Dream that leads to the silver orbs in Phantasm

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

Don Coscarelli had a dream as a teenager and what he could remember of it, there was also a quite futuristic chrome sphere dispenser out of wihich the orbs would emerge and begin their chase.  He was fleeing down endlessly long marble corridors, pursued by one of these chrome spheres intent on penetrating his skull with a wicked needle,  and as far as he could remember, the spheres never caught up with him. And so the dream stuck with him and later when he came to write Phantasm, it seemed like a perfect device which which to arm the tall man.

Sources

1. The idea of the sphere, or the orb as it's often called , came to Coscarelli in a dream. He had a nightmare with the silver ball chasing him through corridor after corrdor endlessly. "Unlike most dreams, this one stuck with me. And while writing Phantasm, it seemed like a perfect device with which to arm the Tall man." (Reel Terror, p284)
2. THE SILVER SPHERE
   In Don Coscarelli’s surreal 1979 horror flick, something odd is going on in the local mausoleum. Little Mike investigates, but gets caught. Then a silver sphere glides into view. It extrudes knives, flies right into the guy who’s apprehended Mike, and drills into his forehead, sending an arc of blood spurting into the air. The idea came to the director in a dream: “I was in my teens, and what I can remember had mainly to do with my fleeing down endlessly long marble corridors, pursued by a chrome sphere intent on penetrating my skull with a wicked needle. There was a quite futuristic ‘sphere dispenser’ out of which the orbs would emerge and begin chase. As far as I can remember, the spheres never caught up with me…” (www.sfx.co.uk/2009/10/20/50_scariest_horror_moments_ever_40_31/) 
   
   
   

dream of the devil in Post Tenebras Lux

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

1. The Guardian: And the CGI devil?
   Carlos Reygadas: Think for a second. The film is about life, everything you can go through, different representations of evil that we've met, very often incarnated in the devil. Maybe it's also a dream the child has, I don't know. The same thing happens to us in life: when you grow up and think back to your childhood, you can never really know the things you remember are things you created or real. That's the way perception works in the head, isn't it?(www.guardian.co.uk/)
2. Cineaste: About that demon. When that came on the screen, you could hear a wave of astonishment come over the Cannes audience with whom I saw it. This is a new kind of image you've made, an aspect of the Cinema of the Impossible. Where did that come from? Some might view it as fantastical, while your films have been generally grounded in reality, even with the occasion explorations of the metaphysical.
   Carlos Reygadas:Actually I wouldn't say that this is fantasical. Fantasy movies are one of the few genres I don't like. When I was designing this devil, and talking with technicians, they kept going back to notions from Lord of the Rings (2001) and such. I explained to them that this image came out of a dream I had, set in my parents' house, where I lived until I was five. The toolbox the demon is carrying is actually my father's, the one he was carrying before I was born and he still has. (Cineaste Summer 2013, p11)
3. Slant: And you made a red, animated devil who enters the family house twice with a toolbox in his hand. We will never know what's hidden inside. I saw that kind of box in Belle de Jour as well and I still think about it.
   Carlos Reygadas: The thing is I also have the right to ask some questions, so I would like to ask you why the hell you would like to know what's inside? [laughs] Evil is part of our lives. The film is about an ordinary life, the imagined future, fantasy, memory. All elements of pure naturalism! The red devil could be part of dreams, so it's as real as they are and as important as any other part of everyday life.  (www.slantmagazine.com)
4. Carlos Reygadas: They’re always talking about the bloody devil! I wanted to film a dream. I don’t see devils in ordinary life, so I had to make one in a computer. For me, it’s ordinary reality. Reality is not only the conscious present. But also dreams, memories, the imagined future, actual present, immediate past and immediate future. These things are always there in our mind, flipping back and forth really quickly and without any kind of code. This is just a dream. But dreams are just reality. But whatever. (http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk)
   Slant: And you made a red, animated devil who enters the family house twice with a toolbox in his hand. We will never know what's hidden inside. I saw that kind of box in Belle de Jour as well and I still think about it.
   CR: The thing is I also have the right to ask some questions, so I would like to ask you why the hell you would like to know what's inside? [laughs] Evil is part of our lives. The film is about an ordinary life, the imagined future, fantasy, memory. All elements of pure naturalism! The red devil could be part of dreams, so it's as real as they are and as important as any other part of everyday life. I put into the film the photo of a Spanish golfer as well. It represents an end of a certain epoch. It's amazingly detailed, yet you don't see any labels on the clothes and props. Personally speaking, it shows my nostalgia for the better times when you weren't forced to name things. The vision of that sort of pureness makes me calm. I don't like and don't need any sort of brands.
   - See more at: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/feature/interview-carlos-reygadas/316#sthash.trfw9Syl.dpuf
   Slant: And you made a red, animated devil who enters the family house twice with a toolbox in his hand. We will never know what's hidden inside. I saw that kind of box in Belle de Jour as well and I still think about it.
   CR: The thing is I also have the right to ask some questions, so I would like to ask you why the hell you would like to know what's inside? [laughs] Evil is part of our lives. The film is about an ordinary life, the imagined future, fantasy, memory. All elements of pure naturalism! The red devil could be part of dreams, so it's as real as they are and as important as any other part of everyday life. I put into the film the photo of a Spanish golfer as well. It represents an end of a certain epoch. It's amazingly detailed, yet you don't see any labels on the clothes and props. Personally speaking, it shows my nostalgia for the better times when you weren't forced to name things. The vision of that sort of pureness makes me calm. I don't like and don't need any sort of brands.
   - See more at: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/feature/interview-carlos-reygadas/316#sthash.trfw9Syl.dpuf

Hummingbird

1. Indeed we may well be dealing with a multitude of utterances of "Hmm" wondering what to make of the experience. Actually this was a good and fair Jason Statham movie giving in some scenes where he wasn't breaking people's bones, a fairly sensitive performance and his relationship with the main female character was quite a different too for mainstream cinema so despite the endless violence there was something quirkily sensitive going on. Many recogniseable shots of places to be found in Covent Garden and Soho were to be seen but don't expect to find a woman yelling out "cut price t-shirts" in the place where she was seen in the movie
2. I heard that he played quite an emotional role in the film "London" starring Jessica Beal from several years ago, I still haven't seen it, I might be concerned about seeing it myself if he doesn't get a chance to beat the living daylights out of someone in it but I suppose anything too extreme like allowing Statham to act could send his typical audience into a state of confusion and mental paralysis. 
3. The hummingbird in the title appear to be hallucinations of hummingbirds from a traumatic wartime event in a country where hummingbirds don't naturally exist but in cinema it just seems to be the normal thing to have people hallucinating hummingbirds, as in Cowboys vs Aliens and something else that I can't remember.
4. I suppose in the end. the role the leading lady had was a sort role that could have been in a British movie fifty years ago where the romance on the screen was a much more innocent thing, and so well it would not have been ideal for the Angelina Jolie and Jessica Biel wannabees of this world. Former Polish model Agata Buzek as an actress had a slightly unconventional look but one much appreciated and I look forwards to more appearances fro her in time to come. Yes, I think that what one could extract from that film was quite wonderful at the end of the day and if it went down as a commercial flop that's not ultimately a bad thing,  it defied aspects of mainstream conventions while still coming up with something solid so that Jason Statham could do his thing while keeping the ship going for those who want to see Jason Statham doing something that they expect him to do which probably can have the effect of forcing him into a tight corner, hopefully though they made enough money to make other smaller budget movies like this seem reasonable. 

World War Zzzzzzzzz......

a) Seeing the movie. I found himself going to see the zombie movie World War Z which I went to see not having much hope for it and although I liked the main characters in the movie, I appreciated the use of 3D in most of the movie, but by the end of the film I found that I wanted to call it World War Zzzzzzzzz...... and so it seems that a number of other reviewers have addressed it by a similar amount of Zs. It just got more hideously boring for me as I watched the various seemingly idiotic events that took place to help string together its attempt at plotting. There is the fact that the script had been rewritten by Damon Lindelof and maybe I should have pretended that I didn't read or hear that name. He seems to be someone playing script doctor these days because he is a well known script writer whose name seems to help film productions along but his name never seems to be good news for me , so I wonders what the original script was like and if the people acted as idiots in the same way to get the film moving. However one thing to note though that I don't have much of an interest in zombie movies so that might probably take a lot of the fun out of seeing this film.

b) Reasons why I didn't like it, involving spoilers: What seemed the most idiotic was the way that they went to Korea to take a look at a situation only because they hadn't read the e-mail properly, the only reason to get the story going was to have idiotic mistakes  taking place, such as when Brad Pitt's character was returning to the plane in Korea, he didn't turn his mobile phone off for the purpose of silence just in case he was called, and when they got to Israel, it was only when he was there that the people were singing loudly enough to draw the zombies in, the columns of zombies were great scenes but indeed the reason why they suddenly crawled over the walls at that moment irritated me endlessly, sure there would have been enough of this singing taking place earlier or was it really only at that moment when Brad was there that they

Brad Pitt as the film's leading character

decided to let the people in through the walls. If they showed less of the closeups of zombies I might have enjoyed the film even more.and in the aircraft, the idea that someone had spent the whole time in the toilet since the beginning of the flight having turned into a zombie at some point without causing concern about spending so long in a toilet. Then there was the moment where Brad Pitt survived the aeroplane crash in a totally destroyed aeroplane, it looked ridiculous. Probably what was discovered about avoiding being killed by the zombies irritated me as wel, and the moment when the woman in the clinic telephones Brad Pitt when he is about to enter the chamber where the viruses are kept really seemed idiotic since that was another thing about to attract the zombies.

Daniella Kertesz as Segen

c) Things that I liked.  I loved the beginning scenes of traffic in the high street with explosions in the distance and people running in terror, the scene in the super market where people were trying to get their provisions, and the scenes of destruction involving trucks/lorries smashing other vehicles in their way. I thought that Brad Pitt carried the film well, I don't think that he has been in too many movies recently, the cast otherwise seemed generally unknown. The actors who played his wife and children were all fine in the film, they didn't irritate me in the slightest, and Brad Pitt managed to get to play the sensitive father. The sight of a noticeably British street in Wales was briefly a merry site, and the odd slightly disorienting scene where Brad Pitt wakes up after three days, one wondered what was about to happen next but once the rest of that scenario was spelt out, it didn't inspire me too much.  The female Israeli soldier, Segen, played by Daniella Kertesz with her soulful look seemed very lovely even with very short hair and keeping her alive through the film even with only one hand left was a great asset enough to keep me slipping into a comatose state because of the complete boredom before the end of the movie but by the end of the movie everything in the film was boring.

During the film I began to wonder what would happen if this film started to fuse with the recent movie Zero Dark Thirty that had a lot of scenes in compounds in hot countries and a military presence with men encaged. I wondered if there was a way to have David Morse suddenly become an encaged member of Al Qaida although I couldn't imagine what he could possibly do.  

d) The final part. The final part of the movie dealt with getting into a wing of a hospital taken over by zombies and this is where I became incredibly bored and wanted to go to sleep. Maybe this is the sort of thing that might inspire computer game players, I do not know.

The Dream that became The Ladykillers

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Alex Guinness, Danny Green and
Katie Johnson in The Ladykillers

1. One night he dreamt up the idea for The Ladykillers, as Mackendrick once recalled: "Bill woke up one night with the idea complete in his head. He had dreamed of a gang of criminals who commit a successful robbery while living in a little house belonging to a sweetly innocent little old lady."  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk) 
2. Liam Rudden : Earlier this year I met Kindred Rose, son of William Rose, who revealed that The Ladykillers was very nearly a story that was never told.
   He explained, “My dad’s first wife, Tania, told me that one night, in the summer of 1954, he had woken her up and told her of this strange dream he’d had about five criminals who knew that, to get away with their last robbery, they had to kill this lovely old lady. However, the more they tried, the more difficult it became, until only she was left.
   
   "He told Tania all this in the middle of the night and then promptly went back to sleep. The next morning at breakfast she asked if he remembered his dream and he had no recollection of it whatsoever.
   
   "She then told him his dream... so he first heard his story of The Ladykillers from her."
   
   That story was quickly embraced by the studio with The Ladykillers released very soon after.
   
   Rose adds, “With almost all his other films, my father would talk about them for years before they would be developed. This was the fastest turn around of them all - just a matter of months from having the dream to it being in the cinema. Ealing fast-tracked it because everyone loved it but even so, that’s quite impressive."
   
   The Ladykillers is also the only one of Rose’s films in which everyone dies.
   
   “From day one he insisted that the characters shouldn’t be too real. They had to be caricatures because if the audience empathises too much, then having them all die at the end would be too dark and wouldn’t be funny. So they are meant to be cartoon-like, the opposite of the characters in his other films.” (www.scotsman.com 01/11/2012 13:51 )

Dreams inspired the tidle wave sequence in Abyss: Special Edition

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

Omni: The release version of The Abyss was two hours and 20 minutes; the Special Edition was three hours. About half of what you put back is character development
-- bits and pieces, the relationship between the two main characters. Another 20 minutes is the subplot leading up to nuclear confrontation and the NTIs' (non-terrestrial  intelligence) resolution of that with the wave. Was the wave sequence -- which was cut from the theatrical version of the movie, but available on Special Edition on laser disc or cassette -- really inspired by a dream you had?

James Cameron: I used to always dream about tidal waves. I don't know if it's a Jungian thing; I haven't researched it. Waves are rather good metaphors, which is probably why I was attracted to [rewriting the Kathryn Bigelow feature] Point Break, even though I don't surf. It was called Johnny Utah originally; there were nine drafts of the script floating around. The idea of surfing and the psychology of that was very interesting to me.

Waves are fascinating, especially if you've studied physics. Once the energy has been expended to displace the wave, the wave can't be stopped. If you've ever spent any time in big waves, you know that the human body is nothing compared to a mass of water being moved around. Waves struck me as a good metaphor for death. (Omni magazine 1998)

Dreams that inspired Kill List

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

When Ben Wheatley sat down to write the script for Kill List with his wife Amy, they took things such as reoccurring nightmares, fears and anxieties of theirs and writing them into the fabric of the script. When he was a child he lived near the woods and was afraid of the woods., and he would have a dream where he was hearing music, and following a large group of people who were going to do some kind of worship that he didn't understand and then he watched them turning seeing him, chasing him and killing him. It was a key image for Ben and disturbed him since he was very small and later found that at screenings of his film,  others were saying that had similar dreams and so for Ben it made some sense.

SOURCES

1. Q. Is it true that Kill List was inspired by your childhood nightmares? 
   Ben Wheatley: Yes, I trawled my memories for the scariest things I could think of and that whole thing of following cultists through the woods stems from a dream I used to have a lot as a kid. I just thought if it was scary as a kid then it could apply to lots of people, and weirdly, afterwards when we’d had a few screenings people were saying that they had had similar dreams, so it kind of made sense.(www.indielondon.co.uk)
2. Ben Wheatley: And I'd been thinking about things that really scared me, things from dreams and nightmares I'd had as a kid, so I kind of thought about those and wrote those down. And then general fears of like I've got a young son as well, and that kind of thing with being a father is that you worry about the fear of me accidentally crashing a car or something and killing your family and it being your fault. So there was that kind of fear, and then the whole thing with the cults is I used to dream a lot about following cults in the wood and them seeing me, chasing me and killing me, so it was kind a mixture of those two. And then it was just mixing together and finding a throughline that would be able to kind of just tie those terrifying moments together - and that's where the list came from. (www.boxoffice.com)
3. Kill list is not like any other horror film I’ve ever seen, did you aim to make it as original as possible when you were making it?
   Ben Wheatley: Yeah, I think you always want to make something original…well I suppose not, you might be making a remake. Going in to it I thought that if I was going to make a horror film then it better be horrible and there’s no point doing it unless it’s going to be scary. A lot of the stuff came from dreams and nightmares that I had as a kid so when I wrote it with Amy (his wife) we kind of strung together those incidents so I felt that if it was primal enough to give me enough of a fear that would give me a reoccurring nightmare then it might chime with an audience. (idolmag.co.uk)
   
4. Ben Wheatley: Much of it was strung together from nightmares I had as a kid, recurring dreams of being chased. (www.timeout.com)

   

   Ben Wheatley (image  from web.orange.co.uk/)

5. Which leads into the Pagan cult aspect of the film. Is that degree of fanatical, religion-based group mentality something that has always fascinated, or even frightened, you?
   
   Ben Wheatley:Yeah, that comes from dreams, for me. I used to have nightmares about that when I was little. I lived near the woods, and I was afraid of the woods. When Amy [Jump, his wife] sat down to write the script, we tried taking these things that are recurring nightmares, fears, and anxieties of ours and writing them into the fabric of the script, to make sure that we’d hit these beats and make people feel uncomfortable.
   For me, I guess, the script really started from this dream I used to have, which was being in the woods, hearing music, and following an awful lot of people who were going off to do some kind of worship that I didn’t understand, and then me watching them and them turning, seeing me, and chasing me. That was the key image for me, that disturbed me since I was very small. (www.complex.com/) 
6. The sound design also gives the film a very heavy, haunting dreamlike feel, which seems to fall in line with your nightmare influences.
   
   Ben Wheatley: I think cinema is a dream, though, isn’t it? That’s the thing. You go into a dark space, you have a vision, and then you leave it—that’s a dream. All films are compressed time. They don’t make any sense; they jump around in time and space, and you’re looking up close at things and looking far away at things. If you think about what your reality is, your reality is a fixed camera that moves through space. The only other time where you have something that jumps through space and time and you move very close from things and very far away from things, very quickly, is dreams. (www.complex.com/)