Director grew into his brand of horror

The British-born director Christopher Smith was obsessed with horror films when he was a lad. He acquired his first taste for the genre watching vintage B-movie fare from Hammer Film Productions on television. By the time he reached 12, Smith had graduated to grislier offerings, such as “I Spit on Your Grave.”

Too young to rent such movies, Smith would smuggle them out of his local video store inside copies of more kid-friendly fare like “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“Everybody did it,” he says proudly.

Now he’s making his own horror films that young boys will probably sneak home.

Smith’s first project, 2004’s “Creep,” about a woman who finds herself trapped in the London subway for a night, didn’t impress critics. But his second, “Severance,” which opens here Friday, was a critical and commercial hit in England and other parts of Europe last year.

Sort of “The Office” meets “Deliverance,” it blends an ample amount of gore with some macabre, funny moments -- just check out the scene in which someone tries to shove a severed leg into a small refrigerator.

“Severance” revolves on a British-based multinational weapons company’s team-building weekend in the mountains of Eastern Europe. A road obstacle forces the group’s members to trek through the woods to their lodge, and they encounter a group of murderers who are intent on picking them off one by one. Danny Dyer, Laura Harris, Tim McInnerny and Toby Stephens star.

“Severance” is filled with references to Stanley Kubrick’s movies. A sequence in which Dyer is fed grapes by nubile young women in robes, for example, is a tip of the hat to a similar tableau from “A Clockwork Orange.” And just as in “Dr. Strangelove,” the song “We’ll Meet Again” is heard over the end credits.

Smith says, however, that he didn’t get the idea to use the song from “Dr. Strangelove.” He was inspired instead by hearing Johnny Cash’s rendition of the tune

“I thought it had more of a cynical, antiwar vibe to it than the [original] Vera Lynn version,” he says. “But when we tried to get that song for the end of the movie, they wouldn’t give it to us because it was a love song [Cash] did after his wife died.”

So Smith ended up using a hard-rocking version performed by Ed Harcourt.

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-- Susan King