Anna Clifford plays a serial killer of bad stand-up comedians in the darkest of black comedies by Thomas James - his latest video for Irish rock band Gurriers.  

The video for Waiting For Fisher - a reference to the late writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher - opens with a montage of public-access/infomercial vignettes, before launching into a visceral narrative, where Clifford joins the audience at a stand-up comedy event.

The mundane setting and Clifford's mesmerising performance, with a Joker-like grin fixed on her face - and the sudden violence - really shows what James can do within the horror genre. It has the unsettling sensibility of classic British chiller from the 1970s - grim, gritty and increasingly nightmarish. And even as Clifford becomes more deranged, on some level we are still rooting for her.

Finally she takes the stage - after all, Clifford is herself a comedian - to utter a question - "what's difference between the end of the world and a smile?." It's possibly a reference to Fisher, a Marxist scholar (and music writer) who wrote: 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'      

"Me and the lads bonded over Mark Fisher quite early on - so it felt appropriate to be putting this madness together for them," says James.

"For me, the video is a visceral, surreal, grenade of a satire - observing what the confines of competition can drive us to, in a system which tells us to always try to reach the top of the pile - treading on as many heads as we’re told to along the way."