All You Need Is Death

All You Need Is Death (2024)

Love is a knife with a blade for a handle.

A young couple who collect rare folk ballads discover the dark side of love when they surreptitiously record and translate an ancient, taboo folk song from the deep, forgotten past.

Date of release
2024-03-19
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (25)
Runtime
1h 37m
Genres
Horror
Director
Paul Duane

Casting

Interesting facts

All You Need Is Death is a 2023 Irish horror film, written and directed by Paul Duane in his dramatic feature debut. It concerns a pair of ethnomusicologists who unethically record a recital of an ancient song, thereby inciting the negative attentions of supernatural forces. It was made on a shoestring budget initially entirely funded by the director, and featured largely unknown actors with the exceptions of Olwen Fouéré and Gary Whelan.

Production

Duane decided to make a low-budget horror film in June 2021 while in lockdown during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland. He had previously worked in television and documentary film, notably directing the highly praised Barbaric Genius (2011) about writer and iconoclast John Healy, as well as several music-oriented documentaries.

Although the production later attracted funding from Screen Ireland, many members of the production crew agreed to work for low fees or perform roles above their usual pay grade, and the film's post-production was completed on a deferred pay basis, Duane incurred significant debt in funding it.

My main guiding idea was to use traditional instruments in unusual ways to suggest something primal and chthonic. I often envisioned people living in pre-Christian Ireland getting a hold of these instruments somehow. I wondered about how they would make sense of them, how they would hold them, how they would use them and what sounds they would make to accompany their religious observances, their chants and their rituals.

Duane's impetus for writing the film came after watching a lot of folk horror such as Kill List, Haxan and The Wicker Man and wanting to centre folk music in the genre, telling one interviewer "I wanted to do something that I'd never seen anyone do before which was make a folk horror that accentuates the folk." The first person Duane sent his script to was musician Ian Lynch of Irish doom folk band Lankum.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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