But Elsa and Karloff are the perfect couple, too vivid, too alive to have died in the final explosion. Even as Henry and Elizabeth fade from the imagination, the monster and his mate live on forever, icons of the perverse, in our dreams.

This essay originally appeared in the collection Cinema Macabre, edited by Mark Morris, 2005.

MirrorMask: An Introduction

Somewhere in North London, as I type this, Dave McKean is hard at work on MirrorMask. He’s sighing and frowning and working extremely long hours, just as he has for the last eighteen months, compositing shots and solving problems. Dave designed and directed and composed every shot in MirrorMask. The finished film has to be delivered at the end of this month. If there’s one thing he doesn’t have time for, it’s writing introductions.

So this is the story of MirrorMask according to me.

It was the summer of 2001. The phone rang. It was Lisa Henson, and she wanted to know whether I thought Dave McKean would be interested in making a fantasy film for them—something in a similar vein to Labyrinth. Although, she said, Labyrinth had cost the Jim Henson Company about forty million to make twenty years earlier, and, while the funding for a new film existed, there wasn’t very much of it: only four million dollars, which is a lot of money if you come across an abandoned suitcase full of cash in a hollow tree somewhere, but won’t get you very far in the world of fantasy filmmaking. She had seen Dave’s small films and loved them. Did I think that Dave would be interested? I said I didn’t know.

Obviously, said Lisa, she couldn’t afford to pay me for writing a script. Maybe I could help a writer come up with the story . . . ? I told her that if Dave said yes to directing it, I was writing the script, and that was all there was to it.

Dave said yes.

I had half an idea, and I wrote it down and sent it to Dave. A girl from a traveling theater, who found herself kidnapped into some kind of fairyland by a fairy queen. An unreliable Puck-like guide. A girl forced to become or to pretend to become a fairy princess, while a real fairy princess was forced to try and pretend to be human.

Meanwhile, Dave had had a dream, and on waking decided it might be the basis for a good film: a mother in the real world who is extremely ill, a world of masks, a girl who had to wake the sleeping white queen, a white queen and a dark queen, a balance that was shifting and breaking. He sent me an e-mail, describing the dream, and his idea for a film, and several other ideas he had had for the feel of what he wanted to convey.

I wondered whether we could combine the two ideas.

In February of 2002, the Jim Henson Company sent me to England for two weeks. To save money, and because we both thought it an excellent idea, Dave and I stayed in the Henson family house in Hampstead. It hadn’t been decorated since Jim Henson died, and everywhere we were surrounded by his world. In a cupboard in the lounge we found a video of an early edit of Labyrinth, over three hours long with the voices of the puppeteers doing their characters rather than the actors, and we watched it in the evening over a few nights, to help put us into the mood. Dave had a pile of art books with him, books on surrealism and sculpture, books filled with imagery that he thought might come into play in the story.