This piece first appeared in the Guardian Guide, issued dated 27 August 2011…In major towns, a strange pagan symbol has begun appearing on walls and bus shelters. It looks a little like a tent in the crosshairs of a gun, and if that sounds a bit weird, that's only the half of it. The image is the key selling point of a new British movie called Kill List (reviewed here), a genre mash-up that is frustrating to write about simply because its mysteries really must be preserved in order for it to maintain its power. At the outset, it seems to be a post-Iraq gangster movie, with lots of Pinter-esque punch as an ex-soldier named Jay (Neil Maskell) teams up with an old army buddy, Gal (Michael Smiley), and carries out a series of ever more violent contract killings in order to support his wife and son. By the end, though, it has become something quite different.
Strange. Bizarre. Nightmarish. Three words that can not be used to describe its director, Ben Wheatley, who wrote the film over Christmas 2009 and then knocked it into shape with his creative partner and wife Amy Jump. We meet at Brighton station and head for lunch at the seafront Regency fish and chip shop, where snaps of Gordon Ramsay, Lee Evans and Suggs out of Madness grace the Wall Of Fame. "You can't come to Brighton without seeing the sea," smiles Wheatley (no relation to seminal occult novelist, Dennis). A stout, kindly chap of 39, with his beard, shoulder-length hair and loose-fitting cotton combo, he's something of mash-up himself: half 1960s San Francisco hippy, half 17th-century cavalier.
Kill List is Wheatley's second feature, but since the film needs to hold back its secrets, the most you're likely to see of it, aside from a very coy trailer, is that logo, which is its marketing team's main piece of ammo. "I don't envy them, really," laughs the director, who, funnily enough, got his own career going through viral marketing with short films on his website (mrandmrswheatley.blogspot.com) that brought him into television, courtesy of Armando Iannucci and his BBC2 show Time Trumpet (Wheatley also worked on Channel 4's Modern Toss and BBC3's The Wrong Door).
"The funny thing is," Wheatley recalls, "when I first drew the logo out, I thought, 'Yeah, that's brilliant!' And then I thought, 'God, it really looks like something …' And when we finished the movie I realised: it's like the Blair Witch logo! So I thought we were were going to get slaughtered by people saying, 'Oh they've just ripped off Blair Witch.' Now everyone's saying it's like the Deathly Hallows logo, which is a triangle with a circle and a line down the middle." He sighs: "But I've no idea about that! I'm too old to be reading about wizards, y'know?"
And despite the Blair Witch comparisons, Wheatley refuses to play up any cross-genre appeal. "I see Kill List more as a horror film than I do a crime film," he reasons. "People are saying, 'Oh, it's got hitmen in it, therefore it's a crime film.' But I never saw these people as existing in the same world as Danny Dyer. Or even the Get Carter world. It's not in that world. I suppose it's a war movie, really. They're veterans. They're not thieving, have-a-go cockney criminals; they're professional people who do a job."
And like all good horror films, Kill List is really about something else. At its base, it's about money, what we do to get it and how we've come to worship it. "My favourite horror movies from the 70s, like Dawn Of The Dead, are reacting to their times," says Wheatley. "Whether they knew it or not. What's the point of making anything unless it's a reaction to the time you live in? Otherwise you're just going through the motions, copying something that's happened before just because you liked it. But that's not enough for me. You've got to look at the reality of what's going on. We've just had two major wars going on that nobody seemed to be that bothered about. They were just rolling along. Even though a million people marched and said, 'Stop it,' they just went ahead."
"So we're in the middle of this Vietnam experience," he continues, "and no one's really saying anything. And then there's the recession. So I wanted to make a film about a family that was living with that. They're a kind of 'stock' family, but they're under a lot of contemporary pressure because they're in a lot of debt. And once you're in that world of debt, there's no way to turn the boat around, is there? You can't do it fast enough. You're locked in. And that's the same for everyone."
Something that also seems very relevant is that Kill List is about people with no moral compass, including Jay's wife, who is complicit in his crimes. "I think the problem with genre films is that often you're rooting for people who are essentially evil," says Wheatley, "so to a degree there was a certain amount of us rubbing the audience's noses in these evil people. Hitmen are not good people. They're … fuckers!!! But I've always liked the idea in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 that, because he's been lied to, the computer goes insane, because he's essentially an honest creature and he can't deal with the human idea of mistruth; they won't tell him what the mission is. And that's kind of what I was thinking about these two guys. They've been to Afghanistan, and a lot of these places, but they know, in the backs of their minds, that, even though they're doing a job, what they're doing is not necessarily justified. They'd rather have been in the second world war, which, in retrospect, was a clean, understandable war. But this stuff isn't. In that way, the film's about the whole erosion of the social contract – as we've just seen with the riots as well."
Wheatley's thoughts about these issues are reflected in the film's abrasive visual style. Though Jump doesn't physically get involved in the actual shooting of the scripts ("It's all a bit high-pressure and shouty"), Wheatley says she was very involved with all the staccato tics that were added in the edit suite. Neither are interested in the rules of proper film-making. "If you break them consistently, it doesn't matter," he laughs. "It drives my editor to distraction! But I guess what I'm trying to do is use realist camerawork and realist performances to give more weight to the drama within the piece, using a psychology that people understand."
Which all makes the film sound somewhat worthy. By the end, though, Kill List is anything but a socio-realist polemic. "Some people say, 'I could see the ending coming,'" says the director, more than a little testily. "And I'm like, 'Well, what do you want? Did you see the ending of Jaws coming? Did you know the shark would die? Do you get a special badge for that?'" He laughs. "You're not better than the film-makers just because you could 'read' it. That's not the point."
Instead, Wheatley insists that the film should be open to interpretation. "With all the interviews I've done, I've tried not to pin it down to anything," he says. "You can read it as a straight B-movie where a guy does get tangled up with a cult and it all goes too far. Or you can read it that he's just fucking nuts. Which isn't really satisfying, I know! But we decided to leave it open. Not everything has to be explained. Some things are inexplicable, and the mystery is much more interesting than the reality. I think that's the case with this."
Fittingly, the experience will end, for those brave enough to see it, with that peculiar symbol. "We put the logo at the start," says Wheatley, "because we needed to state where the movie might go, and it's quite scary when see you it. And the fact that you see it again at the end, for me, makes the movie into kind of like a curse. That's why there's no happy music at the end, there's no closure."
He grins: "You're supposed to be suffering."
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