After the success of ‘Scayrecrow‘ and ‘The Screaming skull‘ – Penny dreadful number 4 : The Hairy hands has been awarded a budget of £10,000 to begin production by South West screen and the Arts Council of England. The film, as with previous entries, will be directed by Ashley Thorpe, music and sound design by Mick Grierson and will star ‘dreadful regular’ Ed Berry. The film will be produced by Tom Atkinson – the man behind the ‘10 pound horror film‘.
Director Ashley Thorpe – “The primary aim of ‘THE HAIRY HANDS’ is for me to find a way to set an atmospheric horror short in a moving vehicle. I love Hitchcock, I especially love that sequence in ‘Psycho’ when Marion has stolen the money and is racing out of town with all that character voiceover – its a very clever way of doing exposition, and all the while you’re getting to see her reactions, the camera just cutting between her car and the road. Pure drama. ‘Psycho’ is also a good example of a film that sets the audience up going in one direction and then completely turns it upside down just as you’re getting comfortable, and I’m hoping to do the same with this one.”
“Though ‘The Hairy hands’ will be a technical advance upon previous shorts ‘Scayrecrow’ and 
‘The Screaming skull’ – I am aiming for the technology not to rule the aesthetics of the piece. Though cleaner, the look of the new film will still have a ‘painted’ look and though more polished the film will still retain a textural hand made quality, highly stylized, but still retaining all the hallmarks of the previous animations – albeit this will be a lot more noirish. It’ll be a little shorter, a little tighter than the previous entries but it’s packed full of ideas, references and little asides…It’ll also have a few surprises…something you probably won’t have seen before…which I’m not going to tell you about…” – Ashley Thorpe