In the spring of 2023, Strange Attractor Journal 5 was launched with a big event at Camden Art Centre. The most recent edition in this anthology series, it contained the full text of an unrealised screenplay I had written with David McGillivray back in 1997. The movie was to be called Let Me Die a Monster, and the opportunity to present a staged reading from it in public was too good to miss. David and I selected a couple of representative scenes and recruited some performers to read the key parts. The performance was very well received by a capacity audience. The action of Let Me Die a Monster takes place in the dying brain of Hollywood actor Nick Adams, who took his own life through a drug overdose. Nick Adams had been friends with James Dean and Elvis Presley; and there were also rumours that he’d had an affair with at least one of them. Adams was also one of a small number of Hollywood actors in the 1960s who went to Japan to make monster movies. He had the unique distinction of appearing opposite Godzilla in the 1965 kaiju epic Monster Zero (AKA Invasion of Astro Monster). The premise of Let Me Die a Monster is that, while dying, Adams imagines he's filming one last monster movie in Japan and has hallucinatory flashbacks to his time with James Dean and Elvis Presley. There’s an alien invasion going on as well, but that’s another story for another time. Meanwhile the British Film Institute had been preparing a Blu-Ray release of another Nick Adams movie that had come out the same year as Monster Zero – the British-made Die, Monster Die! in which he headlines with Boris Karloff.
Vic Pratt of the BFI wanted to know if David and I could re-stage one of the scenes we had presented at the Camden Art Centre launch event for inclusion as extra on the Blu-Ray of Die, Monster Die! We said we’d love to, and David quickly contacted Iain Stirland, who’d played Nick Adams in our reading, and Daryl Crick, who’d been our Elvis. After a couple of rehearsals, we were ready to film the scene, which we did in a secret location, more familiarly known to a select few as the kitchen in David’s house. Sarah Appleton worked and camera and the sound, Vic Pratt documented the whole thing, while I read the stage directions. David and I were filmed talking to-camera about Let Me Die a Monster and discussing Die, Monster Die! and the strange appeal of the Nick Adams story.
I am pleased to announce that the BFI Blu-Ray of Die, Monster Die! is now available for purchase, and you can find it right here. It is loaded with all sorts of extra goodies, and I feel very pleased and proud to find myself in such fabulous company. Die, Monster Die! makes the perfect companion to the script of Let Me Die A Monster as it appears in Strange Attractor 5, so consider your life incomplete without either of them. Available wherever you go to get your weird on. Thank you.
Pictured Above
Die, Monster Die! cover art for the BFI Blu-Ray release
Nick Adams (Iain Stirland) stops Elvis (Daryl Crick) from choking
KH during shooting
David McGillivray smiling wickedly
Sarah Appleton in action
David McGillivray holding a copy of Strange Attractor Journal 5 and KH with a vintage VHS of Die, Monster Die!
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