Horror movie memory lane...

During my formative years I became the massive horror fan that I am today, and as I've written about before, this period of my life struck right in my early-teens just when the British Board of Film Classification was undergoing a change of leadership and policy direction - the year was 1999 and all of a sudden a whole host of previously cut and/or banned horror movies were being unleashed onto the British public for the first time in years (in some cases decades). I came to see many of the big name classics of the genre via our local video rental store, or through fudgy dubbed copies on VHS from friends who had in-turn dubbed them from the same video rental store.

During this time - February 1999 to be exact - I devoured with wide-eyed fervour Channel 4's "Censored" weekend, when I got to see Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters here in the UK) and Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant for the very first time. The former was at the time still cut (by 23 seconds - 4 seconds from the eye gouging, and 19 seconds from the devouring of the same victim's body by a gathering of flesh-hungry zombies) and the latter was in a strange situation ... it was passed uncut theatrically, but on home video suffered from trims to one scene of drug taking.

Anyway, I happened to stumble upon some of the introductions for that Censored weekend by UK film critic Mark Kermode (my personal film critic of choice) on YouTube - check them out below (that theme music has been firmly and fondly lodged in my head for 13 years now).







Around about this time there was also a Film Four "Extreme Cinema" channel, so here's a couple of bonus introductions from there...

Braindead (aka Dead Alive) and A Clockwork Orange.

Feature - "Re-Entering the Nightmare: Eraserhead 12 Years On"

David Lynch’s 1977 debut – Eraserhead – was my first introduction to the man’s uniquely idiosyncratic work. In the summer of 1999 I was fifteen years old and I was on holiday in Scotland with my family. During those couple of weeks we visited Edinburgh, and being a film-mad teen I was eager to scour the shelves of HMV and Virgin Megastore (back when the latter still existed).

At this point DVD was still a long way from taking over VHS, so the landscape in these stores was dominated by the reassuringly sturdy forms of video cassette boxes. With money to burn (relatively speaking), my eyes grew wide at a special offer – three videotapes for £15 – and I duly selected three titles: Graveyard Shift (Ralph S. Singleton, 1990), Evil Ed (Anders Jacobson, 1995), and Eraserhead.

Featuring screaming faces drowning in rat-infested water, severed heads, a screaming, crimson-coated, lunatic film editor, and bold text proclaiming “BE WARNED: The nightmare has not gone away…”, it’s little wonder I was drawn to the box art of these particular titles. Being fifteen at the time – and each video alluringly brandished with an 18 certificate – it fell to my Dad to purchase the videos. The store clerk knew full-well who the videos were actually for (proclaiming knowingly “I see you’re quite the connoisseur”), but they didn’t care. To me there was a sense of danger and fascination about it; I wasn’t legally of-age to be purchasing these videos, and yet by that point I’d been watching 18-rated movies for six whole years (don’t worry – they weren’t anything wildly inappropriate).

I found Graveyard Shift to be an average, but not all that memorable Stephen King adaptation, and Evil Ed to be an utterly barmy horror comedy that really earned the cover blurb “a rampage of exploding heads and flying limbs make this gorefest truly splatterific!” … however, Eraserhead proved to be an entirely different journey.

It was to take me the best part of the ensuing 12 months to get through every one of the 89 minutes in the running time. The film was so bizarre and unsettling to the early development of my cinephile senses that I could only manage 5 or 10 minutes at a time – with gaps of weeks or even months between these sporadic portions. No doubt this extremely fractured form of viewing didn’t help in achieving any kind of understanding of the narrative, but even if I’d viewed it in one sitting, I simply wouldn’t have ‘got it’ one bit aged fifteen with the typical attention span for my age.

More than a decade later, and with The Horror Channel showing Twin Peaks in-full (which I’d never seen before), I truly discovered the work of David Lynch. Blue Velvet (1986) revealed itself as beautifully dark and consuming, while second-attempts at Lost Highway (1997) and Wild At Heart (1990) proved successful. A transcendent witnessing of Mulholland Drive (2001) was followed by the half-baffled enjoyment of Lynch’s most cryptic work to date – the three-hour-long Inland Empire (2006). Aged fifteen, the latter wouldn’t have even been attempted had it been out at the time, but now things were very different – and as such I realised that I would need to return to Eraserhead, which had spent the last 12 years sitting on a video shelf quietly goading me.

I had realised that Lynch’s actual work, and his reputation, are two very different beasts. The content of his work is far easier to decipher once you understand what information in each scene is key to the plot, and what information is unique, inspired, dream-like, Lynchian window-dressing.

The following blow-by-blow account is laid out by time, during which I will posit my personal understanding of Lynch’s most widely analysed, and argued about, film.

Spoilers ahead.

January 15th 2012

8:02pm – Resembling the Lady in the Radiator, I steel myself with a face full of Jaffa Cakes, and press play.

8:04pm to 8:09pm – Henry, full of apprehension, floats in space, but it seems the planetoid going through his mind is in fact a nightmarish ovum. Is this happening now, or is this a guilt-ridden memory – a memory of Henry’s shame, and perhaps even lust, as engendered by the scarred man who instigates the terrified release of Henry’s sperm. Splash down: conception.

It was at this point, I seem to remember, that I first took a lengthy breather from the film as a freaked-out fifteen year-old.

Industrial landscapes that howl with angry, distant machinery – a typically Lynch obsession is birthed on film. Guilt, corruption, intimidation and paranoia seep from every brick, every stained and broken window, and every blackened steel girder.

8:12pm – Ah, the ever-popular zigzag patterned flooring. As the elevator doors slide shut on Henry, I finish my Jaffa Cakes and prepare to enter the nightmare.

8:13pm – “Are you Henry” – we meet ‘The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall’ – the temptress of apartment twenty-seven.

No wonder Henry’s a bit down in the dumps. His shitty one-bedroom apartment roars with the sound of a hissing radiator and features a window without a view.

8:18pm – Henry and Mary X: their relationship is a fractured one amidst a terrifying industrial hell that roars with a cacophony of man-made noise, smoke, decay, loneliness and no small measure of social awkwardness.

8:22pm – Time for dinner at #2416: The wild feasting of puppies upon an exhausted/indifferent mother canine foreshadows news which will bring Henry’s world – and vacation – crashing down around him.

8:25pm – Puppeteering Grandma to mix a salad. An eyebrow takes a subtle step forward in its ascent up my forehead. This is one of those oddball details, with little-or-no underlying meaning, that you so often see in dreams or nightmares that make little sense, but which provide background texture to a scene.

8:27pm – Henry carves the damn-near foetus-size chickens at the behest of crooked-kneed patriarch Bill … if I remember correctly, my fifteen year-old counterpart took another lengthy breather after the close-up of the viscous ooze that gushes forth from the miniscule chicken as its legs flail about. Considering a scene towards the end of the film, perhaps this is another moment of foreshadowing.

8:30pm – A blown bulb, a mother’s invasive questioning and out-of-the-blue personal-space-invading, and a nose bleed. A moment of handheld, free-roaming camerawork unsettles the glaring balance of the usually static, scrutinising camera.

8:34pm – Feeding the horrific premature result of Henry and Mary X’s premarital lust … and receiving a very small worm-like thing in a very small box in the mail. I sense that my fifteen year-old counterpart has gone AWOL once again.

8:37pm – A stormy night to mirror the post-natal torment of Mary X.

8:44pm – Mary X, the woman caged by her youthful indiscretion, flees leaving Henry alone with the monstrous baby … and the temptress next door.

The nightmare escalates – the baby is unwell … it’s sickly wailing, and its diseased appearance, have decidedly disturbed me. The power of the Jaffa Cakes is called upon.

8:52pm – The ‘Lady in the Radiator’, her swollen cheeks, her cutesy come-hither smile, and her dance upon the stage inside Henry’s radiator. Naturally in 1999 such an image simultaneously flew over my head, and exploded it, but I feel I have a better grasp of the scene’s meaning – or at the very least I have an interpretation to proffer.

This vision of Henry’s creation stomps on his sperm – the result of his lust; the very product that rendered him trapped alone with his ailing, premature, inhuman offspring – and so suggests a sense of innocent bliss, a suggestion of what could have otherwise been, before his pre-marital dalliance with Mary X.

8:56pm – Mary X is back in Henry’s ragged bed, crowding him out, but this seemingly normal scene becomes a ghastly unreality as our electric-haired protagonist exhumes giant, slimy, sperm-like worms from between the sheets (from between Mary’s legs … is this a form of afterbirth, or a rejection of his seed?).

As we return to that miniscule worm in the miniscule box that came in the mail, only to be devoured by it whole, I ponder if this worm is in fact a seed of an idea in Henry’s head, and become quite freaked out … I’m so glad I’m not on drugs right now.

9:00pm – The temptress of #27, locked out of her apartment late one night, comes to resurrect Henry’s lust … but where is Mary X, Henry’s new wife, and is this encounter a dream? Henry silences the gruesome progeny.

9:03pm – Infidelity strikes: The pair are quite literally consumed by their actions and sink into the cloudy pool within his marital bed. Sexual seas split – possibly at the moment of climax – but any ecstasy is usurped when the temptress comes face-to-face with the planet-like egg.

9:05pm – “In heaven, everything is fine” – so sings, quite hypnotically, the Lady in the Radiator. The Lady, and Henry’s infidelity, are juxtaposed … however she vanishes after a moment of happiness with him, only to be replaced before his eyes by the scarred man, his dead sperm, and a gnarled and lifeless tree.

9:09pm - A mixture of guilt and threat creeps in as Henry finds himself on trial for his actions.

Then his head falls off – replaced on his shoulders by that of his terrible offspring – as the dead tree secretes a trickling river of blood into which Henry’s severed head suddenly falls.

The head descends from the sky, the skull cracks open, and a child steals it as a homeless man protests.

9:12pm – Over the last 12 years I had almost convinced myself that the following sequence was just in my head, but no – Henry’s decapitated head really is taken to a pencil-making factory where a sampling of his head (much like you’d take a core sample of cheese) is used to make the eraser part … well that explains the title of the film, I suppose.

The dust of his ‘Eraserhead’ wakes him from his hallucinogenic dreamscape where thoughts of his tryst with the temptress plague him … just as two people feverishly dig (or fight?) in the dirt in the alleyway below.

9:18pm through 9:27pm –Henry’s grotesque child mocks him as the girl next door returns home with another man, much to Henry’s dismay. She sees the head of the baby on Henry’s shoulders.

Full of resentment, Henry hacks open the bandages that encase the screaming premature progeny – and he ruddy well stabs it … the disturbance levels in my mind have taken a big old leap … however quite soon both eyebrows find themselves making friends with my hairline as an oozing volcano of goo and sparking electrical outlets precipitate the baby’s head growing to room-consuming size so it can stalk Henry’s terrified form in the strobing Lynchian light … things have most definitely gone a bit mental.

9:28pm – The planet-like egg breaks open as the scarred man wrestles with his jammed levers – then Henry finds himself with the Lady in the Radiator. Hugging her, he discovers that in heaven everything really is fine.

He killed his hideous offspring – and did it in return kill him? – so he can live free of torment forever after.

9:38pm – I watch an episode of Cougar Town to un-freak my mind.

In summary the meaning of the film is quite clear – it’s all about the fear of an impending birth, the dread of on-coming fatherhood, and the torturous and guilty thoughts of a mind-in-fright seeking escape. To me it’s about responsibility versus temptation, and nightmares born out of a fear of everything going wrong – not only with the imminent birth but also your own life, and your relationship with the mother.

Twelve years apart, these two viewings of Eraserhead could not be more different. With age, experience, and even a film degree, comes understanding of a film that flew right over my head in 1999. Back then I struggled with it completely, whereas now I found it quite concise – and I have to say I rather enjoyed it.

My most memorable movie viewing experiences #5...

Uni Years:

The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941):
When – Autumn 2002
Where – Campus Screening Room
Why – My three years doing my degree in Film & Television Studies was a time when my eyes were opened to a whole host of films that I would have never watched beforehand, and one of the big new things for me was in the first semester of the first year on the Key Issues In Film Studies course when we had a print screening of the Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon. My mid-semester essay was to do with the style of the film, and I became a Bogart fan – consuming Casablanca (one of my all time favourite films, along with The Maltese Falcon), Key Largo, and The Big Sleep in quick succession in the following weeks – and as a result of this tale of Sam Spade, the 1940s has become one of my favourite periods of cinematic history.


Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998):
When – Mid-2000s
Where – Off-Campus Bedroom
Why – While I’d already seen the movie a handful of times since not long after its original release, it was during the Lucas & Spielberg course that I came to do an essay on the opening Omaha Beach sequence – a shot-by-shot breakdown in fact, and when you consider how many shots there are in that first 25 minute sequence, it was an arduous task. Every few seconds I’d be pausing the DVD – sat there in my cramped 6ft by 8ft bedroom – and writing down exactly what was happening on screen and how it would fit into my analysis. I’ve rarely studied a sequence in that much detail, and as a result producing that essay has stuck in my mind ever since.


E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982):
When – Mid-2000s
Where – Campus Screening Room
Why – Again during the Lucas & Spielberg course, one of the weeks focussed on E.T. – a film that I’d enjoyed as a kid, but for some reason had come to really quite dislike during my teenage years … I’m not entirely sure why, but I was so switched-off to the movie for some reason. Quite to my surprise then, was when we watched the movie together as a class, and I got totally invested in it. What’s more, it actually choked me up, and as a result my opinion of the movie (which had become bitter for no discernable reason) performed a total 180.


La Jetee (Chris Marker, 1962):
When – Mid-2000s
Where – Campus Screening Room
Why – During the Photography & The Arts course, on which I did an in-depth analysis of the visual language of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, a film which really struck me was La Jetee – the film which went on to inspire Twelve Monkeys. The music, the static visuals in their high contrast black and white brilliance, the dark and weird sci-fi plot – it all left a lasting impression.


Saw (James Wan, 2004):
When – 2004
Where – Off-Campus Bedroom
Why – It’s easy to forget now, as a result of annual sequels of diminishing quality, clarity and box office draw, that the original Saw was a grotesquely dark and brilliant indie horror flick that came like a bolt out of the blue. It was truly chilling in its approach to truly chilling subject matter; its violence was stunningly graphic (and not at all expected or old hat as what the sequels produced), and the big reveal at the end literally left my jaw slung low with shock – in fact that entire reveal, brilliant industrial score included (which still sends shivers down my spine to this day), haunted my mind for quite some time afterwards.


Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971):
When – Mid-2000s
Where – Campus Seminar Room
Why – Less of a viewing of the movie, and more a group presentation of a theory regarding one particular sequence. Once again on the Lucas & Spielberg course, my group and I had drawn the latter’s stunningly gripping debut chase movie, and we proceeded to – jokingly – argue that the entire movie was an allegory for male rape. We argued (with the rest of the class in on the joke, but not the lecturer, whose Modus Operandi for reading movies consistently skewed towards more Freudian territory) that the great big brute of a truck was raping the effeminate little red car and that it was all to do with sexual dominance in the male species.

Now, there is an argument that can be made for such a reading, or part of such a reading – and we were half-serious about it – but it was this deliberate, joking escalation of the theory into perverse territory that has become one of my fondest memories of film school. In fact the lecturer rather liked our theory!


Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004):
When – Spring 2005
Where – Off-Campus Living Room
Why – During the spring semester of our final year at university, tensions and divisions were beginning to present themselves within our group of four in our off-campus house. Personally I found the final six months of university to be quite a stressful time for various reasons, and after a few blow-outs amongst the group, we needed something to regain the sense of fun and unity that had summed up the first two years of our time at uni.

That movie was Napoleon Dynamite and it was introduced to us all by one housemate who was quite taken with it. We sat down to watch it – a background tension in the air – and within twenty minutes we were all laughing uproariously at the quirky indie-com. The movie became the last big thing that we as a house were all about, and we watched it many times – practically quoting the script verbatim as it would play, and not even when we were watching it, just during a normal day. It was such a thing of the moment, for me at least, that I’ve not yet re-watched the movie since – only the odd moment here or there when it’s been on television – however, when I do, I’m sure it’ll take me vividly right back to those final weeks of university when everything got back on track in the house and we all got that sense of fun back.

My most memorable movie viewing experiences #4...

Formative Years - Part Two:

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Tony Randel, 1988):
When – Late 1990s/Early 2000s
Where – Television
Why – Having seen the first movie on a grubby dubbed copy, I recorded the second some time later from the TV, and proceeded to begin watching it whilst eating my lunch. The reason this viewing is memorable is that when it got to the scene where a mental patient believes her skin is scrawling with maggots – and we see her arms from her perspective to be doing just that – I actually had to turn it off in order to continue eating. That’s the only time – so far – that that has happened.


Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974):
When – Early 2000s
Where – Television
Why – One shot specifically, on my first viewing of the early slasher flick, wigged me out – namely the wide open eye staring through the gap in the door without the person on the other side knowing. One time when I was a kid I saw a movie on TV – a ghost story type affair – and at one point a man was pushed down a flight of stars and died when he struck the bottom, and they cut to an extreme close up of his wide open eyes. It freaked me out as a kid, and that discomfort with wide open eyes has stuck with me – so that particularly shot in Black Christmas gave me the creeps big style.


Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991):
When – Late 1990s
Where – Television/Home Video
Why – I first saw it on the BBC (and it was cut for violence and language), and I foolishly taped over my VHS recording of that broadcast, and no sooner had I done so than I wanted to see it again. It never showed on TV again and eventually, after a long time of waiting, I got it on video and was surprised to see that it was unlike the movie I was used to – namely it was uncut. Finding T2 on video became a mini mission at the time, like some sort of elusive Holy Grail, so when I finally got my mits on it again it was like a big old slice of victory cake.


A Nightmare on Elm Street 1 & 3 (Wes Craven, 1984 & Chuck Russell, 1987):
When – Late 1990s
Where – Home Video
Why – Before I was allowed to watch full-on horror movies at home (I remember being disallowed from watching the first movie when it showed on Channel 4), I got to see the first and third movie over at a friend’s house one night, and it was an illicit thrill to be watching this horror movie I’d heard so much about in the dark. Sneaking around watching horror movies you weren’t allowed to occur for a finite time, and it was a time that certainly made a lasting impression.

Although it wasn’t always horror movies – indeed one of the best examples of a forbidden movie fruit for a good while was the at-the-time-controversial Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction – the former for its tabloid-baiting violence, and the latter for its tabloid-baiting drug use. Whether it was watched on television, or dubbed from a friend’s dub, watching certain movies at a certain point in my life was a secretive thing – movies perceived to be too violent, or too scary, or a bad influence – but it’s just the sort of thing that young teenage boys do. You get bragging rights, and you ascend to the ‘seen it’ club for that flick, and it’s a style of movie watching that so epitomises being a teenager.


The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980):
When – Late 1990s/Early-and-Late 2000s
Where – Home Video
Why – On a school art trip to London, in the time we were afforded afterwards to go hunting around the capital, we stopped in at the huge HMV and – at the age of 14 – bought this 15 rated John Carpenter horror flick. It’s kind of daft and lame now, but at the time it was a thrill to ‘trick the system’ and pass for a year older than I was. However I didn’t much care for the movie on my first watch – I found it slow and far from explicit – but then I rediscovered it several years later and I thought it was genuinely creepy, and a fantastically tense ghost-story-style tale.


The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1999):
When – 1999/2000
Where – Video Rental
Why – At the time the Internet wasn’t in widespread use, and I certainly hadn’t had much experience of the web, so word of a movie such as this was spread person-to-person. Was it real? Many people believed so, although I was only half-convinced … if it really was real, and people had really died, how would they be allowed to release it in cinemas and home video, and create a line of merchandise for it? Regardless, that final sequence proved to be the scariest part of the flick for me. It’s long since been absorbed by the popular culture, but at the time there was a special air about this indie shocker.


Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1976):
When – 1999
Where – Home Video
Why – On holiday in Edinburgh in the summer of 1999, we stopped into HMV and three videos were bought for me (being that I was underage, not that the wise till jockey cared – indeed he commended my taste) – those videos were Graveyard Shift, Evil Ed, and David Lynch’s bizarre debut. I’d never seen a Lynch movie before and its sheer power (in terms of the weird and the disturbing) freaked me out too much. As a result I was only able to watch the movie in portions of 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes – with long gaps in between – it probably took me a good several weeks/few months to see the entire movie, and I’ve not seen it since … but I have been meaning to. Did it leave an impression? You bet it did.


The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982):
When – Mid 1990s and beyond
Where – Television
Why – I was about 10 years old when I first saw John Carpenter’s sci-horror-gore-fest, and initially it fascinated me for the special make up effects. However, as time has gone by and I’ve grown up, the themes of isolation and paranoia have really captured my imagination and built up into a genuine mild fear of the movie. It has become an intimidating flick – just like the equally superior Se7en – that is one of my all-time favourites, but one that sits on the shelf daring me to watch it. When I finally do watch it from time-to-time it’s never quite as horrifying as my mind has led me to believe since my last viewing, but nevertheless, the expertly crafted sense of isolation and paranoia linger aggressively for days afterwards.

My most memorable movie viewing experiences #3...

Formative Years – Part One:

The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981):
When – 1998
Where – Home Video
Why – After school one day we stopped in at the local post office, and for the previous few weeks they had had a bargain bin for videos, £5 a pop. I’d already nabbed a number from there, but having just that week heard about Sam Raimi’s gruesome horror from friends (who summed it up somewhat dismissively as “pencil stabbing and oozing mashed potato”), I knew that it was in fact going to be something special.

Still decidedly too young to buy it for myself, my Mum and the shop girl joked about how neither of them would watch it in a million years as it was bought for me, and then away home. Initially it was a bit slow, but as soon as the gore starting flying my jaw hit the floor – so as you can imagine, the final act promptly inspired me to flip my lid. At the time it was the goriest film I’d ever seen, and at that point in time the BBFC hadn’t entered its post-Ferman age, so this copy was the rather butchered version borne out of the ‘Video Nasty’ era (this being named “the #1 nasty”) – but still, it became an all-time favourite, and an inspiration.


The George A. Romero Undead Saga (George A. Romero, 1968, 1978, 1985, 2005, 2007, 2009):
When – 1998, 1999, 2005, 2007, 2010
Where – Home Video/Multiplex Cinema
Why – in May 1997 I bought a copy of SFX magazine during a school trip because in the corner of the front cover I saw the name “George A. Romero”, a name which I’d heard was synonymous with the zombie genre – a genre that had recently become of interest to me, despite having never really seen any zombie movies before. That article, in connection with the release of the Cannes Cut (distributed incorrectly as the “Director’s Cut”) on home video by BMG, made me ravenous about seeing Dawn of the Dead. Initially however, it eluded me, for what seemed like forever.

However, in a local Woolworths I came across a copy of Day of the Dead (a couple of fascinated images from which appeared in the aforementioned SFX article) for £5.99 – so I snatched it up (or rather, it was bought for me, as I was still an early teen at this point) and hurried home to check it out. Having only recently been awed by the gory delights of The Evil Dead, I was soon astounded by the Tom Savini’s make-up effects. It blew my mind.

Fast forward a bit and we have Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead. The former was a good flick from the get-go (a friend and I even did a soft toy spoof version, a la The Adam & Joe Show), but it was the latter that stunned me silent. I remember putting the video on, sitting down, and then 2 hours and 20 minutes later I was left, still on the edge of my seat, jaw literally agape, as the sound of the clock bell echoed into nothingness. It became, and remains, my all-time number one favourite movie.

Fast forward again to the release of Land of the Dead – my first Romero flick in the cinema, and a zombie one to-boot. I watched it with a fellow Romero fan, and an audience who was likewise in-tune with what was happening on-screen … except for the trio who clearly couldn’t get in to see Guy Ritchie’s new film (Revolver), who promptly fled once the innards really started to fly.

A couple of years later and there I was, the only time I’ve been to the cinema alone, seeing Diary of the Dead. It was me, a couple, and one other guy who sodded off part-way in (maybe he worked there, I don’t know). The lens dipped whilst the projectionist was away, and while I said that I loved it, deep down I was disappointed by it. My relationship with Diary has been all over the place ever since.

Finally we come to Survival – not a memorable viewing, but I enjoyed finally getting to see it, even if it was direct-to-DVD here in the UK. It’s not perfect, but I dig it.


The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974):
When - 1999
Where – Home Video
Why – 1999 was a decisive time in my formative years, as the British Board of Film Classification entered a new era when James Ferman left, and a whole slew of previously banned films were finally released and went straight onto the home video market. In this instance a friend had rented it, dubbed it, and then I dubbed his dub – so I had this third generation copy (or you could argue fourth generation what with the original video having to be sourced en mass, however that’s done) and I remember eating dinner whilst watching the flick – the picture and audio were fudgy, being a dub-of-a-dub, but it only served to make the experience of first seeing this notorious video nasty all the more illicitly thrilling.


Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980):
When - Late 1990s/Early 2000s
Where – Home Video/Television
Why – Similar to Chainsaw Massacre, my first copy of Friday 13th was a dub-of-a-dub, and so the fudgy visuals and audio again served the illicit thrill of watching this landmark slasher flick. Furthermore, a few years later, a group of us all sat down to watch it at a house party – and one of the girls was terrified of horror films – so on more than one occasion, including the famous final jump, the more devious-minded of us would sneak up behind her and scare the bejesus out of her.

The rest of the flicks I would see in a somewhat scattered pattern on home video and television, and as close as I can figure it the order went something like this – 1,2,3,4,8,9,6,7,10,5 … although I can’t remember exactly.


A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971):
When – 1999/2000
Where – Home Video
Why – Of all the films from my formative years, Kubrick’s balletic tale of ultra violence was one of the most influential – and it was certainly the most influential of my final year of High School. It was one of the most iconic of the video nasties era – and it hadn’t even been banned (it was removed in the UK by Kubrick himself after so-called copycat incidents occurred) – so with the combination of a change of leadership at the BBFC, and the death of Kubrick himself, his self-imposed ban was lifted.

I saw the movie, read the book and listened to the soundtrack repeatedly. It was so influential in fact that the exam project for my GCSE 2D Art was directly inspired by it utilising a mixture of adapted images from it, and images referencing it.


The Fly II (Chris Walas, 1989):
When – 1993/1994
Where – Television
Why – At age 9 I began to watch horror movies, albeit ones that were as much science fiction as they were horror, and the sequel to David Cronenberg’s ultimate body horror remake was one of those introductory movies. Certain scenes gave me a jump – such as the mangled, grotesque dog lunging out of the darkness – and certain scenes gave me reason to repeatedly rewind and review (frame by frame) to examine how the special effect worked – such as the guard who gets crushed by an elevator.

What was more memorable though was my Dad, quite rightly, making sure that the difference between reality and fiction was concrete – speaking of the guy crushed by an elevator, I remember him saying something along the lines of ‘if that character was real he’d have a wife and kids, and someone would have to tell them he was dead’ – I kind of chuckle about it now, but it was a subtle way to just re-affirm that a movie is just a movie, and horrific things happen in the real world that actually have to be dealt with.


Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979):
When – 1993/1994
Where – Television
Why – Along with The Fly 2, this was one of the first horror movies (also part sci-fi) that I ever watched, at the tender age of 9. At the time I found it a bit dull, I must confess, what with the long takes creeping around the Nostromo, and the subtle use of the titular xenomorph itself – however it implanted itself into my mind, and I now consider it a true classic.


Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978):
When – Mid-to-Late 1990s
Where – Television
Why – While I’d already started to watch adult oriented movies like Alien, The Fly 2, and the Terminator movies, I hadn’t gotten into (or, really, been allowed to get into) proper horror movies – and in this case, Carpenter’s seminal slasher. I remember watching this one weekend morning with the door closed, the sound turned down really low and with my finger hovering nervously over the ‘STOP’ button.

Similar to Alien, at the time I considered it a bit dull and light on the violence, but also like Alien I quickly came to view it as a true classic. However, it was the illicit thrill of watching this taboo horror flick that really stuck in my mind.