Scream and Scream Again… with HookJaw!
24 September 2024 · 2 min read
It’s a funny thing being dyslexic.
Especially undiagnosed GenX dyslexic.
Turns out that paradoxically, many writers are also dyslexic. And it’s kind of a super power now.
However, in the 80’s, loving horror and wanting DESPERATELY to create my own stories meant there were only a few viable options were open to me. And one was not writing. I consistently failed ever ‘English’ test.
It was clear. I could not write.
According to the wisdom of the 80’s at any rate.
And so Super8mm film became my choice. That was expensive though, and needed others to help me make films. It was Summer holiday stuff and not dark winter evenings.
But comics, and the kind of dark, twisted horror and sci-fi comiscs of the 80’s, were perfect for me. I was by no means the most talented artist, but I could draw, and I was pretty good with inks.
‘Scream’ was a short lived horror comic that I adored, though I did want more horror than I think the publishers wanted.
2000AD was awesome too, and I recall Hook Jaw (panel below), scaring the bezeejus out of me. This one image below, of the guy getting his legs bitten off stuck in my brain even to this day. I wanted to look away, but I could not. It’s clearly a gory cash in on Jaws, it was gruesome and addictive. And then I discovered Flesh. If you know, you know.
I just was not good enough at drawing, and I took far too long for it to be a real option.
Thank goodness that soon after, spell checkers appeared on computers, and it turned out there was a fix for ‘stupid’, which was what I was told I was.
I still love comic book art deeply, and in a parallel universe somewhere, I am sure that I am drawing horror and sci-fi art for these amazing publications that blossomed in the 80’s.
Written by
Chris JonesPassionate about all things film, I have spent my life watching movies, making movies and helping others make their movies too. Most recently I have been directing Splinter Unit on 'Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning', parts 1 and 2 for Paramount. I also executive-produced 'The Enfield Poltergeist' for Apple TV+. Deeper into my past, my early major projects include action thriller 'The Runner', serial killer thriller 'White Angel' and paranormal horror 'Urban Ghost Story'. I co-created and authored The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, published by Bloomsbury. There are now eight books in the series. More recently I have run a series of London-based festivals, kicking off with the London Screenwriters Festival which attracts over 1,000 professional screenwriters from around the globe annually. I also set up and run TEDxEaling, an annual TEDx conference on storytelling and human communication. In 2009, I made the multi-award-winning and Oscar-shortlisted 'Gone Fishing', the whole process being heavily documented on my blog. In 2014 I completed my fourth feature film, the crowd-created 50 Kisses which entered the Guinness Book Of Records for most screenwriters on a feature film. Following this success, I founded Create50 to continue the idea of crowd-created projects. Twisted50, our first book, was published on Halloween 2016 and immediately toppled Stephen King from the top spot on Amazon. Five books have followed in the Twisted50 series and we are working on the sixth now. During the summer of 2016 I trained to become a master Firewalk instructor and now regularly take people across the hot coals for charity. Late 2017 I directed the short film 'Seeing Him' which collected a ton of awards too. Over the following years I continued to make award-winning shorts, such as Meet The Nativity and Never Too Late. In the summer of 2022 I premiered Impact 50, the second feature-length movie from Create50. This time I directed the segment at the start of the film, with Olivia Williams as the President, and written by Joe Eszterhas. In the summer of 2022, I also joined the Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 productions as Splinter Unit director. At Halloween 2023, the Apple TV+ show that I co-executive-produced, 'The Enfield Poltergeist', premiered. I run regular filmmaking workshops for filmmakers both online and in person. Some people ask how I began making films? Like most filmmakers of my generation, it was with a Super 8mm camera, summertime and school friends, usually after watching a behind-the-scenes TV programme on a Hollywood movie like Star Wars. My first film was a zombie horror called Necronomicon, heavily influenced by John Carpenter's The Fog. And I was hooked for life. Contact me at Ealing Film Studios, Ealing Green, London, W5 5EP, UK
