About halfway through the shooting, Louis was diagnosed with cancer. This was a blow to all of us. I had planned to completely rewrite the script, but he would have none of that. He insisted on completing all of his scenes. At one point, we had to put a hat and a wig on him, because he had lost most of his hair due to chemotherapy. But he was completely professional and did everything that was required of him. Now I understand his cancer is completely in remission. Good show, David.

As his sidekick Holly, Prudence Theriault is more or less an Emma Peel character, with a couple of important differences. Unlike John Steed and Emma Peel, David and Holly sleep together. They're more than just business partners, and we don't hesitate to show it. Also, Holly is a psychic and she reads Tarot cards. In this case, the film mirrors reality, as Prudence is a professional Tarot card reader. She's also a seasoned stage actress who recently appeared in an upstate New York production of DRACULA as Mina.

Of course, you can't have heroes without villains, and I'm very happy with the bad guys and bad gals of LAM. The main evildoer is a character called Raven, played by Peter Hughes, who is not only a stage actor but a fan of the genre and of comic books. He gave me just the kind of over-the-top performance I was looking for, with a kind of Vincent Price fruitiness. There are also a number of femme fatales in the film, most memorably actress/singer Shari Sklar, who has a really fun time saying lines like, "I'll enjoy taking you two apart myself," and looking great while doing it. Then there's Amy Kerr as Caitlin, a Celtic witch who wears short black skirts and does some interesting things with blood.

LAM was filmed all over upstate New York. In the story, Raven owns a goth nightclub called "The Funeral Parlor," and we filmed those scenes in an actual club called QE2 in Albany, New York. The exterior of London and Gemini's home is actually Lindenwald, a national historic site and home of the eighth President of the U.S., Martin Van Buren. It's supposed to be haunted, by the way.

The graveyard which figures largely in the movie is Chatham Rural Cemetery, which we had also used in BLOOD OF THE WEREWOLF and BLACK EASTER. It has some wonderfully atmospheric old tombstones and a receiving vault that you can actually walk into. We also filmed interiors at another allegedly haunted place, The Crooked Lake House, in Averill Park. In the 1940s and 50s, it was a trendy nightclub visited by gangsters and movie stars. So we got some great production values--considering the fact that we didn't have to pay for any of them!

The movie took seven years to complete for a number of reasons. Our leading actor's cancer, of course, was a tremendous setback. But beyond that, we did reshoots on a number of scenes, including the one involving the Lovecraftian deity Shub-Niggurath, which didn't really work the first time. And then there was the post-production nightmare...

The single biggest reason it's taken so long to complete LAM is post-production. It had been shot on a pro Panasonic video system, but at the time, our editing facilities were primitive. We cut together the first two and a half minutes of the movie, and the system crashed. So we decided to farm out the post, but the two professionals we spoke to were unable to make the committment. It was, after all, a huge project; we had shot something like 20 hours of footage. A couple of local filmmakers offered to take on the task, but then their system bombed, and they lost all the footage they had cut together. So we went back to the drawing board.

Finally, in 2003, filmmaker Jeff Kirkendall (THE TEMPTRESS) stepped in to save the day. He's finishing it up as I write this, for a 2004 release. There will also be some digital effects, courtesy of Colin Lovelock, who is a TV producer friend of mine. He works with a $30,000 Avid which can do some pretty amazing things. So hopefully the long wait will have been worth it.

And now that we've worked the bugs out, maybe it's time to make it a franchise. Can LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT 2 be far behind? Watch this space!

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