It’s Halloween and appropriately enough, I just finished watching It was a Dark and Silly Night, a new animated short by bestselling author Neil Gaiman and Playboy cartoonist Gahan Wilson. The film had its world premiere at the Hamptons International Film Festival earlier this month and is the latest project from director Steven-Charles Jaffe , best known for his work on the blockbusters Ghost and Star Trek VI. Jaffe also produced the extraordinary documentary about Gahan last year.

The movie is based on the adorable strip that appeared in Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s compilation Big Fat Little Lit and follows a group of children who end up throwing one hell of a party at their local graveyard after befriending the resident ghouls.

Steven tells us a little more about the film:

I've always loved Neil's writing, Anansi Boys, American Gods, and of course The Sandman: Book of Dreams. When I flew to a mysterious castle in the mid-northwest to meet and interview Neil for the documentary, Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird, I brought up It Was a Dark and Silly Night, asking how the collaboration between he and Gahan came about. Neil wrote it specifically for Gahan, saying, "It's full-on Gahan Wilson, but for five year olds!" I then received everyone’s permission to animate it. There's a great animation house in New Zealand that I worked with called Flux Animation (they did the Polar bear and the frog animation for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth) and they did a wonderful job.

My favorite aspect of the film is the scene in the graveyard when the corpses come to life and party with the kids. Working in animation really pushes your imagination, as you are creating from scratch, and every frame has to be carefully thought out, or it gets costly (painfully so), but it's so satisfying when the characters come to life.

I’m hoping to include it as a special DVD extra on Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird, so both films will be available to everyone soon!  

I'd like to be skulking around a graveyard with Gahan for Halloween tonight, but instead I’m off to work on my next film: A thriller set in San Francisco, called I’ll See You Again.