 A kid asked me the other day ‘Why you?’ I was doing a talk about horror writing at a local school to a bunch of fairly disaffected Year 9 pupils, and I was rounding it off by pointing out that I was never in the top sets (true), and I definitely wasn’t the cleverest at school (also true by quite some way). When I’d been the same age as the kids in front of me, I’d always wanted to be a writer, although never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d achieve it. Looking back, I was one of those kids who would have been chosen to finish last, and the question from the audience really made me stop and think. Why me? Why did I manage to achieve this crazy goal of becoming a writer when I’m pretty sure that by now the dreams (professional footballer, Navy Seal, astronaut, film star) of other forgotten classmates from my childhood had been long abandoned? In response, my answer to the kid’s question was pretty much the following:
Out of the three, I’m pretty sure it’s the first one that sticks with me the most. Romanticised as they are now by programmes like Stranger Things, the Eighties were actually a pretty cool time to grow up. There still seemed to be quite a bit of mystery in the world, and there was no internet giving you the option of dozens of different series, clips, and films. Back then our main form of escapism was the local video store, and the Eighties were a golden time for film. And without the internet to demystify everything, who knew how possible these things we saw really were? At thirteen, it was easy to wonder if maybe there really were vampires and zombies and werewolves out there, or if maybe some of these things we’d seen in low budget B movies were rooted in a grain of truth in the real world. One of my friends lost his mum when he was little, and his dad was never around, so by the time we were teenagers we always had a free house, and access to a television and VHS player. As a result of a very laid back guy at our local video store who obviously wasn’t too worried about the damage he was doing to our innocent teenage minds, we had no problem getting our hands on whatever new release we wanted to watch. If you could get over the sometimes clunky effects (and I’ll take practical effects over CGI any day), there was a wealth of horror that you could choose from back when I was a teenager. And as I tell the students I talk to, most of today’s plots for films and TV are derivative copies or pale imitations of those classic Eighties films. Titles like Scanners, Nightmare on Elm Street, American Werewolf, Poltergeist, Aliens, Robocop, Near Dark, Creepshow provide a starting point, but there’s far too many to name. A lot of reviews for my debut novel, Whiteout, have said that it’s really filmic, and I take that as a huge compliment, and more proof of how much impact watching those films in my formative years had on me. And if I had to pick three horror films that really influenced my writing, they’d all be movies that I watched during those teen years, ones that wriggled their way into my head, and fuelled my already over active imagination. So, in no particular order: John Carpenter’s The ThinG  John Carpenter’s The Thing had me at hello. Isolated, frozen setting, a disparate group of characters, a bleak, nihilistic tone, and a mysterious, otherworldly creature whittling the cast down one by one. I’m in! I still find it hard to believe that The Thing got so slated on its 1982 release. Apparently, in the wake of ET, cinema goers weren’t up for John Carpenter’s gore soaked adaptation, and it was slated by reviewers and ignored by audiences. Luckily, the subsequent VHS release opened it up to a wider audience and turned it into the cult classic it deserves to be. There’s so much to like here, from the slow realisation that the creature they’ve found out in the ice is a terrifying extra terrestrial able to mimic the appearances of others, to the bleak, ambiguous closing scene between Childs and MacReady that hints that one of them might not be what they seem. As well as delivering ground breaking effects by way of Rob Bottin, the film also hands out some awesome jump scares, my particular favourite being the scene where a non voluntary blood test meant to find out the identity of the alien imposters leads to some horrifying consequences. For me, though, the atmosphere is what makes The Thing so memorable – trapped far from civilisation, with no access to the outside world, no way to escape, and a creeping sense of doom. These were all things I wanted to include in Whiteout, alongside the sense that no one, not even the characters that readers feel sure will make it, are safe. Salem’s LoT  I’m not actually sure we got this from the video shop. In fact, I think this was a three part serialisation, played late at night on ITV and secretly recorded by one of our gang then smuggled out on a VHS tape. And although it was a slightly clunky adaptation of Stephen King’s classic novel, Salem’s Lot had some good scares in it. One particular stand out was the scene where the child vampire comes back to life and knocks on his little brother’s window after dark, begging to be let in. Our little gang were on board as we watched the adaptation, focussed, but there was nothing too scary here or really nightmare inducing. And then Barlow made his appearance. There’d been whispers and hints, all through the film, about the existence of some ‘master vampire’ character, but it wasn’t until the end of part two that he appeared. I think we were all expecting some well known actor, made up to look like the undead, or a black cloaked riff on the Dracula trope. What we actually got when Barlow made his first appearance was one of the most terrifying scenes I’ve ever seen in a film, right to this day. In fact, it’s so seared on my memory that I don’t even need to go onto Youtube to check how accurate my recollection is (I’m also a little too scared). After dark, a prisoner lies in his cell, the police station deserted, the town outside silent. A shadow moves out in the corridor, the prisoner stirs, and a long, taloned hand causes the cell door to open. The prisoner sits up, confused, and – OMG! What the HELL is that thing!!! A terrifying, blue skinned, bald, snarling Nosferatu jolts up on the screen, growls and snarls, and makes its way towards the horrified prisoner. The old school, otherworldly look of the vampire, the way it appears on screen, its bestial nature… no scene has ever shocked me in quite the same way (not even that scene in The Descent where the underground creature appears in the camera’s viewfinder). When I set out to write Whiteout, I knew I wanted vampires to feature, but there was no way they were going to be the sparkly, alluring Twilight kind. For me, it was Salem’s Lot and Mr Barlow all the way. I think it’s fair to say that I take liberties with vampire mythology in Whiteout, but the character of Barlow and his animalistic, inhuman appearance was a huge influence. Even now, thirty years after I watched it, my friends still delight in posting images of Barlow on my Facebook page when I’m least expecting it. One time, when we were camping out in a deserted farmhouse on a surfing trip in the wilds of rural Ireland, my mates brought along a life sized cardboard cut out version of Barlow’s head. As the trip went on, it frequently appeared in cobwebbed windows, rear view mirrors, dark corners, generally scaring the crap out of me whenever I saw it. Good times. The TerminatoR  Not strictly a horror film, but the central idea of James Cameron’s sci fi classic, being pursued by an unstoppable cyborg that ‘can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead’ (tragically I’m pretty sure I can recite the entire Terminator script on demand) always struck me as being utterly terrifying. I found Cameron’s central antagonist to be the stuff of nightmares, from relentlessly taking down a police station to carrying out emergency eye surgery, and the idea of an unstoppable force of nature that wont give up until it has ‘reached down your thrown and pulled your heart out’ (I’ve edited Kyle Reese’s phrasing here) definitely fed into Whiteout. But more than that, it was the pace of Terminator that was something I wanted to channel in my writing – I’ve the attention span of a gnat, and if something doesn’t grab me immediately I’m looking elsewhere. I loved the way that The Terminator gave you no time to even take a breath, and the whole backstory was cleverly told on the run, and I wanted to try to make my writing give you as few chances to look away as possible. There’s so many other films that influenced me, and probably best not to get me started on books or this article will drag on for a very long time, but the movies mentioned above are definitely the ones that had the biggest impact. I was in shock when Stripes got in touch back in March of last year to tell me they liked Whiteout and wanted to publish it. I’d never had the courage to send anything away before and if my wife hadn’t bullied me relentlessly to do so I would never have received Stripes’ offer of publication. I must have read that email a hundred times to check I wasn’t dreaming it. People like me don’t get publishing deals, and the whole experience has been incredible. And what was best about it was that Stripes took Whiteout as it was – they helped me to edit it, made it a far better book than the clunky manuscript I submitted, but they never changed what it was at its core, and never asked me to water it down, or reduce the gore or the nihilistic tone. Whiteout is YA horror for sure, with its Breakfast Club style teen ensemble, but I’d like to think that it doesn’t pull any punches, and that it’s exactly the book that my thirteen year old self would have loved to have read. And more than that I hope it appeals to horror fans of any age, reminding them that there’s still some isolated corners of the world that have a little mystery to them, and I hope that it brings back old school frights to the vampire genre. Gabriel Dylan Gabriel Dylan is a secondary school teacher who spends his free time living the double life of a YA author. Daddy to two small boys, and a keen surfer and snowboarder, Gabriel loves travelling to snowy or beachy destinations, argumentative children in tow. He is also a lifelong fan of horror writers, such as Stephen King, James Herbert, and Richard Laymon, and the classic horror films of the 80s such as all those mentioned above. The idea for his debut novel, Whiteout, came to him whilst leading a sixth form ski trip to a remote Austrian resort, getting snowed in, and wishing that a horde of vampires would descend from the trees and devour the students that weren’t behaving. To find out more about Dylan and to follow him on social media please follow these links Author Website WHITEOUT Whiteout is the tenth in the series of Stripes popular stand alone RedEye horror novels. ‘She sat us all down and told us a story. About things that lived in the woods. Things that only came out at night.’ For Charlie, a school ski trip is the perfect escape from his unhappy home life. Until a storm blows in and the resort town is cut off from the rest of the world. Trapped on the mountain, the students wait for the blizzards to pass, along with mysterious ski guide Hanna. But as night falls and the town’s long buried secrets begin to surface, the storm is the least of their problems…. Read The Housewife of Horror review of Whiteout here You can buy Whiteout at: AMAZON http://smarturl.it/r58e9y Waterstones https://www.waterstones.com/book/whiteout/gabriel-dylan/9781788950725 WH Smith https://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/whiteout-red-eye-10/9781788950725   Comments are closed.
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