Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

Director: Richard Ayoade

2004 / 143min / DCP

Holness and Ayoade’s screamingly funny spoof of self-aggrandizing “visionary” horror writers, produced for Channel 4, features Holness as monstrously conceited fictional author Marenghi and Ayoade as his toadying publisher/publicist, reflecting back from the distance of years on the “suppressed” low-budget television series they produced in the 1980s—a deliciously, deliberately incompetent show-within-a-show concerned with the Lovecraftian misadventures of Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D. (Holness) and administrator Thornton Reed (Ayoade) at Darkplace Hospital. See the entire six-episode run of the series made to “change the evolutionary course of Man over a series of half-hour episodes,” and enter the Darkplace.