A date with the devil: Reece Shearsmith reveals source of his inspiration

A journey into the black heart of the imagination of Reece Shearsmith is not a trip for the fainthearted. But that is what is on offer this month when Shearsmith presents his favourite silent film to an audience in a Birmingham town hall, before a much-anticipated League of Gentlemen reunion tour of Britain in August and September.

Häxan, or The Witch, is a Swedish chiller from 1922. Its grainy images have fed Shearsmith’s nightmares since he saw it as a teenager late one night at home. “I must have watched it on telly at around 13,” he said. “It is genuinely unsettling and startling because the effects are really good.”

Shearsmith, 48, has just returned from starring on Broadway in Martin McDonagh’s hit play Hangmen, and he will narrate a live translation of Häxan on 17 April when it is screened as part of Birmingham’s Flatpack Festival of Film.

“It is written and directed by Benjamin Christensen, and the first 15 minutes are quite a convincing filmed lecture. Then we travel back to the 14th century and suddenly you are in this extraordinary reproduction of a witch’s hovel, with these two old ladies who are making a potion to try to seduce a monk in a nearby monastery,” said Shearsmith.

“There are little sketches with the witch in action and it culminates in a meeting with the devil, played by Christensen himself.”

A contemporary Danish review denounced “the satanic perverted cruelty that blazes out of it; the cruelty we all know stalks the ages like an evil, shaggy beast. The chimera of mankind.” Strong stuff perhaps, but meat and drink to the man who played League of Gentlemen grotesque villain Papa Lazarou.

It is Shearsmith’s love of creating a crawling sense of dread that is also fuelling his writing sessions with Steve Pemberton as they prepare for the League of Gentlemen tour, nearly 20 years after the first series. It will take them, along with fellow League members Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, to the O2 (“It’s like we are the Who!”).

Shearsmith’s first memory of Häxan is now mixed with his general affection for Halloween as a child, growing up in Kingston upon Hull. The arrival of the annual fair in early October, he remembers, stoked up the excitement. “I went along with my mum and dad and there were these creepy old ghost trains from the 50s. There was even a whiff of Christmas to come as well, because there would be a Santa with a collecting bucket.” He now relishes, he admits, the way Halloween has become a bigger British festival.

“Mark wouldn’t like it, I expect. He’d think it too Americanised. But I watch Häxan every year at Halloween and try to keep the spirit alive all year round.”

Shearsmith’s “obsession” with witches was also sparked by his boyhood collection of books about horror. “They often had that famous woodcut of the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, with the speech bubbles coming out of the demons. It always fascinated me. You can find evil peeping out of anywhere. Out of a cat or an owl, or a misplaced dog walking in at the wrong time.”

The second series of BBC Two’s Inside No 9, co-written by Shearsmith, featured one episode, starring David Warner, that closely reflected his interest in the “absurdity and the cruelty of the witch trials”. “It was very much in keeping with Häxan. Steve is not as obsessed with witches as I am, but he was happy to go along with it for once.”

The audience for Häxan will be treated to moments of humour as well as horror, Shearsmith promises. “There are some funny moments. I will do a wry take on the way the translation comes across.” Yet his real appreciation of Christensen runs deep.

“Häxan has everything. It feels authentically old, it has the devil himself and there is also talk of Dante’s hell at the beginning, with a strange old machine that shows flames burning away and people with pitchforks or being boiled in oil. The professorial tone slightly blindsides you for the real witches and demons to come.”

Shearsmith picks out an alarming torture sequence in which an innocent old woman accused of witchcraft starts to “shop all her friends”. “So from one witch, they suddenly have an epidemic.”

The best horror films, the actor argues, surprise you. “Don’t Look Now, for example, you would not even deem as horror,” he says, referring to Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 thriller. “It is a study in grief, and the ending is so shocking. If it is about something real, then horror will stay with you. The episodes of Inside No 9 that people really seem to remember are the ones that tap into an unexpected emotion, like The 12 Days of Christine with Sheridan Smith.”

Shearsmith and Pemberton write the blackly comedic Inside No 9 – now commissioned for a rare fifth series – after long conversations about “the most judicious way of telling a story in the least amount of scenes”. Shearsmith says he thinks of himself as one half of a writing team. “It is a means to an end for me. I don’t want to write for other people. We are both fans of our own thing.”

And what is that thing? A series of “disposable little black jokes”, according to Shearsmith, although he also hopes the episodes stand up to repeat viewing.

“They are each crafted because we want to make telly that makes you sit up and be attentive. I know people don’t always want comedy to do that. But you can’t let ours just wash over you. We have set the bar high because we care, and that makes it hard to keep doing it. Especially as we are hyper-aware of the danger of repeating ourselves.”

In spite of enjoying chances to act in straight dramas, Reece Shearsmith confesses that, rather like Häxan’s creator, he finds telling his own grim stories the most fun.

“To be honest, it is never better than when we are doing our own thing,” he said.