Year – 1988 Decade – 1980s Cinematographer – Dick Bush Director – Ken Russell Genre – Horror Keywords – 1980s horror; British films; British horror; Vampires Studio – Vestron Shooting […]
Year – 1988
Decade – 1980s
Cinematographer – Dick Bush
Director – Ken Russell
Genre – Horror
Keywords – 1980s horror; British films; British horror; Vampires
Studio – Vestron
Shooting Location – England
Aspect Ratio – 1.85
Format – 35mm film with spherical lenses
Also check out the archive’s collection of frames sorted by category.
The Movie
“Audiences don’t realize my films are comedies until the last line has been delivered and, even then, most people don’t appear to get the joke.” – director Ken Russell in the December 1988 issue of Fangoria
There are times when I definitely have not gotten the joke with Ken Russell, but there should be little doubt about the tongue-in-cheek intentions of The Lair of the White Worm. Certainly not once predatory vampire Amanda Donohoe – shortly after devouring a hitchhiking boy scout – answers Hugh Grant’s query, “Do you have children?” with “Only when there are no men around.”
Based on Dracula author Bram Stoker’s final novel, The Lair of the White Worm finds a rural English village doing battle with serpent-worshipping blood sucker Donohoe (in a role turned down by Tilda Swinton) after the giant skull of one of her reptilian deities is unearthed by a Scottish archaeologist. Not as visually striking as many of Russell’s earlier film – for comparison, here’s Gothic from two years prior – but for me it’s the most entertaining of his efforts from this period. This would be an insane statement for almost any other director considering White Worm has Roman invaders defiling nuns and Donohoe strapping on a ceremonial phallic tusk, but for Russell this one is practically quaint.
Groups of Frames
Zooms
A sampling of the frequently used zooms in The Lair of the White Worm, which are often employed to reframe rather than cutting.
Scene Breakdowns
Donohoe picks up a hitchhiking boy scout. Director Ken Russell on the scene…
“This is an English boy scout at his most glamorous. Now, he’s a lower class boy. You can tell by his accent. So, he’s disposable. He’s not an aristocrat. (The aristocrats) survive in this film, but anyone with a bad accent doesn’t stand much of a chance.”
Hugh Grant uses his family’s ancestral sword to smite a vampire.
Special Make-Up and Creature Effects Technician Paul Jones on how the mid-air bisection effect was created…
“We had the dummy rigged on a wire coming out of its shoulders, but its bottom half was separate…In hindsight we could’ve (joined the top and bottom halves together) with release catches. We could’ve done magnets. But instead we decided to crazy glue it, so it was just hanging on. So, we had just gotten it rigged. We were gluing it all together and we were lifting it up and we said, ‘Okay, we’re going to let go. Are you ready to do the scene, because we don’t want to let it hang for too long because we don’t want it to separate?’ And they said, ‘No, we’re going to call lunch. So you guys have to stand there for 20 minutes to half an hour (to hold it in place).’ And we were like, ‘What? We’re not standing here for half an hour.”’ (Then) we ended up standing there for half an hour holding this body up while people were eating around us because if we’d let go we would’ve had to spend another hour setting it all back up again.”
Hugh Grant on the scene, from an interview with The AV Club…
“Ken Russell is terrific in the mornings. Then he has quite a… “French” lunch, and in the afternoon he’s a fascinating director. I had to do a bit in Lair of the White Worm where I had to pick up a sword and cut someone in half, as one does in a Ken Russell film. And I said, ‘You know, it doesn’t feel quite comfortable doing it this way.’ And his directorial response was, [slurs speech] ‘Well, fuck how it fuckin’ feels. Do it how I showed you, you fuckin’ cunt!’ Which is not classic Ingmar Bergman direction.
Question: Do you miss that kind of stuff on the set? Because I imagine you don’t encounter it much anymore.
No, not that much. But I do miss it. The whole thing is a lot less fun now than in the days when I made semi-rubbish all the time.”
Quotes and Info
(Unless otherwise noted, quotes are from the commentaries and special features on the Blu-ray release of the film.)
Director Ken Russell on making The Lair of the White Worm, from the December 1988 issue of Fangoria…
“Nothing went smoothly at all. It was a very difficult picture to do – but then, all films are difficult one way or another. Films aren’t fun to make; I’d like to squash that idea once and for all. Thinking up the ideas is a tremendous experience, that’s the easy part. Getting them from paper onto the screen is bloody hard work. Having to shoot something of this nature on a low budget is an absolute nightmare. If I’d had a Spielbergian budget, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’d still be shooting. Bigger budgets don’t necessarily make for better films. Lair, however, would be a much more unusual story if there’d been more money.”
Russell on the film’s locations…
“There’s some quite moody locations in this film. I love location hunting. You discover parts of England you didn’t know existed. I didn’t know Thor’s Cave existed, but I was thrilled to find it. It seemed too good to be true and then when I chose the farm house for the girls, the geography of the house suggested scenes. When the snake lady is creeping about upstairs and all these doors open, it was because the doors were there and I thought, ‘Hey, these can be used.’ I find that various locations suggest scenes, like in the scene near the end when the girl is being chased by the vampire policeman and she goes in this semi-underground passageway. Well, I didn’t have a scene for that but having seen the possibilities, I wrote the scene in. That happens a lot. Also the sundial, which pierces the eye of the mad policeman. I saw the sun dial there and thought, ‘Hey, there’s going to be a confrontation here. Wouldn’t it be great if that sundial spike goes through his head and pokes his eye out?’”
Russell on working with editors and his predilection for long takes…
“So far as editing is concerned, there’s very little on the cutting room floor on this film. I edit my films in my head before I actually shoot them. There’s not much for the editor to do. If I don’t need close-ups, I don’t shoot close-ups. I just don’t waste time. Many of my scenes are shot in one take or in a wide shot and a couple of close-ups. There is no point in just shooting traditional long shot, mid shot, two close-ups, reverse angle, over the shoulder just for the sake of it. When I shot Altered States I remember Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the script, saying to me when he saw how I was working, ‘You’re shooting scenes in one shot. That means when you’ve gone I can’t recut them.’ I didn’t tell him that was the idea…It seems to be there’s one way to do a scene and to cover yourself by shooting this way, that way, upside down and around the corner, it’s just an admission of the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Editor Pete Davies on working with Russell…
“I remember the first week of working on (the movie), he was shooting the hallucinatory scenes and I went over to the set. We were at Elstree and I went over to the stages and just as I walked in, there was Ken on a ladder with a megaphone and he just shouted out, ‘Alright, Romans, bonking positions.’ That’s typical Ken.”
Special Make-Up and Creature Effects Designer Geoff Portass on working with Russell…
“Ken Russell as a person was exactly the same as you would expect him to be. It’s that simple. He was flamboyant. He always wore that big fur coat whatever the temperature and the couple of days I walked onto the set he would walk up to you, “Geoff, glass of champagne?” Ten O’clock in the morning….He was volatile. He was creative. He was fascinating. He was funny. He was weird. Just everything you thought he would be.”
Special Make-Up and Creature Effects Designer Geoff Portass on the titular creature…
“There were no worm malfunctions simply because there were no mechanics to go wrong. It was a series of big, soft puppets. Admittedly, it was absolutely hell inside the large worm head. You were essentially talking (about) a giant piece of rubber with foam inside it that was incredibly insulating on a hot film set at the bottom of a hole.”
Special Make-Up and Creature Effects Modeler Neil Gorton on working with the worm during a sequence that found the creature at the bottom of a 40-foot tunnell built at Elstree Studios…
“We got the worm in there and set in position and we were looking down at it and we were sort of fairly ready to film and they kind of went, ‘Can it be slimed up?’ And you’re going, ‘No, we can’t get at it. It’s down a great big hole now, 40 foot in the rafters.’ We tried taking cups of slime and throwing it down to get slime on it. That wasn’t working. In the end the stunt supervisor and the wire rigging guy (saw) a little sort of pulley round one of the beams and they were like, ‘Come on, we’ll get you down there.’ So I ended up being stuck on a little harness and a rope and lowered into this thing with a bucket and a brush to slime up this worm while dangling 40 foot out of a rafter.”
Russell on a scene where a policeman is bitten on the leg on Donohoe’s property, which was added during production…
“At first it wasn’t in the script because I didn’t think it was necessary, but when the film was pretty well cut together – though we were still shooting – I decided we needed a little more exposition about what had happened and who was who and what was what. Unfortunately, there was very little money left in the budget – enough for just four flats all screwed together and four bits of tacky furniture covered in white sheets, which cost very little. But I think it gives a rather macabre effect, especially as our starlet is in white also.”
Russell on the film’s low-fi solution for driving backgrounds while shooting car work on stage…
“We actually filmed a roadside scene on a cheap video camera and then ran it in a cheap VCR on a cheap television screen and stuck it in the back window and had a man with a watering can spraying water over the windows in the front. Ingenious. Spielberg eat your heart out.”
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