I’m nine years old. My older sister Ruth and I are in Fast Forward, our local video shop in Edinburgh, Scotland, arguing with our dad about what VHS to rent. Dad says we can’t rent Innerspace, the ’90s classic sci-fi comedy starring Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan, and Martin Short. Why not? Because I rented that last week. And every week for the last few months. Apparently, that’s too much Innerspace. Since Mum and Dad’s separation, renting videos and going to the cinema is our favourite form of quality time with Dad. Today, Ruth wants to rent the new Friends boxset, or Goodfellas. I’m too young to watch Goodfellas, apparently… I want to rent The Simpsons boxset, or Jurassic Park. My father suggests some classic film, but Ruth and I are deeply suspicious of anything filmed before 1980. These kinds of disagreements can go on for hours, with nobody backing down, leaving little time for actual movie watching. We compromise: Friends and The Simpsons. As we leave the shop, I struggle with the idea that I have to compromise at all … Just days ago, I was forced to endure My Best Friend’s Wedding at the cinema, ’cos Ruth wanted to watch it. My dad tells me not to worry, because this weekend we’re going to see Volcano, and in all likelihood, a bunch of people will get melted by lava. I like the sound of that.
I’m 14 years old, holding my first MiniDV camcorder, watching my mate Sean prepare to jump off a 10-foot wall into a giant bush. My mates and I are obsessed with Jackass;I’ve got the DVD box set, plus the preceding and far more anarchic CKY. We’re shooting my first foray into filmmaking, a Jackass rip-off called Cunts Doin Stunts, an objectively hilarious title and the wittiest aspect of the finished piece. In my teens, my favorite part of the process was cutting all the footage together to music, an aspect of editing I still love to this day. It was hugely satisfying to screen the finished juvenile fever dream for my pals and see them laugh at what I’d created.
Back atop the wall, Sean looks at the precipitous drop, nervous … I tell him the bush will break his fall. Easy for me to say. I don’t do the stunts, I just film them. My other mates look on, calling Sean a shitebag, despite the fact none of them are willing to do it either. Sean can’t have that. Sean’s the hardest kid in our group. So Sean jumps. I film it in slo-mo – for a few seconds, he looks angelic, like a superhero in a tracksuit. Then he cuts straight through the bush and lands in the dirt like a bag of bricks. Turns out the bush was one of those bushes that gave the impression of a bush but was actually a hollow shell of a bush. Sean breaks his collarbone.
I’m 17 and working as an usher at my local cinema, the Filmhouse. As far as I know, it’s one of the only cinemas to still have the ushers sit through the film. I watch everything, from the latest Hollywood releases to experimental 1950s Polish cinema. Tonight, it’s Dead By Dawn, the annual horror all-nighter: 12 hours of horror films screened back-to-back. Horror fans queue at the doors, huddling around their multipacks of Red Bull, discussing the new wave of torture porn that’s sweeping the industry. With their metal tattoos, facial piercings, medieval beards and Cannibal Holocaust T-shirts, they may look mean … but make no mistake, these are the most patient, well-behaved customers I deal with. Nothing like the European arthouse crowd, who never look you in the eye when you tear their ticket, proceed to laugh loudly throughout the film to signal their understanding of the subtle French humor, and then afterwards leave the theatre audibly bemoaning the lack of that same subtle humour in mainstream cinema. No, the horror fans just want to have a nice time with their friends, watching hapless teens being dismembered onscreen. I watch the first two films, then fall asleep intermittently during the third, resulting in a bizarre waking nightmare where I occasionally regain consciousness just as someone is being disembowelled or decapitated. We finish the screening, open the doors, and the horror fans disperse, blinking like bats at the morning sun. I’m filled with warmth at the notion that cinema brought them all together for an evening.
I’m 24 years old. Back home in Edinburgh from London, having graduated from my master’s in directing fiction. I work three part-time jobs to make ends meet whilst I await the call from Steven Spielberg to tell me that they are rebooting Innerspace and I’m the best man for the job. I’ve made dozens of shorts; some good, some bad, many in between. My graduation film, a batshit-crazy 24-minute musical comedy, has failed to secure me a foothold in directing UK TV drama, the common route for my peers. I sit in the pub with my friend, the actor Grant O’Rourke, and we talk about writing a film, something small and achievable that we can actually make. I start writing The Incomer the next day. But instead of writing an achievable two-hander in one room, I write a fantasy comedy set on a remote island with action sequences, folkloric monsters, flocks of birds, and complex water- and cliff-based stunts. Throughout development, I will doubt not only that I can write this script, but whether I can write at all. Living in my dad’s spare room, I’ll feel like a fraud and a failure. I mean, can you really call yourself a filmmaker if you don’t actually make any films? The next decade will be tough, with ups and downs and many more moments of profound self-doubt … but Grant and I will always return to The Incomer, and as the drafts progress the script takes the form of something that just might actually have a chance of getting made. I don’t believe in fate, but I begin to feel that if we can just get it made, then this project will change my life.
I’m 39 years old, and The Incomer is opening the Edinburgh International Film Festival. This has been quite simply, the greatest year of my life. After an idyllic shoot in the far north of Scotland, working with a supremely talented Scottish cast and crew, we premiered the finished film at Sundance 2026 – a bizarre and overwhelmingly positive experience, where we won the NEXT Innovator Award, which sounds like something awarded to a tech start-up … I signed with U.S. agents and have been taking meetings with American producers called Ryder and Wyck and other American-sounding names. As I stand in front of the Edinburgh audience, I find myself having what many will refer to as a “full-circle moment” (a term which I find weirdly annoying for some reason, though I can’t dispute its suitability). Amongst the audience are my sister (crying tears of pride), my mother (whose island heritage directly inspired the film), and my father (who, upon seeing the Universal logo at the start, exclaims, “It’s like a real film!”). My childhood friends are there, including Sean, and his (now healed) collarbone. Grant, who plays one one of the main characters in The Incomer, is there, too, both of us overjoyed by our luck at having made an actual film. I tell the audience I am pleased to show my debut feature in this cinema, because it’s the same cinema in which I sat many years ago as an usher, breathing in the stale sweat of all-night horror fans.
After viewing The Incomer, my partner will say to me that The Incomer is me in film form. Maybe she’s right; in many ways, it’s the culmination of not just my career, but my entire life to this date. Influenced by those closest to me and inspired by my deepest passions, it’s both terrifying and exciting to share it with the world, but I’m immensely proud of this film.
When our local video shop, Fast Forward, eventually closed its doors and admitted defeat at the hands of streaming, the owner informed us that our account had by far the highest number of rentals in Edinburgh. I’m still proud of that, too.
Featured image, showing Louis Paxton on the set of The Incomer, by Anthony Dickenson.
