Here’s Our First Look at Alan Moore’s First Feature Film, Wild Gothic Fantasy The Show

Legendary comics writer Alan Moore has had several of his works adapted for the screen, but we now have a first look at The Show, his first original feature film to be produced.

Directed by Mitch Jenkins from a script by Moore, The Show follows Fletcher Dennis (Tom Burke), who has been hired to track down a stolen artifact, an investigation that brings him into contact with the most unusual and dangerous elements in Moore and Jenkins’ hometown of Northampton.

“With The Show, I wanted to apply the storytelling ability accumulated during the rest of my varied career to the medium of film,” said Moore in a statement. “I wanted to take some very old-school approaches to film and to find out, alongside Mitch Jenkins, what would happen if you connected them up with some very modern ideas and technical capabilities, and I wanted to make a piece of radical and progressive cinema that was also ridiculously sumptuous, involving and entertaining: a genuinely spectacular show.”

In truly Moore-esque fashion, the project also comes with the following synopsis:

A frighteningly focussed man of many talents, passports and identities arrives at England’s broken heart, a haunted midlands town that has collapsed to a black hole of dreams, only to find that that this new territory is as at least as strange and dangerous as he is. Attempting to locate a certain person and a certain artefact for his insistent client, he finds himself sinking in a quicksand twilight world of dead Lotharios, comatose sleeping beauties, Voodoo gangsters, masked adventurers, unlikely 1930s private eyes and violent chiaroscuro women … and this is Northampton when it’s still awake. Once the town closes its eyes there is another world entirely going on beneath the twitching lids, a world of glittering and sinister delirium much worse than any social or economic devastation. Welcome to the British nightmare, with its gorgeous flesh, its tinsel and its luminous light-entertainment monsters; its hallucinatory austerity. Welcome to The Show.

It appears that Moore himself is also the star of The Show’s first look, sitting on the moon with some rather outlandish makeup. The feature continues the story of short film series Show Pieces, Moore and Jenkins’ long-gestating previous collaboration.

“Having spent the previous decade collaborating with my dear friend Alan Moore and the last seven years of it working on our film project Show Pieces, to finally find myself directing The Show is a wondrous thing,” said Jenkins. “Being able to take our world and Alan’s words to the big screen is nothing less than magical.”

In addition to Burke and Moore himself, the film’s ensemble also includes Siobhan Hewlett (Show Pieces), Ellie Bamber (Nocturnal Animals), Sheila Atim (Girl From The North Country) and Richard Dillane (The White Princess). Producers are Lex Films’ Tom Brown, and Jim Mooney and Mike Elliott of EMU Films, with financing provided by BFI and Lipsync.

Moore has famously opposed screen adaptations of his comics, but in 2019, we’ll be getting HBO’s Watchmen from creator Damon Lindelof, a television adaptation of the groundbreaking Moore and Dave Gibbons graphic novel.

Production is currently underway on The Show in Northampton, U.K.

Check out the uncropped first-look image below.