Although the last 18 months has produced a high profile radio play – ‘The Demon Huntsman‘ – for Glass Eye Pix and the long postponed launch into pre-production on Carrion Films first feature ‘Spring Heel Jack‘, there hasn’t been a ‘Penny Dreadful’ short released since 2010’s ‘The Hairy Hands’. All that is about to change…and the stimulus for this was something tantamount to extraordinary.
Director Ashley Thorpe: “Although the last year or so have been amazing in regards to higher profile ambitious projects, I’ve felt that we’re long overdue for another short. The feature is in good hands and is developing nicely but it’s a long term project and I don’t think that anyone at Carrion Film wants to sit around and just twiddle their thumbs waiting for the machinations to start. You know, the shorts are spontaneous, and relatively quick to produce. Ok, 6 months may not seem that quick, but you can wait 6 months for a feature script to even be read let alone signed off! Getting a feature off the ground is as much about business as filmmaking. The shorts were genuinely devoid of much of that. Besides, the shorts were always an opportunity to experiment with ideas and approaches that later – hopefully – would be assimilated into future projects, so with such a major project looming, the production of something like ‘Borley Rectory’ is absolutely essential. It’s definitely time to make a film for the love of the form again.”
“Ghostly figures of headless coachmen…a nun – believed to have been bricked up within the walls …a screaming girl at the window of ‘the blue room’… and dragging footsteps in empty rooms. The scene of the ghostly visitations is the Rectory at Borley, a few miles from Long Melford, Suffolk. It is a building erected on part of the site of a great monastery which, in the Middle ages, was the scene of a great tragedy. The present rector, the Rev. G. E. Smith, and his wife, made the Rectory their residence in the face of warnings by previous occupiers. Since their arrival they have been puzzled and startled by a series of peculiar happenings which cannot be explained, and which confirm rumours they heard before moving in…”
Daily Mirror, June 10th, 1929
Could you elaborate on the use of actual footage shot at Borley Rectory: ...”Ha ha. God, it sounds like the Jack the Ripper diaries doesn’t it…The impetus for this one literally fell in my lap whilst working on Spring Heel. I was given some fragments of purportedly actual footage shot at Borley Rectory before it burned down. Now the interesting thing is that – perhaps due to the degradation of the stock – you can in places see something strange at work on the film. So it got me thinking about ghost photography, EVP and all that, and what if we added to these genuine fragments and created a longer sequence exploring the effect of the form itself on the audience 
and explore their expectations. The fascinating thing about ghost recordings, whether audio or visual, is that they tend to be very low quality, and as a consequence an interplay is created between the form itself and the expectations of the audience. You tell someone that there is a ghost in this photograph and you hand them something very degraded, grainy, they’ll start to see shapes, figures, faces. It’s exactly the same with audio recordings, they’ll hear voices. Their mind is constantly generating patterns to make sense of what they are seeing or hearing. The focus of their attention subsequently narrows and they’ll often start seeing and hearing things which aren’t there, but rather are being drawn from the textures of the form and given shape by the expectations of the audience. I find that fascinating and it applies very strongly to the Borley Rectory footage…But then, what do I know…maybe a ghost was caught on film.”