Horror Favourites – Andy Edwards

Andy Edwards’ seaside slasher packs a Punch as the petrifying puppet is brought to life to terrorise the tourists and the locals. This wickedly wacky new feature that’s been dubbed ‘one of the best slasher flicks to come along since Terrifier’ by GBV Reviews.

Following its FrightFest premiere this year, the brutally bloody British horror gets its digital release on 22 January courtesy of Miracle Media.

Ambitious student Frankie (Alina Allison – Cuttlefish) has returned to her hometown to visit her troubled Mum, Julia (Kierston Wareing – Fish Tank). But with her mum’s creepy new man, Elton (Jamie Lomas – The Wind That Shakes the Barley), on the scene, she can’t wait to leave the Kent coast for good and see the world. Set for a final night of fun with her pals before she goes on her merry way, it’s party time… but a night of dancing quickly turns to gore galore and the young locals are about to get more than they bargained for when an old folk tale becomes all too real.

Mr Punch is on the prowl and the fearsome pulverising puppet won’t stop until he’s done his worst, but who is he, why is he creating chaos on the shores and could there be more sinister forces at work? As the carnage escalates, can Frankie survive the brutal bashings and the twisted truth?

There’s no clowning around as Mr Punch stalks the seaside town – merrily battering with his baton to the sound of his maniacal laughter, causing death and devastation in his wake. Pulling no punches with its gruesomely graphic violence, this end-of-the-pier slasher will fill you with fear: That’s the way to do it.

Below the man pulling Punch’s strings Andy Edwards talks about the scary movies he loves the most:

“I’m often asked what my favourite horror film is, and for me that’s like choosing between which one of my many malformed, murderous children I love the most. Impossible. (I only actually have one child in real life, but let’s pretend for a second I’m that woman from Cronenberg’s The Brood)

So instead I’m going to mention a couple of my faves that are unlikely influences on my latest film, Punch. It’s a seaside-set slasher, featuring a masked killer in a Mr Punch mask (from Punch & Judy), which was shot on location in chilly seaside towns in the south of England.

A long way away from 1980’s Los Angeles, but still, The Terminator (1984) is a big inspiration. Nowadays we think of the increasingly diminished Terminator franchise as sci-fi action, but watching this film for the first time in my early teens, late at night on TV, it was 100% a horror film. Arnie is every bit a slasher killer, even more dangerous than any human in a mask. And those final scenes where he comes back from the dead in skeletal form- as scary as any horror I saw at the time.

From this film, I wanted to take the Terminator’s relentlessness. At every point, whatever our protagonist does, Mr Punch is out there, somewhere, after her. And in a wider screenwriting sense, I think everyone can learn a lot from that script – how the exposition is incorporated into action scenes, how the character introduction to Sarah Connor is tied thematically to the perils of technology, even before Arnie shows up.

And secondly, The Wicker Man (1973). Now of course Mr Punch himself is present amongst the characters in the parade, so that’s an obvious influence, but I also wanted to add a touch of the folk-horror vibe to our slasher across the board.

We shot the majority of the film in the town of Hastings, which is a place that does have that pagan edge, with a yearly May festival in honour of a figure known as “the Jack in the Green”.

And so we were able to tap into that undercurrent of British occult weirdness, and add it to the usually American slasher formula to create something that hopefully feels like a unique take.”

Punch is on UK digital 22 January.