In recent years, a movement towards more thoughtful horror has begun – turning away from traditional elements of the genre in favour of explorations of identity, using horror as the medium. All You Need Is Death, Duane’s folk-horror film and first full-length feature horror film, shines as an example of a film that transcends tropes. “I think risk is starting to pay off,” he said. “With the horror genre, if you’re not risking something, I don’t think you’re doing it right.”
“The horror genre is the opposite of limiting at the moment,” he explained. The upsurge of interest in diverse and atypical horror has given the genre comparatively more clout than other genres. Leaning on the horror label can even improve your chances of success as a filmmaker, Paul remarks: “I Saw The TV Glow is an absolutely stunning film, but it’s not a horror film – A24 successfully marketed it as a horror film, and that’s helped it to find an audience.”
When Duane started out as a student filmmaker, the film world was very different. In fact, it barely existed. “If I’d done what I really wanted to do, I would have become a comics writer and artist. It was the way of getting your ideas out there, because there was no such thing as low budget film at (today’s) scale,” he said. Alan Moore, creator of V for Vendetta, whose comics Duane grew up reading, was “a huge inspiration to me”, he said “in terms of the way he looks at the world.”
His first year at art school lined up with the first year of a new film course in what would become IADT; he transferred and didn’t look back. That doesn’t mean his time studying visual art wasn’t valuable, though. “One of the things I really took from painting is the concept of negative space. Negative space is the area of the painting that isn’t the subject, and it can be as important as the subject. For me, in a film, negative space – I’m very interested in the idea that in a film there are things you don’t tell the audience, things you take out of the script.”
“All You Need Is Death was originally set in the 1970s – I took out all references to the 70s, but there’s still people smoking in doctor’s waiting rooms. That’s the negative space. Particularly in horror, if you have a little mystery that people can’t figure out, it keeps them off balance – in a good way.”
His student film, “Inks”, that he made for his graduation in 1988, was the first student film RTE ever bought for distribution. Since then, of course, the film world in Ireland has blossomed into something very different. “I see a lot of people now having nostalgia for the kind of stories that were being told in the 80s and 70s,” he said, “because they feel we’re not getting them now… It’s so much easier now to make a film, there are so many films being made, that a lot of the really good stuff gets lost.”
“When I graduated, you could tour for two years off one short film. .. You’d go round, travel with it and get awards. Even making a feature (film) now, it’s kind of, so what? Because there’s so much out there. We’re in a very competitive atmosphere now.”
Competition’s not always a bad thing – especially as a film fan. “The films I’m seeing in 2024 are so good, and so exciting.” Duane said, pointing to Dermot Malone’s ‘King Frankie’ as a recent high point. “It made me very excited about Irish cinema.”
“In a difficult time, the best thing you can do is be an artist”
Duane’s best advice for film students? “If you make a work of art, it’s a vote of confidence in the future. In a difficult time, the best thing you can do is be an artist.”
“I always tell people that are writing their first feature script, the most important thing is to finish it, because if you finish it, even if it’s bad, you can show it to people, you can rewrite it, you can make it better. Finish the damn thing and then you can improve it.”
But learning how to navigate the film industry itself can be challenging for a newcomer. “Connections are everything,” Duane acknowledged, “which is why you see so many nepo babies around.” Filmmaking, because of the larger sums of money and long timeframes involved in finishing a project compared to other art forms, has less of a capacity to be off the cuff, he explained. “It’s hard to get people to put faith in you.” This problem, it seems, is global. “I talked to film makers from Australia, Canada – anywhere with a subsidised film industry has got the same problems, which are risk aversion and antipathy to originality.” If you want to take creative risks, you can protect yourself with a big name attached to the project, but that’s hard when you’re starting out. One benefit of being a filmmaker in Ireland is the proximity to national talent. “Ireland’s a very small country, we have a lot of really fantastic acting, musical talent of various kinds. You’re usually about one phone call away,” he said. “Everybody has got more connections than they think they have.”
All You Need is Death got made because of one of those phone calls; Duane happened to know the brother of the man who would become his main collaborator on the film’s music, Ian Lynch – of the Dublin band Lankum. The music in Death is the throughline of the entire film: a young couple go about secretly recording and selling off folk songs that the older generations share with them, until one song – never destined for the ears of men – unleashes an ancient curse.
“Tense intergenerational relationships that have come to define Ireland”
It’s hard not to imagine this premise as responding to tense intergenerational relationships that have come to define Ireland in recent years; Duane grew up seeing the horror genre as “an inherently political form”. “There’s an awful lot of twenty-first century life that’s about reworking materials from the 20th century. There’s a line in the film – where a character says “the future has been picked clean”… the characters in the film pay for the commodification of something that’s … a little bit sacred, a little bit secret.”
It was music that inspired much of Death. “A lot of Irish folk songs and ballads are inherently a bit spooky,” he said, adding, “I don’t think we have the greatest visual culture for the weird. I took a lot of visual iconography from Japanese cinema. I’ve seen too many Irish films that have the cliché, shot over the barren landscape of Connemara, with the Uillean pipes playing, and I don’t want to go that way.”
For All You Need Is Death, Duane created his own folklore – the idea of a cursed song isn’t actually from any one folk tale. “For a long time, Irish people have been going, ‘we should make a horror film about the banshee, or queen Maeve’. I feel a bit cringey when people start pulling out these things… A lot of the Irish spooky stories have been done to death, and are a bit Americanised. It feels good to me to come up with an idea nobody’s used before, rather than lean on tropes you’re taking from mythology, and folk tales. But that’s just me. I’ll be proved wrong by somebody making an amazing Banshee movie next year.”
All You Need Is Death is streaming on Shudder; you can support Duane as an independent filmmaker at https://www.patreon.com/c/weirdandconfusing.
