THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW
Kiwi cult director David Blyth’s “alien abduction musical” Night Freaks has its New Zealand premiere in Auckland next Saturday night. Earlier this year, he talked about the film’s debut in Roswell — the town at the centre of a decades-long conspiracy theory that debris from a UFO crash was covered up by the US Government.
Sometimes you have these moments where the fabric of reality suddenly tears. That’s something I’ve explored before, in Wound and Ghost Bride. People who claim to have been abducted by aliens genuinely believe something happened to them. The mind is a funny thing and I do think we’re all part of something bigger. Like the mechanisms behind the clock face, there are moving cogs and wheels we’re not necessarily aware of.
I’m known as a horror film-maker, of course, but the documentaries I’ve done in my film career have focused on three separate groups: war veterans, sexual fetishists and abductees. And what I realised is they’re all unique, private groups that are very hard to get inside of. So in a way, I had to have skin in the game.
With the veterans, it was through my grandfather, who fought in World War I. When I started filming people who wore masks and took on other personalities on the internet [for Transfigured Nights], I got into it a bit myself. There are hints of that in there. And then with the abductees, I actually had a paranormal experience of my own in America. But that’s a whole other story.
Psychic phenomena have always been an interest for me since I was a teenager in the parapsychology section at the library. When I worked for Richard Driver on a TV show called The Drum, the very first interview I did was with Captain Bruce Cathie, the Auckland airline pilot who saw UFOs in the 1950s.
The thing about the UFO people is that they don’t like being ridiculed, so they become very secretive. They don’t go to parties and talk about it. How does an everyday person deal with that, when you can’t even tell your family without them thinking you’re a nutter? I thought that was an interesting journey. And by day 30 of lockdown, we were all a little desperate to be abducted.
The premise of Night Freaks is that these two every day, ordinary people are taken and meet on a UFO. Then they can’t actually meet [back on Earth] because we’re in lockdown. The aliens bring them up to the mothership and give them the child that they’re never going to have — a teenager they win on a game show. So, it’s not boy meets girl, it’s fellow conspirator or fellow person down the rabbit hole.
I’m a free-range film-maker. Everyone else is in the caged, consumer-capitalist model. For me, the pandemic was an opportunity to try and find a new storytelling language, whether people were abducted or not. In those first weeks, all these seeds in my life started to blossom. Suddenly I’m thinking to myself, I’m not going to be making a feature film with 30 crew and a million-dollar budget. All I had was myself, my house and my editor/cameraman Edward Larsen. His house is in the film, too. The first song I wrote for Night Freaks was the nightmare song, Submit to Me.
It’s also a kind of bookend to my first film, Angel Mine [released in 1978], which was about a couple who had completely bought into the false needs of our consumer society. The alien masks I’ve used in Night Freaks are cheap, $15 Chinese masks; that’s part of the humour of it for me, and of course, all these masks are in big use in Roswell.
My whole career is about revealed/concealed, and what’s interesting about Night Freaks is that it reveals a lot more about my own journey. It’s where I’ve finally integrated everything — not just the normal and the incredible, but also an integration of the male and the female because that’s been a struggle in me. Some people would call my film experimental, but it’s actually the most honest and courageous thing I’ve ever done.
Everyone I’ve talked to has heard about Roswell and they know it’s part of the whole UFO thing. I told the Roswell Daily Record that when they interviewed me the other day — it’s the same newspaper that announced the 1947 UFO crash [claims the US Government has covered up evidence of alien craft are the subject of an upcoming hearing in the House of Representatives]. A UFO conference is being held at the same time as the film festival [speakers include UFO expert Nick Pope and author David Childress, a regular on the History Channel show Ancient Aliens] and I’m in the same hotel with all of them.
I’ve always been on a journey. For me, it wasn’t enough just to eat, sleep and go to Rarotonga for two weeks. I wanted to somehow understand my place in the bigger picture. Night Freaks brings everything together, because at the bottom of it is connection and love and acceptance.
If you have a weird experience, accept it as part of the mystery of this life that we’re living. You don’t have to be ashamed or think you’re a freak. That’s the psychedelic message, if you like, because at the bottom of Night Freaks is connection and love and acceptance. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am a fruitcake, in a sort of kooky, loving, connecting way.
– As told to Joanna Wane
• A key figure in Kiwi Gothic cinema, David Blyth broke onto the international film scene with his cult classic Death Warmed Up in 1984. Night Freaks, described as an “alien abduction conspiracy musical/feature-film mashup”, stars Yvette Parsons and Andrew McClennan (who also composed the music). Tom Sainsbury, Geeling Ching and Ian Mune are among the cast. The New Zealand premiere will be held at Auckland’s Capitol Cinema on November 11, opening with a live performance by McLennan and Jed Town, signing songs they composed for the soundtrack, with special guest Jemma Pollock, who plays Infinity in the film. For the trailer and a look behind the scenes, see night-freaks.com
DAVID BLYTH’S SHOWREEL
From zombies and vampires to sexual fetishists and World War I heroes — here are some of the highlights from five decades of filmmaking:
A Woman of Good Character (1980)
In her first screen role, Sarah Pierse plays a young English servant girl in the 19th century who finds herself on a rundown sheep farm in Canterbury. Pierse won Best Actress at the Feltex Awards and the film was nominated for Best Drama but lost out to Roger Hall’s public-service sitcom Gliding On.
Death Warmed Up (1984)
New Zealand’s first “splatter” movie, released three years before Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste. A young peroxide-blond Michael Hurst (a homage to Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner) takes revenge on the mad scientist who programmed him to murder his parents and has an army of killer mutants on Waiheke Island — Bruno Lawrence among them. Blyth’s biggest international success, the film won the Grand Prix at the Festival of Horror and Science Fiction in Paris, with cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky on the jury.
Red Blooded American Girl (1990)
Aids and vampirism combine in this supernatural thriller starring Christopher Plummer. Two years later, Blyth cast Al Lewis from the popular 60s show The Munsters as a sweet old vampire who doesn’t like blood in the more family-friendly Moonrise, released here as Grampire (future Pluto singer Milan Borich also makes an appearance).
Bound for Pleasure (2001)
A documentary originally screened on TV3, this intimate look inside Auckland’s suburban BDSM (bondage, discipline and sado-masochism) scene explores the world of dominatrices and their clients. Transfigured Nights, on webcam mask performers, followed in 2007.
Our Oldest Soldier (2002)
The first in a trilogy of documentaries on Blyth’s grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel “Curly” Lawrence Blyth, who was the last living New Zealand link to the liberation of Le Quesnoy in France at the end of World War I, after four years of German occupation. He died in 2001 at the age of 105. French Connection (2011) was filmed in Le Quesnoy to mark the 90th anniversary of the battle, while the final instalment, Grandfather’s Footsteps (2018), retraces Curly’s war journey from Egypt to France.
Wound (2010)
Hailed as a masterpiece by British film director Ken Russell, Wound marked a gory return to the horror genre, documenting a woman’s descent into madness — including what Blyth describes as “full-on taboo gore” and an “absolutely bizarre” birth sequence. Shot in less than a fortnight, it premiered at the Incredibly Strange Film Festival in Auckland before being released in Europe.
Ghost Bride (2014)
An arranged marriage goes wrong when a Chinese matchmaker (Geeling Ching) invokes the ancient practice of minghun: a spirit marriage. The supernatural romance/thriller, which had a 25-screen opening in Manila and screened at the Montreal Horrorfest, stars a young Yoson An (Mulan) facing life as an undead groom and Rebekah Randel (nurse Dawn Karim on Shortland Street) as the Kiwi girlfriend battling for his soul.