FOR THE HELL OF IT – A modern supernatural thriller featuring a group of friends at a beach slumber party who become freaked out by the arrival of a severed head washed ashore.

I’ve always enjoyed the Universal movies of the 1930s and 40s, notably Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and The Old Dark House, all directed by James Whale, plus the Hammer films made at Bray (and later at Pinewood) and the Amicus horror pictures produced at Shepperton in the 50s and 60s, yet I’ve never been a particular fan of the slasher movie. However, I recently saw Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me, Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (Cornish for ‘Stone Island’) and Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear, all modern takes on the horror movie and I admired each in different ways, and so I thought why not write a story with lots of spilt guts and horrible deaths to add the collection?

Next morning I woke up with the image of a severed head washed up on a beach and a group of thirty-somethings who discover it. Perhaps it was from an old storybook I’d read of the legend of Blackbeard’s ghost, where his chopped head is hung from the bowsprit of the ship. Or perhaps it was Caravaggio’s ‘Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist’, one of the many religious paintings I saw every day on the walls at school. I remembered as well William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which also had a beach setting, and the parable nature of that paradise story began to colour the one I was forming in my mind of a tale involving seven little sins. And the more I thought about the plot, the more I realised the best way of presenting the tale would be in a screenplay format. Not a shooting script with ‘Fade to’, ‘Cuts to’ and the rest, but rather a story that is primarily written as visual images, action and dialogue, which activates, as it were, the camera inside the reader’s imagination. And that was my intention with the screenplay format of For the Hell of It.

"'A picture is worth a thousand words', but with Steve Nallon's For The Hell Of It, his words evoke a thousand pictures. Beautifully written, thought provoking and original, the script feels like an adaptation of a literary classic."

John Henderson, BAFTA and Emmy winning director