Hush

I spent Tuesday night in south Yorkshire (Darrington to be precise) on the set of writer-director Mark Tonderai's Hush. It's a Warp X production, a low budget psychological thriller in the vein of The Vanishing (the original, of course), Duel and The Hitcher, with a nod or two to Road Kill and Breakdown. Except it's set in England which isn't famed for its road movies because, well, we don't have roads the way America has roads.

There have been various attempts to mine this genre in the UK before (Butterfly Kiss and Heartlands spring immediately to mind, though I'm sure there are others that I just cannot remember off the top of my head right now) but I wish him well. He was a nice bloke who clearly knows his stuff, and they were rattling through so many set ups I thought I'd strayed onto the set of a Roger Corman production. Hush stars realtive newcomer Will Ash as Zakes, a wannabe writer who spends his night trawling the M1 replacing posters in toilets and service stations. On this particular night he's joined by Beth (Christine Bottomley), his girlfriend, who's asleep next to him when he spots a woman, naked and bloody and bound in the back of a white van. Zakes gives chase, Beth goes missing and, well, that would be telling...

Hush should be out sometime next year.