Following his big screen debut with Brit horror Creep, director Christopher Smith cut a deal for Severance. Pitched as The Office meets Deliverance, critics and moviegoers loved the "slick mix of satire and splatter". It fared well at the box office, although Snakes On A Plane stole most of its thunder...

Field Trip

A half-hour Making Of featurette follows Smith and a cast that includes Danny Dyer, Toby Stephens and Tim McInnerny, to the forests of Hungary. Between snippets of b-roll footage that see them strung up, maimed and tortured, there are interviews that attempt to clarify the concept. "I think British horror films are a bit more mature and twisted and strange and I like that," says Stephens. But of course, there's also the comedy element. In his commentary for the film (accompanied by various members of cast and crew), Smith uses the word "ironic" a lot, and describes the tone as drawing from "a nutcase palette".

Smith also provides commentary for eight deleted scenes. He talks about the difficulty of balancing the laughs with the scary stuff, particularly in a sequence where Steve (Dyer) is high on drugs and believes that a deer is talking to him. Apart from the fact that the deer looks like it's been cut-and-pasted from an old 80s wildlife show, it sounds suspiciously like Leslie Phillips… Annoyingly, you cannot view the scene (or hear Phillips' dulcet tones) without the commentary.

Office Politics

Screenwriter James Moran briefly explains what inspired him to write the script in The Genesis Of Severance. Not surprisingly, it had a lot to do with his anger at being bumped and jostled by "yuppies" on his daily commute. "I wanted to take my revenge on them onscreen," he hisses. And as it turns out, he didn't set out to make it funny at all. (We're sure this guy was a real riot at the office Christmas party.) Meanwhile, Smith gets a touch of road rage in The Coach featurette, revealing the logistical nightmare of filming aboard a moving vehicle. It kept breaking down, he says, "like the shark from Jaws..."

"It's a bit more rough and ready as regards to health and safety," admits Smith in Not So Special Effects. This is hardly an in-depth look at the stunts, but it is alarming to see Dyer staggering around shooting blanks into the woodland (naked flames in a forest - outrageous!). An outtakes reel exposes just how dangerous the situation is when the gun backfires on Dyer. Apparently, it's not easy being Danny, as another featurette shows (although it does give you the excuse to swear a lot and flash your family jewels at the cameraman).

Easter egg alert: click on the pie in the second special features menu and you'll hear testimony on 'The Lodge Incident' from the Hungarian girls featured in the opening scene of the film. An animatic reel of the same sequence is thrown in as well, along with a storyboard version of the alternative ending. Topping things off is the corporate video for Palisades Defence, which could have been scripted by White House spin-doctors. "We're hitting a homerun for freedom," states the company president, "and calling a time out on terror..." Horror buffs with a sense of humour should definitely get a kick out of this DVD.

EXTRA FEATURES

Severance DVD is released on 8th January 2007.