Freakdog revisits Medusa Touch

Shrooms director Paddy Breathnach's new horror film is a tale of revenge where a barely-tolerated hanger-on in a group of bright young things suffers a paralysing accident during some fun and (drinking) games. Abnegating all responsibility, the selfish twenty-somethings abandon the severely injured young man - called a 'freakdog' by them - at a nearby hospital, where he remains in critical condition.

His eventual and bloody revenge is rather unusual, as the aggrieved youth seems to be enacting it from the torpor of his own coma, and the carefree bar-set find their cares added to considerably as they drop one-by-one, in the time honoured tradition of teen slashers...

Freakdog seems to be revisiting the territory of the 1978 Richard Burton thriller The Medusa Touch, where Burton plays a mysterious telekinetic novelist with 'the power to create catastrophe'. In the film, the John Morlar - Burton's hospitalised character, though his name is eventually shown to be a complete mystery - crashes a 747 into the side of Centre Point in London's West End just by the power of thought, and - in a series of flashbacks told in a police procedural style - is seen to wreak revenge on his enemies. At the film's conclusion, Burton, still apparently comatose, destroys Westminster cathedral as well.

Or will Freakdog be a mindfuck instead, where the entire film happens in one second of activity in the occipital lobe...?

Freakdog will be shown at Frightfest in the Autumn.

Interview with Paddy Breathnach