Ultraviolet articles & Reviews
From the The Australian, November 2, 1998
A case to get your teeth into by Amanda Meade
Australian actor Philip Quast poses the question: "How many people go to church and drink the blood of Christ?"
Speaking from Morocco where he is filming the $100 million US TV mini-series Cleopatra, Quast argues that a new ABC drama series about vampires, Ultraviolet, has a perfectly believable premise.
Vampires exist in the modern world and a secret police squad, funded by the Vatican, is needed to ward off their evil ways. "No, I don't actually believe in vampires but, honestly, the scripts are so real it's hard not to." Quast says. "And a lot of people do!"
Ultraviolet, a new six-part drama from the UK's Channel 4, is produced by World Productions, the outfit which brought us the ABC's cult hit earlier this year, This Life.
Jack Davenport (Miles in This Life) stars in Ultraviolet as Michael Colefield, an honest detective sergeant and a reluctant recruit to the clandestine anti-vampire squad.
In episode one his best friend Jack, also a detective, disappears on his stag night and Michael's loyalty sees him interrogated by the squad investigating the mystery.
Quast, who settled in London with his wife and three boys three years ago,plays Pearse Harman, the enigmatic leader of the squad and a Catholic priest with close connections to the Vatican.
"I read the script and I wanted to do it straight away." Quast says. "I think nearly every actor in London wanted to do it. The scripts read wonderfully. There was never anything changed on set."
Earlier this year Quast won his second Olivier, Britain's top theatrical honour, for best actor in a musical for his performance as a cripple in the Donmar Warehouse/Cameron Mackintosh production of The Fix. His previous Olivier was for Sunday In The Park With George in 1990.
Since 1989 Quast has been dividing his time between England and Australia.
The son of a Tamworth turkey farmer, Quast remains fiercely modest and rejects the whole notion of being a star.
He has always said he doesn't think his life is any more interesting than anyone else's.
He is very proud, however, of Ultraviolet which was well received in the UK. He believes people will find it difficult to follow the plot in the first two episodes but urges them to persist. Certainly, there is nothing obvious about it. There are no long pointy teeth, wooden stakes, black cloaks or garlic cloves.
"In fact the word vampire is never used." Quast says. "Only the subtle reference to 'Code V'."
Ultraviolet is a modern take on vampire mythology. Against the modern vampire enemy the clandestine squad uses carbon bullets, the chemical allacin and ultraviolet, instead of daylight.
"I think it is done very, very well considering it's a cult thing." Quast says. "The issue is taken very seriously."
Producers have taken the medieval concept of vampires and woven into the script modern issues such as AIDS, global warming, CJD, Ebola, pollution and abortion. The vampires believe mankind is destroying their life force blood and they are fighting back.
Quast: "My character gets a blood disease in the third episode and then he faces a dilemma." Quast says. "The method of the vampires is to recruit people who are ill and give them immortality."
From the Radio Times, under BBC`s Todays Choices for
Tuesday.
"A complex and convoluted plotline ushers in this 6 part series that is part thriller and part horror tale Although the word is never mentioned in the first hour, it`s all about vampires and how they would operate in the contemporary world. It takes old fears and them into today`s paranoias - Aids, conspiracy theories, the end of the world and so on.
These are not your usual vampires. They don`t work alone, they don`t bare fangs and they don`t hold with garlic and wooden stakes. The only thing they have in common with Christopher Lee is a lack of reflection. And they are sensitive to Ultraviolet light."
From The Guardian
Necks and drugs and rock'n'roll
The myth of the vampire owes its all to Victorian repression. What's it doing in the Pill-popping, partner-swapping 1990s, asks Justina Hart
Thursday September 3, 1998
In the UK writer/director Joe Ahearne, best known for his work on This Life, has just produced Ultraviolet, a sophisticated six-part re-working of the myth for TV. His immortals, who resemble mourners at a posh funeral, drive black cars with tinted windows. They seek world domination and are organised along similar lines to James Bond's villains. They invest vast wealth in researching diseases like leukaemia to keep their food source in prime condition, and bite only victims who want to become vampires. It's not entirely PC: in one episode, a car-crash victim chooses to become a blood-sucker rather than end up in a wheelchair.
But creators of modern vampires are caught in a bind. Dracula may be a damn good yarn, but its black-and-white morality, its goody-two-shoes doctors and lawyers who constrain the proto-feminist heroine, Mina, leave us cold. To have resonance, the myth must be updated. Yet because Dracula is so grounded in the culture of the late 19th century, re-workings risk reducing the myth to silly blood 'n'sex fests or producing creatures that aren't properly vampiric."
Joe Ahearne believes vampire films appeal to teenage boys
because they're "a safe exploration of sex", but in Ultraviolet
he has dispensed with eroticism, garlic and running around
with stakes, to produce a cool study of modern paranoias.
"It's about what unsettles people today," he says. "Some
fears are age-old, like dying, but the series includes modern
terrors like Aids, genetic engineering and paedophilia."
Ahearne has applied science to both vampires and humans.
He has also tried to respect the myth. "It's very logical. If
you say vampires don't show in mirrors, then they don't
appear in photos or on video." (As one of the
vampire-hunters points out: "Surveillance is a bitch.") But, in
a departure from Stoker, he's re-invented the villains not
just as embodiments of evil but as rational beings that
behave as their nature dictates.
Holland believes this type of scientific gloss is inevitable in any vampire work not set in the period of the original novel. But he argues that once you strip away the element of sexual depravity, you're left with super-beings or aliens by another name.
"The basic myth remains of creatures coming from the night, abducting you and taking your blood - but that's really the same plot as The X Files," he claims. "The advantage The X Files has is that a high percentage of people actually believe in alien abductions." He says the true appeal of the vampire myth is still that it's "about the pleasures of forbidden excess, addiction and drugs".
Ultraviolet starts on September 15 on Channel 4
Ultraviolet - a review
By Pete Clark, Evening Standard, 16/09/98
The latest programme to play on our fear that nothing is what it seems is Ultraviolet. Whereas the horrors contained in previous examples of the genre from Twilight Zone to the X Files, could be held a bay because most of the bad and spooky stuff happened in America, Ultraviolet is set firmly in London. There is no escape.
Because of the lavish Press advertising attending Ultraviolet, and the frequent showing of ultra slick trailers, the programme has been widely compared to a UK version of the X Files. This is at once a compliment and a kick in the extra-terrestrials. The problem with even the most confident of homegrown attempts at designer chills - and Ultraviolet is nothing if not confident - is that we start making comparisons immediately, and most of them are odious. I spent the first 10 minutes checking out hairstyles, possibly to the detriment of the action. Was there anything here to match the supreme floppiness of Mulder's mane, or Scully's bob? And then ther was the vexed question of the tailoring: would the characters be able to take a good beating, and still spring up as if about to take to the catwalk?
In the event , none of it mattered. The plot was a fabulous confection involving thoroughly modern vampires, the Army, massive counterfeiting operations, and the church. The last is a sadly under-used atmospheric device, offering as it does, a fast track to 2,000 years' worth of nameless fear and wonder. There was one was one scene inside a church - where the camera did nothing more than linger on a hymn board with three tunes marked out in Roman numerals - that caused distinct feelings of unease and prompted three different theories about what was really going on. When the fight is between good and evil, this is the ideal place to stage it.
In the final analysis, however the first episode fell short of living room scary. The way the action unfolds allowed the viewer to be one step ahead of the policeman, always a dangerous procedure. When you have spent 15 minutes yelling "The vampire chappies don't show up on film or in mirrors, you dummy!" it's difficult to root for him when things get really tough.
On the other hand there is a largely successful attempt to make the characters into something more than the usual ciphers. It is very easy when vampires are on the loose to let the rest of the suckers wander around until it is time for their necks to be bitten. The dialogue also has its moments: "If we let this happen, in 50 years' time our loved ones will be battery farms," declared the head of the good faction. "Believe me, our free range days are over!"
Furthermore, Ultraviolet makes a valiant effort to lend a distinct ambiguity to the proceedings: without labouring the point in an Open University sort of way, it does suggest that our feelings towards these vampires are not dissimilar to those we habour concerning minorities which we feel to be in some way threatening or anti-social.
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