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By my count, there are six horror/thriller movies on the screens for the Halloween market – seven when you count the Michael Jackson reanimation This Is It .

If, however, your cold, blackened heart craves a more lasting shock, spend Halloween weekend with director Nicolas Winding Refn's bizarre docudrama Bronson , opening today, it's a creature feature for people who think they're too smart for monsters and ghosts. You've been warned.

Based on the real life of one Michael Peterson – a low-rent British criminal who, via his own violent misadventures, has spent more than 30 years in solitary confinement – Bronson tells the story of how Peterson coped with his isolation by adopting a second persona, one physically modelled and named after macho Death Wish star Charles Bronson. “Charlie Bronson,” as Peterson is now known, has since become a cause célèbre in Britain, and one of it's most famous outsider artists. Yet, Peterson/Bronson remains in solitary confinement to this day, mostly because he can't stop hitting people.

Refn, 39, is no stranger to prison dramas – his Pusher trilogy, a series of films about drug dealers and the failures of the war on drugs, has won international acclaim. But Bronson is a departure in style. Imagine a violent Cirque du Soleil spectacle directed by Stanley Kubrick, and you're ready for Refn's lurid, theatrical take on the biopic genre.

Are you arguing in this film that solitary confinement is a form of torture, that it drives prisoners to madness?

I have no intention and had no intention of making a political film. There was no way that I could judge incarceration or punishment because all those elements are really not what the movie is about. They're just the shell. And I think Charlie's madness was already there, he just needed a stage to be able to perform it.

How much of the prison footage is taken from reality – such as the narrow cage Charlie is put in, or the harness gag used to keep him from biting guards?

Oh, that's all artistic license. That's my own interpretation of his own descent. I wasn't allowed into the prisons in Britain. The British system didn't want to participate in the movie, so the movie was shot in a house, not a real prison. I only had a million dollars to make the film, so the film needed a major work-over, to not be the traditional prison film.

But you must be aware that people will read this film as a critique of the British prison system?

Of course people will always use anything like this to make a political debate, and they tried to do it in England – thank God it wasn't done very successfully, because once they saw the movie, they saw that it wasn't really very political. But it was certainly tried.

Bronson often looks like a filmed play – Charlie is literally on a stage. Why did you choose that route? Does the script come from a play?

No, it doesn't, but that's how I reconceived it. I thought of it as a one-act play because it's not really a biopic it's a movie about transformation. And, because I didn't want a voiceover, I came up with the idea that he was a performer, performing his life in front of perhaps one or two people, because he wants to be in control.

The lead, Tom Hardy, gives an alienated, overaware performance, while the rest of the cast give realistic performances. Why?

It's because in Charlie's mind, there is only Charlie. Everybody else are only there to underscore him. He's like a fairy-tale character – everything is about him and his own perception. Charlie's completely oblivious. He's chosen a very strange way of life, and anything that does not fit into that life, that sticks out, to him is not visible.

Did you meet with the real Charlie Bronson?

I've never met him, no, no. I didn't really have an interest in meeting him, because I didn't really have an interest in making a biopic of Michael Peterson. I mean, I couldn't, because I don't know who Michael Peterson is, and Charlie Bronson is not a real person, he's Peterson's made-up personality. I was interested in the transformation from Peterson to Bronson. And, on top of that, the Home Office in Britain wouldn't allow me to meet with Charlie, because of the political nature of me making a movie about him. So, I had to use my own interpretation.

But there is a lot of material out there about Charlie Bronson, including his own books. Do you have any clearer idea of him now?

No, I never did any research and I only read his autobiography, to get some kind of hint. And in that book he did say one very interesting thing, at the end: that maybe he always wanted to be in prison. That's how I began to write it – maybe this guy was not escaping from prison but into prison. Why would somebody do that? The only thing that runs through everything he does is a sense of narcissism. He wants to be famous. But I certainly don't know who is Michael Peterson or who is Charlie Bronson.

Would people care about Charlie Bronson if he was not an artist?

I don't think it's his art that people are thinking about, because his drawings and so forth are not works of great art. But what's interesting about them is that they are pure emotion. They are pure outbursts. I guess that makes them interesting, but, you know, not art.

Was the real Charles Bronson aware of Charlie Bronson?

Oh, I doubt it. Charlie's only famous in Britain, but he's very famous there. You ask any cab driver who Charlie is, and everybody knows who he is – so, I guess Charlie achieved everything he wished for.