Work under way on animated horror 'documentary'

Reece Shearsmith is to star in a Gothic horror film about the most haunted house in England.

Borley Rectory is described as an 'animated documentary' but with live action and fantasy sequences.

Filming is already under way on the 30-minute movie, but Carrion Films are appealing for £3,000 on crowdfunding website Indiegogo to finish it.

'The project oozes as much quality as it does evil' said Shearsmith. 'Borley Rectory is one of the great ghost stories. I needed to be part of it.'

Built in 1862, the real-life rectory in Essex was damaged by fire in 1939 and demolished five years later. But there had been rumours it was haunted ever since it was built. Those reports escalated in 1929 after the Daily Mirror published an account of a visit by paranormal researcher Harry Price.

Among the supposed hauntings were a nun, said to have been bricked up behind the walls, a screaming girl and a phantom coach driven by headless horsemen.

Despite Price's renown as a paranormal investigator and exposer of fraudulent spiritualists, it has been been claimed that he was hoaxed, or that he faked the phenomena himself.

'Obsessed' with the story as a child, Shearsmith plays Mirror journalist Vernon Wall. Price is brought to life by actor and Gothic horror historian Jonathan Rigby, who portrayed Kenneth Horne in a number of Round The Horne tributes on radio, television and stage.

Shearsmith was previously part of the 2010 Radio 4 show, The League of Gentlemen's Ghost Chase, which saw the group reunite after five years to spend the night in the allegedly haunted Ancient Ram Inn in Gloucestershire. He also starred in the West End play Ghost Stories, by the League's Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman.

He became involved with Borley Rectory after seeing the film's artwork by writer-director Ashley Thorpe tweeted by Nyman's long-time collaborator, illusionist Derren Brown, for whom the animator had previously worked.

Comedy actor Steve Furst was asked to play the Reverend Lionel Algernon Foyster meanwhile, because of his striking resemblance to the curate who lived in the rectory.

The film is narrated by A Room With A View's Julian Sands and scored by Siouxie and the Banshees' Steven Severin.

'It's all these Gothic ideas wrapped up into this little parcel, coinciding with this time of a new, scientific approach to ghost hunting' adds Thorpe, who relaunched the film on a tighter budget after it only secured two-thirds of a £10,000 crowd-funding target last year.

'Harry Price is such a complicated character – he was known for debunking these stories, then he gets caught up in possibly planting or inventing evidence, which makes for a great mystery. Like Jack the Ripper, it'll probably never be solved because the evidence is so convoluted by the myth'.

Like Price, Wall is depicted as 'ambiguous', if only because his real-life counterpart was so enigmatic says Thorpe. 'So many people became famous because of the haunting but it's difficult to find out much about him. I could only find one photograph, the back of him from a distance looking at a summerhouse'.

In the film, Wall is shown to be 'excited by the story, but there are these little moments where he feels that maybe he's being manipulated by Price and that he's not sure what to think'.

The film's look is both 'noirish' and 'fantastic', a mixture of animated styles and 'really weird techniques' he adds. 'There are hand-drawn things in there, character capture, digital and traditional models, painted backgrounds and rotoscoping, where I've either drawn over the actors or contemporary photographs of the rectory. It's perfect for this particular project, clouding what's real and not real'.

Carrion Films are speaking to several horror festivals about showing the film late next year. And Thorpe hopes to release a DVD with cast and crew interviews, packaged with his previous horror shorts. Those pledging to fund the film will receive merchandise but 'a big investor would be lovely'.

The news comes as it was announced that Shearsmith's League Of Gentlemen collaborator Mark Gatiss will narrate an iPlayer special as part of the BBC's upcoming Sci Fi season.

He will voice My Life in Science Fiction: Stories From The Stars, which will feature the likes of Richard Dreyfuss, Rutger Hauer and Nichelle Nichols speaking about their work.

A release date for the programme has not yet been announced.

Here is a trailer for Borley Rectory.

By Jay Richardson

Published: 4 Nov 2014