‘We don’t want to give anybody sleepless nights’

Confession time: I’m not all that scared by horror movies. Of course, a loud jump scare will get me every time and I’ll flinch at a brutal slasher movie slaying but the terror rarely lasts any longer than the film itself. Even as a youngster I knew what I was seeing wasn’t real so I didn’t spend a lot of restless nights worrying if a monster or madman was coming to get me. My enjoyment of horror films comes more from the atmosphere, visuals and bizarre scenarios than being scared in the traditional sense. Still, there is one movie that deeply affected me when I first saw it and still sends a chill up my spine today, even if it’s not technically a movie at all.

Ghostwatch was a one-off TV show that aired on BBC One on Halloween night, 1992. Although it was part of the BBC drama anthology series Screen One, it was presented as a genuine live investigation into a haunting at a London council house. The story – heavily inspired by the allegedly real Enfield Poltergeist case – concerned a divorced mother and her two young daughters being menaced by a malevolent spirit dubbed ‘Pipes’, due to the eerie clanging noises it made on the house’s plumbing system. Into this accursed abode would go legitimate TV presenter Sarah Greene and comedian Craig Charles as investigators, while chat-show legend Michael Parkinson and Greene’s real-life husband Mike ‘Smithy’ Smith held things down back in the studio. What starts off as a jovial, light-hearted ghost hunt quickly gets out of hand, leading to a shocking conclusion that leaves you questioning everything you’ve just seen.

It was my mother, of course, who first alerted me to Ghostwatch a few days before it aired and at 9pm on October 31, there I was in front of the TV, ready for some real-life Halloween scares. And I genuinely did think it was real (at least to begin with), along with a sizeable chunk of the viewing public. It’s easy to mock now, with our gizmos and gadgets beaming ‘reality’ into our brains 24/7, but back in 1992 why would we NOT think it was real? The early ’90s brought the dawn of reality TV and along with the then-novel live telethons like Comic Relief and Children In Need, we were getting used to camera crews following around the emergency services for shows like Hospital Watch. Then there were the presenters. We all knew Sarah Greene and Craig Charles from kids’ TV and Red Dwarf, and who could be more trustworthy than the venerable Michael Parkinson? Most important of all, it was on the BBC. Auntie would NEVER lie to us, surely?!

Although it had been filmed months before transmission, for all intents and purposes Ghostwatch looked exactly like a live TV broadcast should, starring the exact people you would expect to see, and until things really started to go bonkers later on in the show there was absolutely no reason to believe what you were watching wasn’t real. Had I watched it straight through from beginning to end, perhaps the pretence would have fallen sooner, but such was my level of fear at what I was witnessing I spent most of the night switching back and forth between channels, utterly terrified but unable to stay away for long. This fragmented viewing only added to the ‘reality’ of the situation and by the time we got to the shocking finale, I went to bed with the strong possibility that I’d just seen a genuine haunting on live TV.

I wasn’t the only one. Come the morning, the entire country (or at least the tabloid press) was in uproar. No BBC programme had ever received so many complaints. As the moral outrage mounted and calls for heads to roll intensified the BBC scrambled for cover, but when it emerged a few days later that a young man with learning difficulties had taken his own life, possibly as a result of the programme, a moratorium was placed on Ghostwatch ever being shown again.

Although Pipes was gone, gathering cobwebs in the BBC vaults, he certainly wasn’t forgotten. Ghostwatch had earned a place in television infamy, alongside that elephant having a wee on Blue Peter and the drunken antics of Oliver Reed, and every now and then conversation would turn to memories of that Halloween night in 1992. Even years later as an adult, a creepy, witching hour creak from the plumbing system still had the ability to unsettle me for the rest of the night. Once I got online at the turn of the millennium I soon discovered I wasn’t the only one still having trouble sleeping. With a little bit of digging around you could find others sharing their recollections of Ghostwatch on various websites and message boards, and if you were really lucky you might find a screen grab or two from an old VHS tape or a scan of an outraged tabloid front page from the morning after. While these online finds were good, it wasn’t until 2002 when the BFI released it on DVD that I got to see Ghostwatch in its full glory once again.

Ten years and countless horror films had passed since I had last seen it but the feelings of unease as I put the disc into the player were very real. I knew by now it had all been make-believe of course, but the sinewy, spectral fingers of Pipes dug deep into the darkest recesses of my brain and churned up feelings of dread that I had last felt as a teenager. My biggest fear, though, was that in the bright light of adulthood, this terrifying memory would be exposed as a damp squib, more likely to elicit chuckles than fear – but against all odds I found it still held the power to unnerve. It was a relief to find that Ghostwatch was genuinely still scary.

What was most impressive was realising just how much effort had been put into making it appear as a genuine live broadcast. They say you should never ask how a magician does their tricks, but the commentary track featuring the culprits behind Ghostwatch – Stephen Volk, Ruth Baumgarten and Lesley Manning – in which they lay out in detail exactly how it was accomplished, is a revelation. From tiny touches like the slight delay when an expert appears in a trans-Atlantic link from ‘New York’ to casting real-life outside broadcast camera and sound men rather than actors, I say without hyperbole that I consider it a work of television genius and I feel no shame in being duped on Halloween night back in 1992.

For those of us who saw it at the time, Ghostwatch provides a shared generational memory that still elicits chills today. It’s sad to think that something like Ghostwatch could never happen now (someone might get offended!), but every year on Halloween I’ll dutifully watch it once again – at 9pm for the genuine experience if fate allows – to get a fear fix that so many traditional horror movies can’t ever hope to deliver.

 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – Is It A Slasher Movie?

When it comes to slasher movie icons there are four names that ring out through the hallowed halls of horror: Michael, Jason, Freddy and Leatherface. The stars of the Halloween, Friday The 13th, A Nightmare On Elm Street and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises are as recognisable and popular today as they were when they made their movie debuts decades ago. Google any ‘top 10 slasher movies’ list and they’ll all be in there somewhere.

While other beloved boogeymen and boogeywomen (boogeypeople?) from the golden age of the slasher have fallen by the wayside in the eyes of the mainstream moviegoer, these four titans of terror are regularly remade, rebooted, prequelised and sequelised for a new generation, placing them on the same level as Star Wars when it comes to pop culture staying power for movies of that era.

Especially impressive is the enduring popularity of Leatherface, who made his first appearance 44 years ago in 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As recently as last year he got a (terrible, granted) origin story prequel movie and the fact that you can buy an official, child-size Leatherface costume in 2018 is as mind-boggling as it is awesome.

Only a fool would debate the impact of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the horror genre, with everyone from Ridley Scott to Rob Zombie citing it as an influence, but what is up for debate is its place among the Big Four of slasher movies. While it’s certainly one of my all-time favourite horror films I think it sits a little uneasily as a slasher movie once you scratch beneath the surface of power tools as murder weapons and dead skin masks.

Out of the Big Four, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had the least impact on my burgeoning horror obsession. I knew who Leatherface was, of course, and I knew of the movie’s notoriety, but after being caught up in the video nasty hysteria of the early ’80s it was banned and there was just no way to see it in the UK … unless you had a friend whose dad had an attic full of dodgy videos. I was in my mid-teens but I didn’t care about the stash of porn that was also up there, all I was interested in seeing was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, at any cost.

After a bit of begging and pleading I was finally allowed to borrow the holy grail of video nasties and was, if I’m honest, a bit disappointed. Despite that, it was certainly an experience. Watching an infamous movie on a tape of dubious origin added to the film’s already scuzzy feel, and knowing I shouldn’t be watching it at all only enhanced the feeling of wrongdoing, but it wasn’t quite the wall-to-wall bloodbath I was expecting. For a movie with the word massacre in the title, there wasn’t exactly a lot of massacre-ing going on.

At this point in my life I was subsisting on a steady diet of Halloweens, Nightmares and Fridays and I expected The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be more of the same – after all, Michael, Freddy, Jason and Leatherface were always mentioned in the same breath in horror circles – but it somehow felt different. It was hard to put my finger on at the time but now I’m a bit older and wiser it’s plain to see that it simply isn’t a slasher movie like the others.

Of course, there are strands of slasher DNA in there – the masked killer, the good-looking group of teens being picked-off – but there are many aspects of the film that don’t fit into the very strict slasher movie template that came to define the genre.

For starters, there’s Leatherface himself. Although he’s the most recognisable bad guy from the movie, there’s also the hitchhiker, the cook and Grandpa. He’s not a lone stalker like Michael, Jason and Freddy, this is a family affair. Although there are slasher movies with more than one antagonist, none of them quite fit the bizarre family dynamic on display in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You could even argue that Leatherface is the least aggressive member of the family. The hitchhiker and the cook both go out of their way to cause trouble but it seems obvious that he’s the whipping boy of the brood and just wants to be left alone.

While slasher movie bad guys are often driven by a sense of vengeance for some past wrongdoing – whether it’s getting burned alive by vigilante parents or being allowed to drown by negligent camp councillors – Leatherface and his family lack any such motivation. The young victims have no connection – however tenuous – to the killers, they just find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no score to be settled on behalf of Leatherface and his kin. The teens themselves also fail to abide by many of the usual slasher movie tropes. There is no promiscuity or drug use and aside from a little bit of trespassing, they do nothing to deserve what happens to them.

That other classic slasher trope, the final girl, also doesn’t quite fit here either. Sally might be the last surviving member of her group but she doesn’t end up turning the tables on her tormentors and getting the better of them in true final girl style. She only manages to escape through the sheer incompetence of the bad guys while barely hanging onto her rapidly fraying sanity.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre undoubtably paved the way for the slasher movie boom of the late ’70s and early ’80s, but if you go through a checklist of what makes a slasher movie a slasher movie, it just doesn’t tick enough boxes to be considered part of the genre in the strictest sense.

It makes a much closer bedfellow to something like The Hills Have Eyes, which nobody would ever argue is a slasher movie. Beat for beat, they’re almost the same film, with a stranded family running afoul of a cannibalistic clan in a sun-scorched setting after their vehicle breaks down. There’s even a cantankerous old man at a gas station trying to steer the unwitting travellers away from danger in both films. By comparison, if you take Halloween as the definitive slasher movie, they have almost nothing in common.

I love The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s a great movie and a great horror movie, but if you measure it against the other members of the Big Four, it simply can’t be called a slasher movie.

 

 

Hello Nasties

One of my favourite Christmas presents as a youngster was a book called Horror Films, written by Nigel Andrews. It was full of glorious images from throughout the history of horror cinema, from silent classics such as The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari and Nosferatu through to the then-contemporary ’80s slashers like Friday The 13th.

It was manna from heaven for a young horror fan with its full-colour spreads of vampires, werewolves and other iconic movie monsters, but the pages that fascinated me the most came later in the book in a section titled Horror 1980s Style. The movie stills here were far more graphic and lurid than those found earlier in the book – a pack of ghouls munching away on the innards of some unfortunate victim and a woman’s decapitated head that looked a little bit TOO realistic – with titles I’d never seen in the video shop like Zombie Flesh-Eaters and Nightmares In A Damaged Brain. These were the infamous Video Nasties.

In the early ’80s a loophole in film classification laws meant that unlike cinema releases, movies distributed on video cassette didn’t have to undergo the scrutiny of the British Board Of Film Classification (BBFC). This led to a deluge of uncensored, low-budget, usually European horror and exploitation movies that pushed – and in many cases smashed to smithereens – the boundaries of good taste in a bid to quench the thirst of the growing home video market.

With eye-rolling inevitability, a moral panic followed. Fronted by legendary busybody Mary Whitehouse and with backing from the tabloid press and rent-a-quote politicians, the Video Nasties furore eventually saw the implementation of the Video Recordings Act 1984. Shops were raided, tapes were seized and a distributer was even jailed for releasing an uncensored version of the aforementioned Nightmares In A Damaged Brain.

A list of Video Nasties was drawn up by the Director Of Public Prosecutions, divided into Sections Two and Three. Seizure of Section Two films could lead to the prosecution of a dealer or distributer for disseminating obscene materials, while Section Three films could be confiscated without the need for prosecution. In the end, 72 films made it onto the Section Two list with 39 titles being successfully prosecuted.

This all passed me by at the time. I’d heard the phrase ‘Video Nasty’ but not being of an age to read the papers or watch TV news I really didn’t understand what was going on. What I did understand by the time I got my Horror Films book on Christmas Day in the mid ’80s is that there was a bunch of amazing-looking horror films that I had no chance of seeing.

I finally got my first glimpse of some of these elusive movies in the early ’90s when a few of them started appearing in heavily cut form on home video, with two notable titles being The Evil Dead and Zombie Flesh-Eaters, but things really started to change in 1999 with the retirement of the BBFC’s overzealous director James Ferman. Despite never being on the official Video Nasties list, The Exorcist was something of a bête noir for Ferman due to the young age of the possessed girl Reagan, but once he was out the door it was soon deemed safe enough for an uncut home release. This was swiftly followed by another infamous name in at the annals of horror movie history, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which had been one of the Section Three Video Nasties. Amazingly, the release of these movies didn’t bring about the end of civilisation.

After that, the floodgates opened and a number of previously ‘obscene’ films were passed uncut for the first time. In a lot cases you really had to wonder what all the fuss had been about in the first place. While you still wouldn’t show SS Experiment Camp to your grandma, many of the Nasties were really quite tame by today’s standards, with some of them eventually being downgraded to a 15 certificate. Today, only 10 of the Nasties remain banned, mainly due to not having being resubmitted for classification, and other than violence against animals (quite rightly), most of the others are available completely uncut.

With companies like Arrow Video and 88 Films now restoring and releasing these previously persecuted titles in glorious high-definition, there’s never been a better time to check out some Video Nasties. Here are five of my favourites …

The Evil Dead
Sam Raimi’s cabin-in-the-woods classic was dubbed ‘the number one Nasty’ by Mary Whitehouse, which only gives weight to the theory that she didn’t actually watch any of the movies she was condemning, often making her judgement based on title alone. While there’s plenty of violence on offer, it’s far more cartoonish than a lot of the other Nasties and is served with a huge dollop of jet-black humour. Although I don’t much care for the sequels and the cult worship of Bruce Campbell, The Evil Dead is still a tour-de-force of low-budget film-making that leaves you worn out by the time the credits roll.

The Burning
Although considered by many as a rip-off of the suspiciously similar Friday The 13th, The Burning is a summer camp slasher that more than holds its own when it comes to blood and guts, thanks to the majestic gore effects of Tom Savini. Despite never reaching the same level of public recognition as his hockey-masked rival, Cropsey’s raft massacre alone earns him a place among the top-tier of ’80s slashers, and perhaps the lack of a sequel trilogy to diminish the impact only serves to strengthen his legend.

Zombie Flesh-Eaters
What’s not to love about a movie that features an underwater zombie facing-off against a shark? This is top-level Fulci with a sublime score from Fabio Frizzi.

The Beyond
Another classic from Fulci, The Beyond takes the traditional undead template and turns the bonkers knob aaaaaaaalllll the way up to eleven. Lacking any kind of coherent plot, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on but with this much trademark Fulci madness on offer, a plot would only get in the way of all the fun.

Cannibal Holocaust
One of the few Video Nasties that lives up to its notoriety even today, Cannibal Holocaust doesn’t hold back when it comes to outrageous gore and sexual violence. Some argue that the film is actually much deeper than it initially appears with its themes of social commentary, while director Ruggero Deodato insists all he wanted to do was make a movie about cannibals. Either way, Cannibal Holocaust is certain to leave its mark on even the most hardened horror movie fans.

*Note: This is a very brief overview of the Video Nasties panic. For the full story check out any of the numerous excellent books, documentaries and websites that are out there.

 

 

 

 

Are You Ready For Freddy?

The first I heard of A Nightmare On Elm Street was, naturally, from my mother. Her friend at work had seen it on a double-bill with an unknown cannibal movie (I like to imagine it was Cannibal Holocaust. What a double-bill!) and told her it was the scariest thing she had ever seen.

Like any responsible parent, my mother rented it from the video shop at the first opportunity and brought it home for some fun-time family viewing. In those days it took a while for films to get a UK video release, so if Elm Street hit cinemas in 1984 I imagine I would have seen it some time in 1985. I was nine years old.

Although I was no stranger to horror films, I’d NEVER seen anything on this level before. Here was a bad guy who could get you in your dreams! Everybody has to sleep! There was no escape from Freddy Krueger! The Springwood Slasher was a far more creepy and sleazy character than I’d experienced up to that point. It felt icky just watching him. You got the feeling that a knife-fingered glove to the stomach might not be the worst thing he could do to you.

While most kids probably found that idea terrifying (and to be fair, I did too), I became obsessed. Freddy was my thing that I was into. I remember excitedly telling a teacher at school that I’d seen the film (I’d probably be taken into care these days). The first VHS tape I owned was A Nightmare On Elm Street. I had books. I had comics. I had posters. I had a board game. I (unsuccessfully) tried to make my own replica glove. I was in deep.

And feeding my obsession was a steady flow of sequels, with a new one seemingly appearing with each trip to the video shop. It didn’t matter to me at the time that they weren’t as good as the first one – all Nightmares were equal in my eyes.

The fact that Freddy got more and more cartoonish with each instalment only encouraged my mania. The more corny the one-liner and the more absurd the kill, the more I liked it. Freddy’s working someone like a puppet with their own arteries?! Bring it on! His head is coming out of the top of the TV?! Yesssssss! He’s a giant snake now?! Encore! Encore! I was so caught up in the rollercoaster ride I didn’t realise that Freddy was drifting further and further away from what made him such a sinister proposition in the first place.

We’re in an era now where any nerd culture sidekick can get their own bobblehead, so younger horror fans might not understand just how massive Freddy was back in his heyday. He had a spin-off TV show, he released a greatest hits album, he was in video games, he was a guest VJ on MTV (that was a TV channel that used to play music videos, young ’uns!), he rapped with the Fat Boys and there was even a talking doll. Think about that for a moment. Here was a figurine of a hideously-burned, probably paedophilic child murderer marketed directly to children! What a time to be alive! Have no doubt about it, for a large chunk of the ’80s, Freddy was a pop culture icon as recognisable as any rock star or Hollywood actor.

By the time Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare came out in 1991 I was 16. Although the film was rated 18 I managed to get into the cinema to see it in what was my first big-screen horror experience. There was no way in hell I was going to miss the death of Freddy in 3D (I’ve still got the glasses somewhere in the attic). While the 3D wasn’t exactly mind-blowing I considered it a fine send-off and in my youthful naivety, I genuinely thought that was the last I’d see of the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.

Being a fan was different in those days. We weren’t so obsessed with preserving the past so after that ‘final’ instalment, it was over and I moved on to other things. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare came out a few years later but it wasn’t the same, then in the early 2000s we got the big showdown we’d supposedly all been waiting for, Freddy Vs Jason. I never thought it was that inspiring of an idea to begin with but what we got was a letdown by any standard.

I still love the original Nightmare On Elm Street. Sure, there’s a bit of nostalgia involved but it’s still a stone-cold classic and it deserves its place among the greats in horror Valhalla. As for the sequels, I’m sad to say that I find most of them hard to watch these days. Although the homoerotic S&M themes of Freddy’s Dead were lost on me as a youngster I can now appreciate just how weird and bizarre that movie truly was. Freddy stayed mostly in the shadows and remained a genuine threat. After that, he just flat-out stopped being scary. The quips that I loved as a kid make me wince now, and not in a good way. Even the burn make-up, which looked so slimy and putrid in the first film, began to look more and more like a child-friendly rubber mask with each instalment. It was an ignominious ending for a character who had initially inspired so much fear.

But, despite my feelings now, I can’t ever hate these movies. They played too big a part in my formative years. They’re like an old photograph featuring an especially embarrassing haircut you thought was so cool at the time (it wasn’t really a haircut, just really long hair). You might hide it in a box and put it up in the attic out of sight, but you can’t bring yourself throw it away forever. Sometimes it’s fun to look back at who you were, even if it does make you cringe.

 

 

Searching For Summerisle

Growing up, The Wicker Man was one of those films I had heard about but never had the chance to see. It was an obscure title that seemed a world away from Elm Street or Camp Crystal Lake, something that belonged to an older age of horror, more myth than reality.

I finally got to see it in a late night showing on BBC2 or Channel 4 in the mid-90s. Late at night is the best time to be introduced to The Wicker Man. In a drowsy, half-awake state the weirdness and paranoia of the film are cranked up to eleven. By the time poor Sergeant Howie met the titular effigy I really didn’t know what to think. It was good. I liked it. But I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Was it even a horror film?

I taped the film that night and revisited it from time to time, but I really got into it when the Director’s Cut was released on DVD in 2002. This was a longer version than the original cut and included a documentary, The Wicker Man Enigma, that told the story of the film’s infamously troubled production.

Being a bit older by this point I was able to appreciate how unique and powerful a movie it really is. I now count it among my top ten favourite horror films and it tops my list of favourite British films, horror or otherwise. Simply put, there is nothing else like The Wicker Man.

Earlier this year on a visit to London I had the chance to visit All Saints Church in Fulham, which was the shooting location for Father Brennan’s pointy demise in 1976’s The Omen. I had my photo taken in the famous spot and got a real buzz from seeing an iconic horror movie location first-hand. It also got me thinking about where else I could visit.

It turns out The Wicker Man was filmed a little over two hours away from where I live and thanks to the dedication of Wicker fans before me, all of the locations were easy to find. It also turns out that Summerisle isn’t an island at all, nor is it in the Hebrides. It’s actually a few different small towns in Dumfries and Galloway in the south-west of Scotland, all easily accessible without the use of a seaplane. So, with a boot full of Irn-Bru and the soundtrack playing on the in-car stereo, my partner in crime Fiona and I hit the road on the trail of The Wicker Man.

Our first location was Kirkcudbright, a lovely harbour town that doesn’t seem to have changed much since the Wicker Man was filmed there in 1972. To say it was quiet is an understatement. Even on a Saturday the place felt almost deserted, which only added to the Wicker Man ambience.

In the film, Kirkcudbright is home to May Morrison’s post office and sweet shop, now the High Street Gallery. Although the prop signage and blue painted brickwork are long-gone it’s instantly recognisable as the location from the movie. Unfortunately there were no chocolate March hares or weird cake babies to be found but it was still possible to have a look around inside at the paintings and jewellery that are now on sale.

The High Street also provided the alleyways seen during Sergeant Howie’s search for Rowan Morrison and the meeting point for the May Day procession. Other locations of note in Kirkcudbright include the Harbour Master’s cottages and the church which Howie attends at the start of the film before he sets off for Summerisle.

 

Next on the itinerary was the tiny settlement of Anwoth, which lies about ten miles west of Kirkcudbright. The abandoned church and Miss Rose’s school are both located here, exactly as you see them in the film. Once again, very little has changed except for the trees, which have grown quite a bit taller.

Finally, we headed for the Green Man pub, which isn’t as straightforward as you might think. Through the use of movie magic the Green Man is, in reality, two locations ten miles apart from each other. The exterior is on Ann Street in Gatehouse Of Fleet, about a mile away from Anwoth, and is now private housing. The building has been altered slightly but the general look of the place is the same (The interior of Stark Chemist – now a Boots – which appears in the film as Lennox’s Chemist shop is also in Gatehouse Of Fleet).

The interior of the Green Man was shot at the Ellangowan Hotel in Creetown. Like the exterior it has also undergone a bit of a facelift at some point in the last forty-odd years, however a number of original features remain including the bar and the sliding doorway through which Willow makes her first appearance.

If you’re a dedicated Wicker fan you can even spend the night at the Ellangowan Hotel, which we did. Like Kirkcudbright, Creetown is also a quiet little place and we enjoyed a peaceful night without any naked singing or banging on walls.

We made one final stop the next morning before heading home at the Creetown Heritage Museum, which features a 12-foot replica of the Wicker Man and a section on the movie, including some memories of the production from local residents.

Although we didn’t tick off every place used in the film we hit most of the iconic locations that make up Summerisle and it was a chance to explore a beautiful, unspoiled part of Scotland that I’d never been to before. If you’re a fan who has been contemplating undertaking a trip like this I strongly encourage you to make your own appointment with The Wicker Man. You won’t be disappointed.

 

 

 

 

It’s Showtime!

If there’s a heaven and I get to go there when I die, it’ll be an ’80s-era video shop. It won’t be a Blockbuster or anything fancy like that, it’ll be in the back room of a corner shop and feel slightly seedy, with an infinite selection of horror movies that are never out on rental. This is how I remember my early video shop visits as a youngster and as much as I love a high-definition Blu-Ray, there’s a part of me that will forever mourn the loss of these dens of cinematic iniquity.

My first trip to such a place came, unsurprisingly, not long after my dad brought home our first video recorder. The endless rows of chunky, clamshell VHS cases must have been overwhelming for my young mind because even though I already loved scary movies, I also wanted to see all of the same films any seven or eight year old would want to see in the 1980s. This was a golden age of low-budget straight-to-video gems where each cover artwork looked more outrageous and action-packed than the next, with ninjas, fully-armed Vietnam vets and Boogaloo Shrimps as far as the eye could see.

As tempting as these delights were, after a bit of friendly encouragement from my old man to “make my mind up”, I made my decision. It was Creepshow. It’s no mystery why I chose Creepshow, just take a look at the VHS artwork. It looks scary but it also looks like a cartoon, which is something any kid can instantly understand. And it’s an anthology movie, which meant I was getting not one, but five scary stories to watch. Who could resist?

I ask you, is there a better gateway movie for a young fright fan? You’ve got zombies, body horror, vengeful spirits, monsters, creepy crawlies and even a bit of voodoo. It’s a greatest hits of horror, presented like a comic book come-to-life, all bright colours and dark humour. And who better to take a young boy’s movie innocence than Romero, King and Savini? I didn’t know the names at the time but these three legends would come to mean so much to me in the coming years.

Ever with an eye on his wallet, my dad wisely chose to rent videos on a Friday night which meant they didn’t have to go back until the Monday. I’m pretty sure I watched Creepshow as soon as we arrived home, then watched it again on the Saturday and Sunday. I especially enjoyed rewinding the part where the roaches burst out of the old man, watching it again and again and again. I’d never seen anything like that before and I was horrified, but I just couldn’t turn my eyes away. This was a different beast entirely to the Hammer classics I’d been watching.

If there’s one movie responsible for cementing my love of horror it’s this one. There are others I like more now but I’ll still go back to Creepshow time and time again because it’s just so much fun. I don’t believe that people are defined by the films they watch, the music they listen to or the books that they read, but life pivots on spur-of the-moment decisions and I feel my choice in the video shop that day has led me down a stranger and more interesting path than it might have had I picked a Disney movie instead. Who knows what kind of horrors THAT could have unleashed? I dread to think …

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.