Third Angel

She was really rather ordinary. She is dead and she is famous. A sad tale of a quiet murder.
 
A photographic exhibition explored by torchlight. A journey through the bowels of a building - the hidden spaces behind the public facade. A small, clear plastic cell with room for twenty chairs. Bare light bulbs. Super 8 film projection: a café, a struggle, a walk in the woods, in the 1950s. An interview with a woman who is dead. A lecture about the wounds inflicted by strangulation, with photographs and punctuation. A murder represented by trying to talk whilst choking on a pint of stage blood.

The Killing Show was born out of Rachael’s interest in real life crime magazines, and inspired by an amazing exhibition, The Dead, at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. The show was conceived and initially worked on by Rachael and Robert; Alex came on board as a director and producer later, once With The Light On was completed.

The show was exciting and challenging to make. The images of the women portrayed in the photographic exhibition were deliberately disturbing and violent. They were displayed in a disused industrial unit. It was cold, there was no light, it was very dusty and very hard to hang the pictures. The whole thing was explored with torchlight. We worked with composer Laurence Oakley, to create a sound track that was very low and bass-y to try and unnerve people without them being sure why.
 
Once the audience had explored the exhibition they were led downstairs, through unfinished corridors to a different part of the building, where we had built a polythene room, with one wall being a projection screen. There was only seating for twenty audience members. It was a pretty tight squeeze. After the performance the audience were put out onto a different street to the one they arrived by.