Cutter's Blog : Origin of the Seventh
(Originally published as Ruminations #4 www.coffeewithcutter.com)
I’ve only seen one film by Ingmar Bergman: The Seventh Seal, from 1957. It tells the story of Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), a knight caught in a perilous landscape plagued by the Black Death. On a beach, Antonius meets the personification of Death (played magnificently by Bengt Ekerot), who has come to claim his soul. To cheat Death, Antonius challenges him to a game of chess, a game that continues throughout the narrative of the film. Death, like a true gentleman, agrees to Antonius’s challenge. Shot in stark black and white, The Seventh Seal is an extraordinary piece of cinema with haunting visuals and a multilayered story that is rich with subtext. I cannot recall if I saw Bergman’s film before or after I made my first student short film back in university, but I can tell you with confidence that it has influenced me tremendously. Some films completely change you as a creator. Like Bergman’s Seventh Seal, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) transformed my view on cinema and showed me that film could achieve much more than the standard Hollywood blockbuster. When I was nineteen, I wrote and directed a student short film called An Afternoon With Death as an assignment for my Contextual Studies class. The short followed a young lad named Ron who is dying of brain cancer. He is visited by Death in his apartment who warns him of his upcoming demise. Death tells Ron that he is fated to become the next Death. It clocked in at around six minutes and, although it was fun working with friends on my very first film project, the film didn’t turn out very well. The editing was clunky, the audio was all over the place, and the dialogue was a little corny. Nevertheless, the three of us were proud of what we’d made together, and I believed that this particular fable was done and dusted, never to be revisited. Sadly, An Afternoon With Death has since become a lost film. All of the footage has vanished.
Some ideas have a habit of sticking with you, even when you believe you’re finished with them. They attach themselves like leeches to your cerebral cortex, sucking everything out of you until you’ve no choice but to obey whatever it is they want from you. Though it’s a foul sounding analogy, in reality it’s actually rather beautiful. I love ideas like that, the ones that just won’t die. In my third year, I couldn’t shift the urge to revisit the idea, so I decided to improve upon the faults of the original short and rewrote it (this time with the theme of Christianity added into the mix, at the expense of the brain tumour subplot) and decided to enlist the help of drama students looking to broaden their creative collaborations. After all, if I was to become a filmmaker one day (that dream has since died, but never say never), I’d have to learn how to work with actors who were not friends of mine. Entitled Moribund, the short was filmed in the function room of the old pub I used to work at (The Old Mill, in Alsager), as well as an abandoned barn and St Mary Magdalene's Church. (Awkwardly, I was asked if the film was a celebration of Christianity. It wasn’t, not even a little bit, so I told a little white lie to get permission to film there. I don’t feel bad about that. You do what you must for your art). Unlike its predecessor, Moribund is not a lost film and still exists, in all its low-budget glory, on my old YouTube channel, though its status remains private and has done for years now. It was written and directed under my real name, and although I’m rather proud of the film (imperfections and all), I doubt I’ll be re-releasing it anytime soon. With Moribund completed in 2016, I was certain that I would leave behind the concept. I’d already made it twice. Surely, there would be no conceivable point in making it a third time?
Months later, on September 1st, 2016, I was diagnosed with a rare stomach tumour. To be precise, it was a mesenteric inflammatory myofibroblastic tumour, with mesenteric lymph node involvement. Quite a mouthful, I know. No wonder I always forget the name. Thankfully, a miraculous trial drug reduced the tumour and saved me from an early grave. The first project after my diagnosis and subsequent recovery would be another short film, a possession story called Inhabitant with lots of gory nastiness akin to a classic Lucio Fulci film. The project never saw completion for a multitude of reasons (something I will always regret), and after this failure, I found myself creatively lost. I’d experienced something really traumatic (and nearly fatal!) and I was clueless as to how to work through what I was feeling. I began to understand that whatever I was going to make next would have to be a personal project, something that could only be achieved through an emotional reflection of the life-altering ordeal I’d just been through. It felt like no better time to revisit my old concepts once more, but this time I promised myself that this would be it, the truest possible exploration of these ideas that had stuck with me for so long. Immediately, I decided that it wouldn’t be a short film, nor would it be a feature length movie. After the failure of Inhabitant I decided that filmmaking perhaps wasn’t the right avenue for me. September 2018 was when I began to work on an outline for my first novel (then entitled Chapter VII, before changing to The Seventh and the Last, only to then change one final time to The Ascension of the Seventh). It would incorporate all the plot beats of the two preceding shorts (Christianity, brain tumour, a destiny of becoming Death), along with more subplots and deeper themes, all explored through an autobiographical viewpoint. First and foremost, I prioritised the very real humanity of the characters. All of the gothic stuff, all of the horror stuff and the violent stuff was fun, of course, but none of it would matter without a relatable human perspective at the heart of it all. I wanted to break hearts, to get people to reflect on their own mortality, to think about how it could all be taken away in an instant, without warning, without mercy. Work on the first draft would not commence until the 2nd January, 2019, and the project reached (self)publication on the 7th September, 2021. The story follows Toby Whitman who, after a brain tumour diagnosis, is visited by Death who forewarns him of his upcoming fate in which he is destined to become the Seventh (and the last) incarnation of Death. The journey of writing and self-publishing Ascension taught me a lot about my writing style and creative process, and after it was all over I couldn’t help but feel a little sad that the journey with these characters, whom I’d grown to know better than some people I know in real life, was finally finished. At long last, I’d settled on a definitive telling of this fable. Although Ascension is completely different to The Seventh Seal, the influences are alive and well within the text. Bergman’s film is a hugely important source of inspiration to me, and I would absolutely recommend it to anybody. It’s one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces.
I’ve only seen one film by Ingmar Bergman: The Seventh Seal, from 1957. It tells the story of Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), a knight caught in a perilous landscape plagued by the Black Death. On a beach, Antonius meets the personification of Death (played magnificently by Bengt Ekerot), who has come to claim his soul. To cheat Death, Antonius challenges him to a game of chess, a game that continues throughout the narrative of the film. Death, like a true gentleman, agrees to Antonius’s challenge. Shot in stark black and white, The Seventh Seal is an extraordinary piece of cinema with haunting visuals and a multilayered story that is rich with subtext. I cannot recall if I saw Bergman’s film before or after I made my first student short film back in university, but I can tell you with confidence that it has influenced me tremendously. Some films completely change you as a creator. Like Bergman’s Seventh Seal, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) transformed my view on cinema and showed me that film could achieve much more than the standard Hollywood blockbuster. When I was nineteen, I wrote and directed a student short film called An Afternoon With Death as an assignment for my Contextual Studies class. The short followed a young lad named Ron who is dying of brain cancer. He is visited by Death in his apartment who warns him of his upcoming demise. Death tells Ron that he is fated to become the next Death. It clocked in at around six minutes and, although it was fun working with friends on my very first film project, the film didn’t turn out very well. The editing was clunky, the audio was all over the place, and the dialogue was a little corny. Nevertheless, the three of us were proud of what we’d made together, and I believed that this particular fable was done and dusted, never to be revisited. Sadly, An Afternoon With Death has since become a lost film. All of the footage has vanished.
Some ideas have a habit of sticking with you, even when you believe you’re finished with them. They attach themselves like leeches to your cerebral cortex, sucking everything out of you until you’ve no choice but to obey whatever it is they want from you. Though it’s a foul sounding analogy, in reality it’s actually rather beautiful. I love ideas like that, the ones that just won’t die. In my third year, I couldn’t shift the urge to revisit the idea, so I decided to improve upon the faults of the original short and rewrote it (this time with the theme of Christianity added into the mix, at the expense of the brain tumour subplot) and decided to enlist the help of drama students looking to broaden their creative collaborations. After all, if I was to become a filmmaker one day (that dream has since died, but never say never), I’d have to learn how to work with actors who were not friends of mine. Entitled Moribund, the short was filmed in the function room of the old pub I used to work at (The Old Mill, in Alsager), as well as an abandoned barn and St Mary Magdalene's Church. (Awkwardly, I was asked if the film was a celebration of Christianity. It wasn’t, not even a little bit, so I told a little white lie to get permission to film there. I don’t feel bad about that. You do what you must for your art). Unlike its predecessor, Moribund is not a lost film and still exists, in all its low-budget glory, on my old YouTube channel, though its status remains private and has done for years now. It was written and directed under my real name, and although I’m rather proud of the film (imperfections and all), I doubt I’ll be re-releasing it anytime soon. With Moribund completed in 2016, I was certain that I would leave behind the concept. I’d already made it twice. Surely, there would be no conceivable point in making it a third time?
Months later, on September 1st, 2016, I was diagnosed with a rare stomach tumour. To be precise, it was a mesenteric inflammatory myofibroblastic tumour, with mesenteric lymph node involvement. Quite a mouthful, I know. No wonder I always forget the name. Thankfully, a miraculous trial drug reduced the tumour and saved me from an early grave. The first project after my diagnosis and subsequent recovery would be another short film, a possession story called Inhabitant with lots of gory nastiness akin to a classic Lucio Fulci film. The project never saw completion for a multitude of reasons (something I will always regret), and after this failure, I found myself creatively lost. I’d experienced something really traumatic (and nearly fatal!) and I was clueless as to how to work through what I was feeling. I began to understand that whatever I was going to make next would have to be a personal project, something that could only be achieved through an emotional reflection of the life-altering ordeal I’d just been through. It felt like no better time to revisit my old concepts once more, but this time I promised myself that this would be it, the truest possible exploration of these ideas that had stuck with me for so long. Immediately, I decided that it wouldn’t be a short film, nor would it be a feature length movie. After the failure of Inhabitant I decided that filmmaking perhaps wasn’t the right avenue for me. September 2018 was when I began to work on an outline for my first novel (then entitled Chapter VII, before changing to The Seventh and the Last, only to then change one final time to The Ascension of the Seventh). It would incorporate all the plot beats of the two preceding shorts (Christianity, brain tumour, a destiny of becoming Death), along with more subplots and deeper themes, all explored through an autobiographical viewpoint. First and foremost, I prioritised the very real humanity of the characters. All of the gothic stuff, all of the horror stuff and the violent stuff was fun, of course, but none of it would matter without a relatable human perspective at the heart of it all. I wanted to break hearts, to get people to reflect on their own mortality, to think about how it could all be taken away in an instant, without warning, without mercy. Work on the first draft would not commence until the 2nd January, 2019, and the project reached (self)publication on the 7th September, 2021. The story follows Toby Whitman who, after a brain tumour diagnosis, is visited by Death who forewarns him of his upcoming fate in which he is destined to become the Seventh (and the last) incarnation of Death. The journey of writing and self-publishing Ascension taught me a lot about my writing style and creative process, and after it was all over I couldn’t help but feel a little sad that the journey with these characters, whom I’d grown to know better than some people I know in real life, was finally finished. At long last, I’d settled on a definitive telling of this fable. Although Ascension is completely different to The Seventh Seal, the influences are alive and well within the text. Bergman’s film is a hugely important source of inspiration to me, and I would absolutely recommend it to anybody. It’s one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces.
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