Yeah, no for sure and the thing that was really interesting to me and it made it all the more real, is because like I said before, it feels like a series of documents that would’ve come out of a psychologists file, so there is a moment when you’re reading it, where you think ‘this doesn’t feel like fiction, this just feels like an account of a man’s life who was being analysed for drug addiction and mental health issues’ and you know that’s when it kind of brings it right up to the present moment, because I feel like there’s a conversation happening – I mean not to bring it too much onto the nose – but the conversations we’re having at the moment about mental health, anti-depressants and this feeling, especially in men, it’s really interesting and effectively in the story, the protagonist commits suicide and I think that’s exactly what you just said, we can move on technologically, but on a humane level we are dealing with the same kind of issues and to me that was a fascinating core to the story.

And I always think with horror because, like a lot of genres, it gets brushed with this very broad stroke, so the reason I’ve always loved and championed it, is because it can contain so much more than people perceive it to be. It’s always been able to be overtly political and people almost disregarded it, no matter what extreme message you put in there. What’s your relationship to horror in terms of literature and films? Did you grow up as a horror fan?

I’ve always fought against the genre, to be honest. I don’t necessarily see this as horror, I see this as… it’s Gothic and it’s rooted in the psyche and the psychology, so that side of horror fascinates me. The sort of Stephen King area is like a modern version of it, but when it moves into slasher horror, which is just blood and guts, that’s when I switch off and if it tips too much into a socio-religious world, in terms of The Omen and things like that, I also switch off a little bit.

But this kind of thing, which is medical analysis, I do find that kind of fascinating. Horror is very much du jour at the moment and I think it’s a sort of comment on where we’re at politically [laughs] and as a society. I think people are turning to horror because it’s a little bit like bloodletting, if you pardon the pun! I think we go to this place, because we sort of want to almost vomit our disease inside – I feel like we’re not in a great place at the moment and we look to horror to somehow purge ourselves.

It is an especially cathartic genre, films are often described as a rollercoaster ride, but with horror it can be a cathartic process to unburden by engaging with it.