The Shining was voted most frightening horror ever at the start of the week. But new hit chiller Paranormal Activity is being sold as such. Can they both be right? Stuart Heritage invites you to a scary movie smackdown

What’s the scariest film of all time? It’s an age-old debate, and one that many thought could never be solved. After all, fear is such a personal and individual emotion that categorising any one thing as being definitively scarier than anything else seemed like a worthless pursuit. Or at least it did until a couple of people told the world what the scariest films of all time were recently. And now we know.

The scariest film of all time isn’t The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or Don’t Look Now or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It isn’t The Wicker Man, unless you’re terrified of weird hair and bad sweaters. And it definitely isn’t any of the Saw movies, for the simple reason that Jigsaw seems like the sort of person who’d quite enjoy a nice game of Sudoku. No, the scariest movie ever made is either Paranormal Activity or The Shining. It’s definitely one of those two.

The Shining has earnt its place because this week it was named as the scariest movie ever in a survey conducted by Totalscifionline.com. Meanwhile, recent American box office sensation Paranormal Activity is in the running because a couple of blogs said that it might be the scariest film of all time about a fortnight ago. But which one is the scariest? It’s impossible to say. The only thing that can decide this once and for all is science. And by “science” I mean “a middling sort of Top Trumps rip-off”. Ready?

Best urban myth about the film

They say that Stanley Kubrick refused to tell Danny Lloyd that he was starring in a horror during the filming of The Shining, which isn’t a very scary fact. They also say that Steven Spielberg convinced himself that his screener DVD of Paranormal Activity was haunted. That isn’t a very scary fact either, but it wins on grounds of outright stupidity.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Influences

Stylistically and thematically, The Shining nods to both Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Hansel And Gretel, two stories that have frightened for generations. Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity takes its lead from The Blair Witch Project – a film about some runny-nosed idiots running around a forest and whining a bit.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best parody

Even though it’s brand new, Paranormal Activity already has its fair share of YouTube parodies, the best of which seems to be Paranerdal Activity. But The Shining has Shining, the recut trailer that’s still as sublime as the first time you saw it almost four years ago. WINNER: The Shining.

Best cast pedigree

The Shining: Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Shelly Duvall from Annie Hall. Paranormal Activity: Micah Stoat and Katie Featherstone from nothing else at all.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best reaction video

Terrified audience reaction videos are so key to Paranormal Activity’s success that they even make up much of the film’s trailer. Meanwhile, all The Shining can muster is this. The Shining makes toddlers giggle adorably. Fact.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Scariest title

Paranormal Activity has two scary things in it – the word “paranormal” and the word “activity”, which we already know will be of a paranormal nature because of the word that precedes it. Then there’s The Shining. You know what shines? A nice pair of new shoes. Shoes aren’t particularly scary.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Amount of racehorses named after lines from the film

The Shining has Red Rum, obviously, but until someone breeds a horse called Hey, It Looks Like Something’s Bit You, then it draws a big fat zero.
WINNER: The Shining.

So there it is. The Shining is the scariest film ever made. Now let’s hear no more about it.

The Shining was voted most frightening horror ever at the start of the week. But new hit chiller Paranormal Activity is being sold as such. Can they both be right? Stuart Heritage invites you to a scary movie smackdown

What’s the scariest film of all time? It’s an age-old debate, and one that many thought could never be solved. After all, fear is such a personal and individual emotion that categorising any one thing as being definitively scarier than anything else seemed like a worthless pursuit. Or at least it did until a couple of people told the world what the scariest films of all time were recently. And now we know.

The scariest film of all time isn’t The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or Don’t Look Now or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It isn’t The Wicker Man, unless you’re terrified of weird hair and bad sweaters. And it definitely isn’t any of the Saw movies, for the simple reason that Jigsaw seems like the sort of person who’d quite enjoy a nice game of Sudoku. No, the scariest movie ever made is either Paranormal Activity or The Shining. It’s definitely one of those two.

The Shining has earnt its place because this week it was named as the scariest movie ever in a survey conducted by Totalscifionline.com. Meanwhile, recent American box office sensation Paranormal Activity is in the running because a couple of blogs said that it might be the scariest film of all time about a fortnight ago. But which one is the scariest? It’s impossible to say. The only thing that can decide this once and for all is science. And by “science” I mean “a middling sort of Top Trumps rip-off”. Ready?

Best urban myth about the film

They say that Stanley Kubrick refused to tell Danny Lloyd that he was starring in a horror during the filming of The Shining, which isn’t a very scary fact. They also say that Steven Spielberg convinced himself that his screener DVD of Paranormal Activity was haunted. That isn’t a very scary fact either, but it wins on grounds of outright stupidity.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Influences

Stylistically and thematically, The Shining nods to both Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Hansel And Gretel, two stories that have frightened for generations. Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity takes its lead from The Blair Witch Project – a film about some runny-nosed idiots running around a forest and whining a bit.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best parody

Even though it’s brand new, Paranormal Activity already has its fair share of YouTube parodies, the best of which seems to be Paranerdal Activity. But The Shining has Shining, the recut trailer that’s still as sublime as the first time you saw it almost four years ago. WINNER: The Shining.

Best cast pedigree

The Shining: Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Shelly Duvall from Annie Hall. Paranormal Activity: Micah Stoat and Katie Featherstone from nothing else at all.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best reaction video

Terrified audience reaction videos are so key to Paranormal Activity’s success that they even make up much of the film’s trailer. Meanwhile, all The Shining can muster is this. The Shining makes toddlers giggle adorably. Fact.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Scariest title

Paranormal Activity has two scary things in it – the word “paranormal” and the word “activity”, which we already know will be of a paranormal nature because of the word that precedes it. Then there’s The Shining. You know what shines? A nice pair of new shoes. Shoes aren’t particularly scary.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Amount of racehorses named after lines from the film

The Shining has Red Rum, obviously, but until someone breeds a horse called Hey, It Looks Like Something’s Bit You, then it draws a big fat zero.
WINNER: The Shining.

So there it is. The Shining is the scariest film ever made. Now let’s hear no more about it.

Whether it’s explaining character motivation, or the effect on the audience, film invites you to sit on the psychologist’s couch

Cinema is a powerful medium for exploring the human condition and the complicated workings of the mind. That is why it has particular resonance for psychoanalysis. Cinema allows the inner world to be represented through moving pictures – and some of our most vivid modes of “thinking” or “dreaming” occur in pictorial form. The mind’s capacity for flights of thought, for complex networks of fantasy, can be represented in the sometimes headlong careering of cinematic images.

Film can offer an enlightening and sometimes disturbing insight into troublesome or dangerous emotional states – and film directors have been engaged by the richness of their characters’ inner lives as psychoanalysts have by their patients’. Both groups learned from the other: many psychoanalysts have written on film, while film theorists and writers have made use of psychoanalytical concepts.

So how are psychoanalytic ideas helpful in thinking about films, and the experience of being in the cinema? First, films offer a narrative of human experiences, relations and activities. Psychoanalytic ideas help make sense of characters’ behaviour, though unlike in real life we don’t have the characters responding to help deepen, modify or falsify our interpretations. Instead, we try to make objective appraisals of what the director presents to us.

A psychoanalytic account of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) might include reference to Donald Winnicott’s account of false self functioning. Winnicott suggested that too much intrusion into a child’s life might hamper their ability to be spontaneous in later life, and lead them unconsciously to become insincere and overconcerned with conforming. Truman Burbank, the protagonist of the film, strikes us as such a figure, and part of the pain of the early scenes lies in this sense of his falseness: his over-friendly smile, exaggerated politeness, forced joking and cliche-ridden language. The film portrays his voyage (including a literal voyage) to an uncertain exit from his defensive and unsatisfying, but protected life, an escape requiring not only suspicion and rebellion on his part, but also a supportive Other.

Close-ups on a character’s face and eyes offer an irresistible invitation to the spectator to enter further into the character’s internal world. Psychoanalytic insight can be applied across other art forms, but there is another kind that focuses on what is unique to cinema both as an art form and as an experience for the viewer. Films take place in dark rooms; they are illusions created by flickering beams of light. There’s a parallel in that with dreaming. Important, too, is the element of voyeurism; sitting in the dark, we become an illicit presence at often intimate and private interactions.

The setting itself may even suggest something of the primal scene. The film theorist Andrew Webber has suggested that the slicing of the eye in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) acts as a self-reflexive infliction of punishment on us, the viewers, for our voyeuristic and excited curiosity.

Films may also offer something akin to psychoanalytic working-through. In Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001), a mother, father (himself a psychoanalyst) and daughter work through the pain, rage and guilt about the tragic death in a diving accident of their adolescent son/brother. The process is observed in detail and with psychological accuracy, showing the different (defensive) strategies each of the surviving members of the family adopts to come to terms with their loss. Eventually it will be the unexpected appearance of a “third” (an ex-girlfriend of the dead boy) that allows the whole family to emerge from their grief.

Finally, some films also give the audience the chance to make use of Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit, or later revision, in which events can be reinterpreted. An obvious example would be Triumph of the Will, (1935) Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious and powerful propaganda documentary of Nazi Germany. Seen outside the ideological context in which it was made, it is transformed into the most effective condemnation of the regime it was intended to celebrate.

• Michael Brearley is president of the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The 5th European Psychoanalytic film festival is at Bafta, London W1, until Sunday. psychoanalysis.org.uk/epff5

Whether it’s explaining character motivation, or the effect on the audience, film invites you to sit on the psychologist’s couch

Cinema is a powerful medium for exploring the human condition and the complicated workings of the mind. That is why it has particular resonance for psychoanalysis. Cinema allows the inner world to be represented through moving pictures – and some of our most vivid modes of “thinking” or “dreaming” occur in pictorial form. The mind’s capacity for flights of thought, for complex networks of fantasy, can be represented in the sometimes headlong careering of cinematic images.

Film can offer an enlightening and sometimes disturbing insight into troublesome or dangerous emotional states – and film directors have been engaged by the richness of their characters’ inner lives as psychoanalysts have by their patients’. Both groups learned from the other: many psychoanalysts have written on film, while film theorists and writers have made use of psychoanalytical concepts.

So how are psychoanalytic ideas helpful in thinking about films, and the experience of being in the cinema? First, films offer a narrative of human experiences, relations and activities. Psychoanalytic ideas help make sense of characters’ behaviour, though unlike in real life we don’t have the characters responding to help deepen, modify or falsify our interpretations. Instead, we try to make objective appraisals of what the director presents to us.

A psychoanalytic account of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) might include reference to Donald Winnicott’s account of false self functioning. Winnicott suggested that too much intrusion into a child’s life might hamper their ability to be spontaneous in later life, and lead them unconsciously to become insincere and overconcerned with conforming. Truman Burbank, the protagonist of the film, strikes us as such a figure, and part of the pain of the early scenes lies in this sense of his falseness: his over-friendly smile, exaggerated politeness, forced joking and cliche-ridden language. The film portrays his voyage (including a literal voyage) to an uncertain exit from his defensive and unsatisfying, but protected life, an escape requiring not only suspicion and rebellion on his part, but also a supportive Other.

Close-ups on a character’s face and eyes offer an irresistible invitation to the spectator to enter further into the character’s internal world. Psychoanalytic insight can be applied across other art forms, but there is another kind that focuses on what is unique to cinema both as an art form and as an experience for the viewer. Films take place in dark rooms; they are illusions created by flickering beams of light. There’s a parallel in that with dreaming. Important, too, is the element of voyeurism; sitting in the dark, we become an illicit presence at often intimate and private interactions.

The setting itself may even suggest something of the primal scene. The film theorist Andrew Webber has suggested that the slicing of the eye in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) acts as a self-reflexive infliction of punishment on us, the viewers, for our voyeuristic and excited curiosity.

Films may also offer something akin to psychoanalytic working-through. In Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001), a mother, father (himself a psychoanalyst) and daughter work through the pain, rage and guilt about the tragic death in a diving accident of their adolescent son/brother. The process is observed in detail and with psychological accuracy, showing the different (defensive) strategies each of the surviving members of the family adopts to come to terms with their loss. Eventually it will be the unexpected appearance of a “third” (an ex-girlfriend of the dead boy) that allows the whole family to emerge from their grief.

Finally, some films also give the audience the chance to make use of Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit, or later revision, in which events can be reinterpreted. An obvious example would be Triumph of the Will, (1935) Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious and powerful propaganda documentary of Nazi Germany. Seen outside the ideological context in which it was made, it is transformed into the most effective condemnation of the regime it was intended to celebrate.

• Michael Brearley is president of the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The 5th European Psychoanalytic film festival is at Bafta, London W1, until Sunday. psychoanalysis.org.uk/epff5

The film was called Hell, and it duly became hell. But this 1964 flop by Henri-Georges Clouzot shouldn’t blind us to his genius

Brigitte Bardot called him “a negative being, for ever at odds with himself and the world around him”. Another actor described him as “an interfering man who wanted every actor under his control”. The man they are both describing is Henri-Georges Clouzot, one of France’s greatest film directors, whose work plumbed the depths of misanthropy, paranoia and revenge so unremittingly that it was hard not to believe he was exploring his own psyche in public.

Clouzot was hated and feted in equal measure. One of his first masterpieces, the 1943 film Le Corbeau, is now hailed by critics, but on release it united the French left and the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in an unlikely alliance against Clouzot’s vision of pettiness and self-loathing in a small French wartime town divided by a poison-pen letter scandal. It was brave story to tell in a France torn apart by war; Le Corbeau was pulled from cinemas, Clouzot was fired from the Nazi-owned Continental studios and, after the war, received a lifetime ban (rescinded in 1947) from the French film industry for working with the Nazis.

Today he is largely forgotten, or at best mistaken for the bumbling inspector in the Pink Panther franchise. But now the disgracefully neglected Clouzot is being brought to new audiences with a documentary about his doomed 1964 project concerning a jealous husband’s mental collapse into paranoid fantasy. Called L’Enfer (Hell), the film became a real hell for the director and everyone on set.

One of L’Enfer’s problems was that Clouzot had by then become notorious as a director with a taste for violence and betrayal – and not just in his films. During the filming of La Vérité (The Truth) in 1960, he wanted Brigitte Bardot to fall asleep and drool for one scene. As you do. So he gave her some pills saying they were painkillers. They turned out to be sleeping pills. Bardot had to have her stomach pumped. Her subsequent verbal attack on him was understandable. But she was not the only actress he made suffer. Suzy Delair, who starred in the 1947 film Quai des Orfèvres, disclosed that he slapped her on set. “So what?” Delair told one interviewer. “He slapped others as well … He was tough but I’m not about to complain.”

In terms of violence to his female stars, Clouzot was a monstre sacré akin to his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired and whose psychological thrillers of the 1950s and 60s bear close comparison with Clouzot’s greatest films – The Wages of Fear (1953), starring Yves Montand, and Les Diaboliques (1955), with Simone Signoret as a wronged wife who conspires with his mistress to murder her husband. Four years after La Vérité, Clouzot set about making L’Enfer. It was about a man driven mad by the supposed infidelities of his beautiful wife.

Clouzot cast 26-year-old Romy Schneider, who, though Austrian, was then one of France’s leading film stars. French cinema was a-tremble with expectation: could L’Enfer repeat the success of his earlier, great films? And what on-set tortures did Clouzot have in store for Schneider?

Moreover, French cinema had been revolutionised by the nouvelle vague since his last film, and the likes of Godard and Truffaut had arguably eclipsed Clouzot. Could he now show those young pups he was still the greatest French exponent of the seventh art? The director Costa-Gavras, who worked as production assistant on L’Enfer, said: “He was criticised by the nouvelle vague for planning out everything in the script. The big word of the epoch was ‘improvise’. He had a nice line about that: ‘I improvise on paper.’”

Clouzot was known as a forbiddingly meticulous metteur en scène, storyboarding his films so intensively that actors often felt thwarted. On L’Enfer, he sought to revolutionise cinema by meticulously creating a film using the experimental sounds of Pierre Boulez’s Ircam in Paris, and the then-voguish images of kinetic art to express his hero’s increasingly wild fantasy life. These lurid colour sequences would be juxtaposed with black-and-white footage shot on location.

But he never finished L’Enfer. After a few weeks of studio tests in Paris and 10 days on location, Clouzot abandoned it. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s new documentary anatomises that cinematic nightmare– and it makes painful viewing, though it is filled with tantalising images of what might have been.

How did it come about? Thirty years after Clouzot’s death in 1977, his widow, Inès de Gonzalez, found herself trapped in a broken lift with a young film-maker. During their enforced intimacy, Inès told Bromberg that she had 185 cans of film (about 13 hours) of the unfinished penultimate film. She entrusted the footage to Bromberg to make a film containing interviews with the crew and newly dramatised scenes based on Clouzot’s script.

But we also have something extra: Claude Chabrol’s 1994 film based on Clouzot’s script, also called L’Enfer, starring Emmanuelle Béart as the flirtatious wife and François Cluzet as the paranoid husband. That is hardly enough, even if Chabrol inherited Clouzot’s mantle as the French Hitchcock. His treatment of the story is never as bravura as Clouzot’s promised to be. The test shots for Clouzot’s L’Enfer that appear in the new documentary show that he envisaged using kinetic art in a way that parallels how Hitchcock had used Salvador Dalí’s surrealist dream sequences almost 20 years earlier on Spellbound.

Maybe, though, it was in making these test shots that Clouzot’s ambition went beyond his capacity to realise a film. Film-maker Bernard Stora, then an intern on the film, worked on the tests. “I walked into something totally insane,” he recalls. “Clouzot had the best cameramen and the most seasoned technicians. It seemed clear from the beginning they didn’t know what they were doing.”

The producers, though, saw rushes of this stuff and loosened the purse strings: they saw genius where Stora saw insanity. Clouzot then had a virtually unlimited budget – but it only encouraged him to dream big and worry 24/7. Once on set, hell began in earnest. Clouzot started shooting at a lakeside hotel. But there was a difficulty. The lake, which figured in most scenes, was scheduled to be drained for a hydroelectric generating project. Clouzot had only 20 days to wrap the project. The shoot became as tense as a countdown Hollywood thriller.

L’Enfer’s key protagonists – Schneider, Serge Reggiani (who played the fantasising husband) and Clouzot – are all dead. But what we learn from the documentary is that Clouzot upset his leading man much more than his leading lady. After 10 days on set, Reggiani walked off, claiming to be suffering from Maltese fever, and threatening legal action. “Serge said he wasn’t there to be insulted by a schizophrenic maniac,” says Lan Nguyen, a junior member of the crew.

Reggiani, according to other crew members, had been steeling himself against being bullied on set by the notorious Clouzot and so was already in a highly strained state. How had Clouzot upset Reggiani? He had insisted that, in order to demonstrate the husband’s jealousy, Reggiani would have to run behind a camera car repeatedly, ostensibly following Schneider’s car. Reggiani found himself running for 10 miles a day up vertiginous mountain roads – great footage, but the ordeal took its toll.

After Reggiani quit, Clouzot needed a replacement. Jean-Louis Trintignant (male foil in the 1956 Bardot vehicle And God Created Woman, and soon to be a star of European art cinema) was invited to the set and was wooed by Clouzot into taking the part – but decided against it.

Clouzot now decided it was too late to hire a replacement. Notoriously insomniac at the best of times, he rewrote the film through the nights and shot new footage during the days. The idea was that he would later edit his way around the problem of not having his leading man on set. He became increasingly stressed, alienated and paranoid. Perhaps – and this is just a thought – he should have taken the role himself?

And then one day, while he was filming Romy Schneider and Dany Carel having a lesbian tryst on a boat on the lake, he had a heart attack. He was taken to hospital and was compelled to abandon the film. “It happened at the right moment,” says Stora. “Things weren’t going well.”

Clouzot would make only one more film before his death in 1977. In 1968′s La Prisonnière, he used some of those weirdo kinetic art shots he had filmed for L’Enfer. It didn’t revolutionise cinema, and was forgotten even in a France that cherishes its cinema. Clouzot had been consumed by the very hell he tried, and failed, to show on screen.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is released next Friday

Harmony Korine is the one-man awkward squad of indie cinema, and his new film Trash Humpers, a tale of delinquent seniors, looks to be his most off-putting yet

On stage during a Q&A after the London premiere of his new film Trash Humpers, it’s as if Harmony Korine has become a character in one of his movies: a bad-taste bar mitzvah comedian, perhaps. Someone in the audience asks how he cast the film’s trio of suburban prostitutes. Korine replies that one of them was his high-school girlfriend: “I admit she doesn’t look that great today.” Ba-boom. Where did he get the idea for the film? Well, there was this house in his neighbourhood when he was a kid where people would dump their elderly relatives for $90 a month. The old folks were fed undercooked meat and forced to listen to Herman’s Hermits. With a final flourish, answering who knows what question, Korine declares, “I’m the most American director making movies today.” He’s beaming wildly.

That last line has the audience in stitches, not least because the film they’ve just watched is Korine’s least accessible (some would say least watchable) to date. If you have seen his 1997 directing debut, Gummo, then imagine its glue-sniffing teenagers 50 years down the line. They’ve become gonzo OAPs, suburban winos who prowl Nashville back alleys at night, dry-humping dustbins and bridges, cackling insanely and committing the occasional murder. There’s no plot, little comprehensible dialogue and no suggestion of a world outside the humpers’ network of miscreant buddies (whose number includes a cross-dressing poet in a French maid’s outfit). What’s more, the actors aren’t even old people: Korine cast himself, his wife Rachel and a couple of buddies, all wearing masks and looking like retirement home Freddy Krugers. Filmed on crappy VHS in the style of a home movie, Trash Humpers is the cinematic equivalent of listening to black metal: most people hate it, some can stomach 10 minutes, only the devoted will go the full 78 minutes.

After the Q&A I bump into a friend of Korine’s who worked on the film. How much of what he said on stage was true? “Some of it,” he says laughing. “A lot of it was complete fantasy.” In the past newspaper features about Korine were littered with his self-mythologising tall tales (there was the one about the time he found a piece of a guy’s shoulder in a pillowcase). A mutual acquaintance who has known Korine since around the time Kids was released in 1995 (he wrote the script at 19) tells a good story of the director being in Los Angeles in the late 90s. This was around the time Werner Herzog was calling him “the future of American cinema”. A big Hollywood actor, hearing Korine was in town, summoned the young director to the studio where he was filming. Korine showed up in blackface and took off his trousers before being chased off by security. There’s a video of it somewhere, apparently. Or is it just one of the fibs that Korine likes to circulate?

But during our interview proper, the day before the premiere, American indie’s enfant terrible keeps his answers more or less straight. Now 36, with grey streaks in his beard, he’s a darn sight more sprightly than when he was a few years ago, when he lived in London and shuffled around looking twitchy. The only trace now of his once-distinctive jitters is the non-stop gum-chewing.

Others on Team Trash Humpers make up for Korine’s seeming lack of nerves; you get the impression they are uncertain how to plug the film. A publicist calls it his detox film (Korine is a former heroin user), a purging of all those nasty toxins. That would explain the paranoid tone, but in truth he has been clean for a few years. Korine says the film is more of a reaction to Mister Lonely, last year’s comeback. His first film in eight years, Mister Lonely was a rich and touchingly old-fashioned melodrama set in a commune of celebrity impersonators. But with an $8.2m budget, he says he found the backroom wrangling crippling: “The people involved, the logistics, the bureaucracy. So much energy is put into capitulating. It just chops your head off.” Korine thrusts himself into the back of his seat for effect. Trash Humpers was more of a wham-bam production. Shooting – practically on his doorstop – started four months ago and he was done editing in time for the Toronto film festival in September.

So far the film has divided opinion – nothing new for him there. Experimental art film or sub-Jackass goof-off? Korine seems to be hedging his bets ever so slightly on its place in his body of work. Maybe it’s not even a movie at all, he suggests: “I wanted to make something that replicated an artefact. Or a found object.” At one point there was talk of presenting it as a VHS tape that had been found in a ditch or in a box in someone’s attic.

In perhaps his only lapse into interview whimsy, Korine claims that when he was making the film he was convinced of its commercial appeal: “I was actually thinking it would be the kind of thing someone like Miley Cyrus might like.” What would Miley Cyrus like about it? The man fellating a twig? “I just thought it was so base and, in some ways, so on the surface, that it’s something that someone like her could identify with.” He’s beaming again. As usual, he doesn’t give a twig himself for criticism, or for the charge that Trash Humpers is nothing more than boring provocation: “I don’t give a fuck if people think that or not. I honestly don’t care.”

Korine refuses to be drawn on his private life. He spent a handful of self-destructive years between New York, London and Paris. Anyone familiar with his work probably has a fair idea of the rest of it: break-up with on-off muse and girlfriend Chloe Sevigny, teeth falling out, houses burning down, drugs, near homelessness. Then there was Fight Harm, the abandoned film in which he picked fights with strangers, filmed by David Blaine. “I was quite unhealthy,” he says with a rueful grin. He pauses. “You can imagine, it was hell.” He shrugs and gives the table in front of him a little bang for emphasis.

Today, Korine’s back in Nashville, Tennessee, where he grew up. He’s married with a baby, and when he talks about family life it’s with zeal of a reformed man. ”Living there, you have space,” he says of his hometown. “That was one of the things that was missing from my life for a long time.” And Southern hospitality was a boon during the filming of Trash Humpers: “It would be really late at night and one of the characters would be fucking a trash bin, like really fucking it hard. And then a guy would come out of the house and see it and ask if we wanted the porch lights on.”

As for right now, Korine’s just finished work on a comedy script, and he’s got back the drive that saw him through the youthful burst of Kids, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. “At that time I was literally exploding. Internally I couldn’t contain my thoughts, my energy. At the same time, when I would close the door, I didn’t have much left. I was spent. Now I try to pace myself a little more.” Which reminds me of something said by Harmony Korine the quixotic wunderbrat, at the time of Gummo’s release: that great artists have 10 years in them at best. Was Korine’s decade back in the 90s? Or is it yet to come?

Harmony Korine is the one-man awkward squad of indie cinema, and his new film Trash Humpers, a tale of delinquent seniors, looks to be his most off-putting yet

On stage during a Q&A after the London premiere of his new film Trash Humpers, it’s as if Harmony Korine has become a character in one of his movies: a bad-taste bar mitzvah comedian, perhaps. Someone in the audience asks how he cast the film’s trio of suburban prostitutes. Korine replies that one of them was his high-school girlfriend: “I admit she doesn’t look that great today.” Ba-boom. Where did he get the idea for the film? Well, there was this house in his neighbourhood when he was a kid where people would dump their elderly relatives for $90 a month. The old folks were fed undercooked meat and forced to listen to Herman’s Hermits. With a final flourish, answering who knows what question, Korine declares, “I’m the most American director making movies today.” He’s beaming wildly.

That last line has the audience in stitches, not least because the film they’ve just watched is Korine’s least accessible (some would say least watchable) to date. If you have seen his 1997 directing debut, Gummo, then imagine its glue-sniffing teenagers 50 years down the line. They’ve become gonzo OAPs, suburban winos who prowl Nashville back alleys at night, dry-humping dustbins and bridges, cackling insanely and committing the occasional murder. There’s no plot, little comprehensible dialogue and no suggestion of a world outside the humpers’ network of miscreant buddies (whose number includes a cross-dressing poet in a French maid’s outfit). What’s more, the actors aren’t even old people: Korine cast himself, his wife Rachel and a couple of buddies, all wearing masks and looking like retirement home Freddy Krugers. Filmed on crappy VHS in the style of a home movie, Trash Humpers is the cinematic equivalent of listening to black metal: most people hate it, some can stomach 10 minutes, only the devoted will go the full 78 minutes.

After the Q&A I bump into a friend of Korine’s who worked on the film. How much of what he said on stage was true? “Some of it,” he says laughing. “A lot of it was complete fantasy.” In the past newspaper features about Korine were littered with his self-mythologising tall tales (there was the one about the time he found a piece of a guy’s shoulder in a pillowcase). A mutual acquaintance who has known Korine since around the time Kids was released in 1995 (he wrote the script at 19) tells a good story of the director being in Los Angeles in the late 90s. This was around the time Werner Herzog was calling him “the future of American cinema”. A big Hollywood actor, hearing Korine was in town, summoned the young director to the studio where he was filming. Korine showed up in blackface and took off his trousers before being chased off by security. There’s a video of it somewhere, apparently. Or is it just one of the fibs that Korine likes to circulate?

But during our interview proper, the day before the premiere, American indie’s enfant terrible keeps his answers more or less straight. Now 36, with grey streaks in his beard, he’s a darn sight more sprightly than when he was a few years ago, when he lived in London and shuffled around looking twitchy. The only trace now of his once-distinctive jitters is the non-stop gum-chewing.

Others on Team Trash Humpers make up for Korine’s seeming lack of nerves; you get the impression they are uncertain how to plug the film. A publicist calls it his detox film (Korine is a former heroin user), a purging of all those nasty toxins. That would explain the paranoid tone, but in truth he has been clean for a few years. Korine says the film is more of a reaction to Mister Lonely, last year’s comeback. His first film in eight years, Mister Lonely was a rich and touchingly old-fashioned melodrama set in a commune of celebrity impersonators. But with an $8.2m budget, he says he found the backroom wrangling crippling: “The people involved, the logistics, the bureaucracy. So much energy is put into capitulating. It just chops your head off.” Korine thrusts himself into the back of his seat for effect. Trash Humpers was more of a wham-bam production. Shooting – practically on his doorstop – started four months ago and he was done editing in time for the Toronto film festival in September.

So far the film has divided opinion – nothing new for him there. Experimental art film or sub-Jackass goof-off? Korine seems to be hedging his bets ever so slightly on its place in his body of work. Maybe it’s not even a movie at all, he suggests: “I wanted to make something that replicated an artefact. Or a found object.” At one point there was talk of presenting it as a VHS tape that had been found in a ditch or in a box in someone’s attic.

In perhaps his only lapse into interview whimsy, Korine claims that when he was making the film he was convinced of its commercial appeal: “I was actually thinking it would be the kind of thing someone like Miley Cyrus might like.” What would Miley Cyrus like about it? The man fellating a twig? “I just thought it was so base and, in some ways, so on the surface, that it’s something that someone like her could identify with.” He’s beaming again. As usual, he doesn’t give a twig himself for criticism, or for the charge that Trash Humpers is nothing more than boring provocation: “I don’t give a fuck if people think that or not. I honestly don’t care.”

Korine refuses to be drawn on his private life. He spent a handful of self-destructive years between New York, London and Paris. Anyone familiar with his work probably has a fair idea of the rest of it: break-up with on-off muse and girlfriend Chloe Sevigny, teeth falling out, houses burning down, drugs, near homelessness. Then there was Fight Harm, the abandoned film in which he picked fights with strangers, filmed by David Blaine. “I was quite unhealthy,” he says with a rueful grin. He pauses. “You can imagine, it was hell.” He shrugs and gives the table in front of him a little bang for emphasis.

Today, Korine’s back in Nashville, Tennessee, where he grew up. He’s married with a baby, and when he talks about family life it’s with zeal of a reformed man. ”Living there, you have space,” he says of his hometown. “That was one of the things that was missing from my life for a long time.” And Southern hospitality was a boon during the filming of Trash Humpers: “It would be really late at night and one of the characters would be fucking a trash bin, like really fucking it hard. And then a guy would come out of the house and see it and ask if we wanted the porch lights on.”

As for right now, Korine’s just finished work on a comedy script, and he’s got back the drive that saw him through the youthful burst of Kids, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. “At that time I was literally exploding. Internally I couldn’t contain my thoughts, my energy. At the same time, when I would close the door, I didn’t have much left. I was spent. Now I try to pace myself a little more.” Which reminds me of something said by Harmony Korine the quixotic wunderbrat, at the time of Gummo’s release: that great artists have 10 years in them at best. Was Korine’s decade back in the 90s? Or is it yet to come?

This tale of a young John Lennon, torn between his legendary mother and equally formidable aunt, is an accomplished feature debut from Sam Taylor-Wood

“A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror,” wrote Sigmund Freud – and Sigmund Freud was never twirled by his mum lasciviously around in a coffee bar to the novel sounds of rock’n'roll on the jukebox, and furthermore gigglingly taught by her that “rock’n'roll” actually means sex.

This was the dizzyingly erotic experience of the young John Lennon – played by 19-year-old newcomer Aaron Johnson – in this account of his painful, messy teenage years in 1950s Liverpool, written by Matt Greenhalgh (the author of Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic, Control) and directed by Sam Taylor-Wood.

The mother in question is the legendary Julia, played by Anne-Marie Duff, a cheerful lover of good times and rock’n'roll in all senses, who had a mysterious breakdown after John’s birth and surrendered parental control to her sister, the Tchaikovsky-loving and equally legendary Aunt Mimi, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who brought him up strictly with genteel, middle-class values.

As adulthood dawns, John’s increasingly rebellious discontent manifests itself in re-establishing contact with the dangerous Julia, who passionately introduces him to his musical destiny. She and John begin a strange kind of Oedipal affair, with Julia as the mistress and Aunt Mimi the wronged wife. John’s story is the story of the duel between these two women – an intolerable situation for which music is the only way out.

Taylor-Wood interestingly begins her film with the opening, jangling chord from A Hard Day’s Night, left hanging in a protracted silence until its potential for implied menace and even tragedy has been allowed to float free. It’s a witty opening, but apart from pointed references to “nowhere” in the script and in the title, to a glimpse of Strawberry Field children’s home and to a schoolbook doodling of “Walrus”, Greenhalgh notably avoids cute prophetic touches. However, it has to be said Julia does hang around a bit possessively backstage, to the unease of both John and the young Paul McCartney, played by Thomas Sangster. Heroically, Greenhalgh avoids gags about John letting a woman get between him and the band.

It’s a handsomely made film, with a very game lead performance from Johnson, hampered perhaps only by the fact that Lennon is really a rather callow figure at this stage; unlike, say, the more interesting, more grownup Lennon that Ian Hart played in Iain Softley’s 1994 film Backbeat. When John shows Julia an EP record of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, she asks where he got it, and John says he swapped it with a bloke at the docks. “Swapped it for what?” Julia asks sharply, and John has no idea what she’s implying.

Throughout the movie, I had the sense that Lennon was really a supporting turn and the stars were Julia and Mimi, but that, frustratingly, we were only ever allowed to see them from John’s lairy and semi-comprehending point of view. John has to be the focus, and part of the movie’s point is his youth, his poignant inability to appreciate how much these women love him.

And the film does contrive a tearful crisis in which the awful secret origins of the Mimi-John-Julia love triangle are laid bare. But for me, this finale was a little stagey, is resolved too easily and disconcertingly discloses a more intense story which has been happening, as it were, behind the movie’s back.

None the less, this is an accomplished feature debut from Taylor-Wood, and a satisfying follow-up to her likeable short film Love You More.

It looks like James Cameron is going for the tight-lipped PR approach for Avatar, and the Todd Solondz school of misanthropy might be supplying one of its finest graduates for the next Spider-Man villain

I’m a sucker for getting caught up in the hype for big blockbuster sci-fi movies that know exactly how to market themselves in order to look like the coolest thing since Ripley took out the xenomorph queen in Aliens. But so far the online publicity for Avatar, James Cameron’s forthcoming 3D megalith, hasn’t quite got under my skin. Far more exciting was the 15 minutes or so of actual footage that I saw earlier this year at the IMAX Waterloo in London. OK, so Cameron’s creation, the planet Pandora, did have a certain new-age whiff to it, with all those elfin, blue Thundercat types running around, but it was lurid, visceral and vivid enough to make you want to reach for the Peter Gabriel albums (and I’m a Peter Gabriel fan).

So far Avatar’s online hype machine has been limited to an OK teaser trailer and a pretty crappy website for supposed human recruits to travel to Pandora (which has admittedly improved somewhat since I first wrote about it last month).

The first full-length trailer is due to hit the web tomorrow, but an “international” version with unidentifiable subtitles is already available online, and reports are that it’s virtually indistinguishable from the English-language equivalent that’s about to drop. In the film, Jake (Sam Worthington), a disabled former marine given the chance to walk again via an alien body, or Avatar, which he can control with his mind, is charged with infiltrating the indigenous population of Pandora, the Na’avi, in order to help some evil military-industrial complex types plunder the priceless local mineral deposits. This new version appears to confirm a rather obvious story twist: it looks like Jake goes a little native and turns on his former employers.

There’s also a new featurette, which is mostly just Cameron waxing lyrical about what a genius Cameron is, while various other members of the cast and crew also make with the vapid hero worship, though it does contain a few shots we’ve not yet seen of Pandora.

For all the admittedly impressive motion capture involved, the technology, the ambition and the excellent cast, which includes the likes of Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi and Zoe Saldana, Avatar’s success will ultimately be predicated on its storyline, which right now looks like a pretty generic one that we’ve seen before in countless movies. Let’s hope Cameron includes a few further twists in the tale to shake things up a little.

Elsewhere this week, more rumours are leaking out about Spider-Man 4, Sam Raimi’s forthcoming return to the world of everyone’s favourite wall-crawling superhero type. This time the Evil Dead director is up against it after the critics turned on the series’ last outing, Spider-Man 3, due to its confused plot and multiple villains. The suggestion is that only one bad guy will feature this time, with Dylan Baker, always good value in unusual roles in movies such as Todd Solondz’s Happiness, looking likely to get the nod in the form of Spidey’s old enemy, The Lizard.

Baker already appears in the series as Peter Parker’s sometime tutor and mentor Dr Curt Connors, who in the original comic books is transformed into the reptilian supervillain, so the move makes plenty of sense. And while the New York-born actor doesn’t immediately come across as having the charisma of a Willem Dafoe or an Alfred Molina, who played the villains in the series’ celebrated first two instalments, he’s a class act who more than deserves the shot at a headline role.

What are your thoughts on this week’s stories? Are you getting excited about Avatar yet? And can Raimi turn round Spider-Man, which incidentally also looks set to be shot in 3D? Is Baker the right man to play the series’ next villain, or should a better-known actor be brought on board?

Stage makeover planned for 1988 Tom Cruise vehicle about a bartender who dreams of shaking things up with his own cocktail bar

The mania for turning movies into musicals continues apace with the news that boozy Tom Cruise classic Cocktail is to get a stage makeover.

The film’s screenwriter, Heywood Gould, told the New York Post that he was at work on a script during a 20th anniversary party for the movie.

The 1988 original starred Cruise as a talented stick-swizzler who relocates to Jamaica with Bryan Brown’s grizzled mentor to try and raise the money to fund a classy new bar called Cocktails and Dreams.

“I am writing it as we speak,” said Heywood. “[Producer] Marty Richards is on board and he’s working on the score. It’s far too early to talk about casting. We haven’t approached anybody yet. But I do like Katie Holmes.”

Holmes, now married to Cruise, would presumably be earmarked for the girlfriend role played by Elisabeth Shue in the original. But Gould may face competition from another movie-turned-musical: producers of the Broadway version of Finding Neverland are reported to have set their sights on Holmes for the Kate Winslet role.

Ten movies made into musicals in the past decade

The Producers: Ran and ran and ran until the only thing left to do was turn it into another film.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: John Lithgow and Norbert Leo Butz helped to rake in 11 Tony award nominations in 2005.

The Wedding Singer: Toured the UK in 2008, but never made it to the West End.

When Harry Met Sally: Luke Perry and Alyson Hannigan failed to reignite the magic in 2004.

Dirty Dancing: Currently playing in the UK, US and Germany.

Lord of the Rings: On an endless world tour.

Sweet Smell of Success: Short-lived but acclaimed hack-filled toe-tapper.

Spider-Man: Bono and the Edge have written the music. Julie Taymor directs. Alan Cumming stars as the Green Goblin. The limber hero has still to be announced.

High Fidelity: The all-singing, all-dancing stage show about a grumpy, list-obsessed record store owner closed after 14 performances in New York in 2006.

Grumpy Old Men: The musical of the 1993 film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau hits Broadway this winter, starring F Murray Abraham and George Hearn. A new character, Punky, sexes up the story.