Movies
Doug Bradley Presents ‘Spine Chillers’!
This past weekend Doug Bradley (Pinhead) was on hand to share with the Pittsburgh audience his brand new short series entitled SPINE CHILLERS. Attendees of the convention were treated to the Premiere of “The Outsiders”, a seventeen minute short from a classic H.P. Lovecraft story. You can watch it online here or watch Bradley’s official website for a forthcoming DVD release loaded with extras. Read on for more details on the ongoing series and for the exclusive scoop on more upcoming episodes!
Doug Bradley tells Bloody-Disgusting that the second episode of SPINE CHILLERS will be Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The plan for the third episode is to bring W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” to the small screen with hopes for expanding the series into stories by living authors and writers. How far this goes depends on the online support, so go check it out now and give a little support!
Doug Bradley writes on his official website:
I am a director of a new production company based in Brighton, called Renegade Arts Entertainment Ltd. Renegade will to a large extent carry forward the work of Renga Media, and Tony Luke is also a director. Joining us is producer and director Alexander Finbow. Dominator X, which fell foul of the ‘English Disease’ (financing and production nightmares which are still unravelling) last year, is now to be taken forward by Renegade.
In the meantime, we are proceeding on a number of fronts, and we have produced what is planned to be the first in ongoing series which we’re calling ‘Doug Bradley’s Spine Chillers’ and the first of these is now available. It’s H P Lovecraft’s short story The Outsider. At the moment we’re making it available as a download. You can check out a free preview or pay for the whole thing:
www.renegadeartsentertainment.com/spinechillers
It started life as a half-baked idea from me which popped into my head while recording Mr B Gone and was essentially no more than the feeling that the ‘talking book’ hadn’t moved forward since the days of the cassette tape and that it really should be possible to offer more in the digital age. And it sprang from that to a finished product in pretty short order. Through the good offices of Digital Deli it was recently screened at BAFTA and I was delighted by the response.
We will soon be making it available in hard copy and will present it in multiple platforms, the idea being you could play it as a DVD, mount it on your PC/iPod/phone in audio-visual form or listen to it as a good old audio book in the car on your way to work.
When Renegade’s present project is finished – the video to accompany a track from Judas Priest’s new album ‘Nostradamus’, we will commence work on the second Spine Chiller which is slated to be Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Tell Tale Heart’. If the series takes off, I hope to expand it to use other actors and contemporary and unsigned authors.”
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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