Christopher Smith happily acknowledges that his new film Black Death, a realistic look at 14th century Europe coping with the devastations of the bubonic plague that swept the Continent, is first and foremost a horror movie. A woman is branded as a witch and sought to be tortured and killed by knights in the service of the Church. The dead rise. And a young monk sees how cruel the universe can be. For Smith, horror has been very good, allowing this writer-director to realize the filmmaking dreams that as a boy growing up in England seemed improbable if not impossible. His fourth film (and the first in which he doesn’t take a writing credit), Black Death stars Sean Bean (The Lord of the Rings), Eddie Redmayne (Broadway’s Tony-winning two-character play Red, and The Pillars of the Earth), Carice van Houten (Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book) and John Lynch (Cal, Some Mother’s Son”).
