'It's a long way from Hemsworth to Hollywood': Yorkshire horror author's screenplay turned into film
Simon Clark has spent most of the last 30 years tapping away at the keyboard in the back room of his home in Doncaster. Horror fiction has always been his forte, with Clark selling his first ghost story to local radio in Leeds back when he was a teen.
After dozens of novels including Nailed By The Heart, Blood Crazy, Darker, Vampyrrhic and The Fall, Clark recently turned his hand to writing his first screenplay and now, feature film The Protos Experiment has had its premiere and is available to watch on the likes of Amazon Prime, Sky Store and Apple TV.
“Five years ago, I decided to write a screenplay - a dystopian sci-fi thriller, designed to appeal to fans of the Saw movies, Squid Games and Black Mirror,” says Simon, who was born in Wakefield and grew up in Thorpe Audlin. “Welsh film-maker Julian Richards read it, liked it, and introduced it to Los Angeles production company Avenet Images who turned it into a film.”
Clark says when writing the script, he envisaged a low-budget production filmed in one studio but the producers, as well as director co-writer is Brian Avenet-Bradley had other ideas and it was filmed in LA studios and Californian deserts. "They said they’d been scouting locations over the years and were looking for a film where they could use these brilliant locations.”
Clark, 67, flew to the US to see The Protos Experiment receive its world premiere in San Francisco in July. "I’d sat in rainy Doncaster through a cold and wet winter tapping away at the computer writing a script thinking no one might ever see it so to then see actors saying the words and performing what I’d instructed was amazing,” he says. Though, “it’s a blooming long way from Hemsworth High School to Hollywood,” he adds.
Clark left the school with just one qualification to his name, later studying at what was Whitwood College in Castleford to grain more. His first job was in Pontefract’s Hillards supermarket before he went to work for local authorities in Wakefield and later Doncaster. All the while his free time was filled with writing.
"I was a big fan of Doctor Who as a child and I’d make up stories in my head,” says Clark. “It stuck with me and never left. As I grew up, I was interested in inventing stories and when I was 13, taking the dog for a walk in the village, I suddenly thought I want to be a writer and that’s when the ambition lodged itself.”
Since 1995, after Blood Crazy was published, Clark has made writing his career, his keyboard tapping broken only by walking Border Collie Mylo. "I’ve become a bit of a hermit, sat in the back room of the house writing,” he says. Whilst the film was in production, Clark adapted the screenplay into a novel, which has already been published. And now, it’s back to what he knows.
“As ever I’m sitting in the back room, typing, with the dog prowling in and out wanting his walks. Back to the usual routine. Hollywood was a brief interlude for me to do something a bit different, now I’m back to writing novels.”