ENGLAND'S SCREAMING: Filmmaker Sean Hogan Turns to Metafictional Film Criticism

Although it's more typical to hear about writers becoming filmmakers, here's an independent filmmaker who has written not one, but two new books.

I'll quote directly from the official statement: "Sean Hogan, best known for his films The Devil's Business and Little Deaths, has created two works of metafictional film criticism."

Here I will gladly note that I have known the affable Mr. Hogan for years, and may have imbibed an adult beverage or two with him on his occasional visits to Texas. Beyond the two titles above, which I quite enjoyed, he also directed the unsettling horror drama Lie Still (2005) and produced the marvelous documentary Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD (2014).

So yes, I'm a big, entirely biased observer and fan of his work. That being said, the description of the books makes me raise my eyebrows in anticipation.

"England's Screaming is both a fictional history of UK genre cinema and a state of the nation address, taking films from 1945's Dead of Night to 2018's Possum to create a blackly satirical portrait of the country we live in today. It has a foreword by Jonathan Rigby and the cover art is by renowned illustrator and designer Graham Humphreys.

"Its semi-sequel, Three Mothers, One Father, widens the scope to look at several stand-out works of Eurohorror, and in the process weaves a narrative examining the parlous state of modern gender relations.

"Both books are written in the vein of David Thomson's seminal Suspects; tapestries of characters from notable genre films that extend and intertwine their fictional biographies beyond the boundaries of the movies that spawned them. ... These two new books take this notion even further, employing genre films spanning the last century as a lens through which to look at where we are now."

England's Screaming is now available to order in hardback via PS Publishing.

Three Mothers, One Father is available in paperback and e-book on April 30 from Black Shuck Books.