When you’re a kid, there’s good scary and there’s bad scary. The bad scary is what therapists and counsellors are for when we grow up, but the good scary is mind-food. My favourite bit of good scary was a book by a journalist and pop culture historian called Denis Gifford, A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, published in 1973. It was a kind of love letter to the genre, packed from cover to cover with production photos and film posters from movies made all over the world since the birth of cinema. It was written for adults, so the prose style of the text felt a bit opaque, seeing as I was only 9, but I didn’t treasure this book for the words, I treasured it for the pictures. I must have picked up that book at least once or twice every week, either curling up with it in bed or turning the pages in the dappled light of my den at the bottom of the garden. I’d never seen any of the films it included, and never would until I grew up and could find a few of them on VHS, but that didn’t matter to me. Every image was alive with ghoulish oddity, faces covered in latex, monsters of science and the supernatural. They weaved a thousand creepy adventures in my head, and I thrilled to the shuddery stories in every last one of them. There was a still taken from the 1931 version of Dracula, of his three vampire brides gliding through a castle crypt. Perhaps they also haunted the school playground at night! Perhaps, at this very moment, they were climbing the stairs outside my room! There was a poster from Bride Of Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff looming through green mist. What if he was looking out of the shiny paper, watching me back? What if that expression was his horror at my Planet of the Apes pillowcase? It might have been the sense of other-worldliness the book conveyed which fascinated me so much. I think, looking back, that these freakish outcasts spoke to the inner me as few other fictional characters did. My latest book The Workshop of Filthy Creation is steeped – I hope! – in the same atmosphere of weird creepery, and I like to think the 9-year-old me would have approved. I still have A Pictorial History of Horror Movies sitting on my bookshelf. It’s quite battered now, and over the years it’s had to have sticky tape surgery on its spine more than once, so I rarely take it down from the shelf these days, but it’s an old friend and something that helped shape my imagination. The Workshop of Filthy Creation |
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