Fright Night

Considering my first brush with on-screen horror it’s a miracle I ever came to love it as much as I do. The older I get the less I trust my memories but the first time I saw something truly scary with my own eyes is burned into my mind like it was yesterday.

I must have been about five-years-old and as per my routine at the time I’d fallen asleep on the sofa, ready to be carried off to bed whenever my parents could be bothered.
On this particular night however, I was roused from my slumber to find my mam and dad watching the 1979 TV miniseries of Salem’s Lot. I have no idea what caused me to wake up – most nights I would fall asleep on the sofa and find myself in my own bed in the morning, as if by magic – but whatever the reason, the horror gods decreed that I would awake during the scene where the vampire Barlow appears in the jail cell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLLW5jFcRtI).

That scene still gets me even now, so you can imagine the reaction from five-year-old me. There were tears – lots of tears – and I spent that night (and a few more after it) sleeping in between my parents.

But kids are tougher than you think and they get over trauma much more quickly than adults. I’d already had my first taste of scary stories thanks to my nana and given the chance, I’d always choose a book of ghostly tales from the gift shop if we visited an old castle or spooky stately home.

Eventually my parents and Santa started enabling my burgeoning addiction and all sorts of strange books would appear on birthdays and at Christmas. One of my favourites was The Kincaid’s Book Of Witches, Goblins, Ogres And Fantasy, which featured some beautiful illustrations to go along with the weird folk tales it contained. I recently found my copy in the attic and it immediately transported me back to my childhood on a gigantic wave of nostalgia. If you can pick up a copy on eBay or Amazon, do so.

By this point I was well on my way to an obsession with the spooky, bizarre and macabre and I eventually came round to the idea of watching a horror movie. For better or worse my parents, who have always been very supportive of my nonsense, decided they were ok with this idea and we started at the most natural entry point for a young horror fan: Hammer.

Under the Fear On Friday banner, the area’s local TV station Tyne Tees would show classic Hammer horror films every week and since it wasn’t a school night I was allowed to stay up late to watch. Looking back now I’m sure my parents were banking on me falling asleep before the film even started and I have to give them credit because week after week, the gamble paid off and I didn’t get to see anything. Every once in a while, if I tried really hard, I would manage to stay awake that little bit longer but mostly it’s just hazy memories of Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and an endless procession of sexy vampire women (I didn’t realise they were sexy at the time. That came later). Still, it left its mark because all these years later Friday is still ‘horror night’ as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s how things went for a while. Sometimes I’d manage to stay awake and watch half of a movie, sometimes not. I have vague recollections of seeing some of what I’m now sure was Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell. I also remember seeing bits of Vampire Circus and The Curse Of The Werewolf with Oliver Reed. As for non-Hammer films, there was a made-for-TV horror movie called Don’t Fall Asleep and I might even have seen some of John Carpenter’s Halloween and The Fog. I know for sure on more than one occasion I tried to watch Alien, which seemed to be on TV every time my grandad was on babysitting duty, but I never managed to make it past the opening credits because the music was so scary.

Then one day my dad came home with a VHS video recorder. It wasn’t fancy and it was second-hand, but it’s how I was able to watch horror movies whenever I wanted.