UK horror director Jonathan Zaurin is to tackle his first feature film later this summer and it already looks like it’s one to keep an eye on.
Wyvern Hill is described as ‘the story of one woman’s struggle with reality’ as a series of gruesome killings is shaking the small county of Herefordshire, UK. It tells the tale of Beth, a woman in her sixties who starts to show signs of early Alzheimer’s. Her daughter and son in law move into an old house large enough to accommodate the three of them so that they can look after Beth during this difficult time, that house… Wyvern Hill. It isn’t long before Beth begins worsen but is it her Alzheimer or is there SOMETHING in the house.
I recently had a little chat with Jonathan to find out more about Wyvern Hill, what we can expect, how he feels tackling his first feature and when we can expect to see this new UK horror.
What can people expect from Wyvern Hill?
I think people coming into Wyvern Hill can expect a twisted, violent tale with plenty of twists and turns along the way… but also hopefully a very moving drama about a set of characters that are very unusual for this type of horror films.
We tried to create an atmospheric, brutal horror that will deliver on tension, suspense and visceral horror but also to create a true drama in which you will get to love and care for the characters who are thrown into a horrible situation.
It’s two films in one in a sense, but that’s something that always interested me, the fluidity of genre, I don’t see it as stiff, I see it as a multitude of potential combinations of narrative conventions, plenty of which we haven’t seen yet!
How are you feeling about your coming feature as a Director? How have you been preparing?
To be honest, nervous is the first word that comes to mind haha!
Look here’s the thing about Wyvern Hill, it’s a microbudget, we’re really not spending that much money (total budget around 5k) and we were prepared for it to be exactly that, a (hopefully) high production value microbudget film… but then it started growing (while the budget stayed the same) and now we have a tonne of amazing people involved! For example our main actress Pat Garett who has spent the first half of her career working with Jim Henson and Frank Oz on things like The Muppets Christmas Carol and The Little Shop of Horrors amongst other things.
And so since we started the production the cast has grown to welcome some incredible, established and rising, actors! And the crew has grown to welcome some amazing talent which I can’t quite reveal yet ha! But also the usual suspects and collaborators, first of all my wife Sarah who always produces, Jérome Bardon who is a consistant figure at LBS films, having produced and written a number of films for us but also Mike Coombes who has been a longtime friend and collaborator and who was Georgie in Portrait(s) , Joe Nurse who played Baby Gerald in Santa Baby, Pete Bird with whom I worked on several shorts and Michael Sanchez, the genius from Belgium who is slowly becoming our official composer as he did the music for both The Pit an Santa Baby! the special effects are being
As far as preparing, again it’s a microbudget film so the idea is to try and get as much as my knowledge and time allows me to get done, myself. So on this I am officiating as director, DoP and editor and currently we are in a phase where I swear a lot and try to do my shot by shot breakdown between the thousands of emails from cast and crew all day everyday!
When are you due to start shooting?
We are due to start shooting with a very limited Cast and crew end of August. These are the first wave of scenes which we are shooting before our main actress arrives to Hereford. Then things start seriously kicking off on 11th September.
We’re having to do that also because we obviously want to protect our cast and crew from Covid which represents as you can imagine, quite a challenge on production.
What are your plans for the film upon completion? When is your proposed release date?
The plans are to tour the festivals and find a distributor! We are already having those conversations with some fairly interesting people…
We are basically fairly confident with that though, part of our History at LBS Films is that we, over the last 4 years, have created a series of Award Winning shorts for ridiculously low amounts of money (from £80 to a maximum of £300), all of which ended up being actually VERY profitable both financially and artistically, despite the (almost) total lack of distribution opportunities for shorts! In that respect we were lucky to meet Tood Rodgers at Meridian Releasing who gave our films a huge platform, and now Todd is a producer on Wyvern Hill!
So in a sense the feature is a logical continuation of what we’ve been doing but hopefully with the proper potential channels for distribution available to us!
How did you come across the script?
A few years back I did a BA (Hons) at Hereford College of Arts. My last year was spent making a film called Dirt and we had a course leader replacement halfway through. Long story short the new course leader was Keith Temple, a fairly well known and very talented TV writer who worked on basically every major UK show.
We clicked immediately and we expressed the idea of working together at some point. I hired Keith to play a part in my then new short film The Pit and from there a conversation started.
Keith had an idea for a horror film but he was a bit nervous about writing it as he had never written pure horror (although his Dr Who episode comes close). So I told him that if he wrote it… I’d get it made.
Initially it was called Suburban Shadows, and a lot of work and a year and half later, there it is, ready to shoot: Wyvern Hill.
Has Covid 19 and the UK lockdown and present restrictions hampered your plans? Are you having to make any amendments to accommodate filming?
Yes. Basically it’s been tricky. Initially the plan was to shoot in July. Obviously that became impossible. Our hope was that by September the situation would be settled enough that we could figure out how to work with the safety measures in place.
So that’s what we’re doing, in a sense it plays into our hands, because as microbudget we can’t afford a huge crew anyway, so we’re keeping it contained to a handful of people at any given time, providing hand sanitiser, masks and taking people’s temperatures on a few times a day basis.
In a way, it’s just a few steps to ensure safety and it means we can make this while spreading art instead of germs so it’s not that much of an issue at all.
You always have a responsibility to your cast and crew no matter what, so taking those extra steps really is no bother.
And ultimately, if we can get this made and keep everybody safe then we’re in an ideal position with this, in an industry which is currently not producing very much.
For people wanting to check out your previous work where can they go?
Oh they can go there:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6iwAwYYagpFzYC62_JqCKw?view_as=subscriber
And to see Santa Baby (our latest and most successful film to date) they can go there
https://thterrortime.com/movies/short-films/short-shockers-xmas-comes-early-in-the-ultra-gory-santa-baby/
Alternately they could purchase the Meridian Collective Horror Volumes on Blu ray, on which they can find all of our previous short films!
Do you have anymore projects in the works already?
Always! It’s true what they say that you always have to have another one in the bag. I was told by a producer once that if someone approaches you with a “What’s next?” and you don’t know, you’ve probably blown your chance. So yeah, there’s a wide variety of projects in the bag that are just begging to come out, we’re hoping that Wyvern Hill allows them to!
Gemma is fairly new to writing and the film industry, but it has been a long-held passion since she was a child. After several years of working in business, she left to pursue her long-held dreams of writing and making movies. After writing, and directing her first short in 2018 she quickly gained the bug and hasn’t stopped since. That first short went on to win multiple awards in the USA and was quickly followed by a second short which went on to do even better than the first. Since then Gemma has been focusing on her writing and developing several television shows. She is looking to add to her writing by delving into books as well as news and blog posts, and unleashing her creativity, knowledge and imagination to a whole new world.
