8 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
Who is she? The 30-year-old British filmmaker
has just premiered her debut feature Saint
Maud at the Toronto International Film
Festival and is nominated for the £50,
IWC Schaffhausen prize at the BFI London
Film Festival. Of her horror-inflected films she
says: “I want the audience to feel like they’re
watching something they shouldn’t be.”
Her background: Inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s
stop-motion animation in the 1963 fantasy Jason
and the Argonauts, which she saw as a young girl,
Glass began making home movies as a teenager.
She graduated from the National Film and
Television School in 2014. Her graduation short
Room 55 showed at festivals around the world.
Her films: Saint Maud is a psychological horror
about a pious live-in nurse (Morfydd Clark) who
becomes dangerously obsessed with saving the
soul of her new patient, a hedonistic dancer
suffering from cancer, played by Jennifer Ehle.
This being a dark gothic drama, Maud isn’t as
saintly or as sweet as she initially appears. “Glass
slowly chips away at our certainty about how
to interpret the story,” writes Ela Bittencourt
on the S&S website. Meanwhile reviewing
for Screen International, S&S regular Jonathan
Romney hails Saint Maud as “a hugely individual,
distinctly British piece of genre-tweaking with a
strong female focus and clear potential to cross
borders between arthouse and upmarket horror
sectors”. Her previous shorts were also horrors:
Room 55 (2014) is a sultry dive into the sexual
awakening of a repressed English housewife in
the 1950s. Bath Time, about a woman suffering
from a crippling anxiety disorder, was part
of Film4’s 2015 series A Moment of Horror.
Where to watch: Saint Maud is screening at the
London Film Festival and will be released in the
UK next year. Room 55 and some of Glass’s other
shorts can be found at vimeo.com/roseglass.
Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud
ILLUSTRATION BY LUCINDA ROGERS
Richard Stanley, the cult director of Hardware and Dust Devil, recalls
dealing drugs to Dario Argento at the cultiest of all London’s cinemas
The Scala was one of
the greatest cinemas
of all time. It came
along at exactly the
right time in my life.
I first went there
in 1984 when I was
- I was on the run
from the military police, having deserted the
South African army. I was wandering around
North London as a young illegal immigrant
wondering what the hell I was going to do.
I tried to make contact with my uncle but
he refused to open the door to me. I saw
the Scala had an all-day all-nighter going
on and tickets were really cheap, around
£2.40. I thought, “OK, I’ll sleep in the cinema
and figure out what to do tomorrow.”
It was my good luck that on the bill was
non-stop Dario Argento. In that single sitting
I saw all eight movies Dario had made up to
that point. I didn’t sleep, obviously. I’d only
heard rumours about Argento in South Africa.
Under apartheid, horror and devil-orientated
movies were banned. The show opened
my eyes to all I had been missing. I don’t
think it’s possible for words to encapsulate
what it’s like seeing the first ten minutes of
Suspiria [1977] on a big screen, the size of
the close-ups, the richness of the colours.
By the time I stumbled out the next day I
knew what I wanted to do with my life.
Not long after, there was a test screening of
Argento’s Phenomena [1984]. I spotted Dario
looking nervous outside. I went up and told
him how much I admired him. I gave him the
joint I was smoking. He was very relieved and
then took my name and telephone number.
A week later I got a phone call saying, “Your
friend Dario wants to talk to you.” From then
on I became Dario’s point person whenever he
was in town and needed something to smoke.
The Scala originally opened as the King’s
Cross Cinema in 1920. It was a live music venue
in the 70s before a short stint as London’s only
primatarium [a monkey house] in 1979. When
the cinema reopened in 1981, there were still
tropical murals all over the walls and deserted
cages and a safari urine-type smell in the
basement. The auditorium always felt like it
was an extension of the movies showing there.
When you saw Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke
[1978] plus The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Across the 8th Dimension [1984] plus Roger
Corman’s The Trip [1967] on the same bill, you
knew you’d be met by a wall of marijuana smoke
and everyone would be tripping off their faces.
I ended up living there. Jane Giles [Scala
programme manager 1988-92] sheltered me
after I lost everything on Dust Devil [1992]. I was
about £200,000 in debt and on the run from
every bailiff in town. I was hiding out above the
Scala when we were first screening the prints.
The film’s producer Nik Powell was showing up
every evening, casing our box-office takes to try
and cashflow the end of The Crying Game [1992].
I did find myself making movies for Scala
audiences. In Hardware [1990] there are little
beats after the characters say stupid one-liners
which are only there for the audience to yell back
at the screen. I expect a degree of audience
participation. It must be hard these days to
understand what a genuine cult movie is about.
You can’t just watch a film at home with your
friends. You need to watch it with 300 other
deranged people for it to have its full effect.
Richard Stanley’s first narrative feature for 27
years, Color out of Space, screens at the BFI London
Film Festival on 7, 8 and 9 October and at Mayhem
Film Festival, Nottingham, on 11 October
DREAM PALACES
THE SCALA, LONDON
RISING STAR
ROSE GLASS
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Rushes, 3
