Friday, February 18, 2011

'Black Death' director Christopher Smith talks about making his medieval horror movie (and not making 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies')

You know those medieval-set films in which every golden-hued vista seems to have been shot by the British Tourist Board and the characters all appear to use copious amounts of ye olde hair conditioner? Well, Black Death is a far more gruesome and unhygienic-looking cup of tea. The movie stars a bedraggled-looking Sean Bean as a bishop’s envoy tasked with the mission of finding out why a remote hamlet has escaped the ravages of the titular plague which, in real-life, wiped out around half of Europe’s population in the 14th century. The twisty result often resembles a medieval reworking of Apocalypse Now as Bean and his band of decidedly un-merry men make their way through a countryside filled with all manner of unpleasantness from fields packed with corpses to an attempted witch-burning that ends in tears (or horrible gurgling sounds, anyway).

Click here to read this article from Entertainment Weekly