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The first feature of frequent Frightfester Damon Rickard (try saying that five times fast) had its premiere at this years festival in the heart of London. For regular attendees of the fest, Damon’s name may be familiar as he has directed (and starred in!) some of the opening ident segments for Frightfest in recent years. This year, Damon was in attendance with a film of his very own entitled Never Have I Ever.

Never Have I Ever intertwines elements of a psychological thriller with a dark undertone of horror to create a nuanced sense of creeping dread that crescendos in an unexpected yet satisfying finale.

The audience is introduced to Sam (Andrew Lee Potts), a down on his luck alcoholic whose day seems to be going from bad to worse. We are teased with pebbles of information that allude to the cause of his downward spiral, but despite his...

Exclusive: After spooking both sides of the Atlantic with their hit series Ghosts, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond have found their next project.

The writing duo are working with Big Talk Studios to develop a Netflix animated series that takes inspiration from Family Guy and is set in a British hospital.

Titled In Case of Emergency, Big Talk has produced a six-minute animatic pilot, with members of the British comedy community providing voiceover work.

Big Talk is collaborating on the project with Blue Zoo Animation Studio, a British animation company known for children’s shows including The Adventures of Paddington.

Big Talk CEO Kenton Allen confirmed In Case of Emergency in an interview with Deadline and said the company, which makes The Outlaws, was approached by Netflix with the animation ambition.

Netflix UK chief Anne Mensah and Julio Bonet, the streamer’s London-based manager of adult animation, are overseeing the show,...

Not long ago, Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin promised to reveal to fans "everything that’s gone wrong with House of the Dragon," HBO's Game of Thrones prequel show based on his book Fire & Blood. He's started to make good on that promise in a new blog post called "Beware the Butterflies."

In this post, which I suspect isn't his last, Martin drills down on a change made to the very first episode of House of the Dragon season 2, "A Son for a Son," which climaxes with the death of Helaena Targaryen's young son Jaehaerys, murdered by a couple of mercenaries known only as Blood and Cheese, who were sent into the Red Keep by Helaena's uncle Daemon Targaryen. Helaena's brother and husband Aegon is currently at war with Daemon's wife and niece Rhaenyra, and Jaehaerys is a horrible casualty of their conflict.

Before we go any further,...

The Legacy of Fire: The Rise and Fall of House Targaryen - Main Image

The hit HBO series Game of Thrones first introduced House Targaryen, beginning with the Targaryen siblings Viserys and Daenerys being the exiled remnants of an overthrown rule.

With this family's fascinating lore, the prequel House of the Dragon gives viewers a detailed look at this powerful clan when they are still at the peak of their power.

The Targaryen dynasty is the dominant force in the Seven Kingdoms, thanks to the reign of their dragon power.

They ruled Westeros for nearly 300 years, but their power and influence started to dwindle.

House of the Dragon Season 2 features the beginning of the war between the Greens and Blacks.

As their end is about to begin, let's learn about the rise and fall of House Targaryen.

The Conquest of Westeros

King Aegon Targaryen, the first king of the Targaryen dynasty,...

For the last five years, January has meant one thing to the cast of Ghosts: trundling over to West Horsley Place in Surrey to film the next series. Not in 2024. The BBC comedy’s final episode is set to air this Christmas, and after that, what do this in-demand lot have planned?

Plenty, it turns out. They’ll be popping up on screen and stage, as well as writing new projects both individually and together. As Larry Rickard told Den of Geek, “It’s not like we’re [famously fractious 70s soft rock band] The Eagles and we hate each other!” A Ghosts reunion down the line “wouldn’t be a mountain to climb,” says Rickard. “It’s a door that’s shut but obviously, doors have hinges and handles.”

And ghosts can just walk through them, we venture? “Well exactly, they haven’t even got to go to the effort of opening them.”

“We were quite definite,...

“We made something unfilmable, basically,” Ghosts co-creator Larry Rickard told the Rhlstp Podcast about the show’s unaired pilot. “Then we looked at it and said ‘that doesn’t work.’”

According to the Ghosts team, several things didn’t work about the mini-pilot, which was never intended for broadcast but as a way for them to figure out the show before making series one. Speaking to Den of Geek in October this year, Rickard explained:

“It was based on the pilot script that Mat [Baynton] and Jim [Howick] did, so basically episode one. It wasn’t the case of making an episode and then going, actually that doesn’t work, let’s start again. We were doing a taster, so we shot 12 minutes of material and then edited it together with voiceovers to fill in the missing bits of story so you could sort of watch it in a sequence and understand...

Warning: contains spoilers for Ghosts series five, episode five “Carpe Diem”.

It couldn’t be a joke. That was one rule laid down by the Ghosts creators when it came to choosing a first name for Willbond’s character. Until series five, the WWII ghost had been known only as The Captain – a mystery seized upon by fans of the show.

“It was the question we got asked more than anything. His name,” actor and writer Larry Rickard tells Den of Geek. “Once we got to series three, you could see that we were deliberately cutting away and deliberately avoiding it. We were fuelling the fire because we knew at some point we’d tell them.”

In “Carpe Diem”, the episode written by Rickard and Ben Willbond that finally reveals The Captain’s death story, they did tell us. After years of guessing, clue-spotting and debate, Ghosts revealed that The...

Larry Rickard doesn’t speak French. “I’m terrible with languages!” he tells Den of Geek. When a Ghosts series five storyline in episode four “En Francais” called for his caveman character to speak fluent French, Rickard had to learn his lines phonetically “from a very kind French friend of the producer who recorded everything.”

The result was impressive. To the surprise of the viewers and the Button House ghosts – who’d just reached the point of thinking their afterlives held no more surprises – Robin turned out to be a talented linguist.

“The speech centre of his brain is tiny,” explains Rickard, “but what he’s had is a lot of time to see a lot of stuff, so, he sounds dim but he’s actually smart.”

One of the things Robin saw during his long afterlife was Lady Sophie Bone, the discontented French wife of Sir Humphrey (the other...

Warning: contains spoilers for Ghosts series 5.

Ghosts very nearly had a musical episode. The creators of the BBC comedy talked about it for a long time, says Larry Rickard, co-writer and the man behind the show’s caveman ghost Robin and headless Humphrey. The gang knew they wanted to do a deeply earnest love song, but couldn’t quite make the idea mesh.

“At one point we had a full day on it, but it felt like whichever direction we tried taking the story in to justify the conceit, we ended up at odds with each other over how the plot would then work around it, and how you would justify the songs being there without it feeling like it was a different show. You reach an event horizon of trying so hard to make it work that you realise this isn’t natural and this isn’t us.”

Not natural and not Ghosts,...

Warning: contains plot details for Ghosts series five episode two “Home”, and smut.

BBC One’s Ghosts is one of the few TV shows around that has successfully blurred the line between adult and child viewing. Kids love it, adults love it, and it’s long been appointment viewing for families doing that (almost miraculous in 2023) thing of gathering together around the same screen.

Making Ghosts’ comedy suitable for a mixed-age audience though, means keeping an eye on its adult content. The ruder gags need to be blink-and-you’ll-miss-them and cheeky, but never crass. The sordid circumstances of Julian’s 1990s Tory MP sex scandal death for instance, or Lady Button’s husband’s “Moroccan tea party” with two members of his household staff, are alluded to but never made explicit. The same goes for caveman Robin’s romantic exploits over the centuries, and his (cough) close relationship with his sister.

Welcome to the latest edition of our regular crowdfunding feature here on Nerdly – Back This! – where we take a look at some of the cool content taking the crowdfunding route on sites such as Indiegogo, Greenlit and Kickstarter. This month we’re spotlighting not one but Two fantastic film crowdfunding campaigns…

Folie à Deux (Madness by Two)

Folie à Deux is a neo-noir short film that aims to open up a discussion about men’s mental health. In this film, we follow Oliver, an overworked chef who turns to drugs and alcohol and drags his girlfriend Isabel down with him, turning a loving relationship into one of control and abuse. The short – which is a proof of concept for a feature film – comes from writer/director Naveed Mir and stars Alan Cooper, who was the lead actor in the feature film Claudia.

What’s the crowdfunding for?

Most of the...

“Birthdays or chicken?” Jim Howick asks Simon Farnaby on stage at the BFI Southbank. The first two episodes of Ghosts’ new series have just screened to a packed auditorium, where they were met by a reception that was – what’s a bigger word than rapturous? Euphoric? The place is happy, anyway, very happy. From the ticket queue to the ladies’ loos, there’s jolliness around. In the press seats, old hacks agree that they rarely bother coming out for events anymore, but this is Ghosts. You come out for Ghosts.

The fans have come out for Ghosts in style. There are multiple Pats, dressed in Youth Adventure Club uniforms complete with neck arrows, seated for the post-screening Q&a. A huge group is wearing party hats because it’s Martha Howe-Douglas’ birthday, and the entire room will later sing Happy Birthday to the Lady Button actor. And then they’ll immediately sing it again,...

Button House is closing its doors.

The hit BBC comedy Ghosts, on which the Rose McIver-led CBS sitcom is based, will end with Season 5. The announcement was made in a joint statement by executive producers Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond, which reads as follows:

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“After...

Above: Italian poster for The Lovemakers. Illustration by Mauro Innocenti.Over the past ten years I’ve surveyed the illustrated likenesses of stars like Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Bruno Ganz and Monica Vitti as in memoriams after their passing, so I am happy to say that the occasion of this look at Claudia Cardinale in movie posters is simply that, starting today, the 84-years-young Ms. Cardinale is being fêted with a three-week, 23-film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.Claudia Cardinale is one of my favorite actors, but while exploring her career for this piece I realized that my affection for her really comes down to one film, albeit one of my all-time favorites: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). The fact that she is the focus of perhaps my favorite single shot in all cinema—Sergio Leone's magnificent crane shot as Cardinale’s Jill...

If you thought We Are Not Alone was going to be the kind of comforting comedy you get from Ghosts you’ll quickly find out you’re wrong. The opening scene, in which the main character Stewart ends up suddenly covered in his best friend’s innards after he gets crushed by an alien messaging device, is a pretty big clue that this is a departure into a slightly more grown-up territory.

This new feature-length Dave comedy doesn’t waste any time: we’re straight into the action, discovering Earth has been invaded and conquered by the Gu’uns, a blue, large-foreheaded alien race with Very Big Guns. The Gu’uns don’t muck about – their takeover has included blowing up New Zealand, nixing everyone’s mobile phone signal and blasting the Chancellor of England into space (so it’s not all bad news), and in a brief appearance from...