Once described by GQ magazine as “a film producer behind a whole new generation of on screen hardmen” Jonathan Sothcott is best known as the man responsible for a series of action-packed ‘geezer-teasers’ starring the gamut of tough guys from Lee Majors and Danny Trejo to Craig Fairbrass and Louis Mandylor. Now he’s steering his busy Shogun Films studio towards the thriving horror genre but as we found out he’s actually back in familiar territory.
Tell us the background to Shogun Films, your very busy production company
My wife Jeanine and I set it up at the very beginning of 2020. At the point I’d made many films but found myself increasingly disenchanted with the movie business. She was very much the inspiration. She’s also a terrific actress and I wanted to create a platform for her in the kind of movies we both love – we both grew up in the 80s on a diet of Blockbuster Video genre films which weren’t really being made in the UK where there’s a lot of angsty drama and petty crime thrillers. Of course the momentum was slowed down massively by the lockdowns – we made one film in 2020, a home invasion movie called Nemesis, which in the circumstances turned out pretty well and was released by Samuel Goldwyn in the USA. The following year we made an action movie called Renegades with a much bigger budget and commensurate cast – Lee Majors, Danny Trejo, Tiny Lister, Louis Mandylor etc – and that was a step in the wrong direction as that kind of movie fell out of favour between Renegades’ conception and release. It was a joy to work with those people but the movie wasn’t released until the end of 2022 or even early 2023 in some places and it was a real drain. We were very invested in this action thriller space – in 2020 I even wrote a film with Steven Seagal over zoom so it was it was disappointing seeing it start to lose ground so rapidly.
So in 2023 we had a total re-evaluation of what we were doing and where we were going. The opportunity arose to make a small, fun slasher movie which became Peter Rabid. It’s an important film to me because it lead to Helloween, which was filmed a year ago and just launched at The American Film Market in Vegas. Helloween is a film I’m intensely proud of, it’s exceptionally well written and directed by Phil Claydon and boasts terrific performances from the cast. It was ambitious but everyone worked incredibly hard to make something special and succeeded.
In 2024 we made two further films – the spy thriller Knightfall starring Jeanine, Ian Ogilvy and Geoffrey Moore and the serial killer horror Doctor plague starring Martin Kemp. These are two really solid strong genre movies – Martin is absolutely brilliant in Plague, I was blown away by his performance. And Geoffrey has so much charisma and star quality, and is very much his own man in terms of screen presence. I have high hopes for those. We’re currently in production on a vampire movie called Midnight Kiss and in pre-production on action/horror Werewolf Hunt, as well The Secret of Guy Fawkes.
So we’re on our seventh movie in 4 years and 2025 looks like we’ll make a minimum of six more. My team and I have put the work into development and it seems like we’re at the dawn of a new golden age of production.
That’s a lot of horror movies – does that feel like a big departure for you?
In fact, despite appearances, the opposite is true. My very first feature, Stalker (2009) was a horror movie directed by Martin Kemp and of my first half dozen movies, four were in that genre. Before that, I ran The Horror Channel in the UK when I was 24, being responsible as Head of Programming for the channel’s content. I got that job because horror was my passion – I started out writing articles for The DarkSide magazine in my teens and was moderating DVD commentaries for Anchor Bay, Paramount and MGM for classic horrors such as Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter, The Vampire Lovers and The Man Who Haunted Himself. I was one of the authors of the FAB Press book Ten Years of Terror, I wrote my own book about Christopher Lee and produced a number of featurettes and documentaries during the DVD boom. So to coin a phrase, the horror genre is in my blood. As a small child I was obsessed with dinosaurs and monsters (and can trace my interest in film production back to ‘The Making of Return of the Jedi’ TV special and seeing all the creature shop workers, puppeteers etc) but the seminal moment was, aged around 7 or 8, my parents introducing me to the classic Hammer Horror films – Dracula, The Evil of Frankenstein, Dracula Prince of Darkness and Curse of the Werewolves. Not long after I’d seen – and loved – those, they took me to meet Peter Cushing who was signing copies of his second autobiography in a town called Tunbridge Wells. I remember it very clearly, he was very charming (he kissed my mother’s hand), made a big fuss of me and was slightly concerned that 8 year old me would be scared by all the older ‘goths’ in the queue – though disappointingly he didn’t produce a crucifix with which to ward them off.
So why the change from the gangster and crime films?
The movie business is cyclical and, in the UK, the cycle of crime and gangster content has changes from independent films to big TV series for the streamers – Sexy Beast, The Gentlemen etc. It happened when the DVD market sadly collapsed, which was on the cards for a decade but the death knell was the shop closures around the COVID lockdowns. It isn’t possible to compete with starry, big budget streaming shows and so you have to pivot to something that’s got a chance of working. When I set up Shogun I thought that would be US-facing action movies, at the time they were incredibly popular and there was a fairly simple formula involving cameos by faded stars. There was a great expression coined for them: ‘geezer teasers’. The lockdowns soon brought this to an end too, however, audiences saw through them – yes they love those classic genre actors but they want to see them through the whole movies not (sometimes literally) phoning in a cameo. So in 2023 I really had to figure out a new path for the business and that path was, in the main, horror. We live in a world where Terrifier 3 has made $84 million in theatrical receipts in the USA. And the second one, on a budget of $250k made $10 million. I thought they were great films and that’s the business I want to be in, one that has potential for huge margins and scaling.
The other factor is that there are only so many American action movies one can make in the UK! We now have some amazing incentives to make British films in the UK, to tell British stories, including a 40% tax rebate and I would be crazy not to embrace that.
So you’ve left the action genre behind?
No, definitely not but it’s a smaller part of our overall strategy and films in that space have to have an exceptional hook for us to get behind them, be that a different kind of setting or action, a star who hasn’t done anything in the space. They have to be, to coin a trendy phrase, elevated somehow. We have made a spy thriller called Knightfall – it’s a good action movie but it also has Sir Roger Moore’s son Geoffrey Moore as one of the leads. That has, and will, generate a lot of media interest in a world where mainstream coverage is increasingly hard to get. We have another action movie we’re developing called Killer Instinct and that will have a casting point of difference too.
What kind of projects are you looking for at Shogun?
The vast majority are developed internally, we come up with a concept then I’ll work with a writer or writers to develop it. It’s very rare that a script will come in that fits our parameters – though the good ones often lead to relationships with the writers and we work on something original. For me and Shogun, spec scripts are usually a writing sample rather than a production prospect, but largely we are looking at original low budget horror, action, sci fi and thriller movies – and we like working with older actors, 40+, which I think is a point of difference for us. One thing I would say is writers, target who you send out your emails too, think about their track record and read articles like this where people give specifics. I get so many approaches for dramas, musicals etc and they all go straight in the bin. Eve worse is this trend where the emails begin “dear Industry Professional”… I thought AI was supposed to improve things like that!
On the subject of AI, how do you feel that will affect your business?
For us, it’s a useful tool that can generate work that we wouldn’t otherwise have, such as concept art or story boards and for some cool imagery in movies – but I believe the fundamental core of movies is humanity, I like to see real people and much prefer practical effects. I don’t think it will have much more of an impact than the huge advances in CGI in the 90s did. AI has its limits. The world is changing and things like the recent US election really caught the entertainment industry by surprise – they are having to rethink the content they offer an audience that has in many ways rejected what was perceived as a populist ideology. It happened with Yellowstone but I think people thought that was an anomaly. I think in the next few years there will be a sea change in film and TV and a lot of things labelled ‘old fashioned’ will suddenly become popular (if you want to see evidence of that look at the AVOD platforms such as Tubi – we were all told TV with commercials was dead). We are just going to continue doing what we do – telling great stories with great casts in fun movies that people can enjoy.
How do you manage your work/life balance being married to your regular leading lady?
We don’t have one! When you run your own business you don’t ever really have the luxury of switching off, the pressure doesn’t work 9-5 hours so you can’t either. We spend a huge amount of time together, a lot more than most couples I guess but that really works for us, we love each others’ company without limit and are a really good team. We compliment each other. And you know I just think she’s a tremendous actress, I love watching her work at that. We live a very quiet life these days, it takes a lot to get us to go out socially for work, we have our friends who we love seeing and spending time with and in a lot of cases we work with them too. But at night we’re more likely walking the dog or watching reruns of The Sopranos than hitting it up in the West End! For me I’ve really found the perfect balance with my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
What’s next for Shogun Film?
We’re finishing off Knightfall and Doctor Plague and have been filming Midnight Kiss. We have also shot some scenes for The Secret of Guy Fawkes, which is a cool original concept. We often shoot these movies in blocks rather than all in one go, there are a lot of advantages to that system. Our first big movie of 2025 will be Werewolf Hunt, we’re going with practical creature suits, which we had made in the USA and are currently camped out in my office. I absolutely love Werewolf Films so this is something I’m very excited about – imagine if Predator took place in the Howling universe! That’s going to be great and we will be launching that at Cannes.
By the end of 2025 we’ll have a library in excess of a dozen movies and well on our way to being the number one producer of quality low budget genre movies in the UK and Western Europe.
