Six Of The Best: Garry Sykes

ROPES is a limited web series set in the small town of Caldby, where a murder mystery unfolds through phone calls, livestreams and messages in the three days after the death of Abbie Lee. Scripted by director Garry Sykes, and filmed by the cast under lockdown with no budget, it captures the half‑forgotten atmosphere of that era—masks, gloves, isolation—and places viewers inside a haunted community sliding into darkness, chasing rabbit holes and conspiracy threads that echo everyday life. Soft‑launched on Instagram and TikTok, the project has already drawn over 1.5 million views. From Halloween, episodes are being released on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram from now until the end of the year, with the main YouTube “series” concluding at the end of November.

Here, Garry tells us about some of his influences with a six of the best…

TV: The X-Files
One of the many totally useful things I did during that very strange period in all our lives that we don’t really talk about anymore, called lockdown, was to rewatch the whole of The X-Files. All eleven seasons of it, and both films (plus the imo underrated Lone Gunmen spinoff). As a young teenager in the ’90s, before I properly discovered music and alcohol, I was a complete X-Files obsessive, my AOL history filled with little else but fanfic and newsgroup posts about the show. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson play FBI agents Mulder and Scully, tasked with investigating crimes that defy rational explanation. While Scully approaches each case sceptically, working through the evidence with scientific rigour, Mulder always embarks on some wild flight of paranormal conjecture and – in a total disservice to Scully on the show’s part – is invariably proven correct. As the show went on, the scope grew, uncovering a global conspiracy to conceal the existence of extra-terrestrials among us, and while these mytharc episodes were gripping at the time, these days conspiracy theories aren’t really what they used to be. But it’s the smaller, monster-of-the-week episodes that make the show well worth returning to. Miniature mystery movies made for the small screen, set in small towns where the locals are always as intriguing as the mutants, ghosts and aliens in their midst (or maybe there’s a rational explanation).

Another thing I did during lockdown was write the scripts for my mystery film Ropes, and sent those scripts to actor friends who’d shown an interest, for them to perform and film themselves while stuck indoors. The scenes consisted of a series of telephone conversations taking place in the fictional Northumberland town of Caldby, in the days following the unexplained death of a local influencer named Abbie Lee. The idea was that by listening in to these phonecalls – in which the citizens of Caldby may or may not be telling their truth – the audience takes on the role of detective themselves, tasked with figuring out who amongst the many characters we meet was responsible for Abbie Lee’s death. Whether it was the result of a tragic breakdown, a wider conspiracy, or if something more supernatural could be at work in the town might end up depending on whether the viewer is more of a Mulder, or a Scully.

TV: Play For Today
Play For Today, which ran from 1970 to 1984, was part of a long tradition on British television of screening weekly one-off dramas, based on plays or novels, that reflected aspects of contemporary life at the time. They were often radically political, in many cases amplifying the experiences of marginalised communities, and particularly working class voices (on screen, if not always behind the scenes). A few favourites of mine are Mike Leigh’s ‘Nuts In May’, which follows condescending outdoors enthusiast Keith and his long-suffering wife Candice-Marie on an increasingly unhinged tour of the Dorset coast, ‘The Spongers’, in which a struggling community prepares for a street party celebrating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and ‘Penda’s Fen’, directed by Alan Clarke, a quasi-folk horror dealing with confused sexuality and the roots of British culture. There are a few bluray sets collecting some notable episodes, but also a lot of the lesser-known episodes are on YouTube. Whether you end up watching a charged exploration of then-current affairs, or a teatime family farce, picking one at random is rarely a waste of time.

LINK
YouTube Search for ‘Play For Today’

Music: Twin Peaks – Fire Walk With Me Soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch
I first watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in my teenage box room in Cramlington on late night telly, long before I saw the series, and it’s been in my all-time Top 10 ever since. It also has one of my all-time favourite soundtracks, by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, that is a bit jazzier than the show, and heads into some far darker, more experimental places. The centrepiece, The Pink Room, is a sludgy, four minute mutant blues dirge that buzzes with dirty atmosphere and soundtracks one of the film’s most horrifying scenes.

When it came to the music for Ropes, the FWWM soundtrack was definitely a major reference point I gave to the composer, North East dungeon synth artist Bittercold. Most of the score though comes directly from Bittercold’s formidable back catalogue, which he describes as “influenced by Jeremy Soule, early Mortiis and the wilderness of Northumbria”. When I first added some of his ambient soundscapes to the footage the cast had sent me, it felt like a missing piece had been found. As Lynch and Badalementi – both now sorely missed – knew very well, the sound is absolutely 50% of the movie experience.

LINKS
Bittercold
The Pink Room

Film: Dead Man’s Shoes
I also first saw this film on late night TV, but this time from a friend’s couch in Dalston. I was in my 20s, living in London and, due to events well beyond my control, had been between houses for a good couple of months. Although happy to have so many kind friends willing to loan me their settees for a few nights at a time, I was also falling a bit off the deep end having no space of my own. That night when I went to turn off the TV to get some more fractured sleep, I had no intention of watching anything, let alone a whole film, but the opening sequence of Dead Man’s Shoes had just started – super 8 home movies set to Smog’s ‘Vessel In Vain’, and then those epic shots of Paddy Considine and Toby Kebbell traversing the Midlands countryside. I couldn’t turn it off. Maybe it was partly because anything that had come from anywhere further North than where I was currently laying reminded me of home. More than that though, I don’t think any other filmmaker does frighteningly real violence, or raw, guttural trauma as well as Shane Meadows, and ever since seeing Dead Man’s Shoes, I will watch Paddy Considine in literally anything. It’s also beyond wild to me that one of the best directors and one of the best actors of their generation just happened to meet as teenagers at their local college and end up as best mates.

LINKS
Paddy Considine & Shane Meadows in ‘The Man With No Name’ (early DIY short)

Web Series: Petscop
Petscop is a mysterious, unfinished PS1 game that found its way into the hands of a YouTuber named Paul back in 2017. Paul began posting walkthroughs of the early levels, and it appears that the aim of the game is to capture a variety of surreal cartoon animals by solving puzzles, and then return them to the pet shop from which they’ve escaped. Collect all the pets to complete the game. However, the game barely functions, with pathways that go nowhere, puzzles that don’t work, and broken, looping animations that begin verging on sinister. And then Paul finds an entrance to another, hidden level beneath the main petshop area, and things start to get very weird.

Petscop is part of the Analogue Horror genre on YouTube, something that – ever late to the party – I’ve only discovered recently. The Mickinney Family Home Videos are also excellent, and there are loads more. The genre contains so many of my favourite things – fuzzy found footage, random on-screen text, crushing existential dread, old home movies and immersive mysteries with questions that linger long after you’ve finished watching. I’d go as far as to say that watching these series restored my beleaguered faith in DIY filmmaking, and it provided the first ideas for how our Ropes film could finally be released.

LINKS:
Petscop
The Mckinney Family Home Videos

Internet: TikTok
Another totally useful thing I did during lockdown was to download TikTok, and begin the never-ending scroll. Beyond the dances and many adorable cats, what really sucked me in was the local dramas that play out across the app to audiences in their hundreds. I learned all about gifting ring scandals, watched tearful apologies from alleged grifters, and followed the sagas of stolen pets and the ends of relationships, all relayed direct to vertical camera from everyday neighbourhoods around the UK. While retaining some scepticism about the truthfulness of a lot of what’s out there, I definitely became obsessed, to the point where I ended up folding this style of video content into the Ropes script alongside the phonecalls. It’s one thing telling your story to a confidante on the other end of a phone line, it’s a whole ‘nother thing to broadcast it to anyone who’ll listen.

I’ve heard it said a couple of times lately that broadcasters and filmmakers are producing so many stories that are set in the past specifically to avoid dealing with mobile phones or the internet. At a time when the battle for the soul of the nation is being waged on local Facebook groups and people everywhere are broadcasting their thoughts, opinions and even whole lives, formatted as literal short films that play to vast audiences, I’m not sure turning a blind eye is the way to go.