Pat Higgins: Director
"The Devil's Music" Interview
Thursday, January 01, 2015
Cinescare spoke with Higgins about "The Devil's Music" from his workspace in Leigh-on-Sea in the United Kingdom.
CINESCARE: Congratulations on "The Devil's Music." It's quite a film. A giant stroke on canvas that's known giants ... Joe Berlinger, Myrick & Sanchez, etc.
PAT HIGGINS: I'm delighted that you enjoyed it. It was an extremely interesting film to make, and we're extremely proud of it. I feel that it's important to be aware of the work that's gone before you in the genre, whilst still keeping your own sense of identity!
CINESCARE: You chose a documentary point of view over any other point of view. What prompted the format of "The Devil's Music?"
PAT HIGGINS: Funnily enough, I initially wrote the story as a straightforward narrative novel, back around 2002. I never got the final draft completed to my satisfaction, so it remained in a drawer for years. When we began looking at ways to approach the story with a view to adapting it to film, the documentary format seemed the best way to incorporate many viewpoints within the tale. I can't imagine tackling the story any other way, now.
CINESCARE: The other thing the documentary format seemed to do was open a door for you to play with veracity of version - to explore what your audience would think and believe about Erika, Stef, Robin, and others.
PAT HIGGINS: Absolutely. We were always keen not to give easy answers or only present things from one viewpoint. I like the idea that audiences might walk away with entirely different opinions about what they've just seen, and what happened. The idea offered by Jason (the marketing guru) at the end of the movie regarding his take on what happened and why is one of my favorite moments in the film.
CINESCARE: And that's another big risk you took "The Devil's Music." This is a fairly subtle approach to horror cinema, in which fear generated is fear generated by aggregation. As the audience learns and is patient with the story, the implications of what happened to Erika Spawn's career and Stef after the stabbing build. What were the storytelling challenges of this kind of movie, knowing your historical audience? Is "The Devil's Music" intended as a breakaway film?
PAT HIGGINS: That was very much a concern. There's a tendency to play a bit safe when dealing with low budget horror cinema; to keep the blood and nudity count as high as possible and not ask audiences to think too much. This film doesn't really fit that ethos; it demands the audience's attention without giving them loud noises every few minutes, and we were worried that people might not even consider it to be a horror film. Luckily, everyone seems to have embraced it.
CINESCARE: That largely answers the first half of the follow-up question. Part two still stands: Is "The Devil's Music" intended as a breakaway film?
PAT HIGGINS: Not in any permanent way. I love subtle ghost stories just as much as over-the-top Grand Guignol, and think there's certainly room for both types of filmmaking in my future!
CINESCARE: In the present, does "The Devil's Music" allow you to talk to certain kinds of industry entities that you'd normally skip in favor of die-hard genre professionals?
PAT HIGGINS: Indeed. The Devil's Music has a crossover appeal to non-genre audiences that allows us to spread our net a little wider in terms of who might be interested in it. We've certainly been able to look at submitting it to festivals who wouldn't have been interested in, say, something like TrashHouse.
CINESCARE: At the same time, there's a concrete element of homage in "The Devil's Music." Talk to me about what kind of genre predecessors you were pointing at with some of the scenes and ideas in this film.
PAT HIGGINS: My producer Pippa and I watched a great many documentaries (and faux documentaries) throughout pre-production. We were interested in what didn't work as much as what did; we were eager not to make the same mistakes. I've always been a big fan of "Curse of the Blair Witch", "GhostWatch," and so on; the grand tradition of the chilling fake doc. We tried not to make mistakes that we'd seen others make. We wanted our mistakes to be brand new! We were torn as to how far to push the "found footage" element, and was also eager not to have the audience constantly questioning why the hell anyone would still be filming within that footage! There are, naturally, hours and hours of stuff that we didn't use.
CINESCARE: What you did use, as a thematic underpinning of "The Devil's Music," were scenes about scapegoats. Documentaries being one refuge of the accused and convicted, "The Devil's Music" plays into that component of the craft. Talk to me about the ideas of scapegoating the odd and the unusual - as part of your story about Erika Spawn, Melvin True and Robin Harris.
PAT HIGGINS: During one of the media moral-panics that we regularly have in the UK when something awful happens, I remember that the editor of a locally-produced horror magazine was hounded out of his position at a local playgroup (which one of his children attended) by the press. They continually implied that somebody interested in the genre had no place working with kids (even, presumably, his own) and he lost the job. I always remember that story. I was troubled enough by it at the time that I armed myself with a video camera and wandered around the town centre interviewing people as to what they thought about violent videos. In the media-produced climate at the time (which had tried, as usual, to link a particularly unremarkable horror film to a particularly horrible crime) I couldn't find a single person willing to speak in defense of any level of screen violence. It was a horribly rude awakening about the power of the media, spin and scapegoating. I think the seeds for "The Devil's Music" were well and truly planted back then. That was around '93 or '94.
PAT HIGGINS: The idea of whether an artist is, or can be, or should be, accountable for the actions of his or her audience is one that's always fascinated me. Using contrasting musicians, (Erika and Robin), to explore the subject struck me as the most immediate and accessible way to do it. I think the Bill Hicks routine about blank-faced pop stars ("Since when did mediocrity and banality become a good influence on our children?") was never far from my mind when writing material for Robin. Art can't be held accountable. The whole notion collapses if you try.
CINESCARE: On the other hand, Robin's influence on Stef is material and key to the story. It seems we're meant to hold him responsible for her ultimate state of mind.
PAT HIGGINS: You could certainly choose to look at it that way. Depends whose interviews you trust!
CINESCARE: Trust is another fascinating theme of "The Devil's Music." We might choose to trust one speaker or another, but the default to which most audiences are set is to trust video footage. Joe Berlinger was very upset about this when "The Blair Witch Project" played with the simulacrum of found video footage. One of the characters in "The Devil's Music" brings this up, refuting the authenticity of Erika's last broadcast. Are you working with trust and our established visual cues (in film and television) towards or away from trust with "The Devil's Music?"
PAT HIGGINS: Absolutely. And the authenticity of the clip prior to that ("The End of the Tape") is questionable too.
CINESCARE: In the 1970s, we'd be talking about whom The Other is in the point of view ... about whether we can trust the agent that shows us purported narrative truth.
PAT HIGGINS: It's interesting the way that the signifiers change with time, too. The signifiers of authenticity of a movie from the digital age like, say, "Cloverfield", are very different to those of a similarly themed movie from ten years or so ago, like "Blair Witch." The audiences are so more medium-literate. I've got an unfinished novel sitting on my hard drive which begins with the line, "I am your unreliable narrator." I think that concern has filtered into this movie, even if the novel never finds shape.
CINESCARE: The story you chose presented another challenge: To write songs and film performances. Did you have background in this?
PAT HIGGINS: I love writing songs, and am only held back from taking this further by my inability to play guitar to any normal degree of competence and my god-awful singing voice. By teaming up with a musical genius like Phil Sheldon, who is just insanely talented, I was able to record horrible acoustic guidelines that nobody should ever have to listen to and sit back while he turned them into great sounding music that Victoria could sing to. At least one of those songs was a rewrite of a song that I wrote as a teenager. I never throw anything awat. I will always find use for it. I'm the ultimate recycler.
CINESCARE: And you were working on some ideas about rock and its place in popular culture/influence on crowds.
PAT HIGGINS: Absolutely. The crowd mentality is a big and scary thing!
CINESCARE: You're taking "The Devil's Music" to Cannes?
PAT HIGGINS: We're not having a screening, but we'll be hopefully sorting out the distribution side of things. We want to make sure that as many people get to see the movie as possible!
CINESCARE: How did distribution work out with "Hellbride" and your preceding films?
PAT HIGGINS: "Hellbride" has taken a little longer than we'd have liked due to a couple of things outside of our control, but that should hopefully be resolved shortly as well. "KillerKiller" is out all over the place, and "TrashHouse" was recently released again on a new label in the UK. So the word is getting out. We've got four more projects all ready to go, so the future's looking good.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
