In conversation: Tyler Mellins on the making of 'The Witching Hour' (2025)
26 May 2025
A surreal and stirring new commission has launched this May at The Box as part of our Reimagining the Film Archive (RtFA) programme. 'The Witching Hour' is a fragmented dreamscape, collaged with a Surrealist spirit that stitches together footage held in the South West Film & Television Archive Collection at The Box.
Tyler Mellins (b. 1995, Mansfield, UK) is currently based at Yorkshire Artspace in Sheffield. He creates surreal moving image works and multimedia installations that explore themes of loss, memory, and time. His RtFA commission is a moving collage that aims to “conjure queerness” in the archive and invites viewers to “turn and face the strange”. (David Bowie, Changes, 1972).
The Witching Hour is a fragmented dreamscape, stitched together entirely from footage held in the South West Film & Television Archive Collection at The Box. Through meticulous searching, sampling, and editing, Mellins cut up and re-assembled over 60 items from the archive to create a 15-minute film that takes viewers on an atmospheric journey into the unknown.
Inspired by Surrealist collages which used found images and combined them in unexpected ways. This approach transforms the archive into a space where memories, dreams and fears are unearthed. The local landscape is cast as a stage for these visions to play out on, turning familiar scenery into strange and disorienting dreamworlds filled with wonder, revelation, and unease.
For Mellins, the film’s flexible and ever-changing form, along with its DIY aesthetic — drawing from underground influences like B-movies and punk zines — feels “inherently queer.” This creates images that are fluid, where the usual rules or boundaries break down, and nothing feels fixed or certain.
Mellins approached the archive with a sensitivity to what was missing, as well as what was present. Questions of visibility, historical omission, and the difficulty of tracing queer narratives became part of the work’s development.
“It was really challenging to find representations of queer people that felt relevant to the work I wanted to make. The word ‘gay’ was not permitted as a search term in the database, which presented an obstacle from the beginning. When I did find something, there was often a sense that these were stories “about” queer people from an outside perspective, and I wanted the work to avoid this kind of othering.
Tyler Mellins
Instead, Mellins set out to “conjure queerness” and portray a more personal understanding of queerness rooted in magic, transformation, and the potential for change. Childhood memories, popular culture, and dream logic therefore permeate The Witching Hour’s structure, its tone shifting from soft unease to full-blown nightmares filled with witches, folk rituals, and spectral figures.
To fill archival gaps and bring new visions to life, Mellins also created new material, shot on 8mm film to sit seamlessly within the archive’s aesthetic. The footage shows three men wearing elaborate witch hats, based on a series of paintings (c.1955) by surrealist Leonora Carrington and brought to life by couturier Mason Kane Thomas.
“Filmed in 2025 but probably taking place in my imagination 100 years earlier, these three ‘Weird Sisters’ exist outside of time,” Mellins explains. “There is a magic act at work, transporting queer people to the past and allowing them to be visible in the archives today.” For Mellins, the extravagant hats act as a signifier of queerness that play on the tensions of LGBT+ visibility, imagining an alternative timeline where historic queer people felt safe and empowered to make themselves known.
“While the film does not have a linear narrative, I wanted it to feel like a dream that whisked viewers along,” he adds of the film’s rhythm, which is informed by the Jungian concept of the ‘night sea journey’. This experience is described as a descent into the unconscious mind and a confrontation with darkness that dwells there, re-emerging with new insights. “If there is a lesson in the work, it’s to always turn and face the strange. When you look it in the eyes, without fear, you might find it’s not so scary after all.”
Commission details
Experience The Witching Hour on the big screens in the Media Lab Gallery at The Box, playing on a continuous loop (15 minutes 40 seconds) from 24 May to 7 September 2025. Opening hours are 10am-5pm Tuesday to Sunday (plus Late May Bank Holiday Monday and August Bank Holiday Monday). Free entry.
More about Tyler Mellins
To explore more Tyler Mellins, visit:
- Visit Tyler Mellin's official website
- Follow him on Instagram
- Read our Spotlight article
- Find out more about the Reimagining the Film Archive programme
Banner image: The Witching Hour, “Portal,” Film Still, Tyler Mellins, 2025