Jamie and Marsh climb into their effluent splattered diving-bell and plunge into the bowels, literal and metaphorical, of Mad God, the wildly deranged, deeply harrowing stop-motion masterpiece from animation legend Phil Tippett. Bon appetit!
- Mad God has been released on Shudder, a horror streaming service.
- Fellow Hell-depicters of yore: Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Breughel
- This is definitely not the Dark Crystal.
- A few of the stop-motion references we carry with us:
- Harry Hausen films, e.g. Clash of the Titans
- Aardman Animations’ work, including their brilliant Wallace & Gromit films
- Cosgrove Hall’s Wind in the Willows
- I made tea and coffee on the set where the model shots for Blackadder: Back & Forth were composed/animated
- The Fast Show’s animation sketch
- The Shivering Truth – a body horror take on stop-frame
- Pingu’s The Thing, aka Thingu
- Phil Tippett’s credits include Star Wars (including the AT-AT battle on Hoth, Robocop, Tremors 2, Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers and the astonishingly silly-sounding Virus.
- Potential influences or comparative works:
- The films of Andrei Tarkovsky
- Horrendous mud-slathered pseudo-medieval madness: Hard to be a God
- Powerfully grim war film: Come and See
- Bill Plimpton’s films
- Beautiful documentary about catharsis and obsession: Marwencol
- Jan Švankmajer’s films, Little Otik and Alice
- Other references we make:
- Michael Haneke’s Funny Games
- Dante’s Inferno (not the videogame)
- Low’s album, Double Negative
- Matthew Barney’s epic Cremaster cycle is “a self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five feature-length films”. Well!
- Other things on Shudder you can watch with a temporary sub: White Girl, The Babadook, A Field in England, Ginger Snaps, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, REC, ABCs of Death, VHS 94, Possum and… Heathers???
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Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.