Escape To Castle Diablo

Hello there

So I want to tell you about yet another potential project I’ve got going on, which may well be a daft/doomed plan.

I mean, it’s definitely daft because I’m currently halfway through Scarecrow Club, ongoing with making and pitching Rocky Robot, ongoing with Cactus Man, ongoing with writing another project with Jon, and in the process of rejigging my art output into a proper sideline business.  This is all before we even get into the ongoing back-end tying up of The ParaPod AVBGH and hard copy production. 

But we all like to keep busy don’t we?  What better thing to do than another bloody writing project, and – even better – one that won’t even lend itself to patreon particularly well (unless I just show you all the writing I do on it, but that may slightly muddy the waters on what I’d like to do with it).

I’ll start by telling you something apparently unconnected, which will then become clear as to how it's relevant.

Between fringe shows with Big And Daft, the old comedy troupe with myself, Jon and Rob, we would do work in progress shows.  Everybody is the same, building up a portfolio of potential ideas to then go into your next fringe show. I can’t recall if it was between the first B.A.D fringe show, or between the second and third (seems less likely as the third show was a Christmas show which was more of a play), but we did a residency at the Hen & Chickens in London, with a show called Big And Daft – Escape From Castle Diablo. I definitely put some script from that show on here once.

The overall narrative of Big And Daft was that we were three brothers to different mothers, all from the same father.  The father had stipulated in his will that we had to live together for one year (then changed to two years, then to three, as we did more shows) in order to receive our inheritance.  That was the basic premise for why we were all living together and getting up to daft adventures like going to space or being kidnapped by Father Christmas.  I don’t know why I am explaining the plots, we all remember them from the olden days.  In many ways they are as popular now as they were then…

Escape From Castle Diablo was an idea we had, that the solicitor handling our father’s will was a man called Doctor Diablo, who – despite his innocuous name – was actually evil and attempting to get his hands on our fortune.  This was well before anyone had even heard the name Count Olaf, so there’s another thing we invented at the wrong time. Doctor Diablo originally appeared in a sitcom pitch we sent to Channel 4 called Pawn Stars (yep, again, years before the programme that actually got made), where the three of us were running a pawn shop for a reason that I can’t remember.  Jon said he saw the script not long ago and that it was dreadful. I think our good ideas ran out after coming up with the title.

Escape from Castle Diablo was another example of this, but in a far more deliberate manner.  When the audience entered, Jon and I were already on stage, tied back-to-back and in misery.  There was dramatic old gothic horror music playing, and when the lights went down there was a wordy speech from Doctor Diablo, explaining that he kidnapped us and was holding us in his castle.  It was all a very dramatic pantomime-high-concept idea, that we instantly undercut by finding a door in the room and escaping immediately, before just carrying on with our usual style of show and never mentioning it again. It was really clever and hilarious comedy.

I always liked the title of the show though.  I’ve had a little search tonight to see if I can find the poster, but I think it must be in the garage and it’s well cold tonight. I thought it was an intriguing and old-fashioned adventure title, that could have been more fleshed out as an actual story rather than an undercut premise (funny as that was).

So that’s the first bit of information in the post today, which we can put to one side.  

Now onto the second, before I bring all this together (you’ll see it coming a mile off though).

As I mentioned in December, I spent a bit of time reading old R Chetwynd Hayes stories over Christmas.  To quickly recap, they are short horror/macabre stories, that I first became aware of as a kid, and in the film The Monster Club, which was an adaptation of one of his collections. The Monster Club film was a portmanteau movie, including three stories with a linking premise.  It was a similar production (though sillier) to a lot of the Amicus Productions films like The Vault Of Horror (genuinely good, with amazing performances from Terry Thomas and Tom Baker) and From Beyond The Grave (which also adapts R Chetwynd Hayes stories, linking them with Peter Cushing running an old antique shop). The Monster Club wasn’t officially an Amicus production, but it may as well have been given the aesthetic and personnel involved in making it.

I watched a lot of these films over Christmas too, as well as Tales From The Crypt and Creepshow.  It would be fair to say I’ve got a little revived obsession for portmanteau  productions going on, alongside my already active joy of the off-kilter tales of The Twilight Zone.

In the middle of going through all this old stuff, I wrote my traditional Christmas Eve ghost story, which remains untitled, and – whilst not entirely consummate – I really enjoyed writing it.  It was influenced by my reading the RCH stories (although not in style, I don’t think I could write in his style), in the idea of putting together a jarring tale. I’d enjoyed writing the short story at Halloween too, about the three brothers who played tricks on each other.

The thought process went as follows; Reading the RCH stories, starting to watch (or rewatch) the portmanteau movies, writing the Christmas Eve story,  trying to play Resident Evil and feeling sick with the extreme violence, galvanised enjoyment of the gentler horror genre stuff, thinking I would like to try to write a collection in that style, thinking what stories I already had in stock (some of the completed/planned 4000 Words stories fall into the right bracket too), remembering the Halloween story and that it was about three brothers, thinking about the Big And Daft concept of Castle Diablo, realising this was potentially a constant to link the stories.

That paragraph pretty much sums up the jumbled way that my creative mind works when I am searching for an idea.

So I needed a ‘wraparound’ in order to frame short stories, and Castle Diablo felt like a nice setting.  I think there is something naff about the name Diablo, like a very easy go-to name for horror, but that’s totally in line with names like – for instance - Dr Terror. I was searching for something easy, and realised I had one in stock already.

The premise is currently that Castle Diablo is an actual castle (with a different name) that tourists go to, that is known in legend as Castle Diablo and has lots of ghost stories and tales of curses and the like.  The tour guide of the castle will essentially be the narrator, and all the stories will be (admittedly, tenuously) linked back/tied in to the castle.  I’m not sure at the moment that there will be an actual “wraparound” story (ie. A standalone linking story going on at the Castle itself), but I am having a think to see if I can come up with anything.  I presently envisage it as being written as though the tour guide is speaking directly to the reader about the castle, and there being some spookiness about who the tour guide actually is (I do promise that they will not be called Doctor Diablo though…that might be a silly-too-far).  Work in Progress title is the very simple “Tales From Castle Diablo”.

I can definitely link the Christmas Eve story into it, potentially the Halloween one, and I’ve managed to collate half a dozen ideas using both traditional archetypal horror stuff and original(ish) concepts.  It’s yet another thing I am a bit enthused about at the minute, so will keep beavering away at it and keep you up to date if it develops.

This all said, you can potentially have too many ongoing ideas at the same time, and I’m guilty of that, but the worthy ones usually fight their way to the top of my priorities. If nothing else, when I looked back at the Escape From Castle Diablo script, I did find several transferrable bits of dialogue for Rocky Robot.  I’m definitely going to search back through more Big And Daft scripts this week to see if there’s stuff that can be lifted from the past. They're all relatable as far as character relationships go. No use just sat abandoned on a hard drive forever – there could be gold in them thar hills.  Or bronze at least. Maybe tin.

Happy to hear any thoughts, as always

Have a lovely Friday please, and get that weekend on the go at your earliest opportunity.

Lots of love your way

xxxxxxxxxxxx