No one took notice of the British company WT² until their first film Billy Elliot earned more than $100 million dollars at the box-office as well as several awards. With their second feature, supported by The National Lottery Through Film Council, the urban horror Long Time Dead, they are not only giving the American market stiff competition, but forcing audiences worldwide to once again celebrate the g(l)ory of the horror genre.

Working Title is the UK's most commercially successful production company, headed by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, producers of a string of international hits which include Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Fargo, and most recently Bridget Jones's Diary and Captain Corelli's Mandolin. In 1999, the company set up WT², run by Natascha Wharton and Jon Finn, to encourage the development and production of what  Bevan describes as "low budget films that people want to go and see.", working mainly with first time directors and writers.

First-time director Marcus Adams, who began his directing career in music promos and commercials, met James Gay-Rees who, with partner Mel Smith, runs production company Midfield Films, when both were operating out of the same Soho building.

Adams and Gay-Rees realised that they were each working towards making their first feature film and had similar tastes. They decided to work together.

"Most of the scripts around at that moment fitted into one of three obvious genres ? the London gangster movie, the romantic comedy or the gritty drama. None of that triangle appealed to us." says Adams.

"I've always had an unhealthy interest in horror films. Long Time Dead focuses on the events that result from a group of friends using a Ouija board.  I was intrigued by the idea of using the Ouija board as the basis for the action. It's something everyone knows about and most people have tried. Everyone has a chilling story about someone using it, but I don't remember ever seeing it play a central role in a film. I did some research and found out that, around 1975, the Ouija board, as a commercial board game, actually outsold Monopoly in the US, so it comes with an instant familiarity."

In Long Time Dead a group of students take time out from clubbing to dabble with a Ouija board. What starts out as a high spirited prank soon dissolves into a surreal and horrific nightmare. The board spells out the message ALL DIE, and suddenly the friends are involved in a string of eerie murders. With the terrifying realisation that the killer may be closer than they suspected, doubt and terror replace the previously happy bonds of friendship.

"America has reinvented the teen horror movie inside and out over the last five years, but with the occasional exception, most of the movies have felt extremely suburban and sugary, " says Gay-Rees. Our aim was to make a rawer horror film for the same younger audience, but with a distinctly urban supernatural edge set in London. We wanted the characters to feel grounded in an isolated reality - they're being hunted down by an unseen supernatural force, but due to the fact that they live in a big city, they know no-one would believe them. Hopefully, we the audience, invest in their desperate and scary isolation and go along for the ride. Combined with this we also wanted the opportunity to make a no-holds barred piece of entertainment that has rightly or wrongly become the sole domain of the American film business."

Casting  the  group  of  eight  friends  was  a process that took Adams and Gay-Rees  around  six months.  "I always remember a quote from Aaron  Spelling,  producer  of  many  of  the  hugely successful US TV teen series," says Adams. "He  said  when he was casting he'd throw a bunch of kids in a room together  and watch to see if you believe they are friends."

"We  were  lucky  in that, because there are very few actors in their early twenties  who  mean much at the box office, we had no restrictions from WT² and could cast the actors we thought worked best together," says Gay-Rees.

"It was  great to be able to tap into that pool of talent that is just bubbling under,  waiting  for  the  big role," says Aadams.  "As a first time director working with actors whose film experience was varied, Adams benefited from his rehearsal period, developing the relationships between characters. "But," he says, "I didn't want to overkill the material."

Adams cites his most difficult task as ensuring the veracity of the characters' emotions. "The actors have to play the  roles  for  real,  not knowingly sending themselves up as the American horror  movies tend to do. The film runs at a high pitch psychologically as well  as  in  action, and of course, you shoot a film out of sequence, so I had  to  keep  an  emotional  graph  in my head for each of the characters, tracking their fear for them. There is no manual which exists for directing that drama, so you learn to follow your instincts pretty quickly."

Shooting  around  London,  Adams  was  also  concerned with maintaining the reality  of  his  characters'  environment.  "You have to keep to your theme; start  with where  they are at in life and stick with it. An audience will notice  if  you  suddenly  introduce a wrong note and you'll lose them."

Summing  up  the  appeal  for an audience, Marcus Adams says, "The audience will  come for the ride. It's a roller-coaster of emotions that I hope they can  believe  in.  People  look  to  London  for  youth culture, and we've reflected that by setting the film in the environment where a lot of twenty year-olds  operate today. "