A swarm of undead insects

As the last couple of posts imply, I’ve had a lot of projects on the go over the years and I never know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. With a lot of them, they’ve been developed for certain schemes, or because an opportunity has come up, while with others, they’ve been hanging around waiting for an opportunity.

Some of them end up being Indevelopments. Like World of Pain, which myself and Cooke have been working on for a couple of years now. Because of Cooke’s other film, WOP is currently just hanging around (I imagine it hovering in some weird office space somewhere, not in anyone’s way, but also not where anyone is likely to bump into it. And whenever anybody looks its way, it moves ever so slightly out of their field of vision). It’s a weird feeling – like it’s alive, but not quite – you can’t think about it, because it will just frustrate you that it’s not moving on, but at the same time you can’t quite forget about it either.

My tactic is to always try and work on something new. But, then that just leaves you open to having more undead projects hovering around.

Like Savage, the horror feature which I’ve been developing for a(nother) couple of years. There’s a producer, Carl, who I’ve been working with and who has been good at getting the project seen. But it’s been circling around for ages now and it hasn’t found a place to land (some people like to think of their scripts as children – I obviously think of them as some kind of bird or flying insect. Weird.) or been shot out of the sky in a cloud of feathers (it’s a duck!).

So, in the meantime, I write a short – Deliver Me – which I get some funding for, and I write another outline – Good Advice – which sits in a drawer at Chris’s agents office for months because the company we were originally pitching it to passed – and I start to think about other feature outlines – a witching story, a giallo, a fucked-up family horror. And then, maybe another short while I’m waiting for the other one to kick off, and then maybe this thing with Chris and Digs and Micaiah…

And all the while, these things hovering around my head (now they’re buzzards or vultures) like flies (or flies). It’s like developing something is the opposite of actually what ‘developing’ means – it actually means stagnating. Or maybe it means developing in the sense of ‘and then this virus developed into a deadly strain’ – it just gets more corrupted and virulent.

Maybe I just need to stop seeing them as being alive. The thing is, it never seems like they die (they’re zombies! zombie birds! – hang on, that’s fucking great…Hitchcock crossed with Romero…), so you can’t bury them. Maybe it’s me that wants to keep them alive though, like a dinner table surrounded by corpses, with me pretending that everything’s normal.

Anyway, about this zombie bird idea…