CENSOR | PRODUCTION
DOP Annika Summerson discusses the descent into video nastiness for her giallo-inspired horror
WORDS CHELSEA FEARNLEY / P I CTURES PREM I ER COMMS
T hatcher’s Britain of the eighties serves as an appropriate backdrop for the psychological horror that is Censor . We are taken to a gloomy screening room, where Enid Baines (Niamh Algar) dutifully jots down the gory, egregious moments from a stream of grainy horror movies. Here, she contends with a ruthless, male-dominated work environment, in which her voice barely holds any weight. Then, two things happen that send her buttoned-up exterior into disarray. Her fiction and reality become intertwined, as one of the films she censors inspires a lunatic to murder his family. More disturbingly, she sees another film – shot by fictional director Frederick North – featuring an actress bearing an unmistakable resemblance to her missing sister. Censor then laces together the bleak and visually constrained era with the evocative world of the video nasty, as Baines falls down a rabbit hole of detective work to find out what happened to her lost sibling. ITALIAN INSPIRATION While the original video nasties list included grimy horrors such as I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left , the verboten collection also featured colourful, surrealist works from directors such as Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci. In Censor , the video world is a mix of the two artistic styles. “Prano Bailey-Bond [director] and I wanted these scenes to be somewhere in the middle of a cheap, trashy horror and a classy one, which remained true to the colour palettes of the Italian masters,” explains the film’s DOP Annika Summerson.
We wanted it to feel somewhere in the middle of a cheap, trashy horror and a classy one, with the colour palettes of Italian masters scenes, we pushed the stock to make it a bit grainier – but that’s expensive, so we couldn’t do it for the whole film unfortunately,” she explains. LIGHTING THE MIX Reminiscent of the giallo masters, the video world is full of saturated colours, achieved using a mixture of Arri Skypanels, HMIs and fresnels. Before becoming a cinematographer, Summerson worked as a spark, so gelling these old- school lights was less of a chore – more a labour of love. “In my head, I have a good back catalogue of gels, but I like to run tests for each production so I can see colour combinations. Understanding what they do when captured on different cameras, lenses and with a variety of costumes is a great help. The variables change, so even though I have a notion of what to start with, I’ll still try a lot of
Despite the switch to a Sony Venice for some VFX work in a forest scene at the conclusion, Summerson gazes on this infamous part of movie history by shooting with 35mm and Super 8 – adding that some of the Super 8 scenes were actually from a short called Nasty , that she and the director had shot in 2015. “We also captured a news report at an eighties estate on a Panasonic M40 – an old VHS camera. It was difficult to get hold of, but finding a VHS player to check the tape afterwards was even harder!” Many of the films we see Baines conscientiously censoring are actual video nasties, like Abel Ferrara’s 1979 slasher The Driller Killer . But there are a few faux-nasties that Summerson and Bailey- Bond made specifically for Censor . “These weren’t shot in full; we were rigorous and only did what was necessary,” she explains. “The exception being the Frederick North film Asunder , because when Enid is watching it, she keeps rewinding the tape. So, we had to record a lot of scenes that were going to be rewound on-screen – that was stressful, as we were really short on film stock.” Today’s stock, mostly Kodak Vision3, is much cleaner than what video nasties were shot on. Summerson did consider 16mm for more grain, like she did for Nasty , but found texture through her choice of lens. “I used Canon K35s – they’re soft and have low contrast, which gave the film more of a vintage expression. I also paired them with Black Satin filters, then switched to heavier fog filters when I needed more effects. For certain
LEFT Censor’s video world is full of saturated colours, achieved by gelling HMIs and fresnels
AUGUST 202 1 | DEF I N I T ION 13
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