If You Go Down to the Woods Today...
Sarah Dobbs

The London Underground is a dangerous place, as posters all over the Tube will tell you. An automated voice advises you mind the gap, while garish notices cite hundreds of accidents and a handful of deaths every year. What they don't tell you, though, is that traveling on the Tube could lead to your horrific death in a log cabin in Eastern Europe.

Well, sort of.

James Moran, writer of British horror comedy Severance, was so sick of getting jostled by grim-faced commuters that he took matters into his own hands. "True story," he explains, "I was trying to think of an idea and I had a really bad commute home on the Tube. I was getting pushed around by yuppies, and I got home in a rage and thought, right, I'm going to put some yuppies in a cabin in the woods and I'm going to kill them in horrible ways."

Which is one way to explain the plot of Severance. If you're already yawning at the prospect of yet another tourists-get-butchered-in-a-foreign-country movie, well, you'd be justified. But Severance is different. "You know, normally, cabin in the woods, it's young American teenagers," Moran continues, "but I thought if they were office workers from London, they won't react in the same way, they won't have witty dialogue, they'll just be, you know, arguing half the time about what's going on."

Actually, Severance's cast of assembled office types are arguing even before the killing starts. Team-building exercises are never popular at the best of times and Palisade Defense's trip out to a lodge in deepest darkest Hungary is a step too far; even before the bus breaks down, leaving them all stranded. Team leader Richard (Tim McInnerny) attempts to soldier on with the trust games and gung-ho nonsense anyway, aided by office geek Gordon (Andy Nyman). Slacker Steve (Danny Dyer) prefers to get stoned and fantasize about Maggie (Laura Harris, so who could blame him?), much to the frustration of voices of reason, Jill (Claudie Blakley) and Harris (Toby Stephens).

All of the characters are easily recognizable as people you've probably worked with at some point in your life, without just being easy clichés, which is probably why so much of the humor works. Much has been made of supposed similarities to Shaun of the Dead, but beyond the fact that they're both British horror movies injected with a healthy dose of humor, the comparison really doesn't hold up. Severance is far nastier, far gorier, and occasionally also far funnier. Moran confesses, "originally, the first half was all jokes, and the second half was all horror. With some jokes!" As he drafted and redrafted the script, though, it became more pared down and focused. "It was too funny at the start, so it was actually more about toning it down a little bit."

Not that you'd be able to tell from the finished product. Some of the jokes are funnier for the I-can't-believe-they-showed-that aspect than the joke itself; there's one scene involving a plane and a misfired rocket launcher that, while hilarious, seems a little contentious. That joke came from director Chris Smith (of Creep fame), who called Moran in hysterics one night and explained the joke to him. "There are lots of things that one of us thought of one night," says Moran, "some of it's in there, and some of it isn't. Chris and I started working on it together, sending it back and forth, arguing over lines or deleting things without saying anything because we didn't like what the other person had written!"

Prior to working on Severance, Moran and Smith had met, briefly, at London's annual FrightFest horror movie festival. Moran is a keen horror fan, and it's no coincidence that his first screenplay to get turned into a feature-length film is a horror movie. "I thought, for my first film, I want to do something quickly, and I thought, well, I know horror inside out, so it'll be easy. Famous last bloody words!" Making that transition from being a fan – and a regular attendee at FrightFest – to being a filmmaker has been an interesting process, it seems. "It was the weirdest thing I've ever done in my life! When I was writing this thing, before it had sold, before anyone had heard of it, one of the things that kept me going was thinking, 'it would be so cool if this got made, and it was good, and it showed at FrightFest, and it got a few claps,' you know? And I thought, oh, it's never going to happen." In fact, Severance opened 2006's festival with a special charity screening, and far from only getting 'a few claps', the audience were actually cheering throughout the final scenes.

Not that Moran took any of this success for granted. "I was on set for about a week," he recounts, "it was my first big film set, and it was incredible. I did get quite emotional, I had to go and have a little cry to myself because I was so excited!" Seeing his script enacted seems to have been pretty awe-inspiring for Moran, "I just couldn't quite believe it was really happening. They were recording the bit when Laura gets yanked up by a rope trap. She's hanging upside down, and she has to scream because the killer's coming. She just started screaming for her life and I just kind of freaked out; partly because she sounded like they were actually killing her," he laughs, "and partly because she was really going for it, she was acting her socks off, for this silly movie that I wrote. I just couldn't believe that so much expense and effort was gone to! I just kept apologizing; I needed to stop her because she was getting away, but I couldn't have her fall over because it's not the Fifties any more!"

(In case Moran's horror film fan credentials were under any doubt, he's intensely aware of the clichés that have been in use since the beginning of time, and also of the newer ones that have crept into the genre more recently; it's refreshing to find a writer who's so conscious of the pitfalls, and so anxious not to insult the intelligence of his audience.)

He continues, "so I thought, okay, the killer's probably got a rope trap, and I just wrote one line: she gets caught up in a rope trap and hangs upside down. It was one line, and they were building this big kind of construction in the trees; it's got a pulley, and there's like, two big hairy stuntmen on a scaffold who are going to jump off, and pull the stunt double off the ground, and there's like a crash mat… And I just thought, sorry, I would've written something else if I'd known how difficult it was going to be!"

The genesis of Severance, from pen – or, computer, which in Moran's case is an Apple Mac; he detests all things Microsoft – to big screen might be fairly typical. But for anyone who's never made a movie or been involved in the process, that journey can be pretty mysterious. Moran has been keeping a blog of his adventures since the very beginning; to his knowledge, it's the first British screenwriting blog of its kind. "I started when I was halfway through the writing of Severance. It was 2003 and I thought I had a good shot at making a go of something. So I thought I should keep a journal of it; for myself, and also because I found nothing online about people from the UK who'd had something made who were talking through the process. So I thought, if anyone's interested, they could read about my struggles to become a writer. And then it got sold, and I thought, that's even better, now I can document the whole process!"

The blog has now been maintained for going on three years, right from the beginning of the writing process to the UK DVD release. "I only had like five readers at the beginning, but lately, it's weird. I've got more responsible now, I used to talk about any old shit at the start! But now, people are emailing and saying like it's inspiring to read about someone who's made it! And I used to think that I'd play it down a little bit and take the piss out of myself, but hearing people say that, I think, yeah, that is cool, that would inspire me."

You can read James Moran's blog at http://jamesmoran.blogspot.com;
Severance hits cinemas in April, and is out on region 2 DVD now.