Burke and Hare: exposed!

The first pictures from the set of the upcoming John Landis film Burke and Hare are out! Starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as the eponymous corpse-stealing duo, the film has just wrapped filming at Ealing Studios in London and moved to Edinburgh for location shooting.

The crew will be filming in the city – the place that the Irish immigrant body snatchers made their home – until early next week. The pictures show a tired looking Pegg and Serkis preparing to shoot a scene.

Pegg is to play Burke and Serkis Hare, the owner of the boarding house where the men murdered guests and sold their corpses. Tom Wilkinson will play Dr Robert Knox, an anatomy lecturer at Edinburgh University, who bought the bodies for his students to dissect. Isla Fisher and Jessica Hynes play, respectively, Burke’s girlfriend, the aspiring actress Ginny; and Hare’s wife (about whom there’s no more information), who were also in on the murderous scheme.

The rest of the cast includes a host of Brit actors of the likes of Tim Curry (Dr Monroe, who they first approach about buying a corpse), John Cleese, Steven Merchant, Hugh Bonneville, Bill Bailey and Ronnie Corbett, plus new faces including Pollyanna Mackintosh (Exam’s Brunette). We look forward to seeing them amusingly dispatched.

The film represents a welcome return to the genre for John Landis after a break of almost 30 years. In 1981 he directed the influential comedy/horror An American Werewolf in London from his own script, which he’d been hoping to make into a film for a decade. He went on to direct Thriller for Michael Jackson but apart from that, has not ventured back much into gore ‘n laughs territory. But Landis himself did not write the script for Burke and Hare which came courtesy of Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft – the writers behind St Trinian’s (2007).

For the background on the real life Burke and Hare and background on filming, read our article here.

We found the pictures here and here.