Sundance Channel recently sat down for an interview with Karin Diann Williams & Stuart Hynson Culpepper, creators of THE CAPTIVE. Watch THE CAPTIVE now at Sundance Channel Digital Shorts.
What was the inspiration for The Captive?
Karin: Believe it or not, we started with just the idea that we wanted to make a web series. We had an inkling that the microseries was about to find its audience and really explode as a popular form.
Stuart: We saw all the activity blossoming on YouTube and sites like it and knew a huge audience was there and they were wanting something beyond the user-generated content, something thoughtful and well produced. So we took the plunge. Part of the idea for the themes and action in The Captive came from studying the kind of person we thought were going to engage: someone fairly tech literate and independent in their thinking.
More interested in creating mood with imagery both creepy and beautiful than in following a logical narrative, Dario Argento’s Italian horror films have become masterpieces of gore. Plot lines tend to revolve around young artists and students who find themselves in situations way over their heads, like attending a cursed ballet school (SUSPIRIA, 1977) or dealing (badly) with a stalker (4 FLIES ON GREY VELVET, 1971) or discovering that evil witches lay behind your sister’s mysterious disappearance (INFERNO, 1980). These stories may seem too outrageous to take seriously, but Argento is a skillful director. “Under his eyes, every action, from shifting car gears to peering at a necklace, is exhilarating.”
Not to miss is SUSPIRIA, which is filmed in CinemaScope and arguably Argento’s greatest film. (At BAM, September 5)
Photographer Joshua Hoffine latest series is his vivid interpretation of childhood fears. Such “classics” include the monster under the bed, the monster in the basement, and the not-so happy scary clown in the vein of Pennywise that I’m sure resulted in many night terrors everywhere. With a pinch of Gottfried Helnwein’s morbidity, there is an aspect of Hoffine’s work that dances a fine line between cartoony camp, psychological anxiety, and childhood nostalgia.
If you search YouTube for videos of Don DeLillo, you won’t find much. The author of White Noise and Underworld is not a public man, and he rarely does tours or events. But an enterprising fan known as the Donologist has been uploading DeLillo radio interviews to YouTube. The presentation of these interview clips leaves something to be desired; the interviews are audio only, so the Donologist simply slaps a static photo onto the screen while the audio plays. (You can start playing the video and then switch to another window or browser tab while DeLillo speaks.) These interviews contain some great material about Underworld, one of DeLillo’s masterpieces, as well as lesser recent works such as Cosmopolis and The Body Artist.
Here, in an interview that was probably recorded in 1997, DeLillo talks about the then newly released Underworld with Michael Sliverblatt, the host of the KCRW show Bookworm:
