Horror Favourites – Ed Murphy

With the UK and Irish release of Mark Sheridan’s occult horror CRONE WOOD this Feb we managed to chat to the lead actor Ed Murphy about what horror movies he loves the most.

Elva Trill (Line of Duty) and Ed Murphy (Vikings) star as a young couple who embark on a camping adventure in the countryside. They choose Crone Wood, an infamous spot with a history of witches and folklore. But as the darkness settles, strange noises can be heard and mysterious lights are spotted between the trees. What starts out as a curiosity, quickly descends into a nightmare as the two discover that the horrors of Crone Wood go far beyond local legend. Thrown into a world of cults and ritualistic murder, they quickly discover that pagan Ireland is alive and well.

Combining the authentic pagan ritualism of The Wicker Man with the emersive found footage style of The Blair Witch Project CRONE WOOD has won the support of Asda and Morrisons, two leading supemarkets that will be stocking the DVD. Other outlets where the DVD can be pre-ordered include Amazon, HMV, Simply and Base.

Below Ed Murphy discusses his favorite horror film The Shining:

“My favourite horror film would have to be The Shining.

I’m going to try and explain this by using two nightmares I vividly remember from early childhood.

The First.

I must’ve been around 6 or 7 because that’s when I began learning to swim. In my dream, I was swimming in a fast flowing but shallow river on a hot summers day. I’m not sure where it was, but it definitely was not an Irish landscape. It looked vaguely western so maybe I had been watching a cowboy movie that day or something. Anyway, I’m kind of splashing about a bit; my granny is on one side of the river and my mother is on the other side. I get it into my head to show off my newly learned front crawl. It was always a big deal for me to get over the fear of putting my head underwater, but in the dream I confidently went under and started pumping my arms and kicking my legs, swimming with the current down the middle of this fast flowing river. Delighted with myself, I realise I hadn’t taken a breath yet. I can vaguely hear my granny and mother shouting after me, but it’s muffled by the water and a dull roar in the distance as I swim further down the river. I try to lift my head now, but it feels like it weighs a ton. The dull roar is rising in volume. I sense the current dragging me faster and faster to an ultimate terrifying conclusion.

On the Fear-O-meter scale, going over a waterfall, to a young kid, is up there with quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle.
Running out of breath, I thrashed and struggled to save myself. Then, for an instant, I was weightless. Falling. Shock. Pain.
The world was pitch black but I could feel my back against the cold ground. This wasn’t a dream. I was awake. I tried to move, to get up, but I was stuck. Panic tried to overwhelm me but even at the tender age of 6, I was a pretty logical child. I replayed the events in my mind. While swimming with my head underwater in the dream, in real life I must have turned my head face down into my pillow, slowly suffocating myself. Falling over the edge of the waterfall was just me fighting for breath and throwing myself off my bed. Now, I realised, my big stupid Irish head was wedged between my bed and wardrobe and was stuck. I shakily sat up, had a little cry, got into bed and fell back asleep.

The Second.

I had started piano lessons and a new addiction with the Goosebumps series of books. They were a very popular horror series written for kids. Coincidentally, one of the first books I read was about a ghostly piano teacher that terrorised the protagonist. I went to bed that night after reading a few chapters. I must have also been a bit anxious about my piano lesson the following day – probably didn’t practice enough. So of course, in the middle of the night I wake up to see a spectral figure floating at the end of my bed in front of an equally ghostly piano – think the librarian from Ghostbusters. Like the ghost librarian, she was serene and calm.

Although when my piano wraith notices me and learns I’ve shirked my scale practice, she transforms and mutates into an ugly decaying corpse. She reaches for me, surely to drag me to some torturous underworld where I’m forced to practice scales on a red-hot piano, skin flayed from my hand and surround by fire. And then of course I woke up.

What I like about these two nightmares is that they illustrate what attracts me to horror films in the first place. One is the psychological feeling of helplessness and inability, no matter how hard you try, to save yourself. The other is a more immediate feeling of danger from an actual physical thing that repulses you and attempts to cause you harm.
The Shining combines these two formulas effortlessly.

We’re introduced to Jack Nicholson’s character as the main protagonist. We initially empathise and relate to his feeling of helplessness – weighed down by his faltering career and pressure to provide for his young family. But the more and more his mind starts to slip, as he is being terrorised by the spirits within the Overlook hotel, the more Kubrick steers us towards inhabiting Wendy and Danny’s POV and to experience their mounting terror. As an actor, it’s this razor sharp edge of sanity that most intrigues me in performances.

Wendy, discovering Jack’s repetitive typed sentence after weeks of apparent “work”, allows us into her thought process as she realises her husband has gone insane. This is just as terrifying as the grotesqueness of Jack making out with a bloated, decaying corpse. Wendy’s feeling of being trapped, suffocated by her insane partner, chimed with my near nightmare drowning and inability to save myself. Jack’s repulsive make out scene reminded me of the hellish demon that my ghostly, serene piano tutor mutated into.

Kubrick oscillates between psychological horror and classic horror constantly and it’s this alchemy that lets The Shining transcend any strict genre classification.

It’s exactly what a nightmare should be; the real mixed with the surreal.”

CRONE WOOD is available now DVD and VOD to stream and download from Sky Store, Amazon Prime, Google Play and Apple TV.