Tag Archives: Paddy Murphy

THE Pagan holiday of Imbolc on February 1 makes an apt date for the release on Amazon and iTunes of Paddy Murphy’s horror drama The Perished. The word ‘Imbolc’ means “in the belly of the Mother”, because the seeds of spring are beginning to stir in the belly of Mother Earth. And the plot of the Killaloe-based film-maker’s feature, which premiered in 2019, revolves around a young woman’s unplanned pregnancy, contemplation of abortion and subsequent isolation in a house haunted by spirits from its terrible past as a mother and baby home. For Paddy and the crew it’s a great relief that the film can now be seen in this neck of the woods, having been denied its home premiere in Limerick’s Odeon Cinema in early 2020. That had been meant to happen on Friday, the 13th of March (he sure knows how to pick appropriate release dates), but a certain pandemic came along and put the kibosh on that. …

THE ripple effect in a weir near O’Briensbridge provided the inspiration for a local video games developer to make his debut as a writer and director for a new psychological horror short, his 11-minute film, Ensnared. It took Paddy Murphy just 20 minutes to write the script for this unusual short, which sees the lead role, John Galloway, played by Kevin Kiely Junior, on a descent into madness, as he battles with the very fabric of reality. “The story came from seeing the ripple in the water on the way to the weir. It came out of nowhere. “At first, I was unsure if it was something useable but, on reflection, a week later, I felt that if it flowed really well, it didn’t have to be structurally sound,” he said. In the film, Mr Galloway has an experience in a river near O’Briensbridge, where most of the movie was shot, which makes him question everything about reality, as the …