​My Life In Horror: Poltergeist 
​

I don't clearly recall the first time I saw the original Poltergeist. It's an artefact of childhood, as much so as beloved toys, games and cartoons. I was certainly far too young -by the standards and general assumptions of 1980s British culture-, but that didn't prevent it becoming one of many lynchpins of horror media for me; a standard by which others of similar ilk continue to be measured. The film's imagery, set-pieces, performances and soundtrack are seared into my memory so indelibly that, some 30-odd years later, I can happily replay the film in its entirety behind my eyes. 


From establishing early scenes, in which we're introduced to the Freeling family; their dynamics and  to one another (not to mention the halcyon, 1980s Elysia of Questa Verde), to the metaphysical anarchy that is unleashed later on, this film holds a sentimental charge and significance I find difficult to see past. 


It's a strange thing, perhaps, to describe examples of horror cinema as comforting, but that's exactly what this is for me; subject matter aside, it evokes -in inchoate and ineffable fashion- a state of being that now only exists in memory; a child that is, ironically, very much a ghost himself. 


For a work so familiar, it never fails to engage or evoke powerful emotion: From the moment The Star Spangled Banner plays over the opening titles, that first nostalgic chatter of the dead TV channel (younger readers may find that aspect quite mystifying, given that the phenomena simply doesn't exist any more), a sense of old and familiar belonging stirs; a certainty of place and nature that only very young children know. And even the most horrific, dark and disturbing scenes don't discourage that internal smile (if anything, they strain inspire it to spread even further). I feel the weight and texture of a plastic VHS tape in my fingers, remember the whine of the "rewind" function as the tape rolls back. I even recall the electronic smell of o-zone surrounding the old 1980s video player, the heat that radiated from the damn thing when it had been on for too long. 


But it's so much more than that: it's the texture of old carpets, the smell of no-longer-available washing detergent. It's the unfinished awkwardness of a body and mind that've barely begun to know themselves. 


In that, the film has grown and evolved as I have; the points of reference and identification shifting and elaborating in response to new contexts. 


Back then, I distinctly recall identifying strongly with Robbie Freeling, the only boy of the household (also the classic middle-child, who has neither the hysteria of the eldest nor the mystique of youngest daughter, Carol Anne, and therefore struggles to maintain relevance between them). Despite having a number of powerful set-pieces (the invasion of the animated tree, assault by an extremely creepy clown-doll), Robbie plays a tertiary role both in the film and the family (his function is generally to alert the adults of when something unpleasant is manifesting around Carol Anne). 

Insomnia is being at war with your own mind. It escalates and escalates like a mutually abusive relationship, but one occurring within your own skin, that you have no means of escaping. 


Like my Mother before me (and her Mother before her), from the moment I hit double digits, sleep became a rare and fleeting commodity. Nighttime hours became matters of sincere dread, the certainty of what was to come when my head hit the pillow enough to excite anxiety (which, of course, only made sleeplessness that much more certain). 


If you want to know just how sadistically malleable time can be, talk to an insomniac: Hours stretch into illimitable gulfs, twilight wastelands through which we crawl like thirsting wretches across parched desert. what few oases exist in that desolation are invariably haunted places, the ghosts and demons that infest them congealed from a toxic union of subconscious dreads and the biochemical imbalances of puberty. I still recall the Freudian horrors I encountered in those ruins, creatures that have since found their ways into much of my published work. 


Manifesting uncertain, nascent sexuality -perversely married to day-to-day dreads and anxieties of waking life-, I would often wake from what moments of relief those oases provided in a fevered sweat, disturbed all the more by the betrayals of a body I didn't understand (and still find myself at conflict with on regular occasion). 


That sensation of being twisted in one's own skin, of it being a rapine or smothering alien that one cannot writhe or break free from...I remember that well; the utter wretchedness of the condition, the staring out through bedroom curtains into a dark, still and static world, envying and judging it for its quiescence in the same instant. To my sleep-starved eyes, it seemed an alien place; a paused, shuddering, faintly distorted image on fraying VHS tape. Nothing is real, after enough crawling through the wasteland. Waking life becomes a species of grey dream, disassociated and uncertain. People become ghosts, faces smear, and you begin to recede more and more, deeper and deeper, until whatever distinction exists between reality and fevered dreaming dissolves. 


I recall watching teachers at the front of class from whatever recess my twisted, pupating carcass had found, hearing their voices as though through fog or depths of dirty bath water. My engagement with those lessons, their subjects, was perfunctory at best; just enough to not be condemned as a lunatic, exiled as a disruption. 


In truth, I didn't care if I was; their world -that I'd become increasingly, painfully aware of as childhood slipped away- wasn't one I had much hope for or desire to be part of. In truth, it still isn't. 


Dreams, waking fantasies; my own, those of others, became not only sanctuaries from the corrosive onslaught of grey waking, but essential windows into other realms, echoing Lucy's discovery of Narnia via the wardrobe. I lost myself there, and found myself: It was amongst those states, those stories, that I came to consider and understand the human condition; the abstract lives materialist, post-modern living rarely obliges or provides the means for us to perceive, much less explore. 


It became apparent very early on that I was caught not between two worlds, but fractured amongst many: Whilst I would force myself to reluctantly engage in the droll duties and disappointments of waking life as much as basic operation required, I was more often -and more sincerely- abroad elsewhere, in realms that many might consider disturbing or horrific; nightmares that, to me, were as welcome and enchanting as the most elysian of dreams. 


And, dream or nightmare, I have always been happier, more sincerely myself, amongst them. 


Obsession with art and fiction in all their forms had long since been an irrevocable part of my being; ever since childhood, I could no more separate myself from the imagined than I could my own assumptions of identity, my sense of self. 


In my early teenage years, that obsession -and the immersions that followed- quite literally saved my life. Were I forced to engage exclusively with grey waking, then the suicidal ideation that had already begun to foment would have come to fruition, certainly in the attempt if not the success. There is no doubt in my mind that, without the fiction, films, comic books, video games etc that provided me with not merely escape, but the scope for other conditions, the framework for other experiences and states of being, I would not have survived my high-school years. 


Of course, back then, I lacked the language or contexts for defining my own despair; for considering the diseased condition of my own mind. Whatever worms infested it were eloquent and effortlessly loqacious beasts: It seemed so reasonable, given the condition of the world, that we should all operate in states of despair, that no sane person would wish to endure waking life much beyond childhood. 


Part of that condition is with me still, even now; I don't wholly condemn or deny that lost, despairing boy his assumptions of wisdom, nor am I wholly opposed to the assertions of his disease (diseases too can be wise). I would assert still that the world is unworthy of us, that what tradition and previous generations have established and allowed for is wholly unsatisfactory. 


But I'm not quite so consumed by those certainties as I used to be, nor so willing to surrender in the face of them. 


I assumed, as a child, that it was fantastical fiction in itself that drew my eye; that engaged me more deeply than any other subject. Whilst this was -and remains- essentially true, what I lacked the language to articulate were the qualities inherent -but not exclusive- to that fiction which aroused me: 


Having been raised on the likes of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of The Rings etc, I naively assumed it was portraits of purer, more certain and defined realities that I ached for. It took exposure to darker, more ambiguous material and consideration of my own attraction to it to understand: What engaged me was not certainty or some adolescent promise of "purity" (such was actually antithetical to all I sincerely felt and increasingly knew of myself). Rather, I was drawn by the potential of imaginary conditions; the fluidity and malleability of reality itself. 


In dreams, in nightmares, reality became an unfixed feast; apt to change in the blink of an eye, the utterance of a word. This was as true of the fiction I'd begun to consume as it was my own fantasies and imaginings (increasingly, my appetites strayed away from the absolutism and archetypes of Tolkien and the wish-fulfilment metaphysics of Lewis to the more ambiguous, confrontational fiction provided by Barker, Carter and Le Guin). It was also around this time that my fascination for horror began to crystallise as a sincere part of my identity: 


Whilst as a child, my engagement with horror films and literature had been an airy distraction, of no more or less consequence than the myriad games and diversions I filled my childhood days with, now, it became an obsession: 


I regarded the sagging bookshelves and library of VHS tapes my Mother had accrued over the years with new eyes, not merely as sources of distraction or diversion, but as lifelines. I hurled myself happily into a world of horrors both old and new, seeking out that which disturbed or distressed, that moved or repelled with a treasure hunter's zeal. I ached to be lost; to be elsewhere, even if that elsewhere was a source of nightmares. I became fascinated by my own reaction to those subjects; why they aroused such fascination, why they proved so cathartic in contrast to ostensibly more comforting fare.


The appetite came to mirror that of the vampire or the werewolf; insatiable and undeniable. Largely sleepless anyway, I'd spend long nights in early-pubescent discomfort, losing myself in horrors that aired on late-night terrestrial television (as well as the -always heteronormative- softly-erotic stories I'd soon come to associate them with). 


It was during this period that I arbitrarily discovered the writing of Clive Barker. Whilst I won't dwell on it here overlong (stay tuned for many, more in-depth articles on the subject), needless to say, the man's work dropped into the turbulent pools of my imagination with the traumatic force of a falling star. Though I didn't know it at the time, that discovery chimed with the inchoate burgeoning of my nascent queerness: 


It was likely clear to most of the adults around me -and more than a handful of my fellow youth- that I was a queer kid. Looking back, I don't understand how anyone could've taken me for anything other. 


However, back in the mid-1990s, homosexuality and queerness in general were still largely verboten in UK culture, save as schoolyard insults, sitcom jokes and scapegoats for right-wing media to demonise. Those of us who grew up during that time often lacked the contexts and language enjoyed by our straight siblings to understand or articulate who we were becoming, what we felt. Many experienced protracted periods of confusion, denial and even self-loathing. 


For my part, though I didn't consciously articulate the state to myself until later, the distinction between my peers and I was overt and, indeed, welcome. I have never had the desire to be amongst the flocks of the sun-children; to be accepted or popular. The inclination is somewhat alien to me. Therefore, anything that deepened my removal from the madding crowd was fine and dandy, no matter how confusing I might've found it at the time. 


The art and fiction I consumed during that period leant me both the contexts to understand and the language to articulate what I felt, the changes and traumas rewriting me from the inside. 


Barker's fiction was the very first I'd encountered that spoke to me on that level; that engaged me as a queer youth and sought to show me the metaphysics inherent. Whilst he was far from the first queer creator whose work I obsessed over, his was certainly the first to be so flagrant in its queerness; to exercise expressions the like of which I didn't even know were possible in horror and fantasy up to that point. 


As such, the awakenings and transformations that had been dissolute became crystallised, not to the point that I could make any positive or certain statements as to my identity -that always seemed the reserve of the straight world to me-, but in a manner whereby the flux of it all became apparent, and the anxious need for certainty and anchorage itself began to dissolve (and with it, those old childhood yearnings for states of Tolkien-esque “purity”). 


This was also the era of my first dalliances with self-destruction. 


As established earlier, suicidal ideation is an abiding and extremely persuasive part of my psychological makeup. It's rare a day goes by in which it does not make itself known in some way, shape or form. It's a Siren song; a seduction to other states of being where all the despairs and disappointments of this life are over and done with. At times during my teenage years -and through to my early twenties-, oblivion seemed a preferable alternative to living in a skull that felt infested with biting, venomous broods, a skin twisted on its own skeleton and a world so clearly careening towards self-destruction. 


It became clear to me very early that people are unhappy, almost universally; dissatisfied with their lots and their positions, at odds with something ineffable in their lives. By the same token, I became puzzled (and often infuriated) by the masks they wore, the pantomime of denials they called "life." Why did they not see? Why did they always smile and turn away or frown and condemn me whenever the subject came up in conversation? Even as young as 8 or 9, the performative nature of it was so clear to me, in almost everyone I met. But I lacked the language or contexts to articulate it. 


Only fiction provided that; arenas and mediums in which some degree of interiority is essential, where characters are given to considerations of who they are and what and why and how. Those considerations matched my own in ways that the blithe performances of people off the page or screen did not. As such, I came to identify with the fictional more intimately than I ever did the actual (a tension that still haunts me to this day). 


Fortunately, the rare occasions in which I've surrendered to that existential Siren song, tumbled headlong -and gratefully- into the undeniable abyss, were not successful. And that was more due to ineptitude than any ambiguity on my part; I just never managed to get it right. 


There's a particular species of gallows comedy in that depth of despair; when you arise woozy and uncertain from a night of vomiting up wine and sedatives in the understanding that, not only are you very much still alive (the migraine-pounding of your temples attests to that), but that you couldn't even get dying right; a feat so many achieve without even trying at all. 


It was in those moments that I began to almost believe that perhaps there is some authorial principle in creation; some shit-heel, celestial gutter-poet or comedy-writer who has cruel irony in mind for all of us. 


Not that the suspicion ever crystallised into full-blown belief (mercifully). 


It's a strange thing; in those depths, having reached what I considered then to be the bed of the abyss, I found myself. Fiction, as ever, became the lifeline; a reason to live and a means of expressing why death could be so very, very attractive. 


I won't pretend even now that the inclination has entirely left me; occasionally, I still hear the whispers, feel those spiders stirring in my mind. The major difference is context: I know what they are, and have means of drowning them into silence, if needs be. The world, as it stands, has never been enough, and is a very poor argument in itself for continued existence. Show any potential suicide a flower, a butterfly, a celestial phenomena, and they'll show you an extinction event, a natural disaster, a plague, a societal collapse, a church ceiling crushing the worshipers below. 


Existence itself is not an argument. Life is not an argument, and certainly not a persuasive one. I discovered that very early on. Most people, even most professionals in the arena, lack the language and the means to argue for continued existence. Most of us can't convincingly argue the toss of it with ourselves. 


So, there has to be something else. Something more. And what that is depends on who we are, what we value. It can be difficult for those suffering with suicidal ideation to perceive or articulate; all too often, circumstances and the disease itself have conspired to crush that love from us, and you'd be surprised how elegantly poetic and persuasive the abstract equivalents of cancers can be. 


For me, it was, is and likely always will be stories. Stories had informed the state of my mind and anchored me to the world for as long as I could recall. They were how I engaged with a species and systems I otherwise felt powerfully outcast from. The hunger for stories, the power they maintained to enchant, transport and express, remained the sincerest species of magic, even in those darkest depths, and the places where I found not escape from nightmares, but reconciliation through them. 


The consumption of stories in all their forms and mediums allowed me to work through what I was experiencing. They connected me to creators and characters whose states and circumstances were analogous to my own. 


Furthermore, the fiction I consumed -rabidly, desperately- provided portraits of other ways, better conditions to which I might aspire, even though the chattering, sentient disease in my mind might make it seem impossible. 


Through my teens and the early years of university, my tastes flourished with the eating, every day providing some new form or flavour I'd never been exposed to. My abiding love of poetry, whilst already kindled, truly waxed during this period: Discovering Blake and the Romantics proved a necromantic revelation: Learning about their transgressive metaphysics, the peculiarly mythological manner in which they viewed the world, felt like a communion with dead souls with whom I shared so much, who expressed my own peculiar perspectives in ways I lacked the language to do so. 


It was also during this period that I became exposed to creators such as Patrick Suskind, Poppy Z. Brite (AKA Billy Martin), Chuck Palahniuk, Guillermo del Toro, Douglas Coupland and myriad others. I became filled with them, a vessel for art and stories; for film, video games, comic books, prose and poetry. So, so much of budgets that were supposed to go towards prescribed study materials and basic living were spent on materials that, to my younger, suicidal self, were just as essential; artefacts that, in a very real sense, saved his life. 




Thank you for indulging me this far, especially given the places these introductory articles have taken us. In the third and final instalment, that deep dive will continue,into more recent years, recent traumas and revelations. Thank you once again for staying the course, and I hope that, if nothing else, these strange little confessionals provide some context or clarity for others experiencing similar. 




George Daniel Lea 12/01/2023 

​George Lea is an unfixed oddity that has a tendency to float around the UK Midlands (his precise location and plain of operation is somewhat difficult to determine beyond that, though certain institutions are working on various ways of defining his movements).

An isolated soul by nature, he tends to spend more time with books than with people, consumes stories in the manner a starving man might the scattered debris of an incongruously exploded pie factory, whilst also attempting to churn out his own species of mythological absurdity (it's cheaper than a therapist, less trouble than an exorcist and seems to have the effect of anchoring him in fixed form and state, at least for the moment).

Proclaims to spend most of his time "...feeling like some extra-dimensional alien on safari," which he very well might be (apprehension and autopsy will likely yield conclusive details).

Following the publication of his first short story collection, Strange Playgrounds, is currently working in collusion with the entity known as "Nick Hardy" on the project Born in Blood.

For many of us who operate in the haunted depths and heights of horror, Clive Barker's iconic Hellraiser franchise is an ambient phenomena: we were children, even infants in the 1980s, when so many revolutions and ructions occurred within the genre, transforming its accepted face and blowing apart traditional parameters. For my part, I can't recall a time when Hellraiser did not exist; it's as much a part of my internal landscape as The Transformers or The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as naturally part of the world as storms or Summers. 


Like so many of us, my first exposure came in the form of the UK VHS copy, alongside its sequel, the mythologically ambitious, grotesque carnival that is Hellbound. Though I don't recall the first time I glimpsed and took note of it, the iconic image of “Pinhead” (refered to in the film's credits as “The Lead Cenobite,” later christened “The Hell Priest” in various comics and sequel stories)on the front cover exercised a peculiar and ambiguous fascination over my developing imagination: Here was an image that, whilst disturbing, was also strangely alluring, its symmetry and artistic patterns contrasting wildly with the medium of their recording. Even back then, before I'd read a single word of Clive Barker's prose, before I even knew who the man was or who I was and would become, something about the image attracted and appalled in equal measure. 


For a child already well immersed in the horror cinema of the era -thanks largely to my Mother's extensive VHS library-, the ambiguity of emotion, the complexity of response, was in itself fascinating; abstractly akin to picking a still-bleeding scab, knowing that the skin isn't yet knitted,that there will be pain and blood as a consequence, but unable to leave it alone. Unlike many, many horror films I was already familiar with -The Evil Dead, Alien, A Nightmare of Elm Street, Halloween and myriad others-, Hellraiser boasted a certain patina; a quality of the forbidden that made it, fittingly enough, a profound temptation; an echo of the Lament Configuration puzzle box so essential to its mythology.


My brother and I were never prohibited in our viewing material; our parents took care to vet said subjects and explain their fictional, contrived nature. This sometimes took the form of explaining how certain effects were achieved or pointing out the costume and animation work in particular scenes, or emphasising that the story onscreen was exactly that; no more real or possible than the Saturday morning cartoons we enjoyed. As such, horror became part of our shared childhood; we were as likely to favour a viewing of Predator, The Thing or Aliens as we were The Transformers, Dungeons and Dragons or The Little Mermaid. 


I don't clearly recall the first time I saw Hellraiser; I couldn't tell you how old I was, other than I was likely far too young (a consistent pattern when it comes to formative media in my life), and that it affected me in ways that it did not my brother; evoking emotions that other films it was so often ranked alongside  didn't even come close to. My most abiding, visceral impression is of dirt, not of fear; a sense of spiritual filth that lingers on the film grain and in the images they record. This is not a condemnation in any way; that feeling of being tainted for having watched it, as though the transgression of consuming the material is an occult rite that might well summon unspoken things from across the veil as surely as solving the iconic puzzle box, I recall staying with me for many, many years after that initial viewing. Whilst the images in the film certainly had their power -Frank's rebirth and the variously grotesque stages of his swelling back to something like humanity, the hooks and chains stretching skin to extremity, the Cenobites themselves and their glorious upsetting of reality wherever they occur-, that less defined quality of having being spiritually infected by the film is what fascinated me then and continues to do so. I recall Hellraiser having a power to unsettle me in ways that no amount of Freddy Kreuger's increasingly comic escapades or Michael Meyer's violence ever did. Unlike films such as Alien, which I would return to again and again, consume with near-fetishistic appetite, Hellraiser I returned to gradually and with great trepidation, forgetting certain details in the interim but always recalling that sense of the forbidden, the feeling of transgression that would later recur in my pubescent years with the blossoming of my sexuality and queer identity. ​

Hellraiser, whatever else might be said about the film, exercises power by cultivating a certain poetry between its themes and subject matter: the reactions it elicits in its audience echo those of characters in the film to the same atrocities and situations in which they occur. In the film's opening sequence, Frank Cotton, in his role as a strangely post-modern Faust, blithely solves the Lament Configuration, lacking the scope of imagination to understand what it will summon, and what his blunted, myopic lusts will give birth to. What he summons, what he unleashes and ultimately becomes, are profoundly tainted miracles; supernatural, otherworldly, utterly at odds with much of the concertedly-realist horror of the era. Frank represents an utterly polluted species of metaphysics; eternal life, resurrection, life beyond death, but shot through with a vein of cynical wit: This isn't glory, though the swelling, orchestral soundtrack during his hideously organic rebirth enjoins us to regard it as such; this is a curious mingling of miracle and atrocity, where any distinction between the two dies. This quality is, of course, rendered explicit by The Hell-Priest himself, who declares his cabal as: “...demons to some, angels to others.” To focus on the overt, visual gore, images of physical pain and bodily mutilation is to somewhat miss the point; as interesting, as repulsive, as powerful as they are, they are also part and parcel of a deeper metaphysics and commentary thereon. Throughout the film, familiar Christianic parables and works of fiction are echoed, down to certain symbols and metaphors derived from Biblical myth itself. However, Barker inverts and subtly lampoons those miracles by making them part of an entirely other metaphysics; one that, whilst it sometimes uses the language of Christianity in a wry and sardonic fashion, cleaves to no parameter or assumption of those traditions. In that, Barker creates a status quo in which miracles can be simultaneously welcome and unwelcome; attractive and repellant, sexual and repulsive. That ambiguity of response is something Barker has worked to elicit since his earliest writings. His fascination is not with the purity of horror, repulsion or the other emotions horror fiction is generally assumed to arouse, but with demonstrating to the audience that they enjoy subject matter and imagery that simultaneously repels and disturbs them; that there is worth in that response. It is a conspiratorial act of transgression on behalf of both creator and audience, that is explicitly designed to swell context and undermine assumption, to allow horror to be more than markets, studios and systems of distribution prescribe. 


Even as a child, though I lacked the language or internal circuitry of mind to articulate it to myself, I sensed this on a subconscious, visceral level. That ethos of disturbia; of being tainted by this work, yet reluctantly returning to it again and again, I found undeniably fascinating. As a child given to flights of profound fantasy, dense and protracted internal monologues, explorations of self and my own responses to the outer world, I couldn't help but ache to solve the puzzle of that emotional reaction in the same manner that protagonist Kirsty ultimately solves the Lament Configuration. It felt like there was revelation waiting on the other side, as though if I could only find the language to articulate what was happening, why the film aroused such response, I might blossom into some new state of self-understanding, a surreal Nirvana that isn't entirely from the condition the Cenobites occupy and promise their devotees. 


Whilst I maintained a fascination with various horror-film ghosts, demons, monsters and their ilk throughout my childhood, none of them -save, perhaps, Giger's eponymous Alien- ever exercised the same degree or complexity of obsession as The Cenobites. Aesthetically alone, they were and remain far removed from anything else in the bestiaries of popular horror at the time, and incorporated influences whose seeming incongruity -from the papal to the BDSM- Barker married into a troublingly cohesive whole. Most horror film monsters of the era, whilst beautifully designed, were often aesthetic exercises only; intended to intrigue and horrify via their inevitable revelation. The Cenobites are somewhat different, both in design and presentation. First off, the film makes no bones about revealing them for what they are; albeit shadowed, they occur in the film's opening scene, presented amidst a kaleidoscope of violent, strange and graphic imagery, which leaves the audience powerfully unsettled and questioning what manner of profane circus they've been invited to participate in. Later, when Kirsty Cotton succeeds in unwittingly summoning them, they occur wreathed in clinical, otherworldly luminescence, bleakly radiant in their grotesque majesty. The film plays little games with its monsters du jour, actively inviting the audience to regard them and be fascinated, aroused, disturbed, attracted and repulsed all in the same instant. As a boy barely aware of his own nascent queerness, this experience was formative: to not only encounter creatures whose aesthetics appealed in their own inchoate and ineffabe fashion, but that echoed the queerness I wouldn't actively recognise for many years yet...that was a powerful and unexpected element of my abiding attraction to these films and continued identification with Barker's work as a whole. 


Most mainstream, cinematic works of horror of the era -barring one or two notable exceptions- were assiduously heternormative both in theme and subject; they operated in worlds where cisgender, heterosexual identities were assumed and any deviation was treated either as joke or deviance. Gay characters, if they occurred at all, were either jokes, victims or monsters; there was no in between. And trans-panic killers had been part and parcel of horror cinema arguably since Hitchcock's Psycho in the 1960s. An ugly and pervasive reactionary element of much mainstream horror lay in emphasising and exaggerating the threat posed by “the other;” acting as post-modern reimaginings of traditional folk and fairy tales, they served to reinforce rigid and prescribed forms of morality derived from extremely conservative ideologies. 


Barker, having occupied the depths where the monsters dwell most of his life -having been consigned to those very realms by both his status as a gay man and his underclass position-, came along with Hellraiser and decided to rip those structures and assumptions apart (in a manner reminiscent of how Frank is variously torn to shreds in the film itself). Here, we have a horror story whose queerness is overt, despite the lack of distinct LGBTQ characters or relationship dynamics. Here are iconic horror-film monsters that derive aesthetic inspiration from, amongst other sources, the gay BDSM clubs Barker was familiar with and the underground periodicals he was known to illustrate for (some of which were seized and destroyed as a result of the UK's bout of Puritan panic during the 1980s). The Cenobites are intended to exercise a certain allure over the audience, not merely a fascination with the extent and elaboration of their mutilations (though that is undoubtedly part of their appeal), but in terms of what they thematically represent: Bound up in their variously rent, lacerated, pierced and infibulated forms is an artistic obsession with transgression and transformation; sensuality and experience are the cores of their credo, and their anatomies are merely the mediums by which that is expressed. They are walking works of self-authored art and religious icons; creatures that have reached a pique of sensual excess, thereby achieving a twisted Nirvana, an absolutism and poetry that is enviable, especially to those of us born into the abyss of corrupt and decaying ideology that characterises the last couple of centuries. 


Far from merely being “monsters,” the Cenobites, like so many of Clive Barker's creations, reflect the awful allure of that condition; mythic abstractions of the human beings they once were, rendered absolute by the extreme nature of their remaking and the fundamental inspirations the dark god Leviathan has teased out of their subconsciousness, expressing through their reworked anatomies. 


For those of us that have always been outcast from the prescriptions of tradition and society at large, always denied the ready-made roles and narratives that apply to our straight, cisgender siblings, it's little wonder that the Cenobites -amongst others- exercise a peculiar species of fascination, that transcends any sense of the forbidden born from their monstrosity, and makes them enticing on an existential level. 


In that, the mythology of Hellraiser is echoed in the relationship it draws with its audience; seekers and sybarites within the universe of the fiction come to the Lament Configuration for various reasons: out of curiosity, desire; a need to know or understand. They are then remade by the Cenobites according to those factors, becoming avatars and angels of peculiarly human principles. By the same token, the target audience of Hellraiser finds fascination and -albeit ineffable, reluctant- attraction with its monstrous subjects because they reflect not only their own conditions -being so often cast in the roles of monsters and deviants by the conservative forces that shape and underpin traditional society-, but also the potential within those conditions. There is beauty in abomination and poetry in monstrosity, according to the Cenobites; a message that can't help but chime with those of us variously condemned as both for our inalienable natures. 


Contextually, Hellraiser occurred within a particularly puritan era of the UK (one that, in many ways, echoes the scapegoating circumstances in which we currently find ourselves, especially with regards to our trans siblings). The legacy of Mary Whitehouse and her crusade to impose myopically and fundamentally Christian standards of taste and ethics upon British media was in full swing, the British tabloid press wallowed in painting LGBTQ culture as a disease-ridden pit of license in the wake of the HIV/AIDs crisis, and everywhere, small but incredibly persuasive, influentual pockets of conservatism rose up in response to what they perceived as “declining moral standards” in the sociey they assumed to be automatically and exclusively their's. 


Hellraiser, and Barker's entire body of work, is a response to and refutation of those very forces: here, Barker dares to present entities and a metaphysics purer than any fundamentalist's presumptions of their own traditions, but that operates with regards to inverse, markedly queer assumptions of purity itself: 

I suppose it would make sense to start at the beginning. Already, we hit a problem: what are beginnings, when we get right down to it? By what criteria to we draw the arbitrary line? And how can we apply the notion to something as contradictory and ephemeral as imagination? Do we dream in the womb, before the corruptions and transformative influences of waking life? A romantic part of me would like to think so, even as its rationalist counterpart rises up in contempt of the idea.  


Because that is the crux of it, my loves: the journey that starts here. A safari, of sorts; an archaeological expedition in other ways. An occult ceremony; a pathway to revelations and frustrated experiments. All of these colliding and interbleeding, becoming components in an engine that is also anatomy, also a work of living art. 


So, a beginning: 


In the beginning was a world of nightmares. A world without rules or consistency or fixture. Just because a door opened on a certain room one day didn't mean it necessarily would the next. Just because the shadows were inert and passive in the afternoon didn't mean they would be at night. It was a world of fevers and animated bedroom wallpaper; of faces in fire and storms, of spectres looming over the cot, staring down with mad-eyed fascination. 


It was also a world of cartoons, candy and sunshine. There's truly nothing like the contradictions and ambiguities of a child's reality. 


I remember a world that demonstrated no distinction between waking and dreaming; the divide not yet drawn, and therefore not even a concept. The state of molten sunlight, that would fall through rain upon grass and flowers as vivid as paintings, shifted into one of haunted shadow as evening drew in. Early sensory memory makes beauty and deliciousness out of those liminal times of the day, when Summer warmth began to give way to creeping chill, when dew on the grass became mist and stars began to blink where hot air balloons sailed only hours before. 


That was when the nightmares crept from their warrens. No specific or prescribed monsters these; no werewolves or vampires, no ghouls or Frankensteinian homonculi. Creatures of a more immediate, visceral nature; shapeless things, crafted from shadow and silhouettes, patched together from scraps of distorted feature seen with my waking eyes (that hint of familiarity making them all the more horrific). I recall one entity billowing in the air like a black plastic bag caught up in the breeze, a jellyfish in turbulent ocean. Boneless, filleted, it would dance in the air, hissing its strange promises and prophecies. Another lurked behind trees and bushes in my Dad's garden; a naked, gangrel thing of spider-like limbs and immense, black eyes that almost eclipsed its entire, swollen head. A beast resembling a hybrid between a human woman and an immense, deep green cat, lycanthropic in nature, transforming from smiling human guise to monster only in my company, my sight, cruelly in love with the masquerade. 


Monsters. Demons. Ghouls. As much part of my world as worms, house-spiders and woodlice. And, to my infant self, far more welcome. Where these things crept from, what fevered, infected, broken part of my subconscious gave birth to them, I can't say. All I know is: they did not frighten me. Not in the way that the waking world so often did, with its too-bright lights, its ugly, barking voices, its bangs and cries and sirens. The night came with cool, quiet and solace. My realm as much as their's, known viscerally, inarticulately, at so young an age; perhaps before I'd even started speaking in my head, telling stories to myself and spinning the web that would become mind. 


My realm; the realm of shadows, pregnant silences, flickering shapes at the edges of sight. A world so potent, I couldn't resist or deny it. 


A world I would never want to. 


From the youngest age, the nighttime hours have always been fractious, for my younger brother and I both. But, whereas my brother responded to that with distress and disturbance, I recall lying in bed for hours, in stillness and silence, making games from the shadows at play on the ceiling, in the corners of the room. I don't know how long those insomniac nights lasted, but it felt like forever. I can hardly recall what horrors were born there, what spectres crawled from the shadows, lingered behind curtains and in wardrobe doors. Only that they were many, varied and persistent, always there when the world grew dark and empty, a strange kind of company when dreams failed to come. 


In the earliest days, when I still had a notion of a prescribed bedtime, I recall Summer nights, stood at the large window of my bedroom, looking out at late-evening skies that have never been so brilliant since, at a sun that melted on the horizon, seeming to move and dance to my eyes, becoming the luminous hole through which a Lovecraftian worm-god entered our reality, writhing its way across the sky, eclipsing it with its knotted coils. I remember a shaggy, matted, werewolf-like beast bursting through my bedroom door, its growls and snuffles so tangible, they trembled my guts as it sought me out (but never discovered me beneath the covers). I remember, one night, growing curious at a hole in the wall, a ferocious, red glow emanating from within. Crawling out of bed, I found it to be an opening to a network of small tunnels through which the chatter of flames and infernal industry could be heard. I don't know what manner of goblin-people haunted those tunnels; I never saw them face to face. Only their shadows on the walls, their voices echoing as they approached from around the next corner. 


Horrors abounded in my childhood, long before I even knew what horror was, before any exposure to the books, comics or VHS tapes that would come to obsess me, echoing, as they did, my internal and part-dreaming life far more sincerely than any children's media of the era (though I won't deny, that obsessed me, too). 


It wasn't long before those visitations started to bleed into my waking reality. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the hereditary insomnia from which I'd already begun to suffer, even at that tender age, was starting to take its toll on my developing mind. Anxiety and non-specific bouts of depression were commonplace, as were questions of the systems and assumptions into which I was born (whilst I've never been diagnosed, I'm fairly certain I'd be identified as operating on the Autistic spectrum if I were a child today). Sensory hallucinations, whilst not common or overwhelming, did occur; momentary visual episodes in which the patterns in wallpaper or tree branches would form faces or the tangled masses of monsters, in which phantom music and voices sometimes echoed so clearly, I could swear their makers were in the same room. 


For the most part, I learned to mask and divert myself from this monster-haunted world, to the point that I simply stopped talking to people about it, especially adults, who always became visibly and obviously troubled by the subject.


Of course, it found expression in other ways: drawings and paintings of monsters, ghosts and grizzly tableaux, stories for assigned English projects that echoed the horrors I'd already come to love (a story I wrote in Junior school involving a scientist who manages to capture The Loch Ness Monster, but falls out of love with the myth, seeing the reality of it, gained some accolades that likely set me on the path to the here and now).


But, more often than not, whilst earning high praise for technical acumen, those stories excited concern from those that read them. More than once, I was forced to attend meetings and explain where certain images and entities in my work came from, or was quietly encouraged to move away from such subject matter (more on that later). 


But, in the perpetual darkness of my own private world, monsters flourished. The realms of noise and sunlight most kids my age enjoyed and celebrated in was, for me, one of sincere anxiety, even dread. Amongst the monsters, I was akin. Amongst the children of Summer, I was and have always been alien. 


And, whilst I was an anxious and -unbeknownst to me at the time- powerfully depressed child, the love of subjects waking reality would condemn as morbid or monstrous never left me, never diminished, despite that world's sincere efforts to shame me out of it. If anything, the passions coalesced and crystallised under pressure, finding new and more eloquent expression as I grew into my love of painting and sketching, of film and video games. And, of course, the stories that would become abiding to the point of obsession, in both the reading and creation of. 


As for the nightmares that came at the beginning, and sustained up to this point? They grew as I did, elaborated into fresh shapes and concerns the more I fed and fertilised them with those of others; with the daily traumas and revelations that are part and parcel of growing up. 


The dark and the night have never been still or uninhabited. But now, as the agonising transition from childhood to the nowhere-years of teenage liminality began, I became more part of them. 
​



Continued in Part 2: At War With Self and Sunlight


Thank you for indulging me thus far; there will be more focused, precise explorations of these early years and experiences in essays to come. 


A warning for part two: Though they will remain general for now, it will include a variety of problematic subjects, including: developing sexuality, insomnia, anxiety, depression, social isolation and suicidal ideation, amongst others. In particular, please be aware of content that refers to active suicide attempts. The essay itself will reiterate these content warnings. 

​George Lea is an unfixed oddity that has a tendency to float around the UK Midlands (his precise location and plain of operation is somewhat difficult to determine beyond that, though certain institutions are working on various ways of defining his movements).

An isolated soul by nature, he tends to spend more time with books than with people, consumes stories in the manner a starving man might the scattered debris of an incongruously exploded pie factory, whilst also attempting to churn out his own species of mythological absurdity (it's cheaper than a therapist, less trouble than an exorcist and seems to have the effect of anchoring him in fixed form and state, at least for the moment).

Proclaims to spend most of his time "...feeling like some extra-dimensional alien on safari," which he very well might be (apprehension and autopsy will likely yield conclusive details).

Following the publication of his first short story collection, Strange Playgrounds, is currently working in collusion with the entity known as "Nick Hardy" on the project Born in Blood.

Always a bit of a risky proposition, this. The encore you’re not sure anyone’s really asking for. Then again, if the chap who’s written 60 essays about the idiosyncratic works that messed him up as a kid for the sheer unhinged joy of it is starting to worry about coming over self-indulgent, probably best to acknowledge that particular horse has not just bolted, but fled to another country where it lives under an assumed identity, and has raised a family of foals with little if any idea of what Daddy Did In The War.


Anyhow. This whole project has been about jumping off a cliff, honestly; learning to write nonfiction, learning to write criticism and autobiography; sitting down at the keyboard and figuring out why I felt strongly enough about, say, One Flew Over The Cookoos Nest or the Escape From Colditz board game to commit an evening and a few thousand words to talking about it. And then there was the crowdfunder, and now this crowdfunder, and at the time of writing I don’t know if it’s been successful, because, for reasons that will become clear, I’m writing this a bit ahead of publication. Did it land? Will Volume II get a mass-market release and a limited edition pressing? Who knows? So far, so good, said the falling man; the view is so beautiful, all the way down.


Still. Thanks for coming this far, all of you who have.


And let me beg your indulgence as we take one last trip down memory lane.


It’s 1997, so I must be 19 years old, and my memory is that I'm in a WHSmiths, possibly Christmas shopping on a painful budget. But it’s me and a bookshop, so the odds of my not picking up something for myself are always pretty damn low.


They plummet to zero when I see the cover.


I have no familiarity with the author. But that is one hell of a title. And is there a Barker or King cover quote? Maybe. Something sure draws me in, enough to part with some incredibly limited discretionary spending budget from my Job Seekers Allowance. Interestingly, I remember no especial fear or trepidation; the author and narrative were both unknown to me, unlike some past entries where reputations proceeded. Anyway, I was a veteran, of IT, and The Wasp Factory, and Hellraiser; how bad could it get, really?


And so I dived straight in, with nary a thought to how deep, dark and cold things were about to get.


And it starts off so slow, oddly almost low-key. Sure, our narrator is a serial killer, but he’s in jail, at the end of his career, and I remember wondering if this was going to be one of those ‘told in reverse’ type deals, where we learn about the crimes via flashback, safe in the knowledge that it all ends in a cell… and then, almost immediately, it gets really fucking weird.


Turns out, our man has taught himself how to put himself into a coma, indistinguishable from death, and he can do it so successfully that he wakes up in the prison morgue. It’s an incredible piece of writing, describing the process from the inside, backing right up to the very edge of the supernatural, before taking a hard right into Silence Of The Lambs territory, as our narrator affects a bloody, daring escape.


And then, suddenly, we’re in New Orleans, and it’s like going from monochrome to technicolour as the palate and cast expand like the opening minutes of the big bang, and I have absolutely no idea what is going on but the author has my attention and I am here for it.


And then, while our man is cruising the quarter, looking for likely victims, he encounters a fellow predator.


There’s a moment when they meet - I’ve never forgotten it - where our narrator shakes hands and, in a gesture he tells us he’s used countless times as a way of gauging someone’s potential as a submissive victim, moves his hand down to briefly encircle the other man’s wrist… only this time, the shakee does the same thing.


I am doing the moment painfully insufficient justice, here, because Poppy Z Brite is a world-class horror author, brilliant at pretty much every aspect of novel writing, from characterisation to voice to description to plot to emotion. So, please, just trust me; it’s a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment for the ages, and nothing’s even happened yet.


But I remember feeling, with a moral certainty, that shit was about to go down.


I was very much not wrong.


Before it does, though, the novel cuts away, and we meet recently-split up Lucas and Tran. Lucas becomes an instantly totemic character, for 19-year-old me; when we meet him, he’s ranting and raving on a pirate radio station, angrily condemning straight people as ‘breeders’, with a persona called Lush Rimbaud. It quickly becomes apparent that he’s furious because he’s HIV positive (and this is why he’s split from Tran), and he’s determined to articulate that fury in a world where a plague that only seems to kill gay men is treated as something between a minor inconvenience and a blessing.


Lucas is not a good person. His anger often spills into outright violence, and during his darkest, most self-pitying moment, he comes perilously close to infecting Tran with his own blood; a fantastic example of toxic romanticism that has some eerie echos with the flowering relationship between the two killers, I have literally just realised as I type this. Nonetheless, this guy really spoke to me; responding to the brutal injustices life had dealt him with a defiant spit and fury that felt honestly come by, if a little indiscriminate in expression. Not the first time I’ve felt the pull of such a figure, of course, as you’ll be well aware, if you’ve come this far.


You know, I’m really not feeling so good.


Anyway.


And then there’s Tran, whose situation is less immediately mortal, but no less gut-wrenching; as we meet him, he’s in the process of becoming homeless, thrown out by his parents after they discover that he’s gay. A major part of the brutality comes from the matter-of-fact way Tran absorbs this; he’s always known if they found out, he’d be kicked to the kerb, and his stoicism in the face of the loss and ostracism is honestly kind of heartbreaking.


And then, I learn, with a dreadful sinking feeling, that Tran not only knows the NO-based killer but intends to throw himself at his mercy, imagining he might be able to stay with him, at least for a while.


It’s a brutal twist of the narrative knife, creating huge tension for the reader, an awful sense of impending doom, and inexorable pulling together of darkness and innocence that…


Oh.


Oh, yes, I see.


Sorry. I knew this was getting a bit risky. I’ve stayed too long. Pushed it too hard. Thanks for coming this far, but I’m going to have to leave it there. Sorry. I know it’s a bit abrupt, but I suspect it’ll be for the best.


It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for…

My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.

Still, It Would Be Such A Lovely Ride
​
​

Let’s end with something short and sweet. The first short horror story I can remember reading.


Most of the recreational time at my father’s house was spent in front of screens, both big and small. In my day-to-day life in Devon, trips to the cinema were financially impossible; hell, as we’ve discussed before, TV didn’t actually enter my life until well into my seventh year. But at dad's house there were cinema trips (and theatre trips, though truthfully they made less of an impression), a big old colour TV with a VHS player, and my beloved ZX Spectrum. This last was, in the fullness of time, replaced by an Amiga 500, and I think if you’d asked me, I’d have told you I’d have been happy to sit and play that thing until the end of time, with just the odd breaks for eating, sleeping, and so forth.


Only, you know, not really. Turned out, somewhere around the fourth or fifth day, my mind would crave something different.


When the urge hit, I’d leave the ground floor bedroom that housed the Amega, and walk into the room next door. Which contained the piano, and, more importantly, two walls of bookcases.


I think I’ve mentioned earlier in this series that my father’s current house actually contains a room called ‘the small library’, and yes, that is to differentiate it from the main library one floor up. The set up in this house of my childhood was marginally less grand; still, though, there were a lot of books. I have fond memories of two paperback runs in particular; the minimalist black and white Iain Banks collection (yes, this is where I scored that fateful copy of The Wasp Factory), and the glorious Josh Kirby Discworld covers. In due course, I’d tear through both collections, and Jim Thompson, James Ellroy and Elmore Lenord besides, and I learned a lot from all of them.


But this particular day - I suspect I’m shy of ten years old - none of them jump out at me. Instead, I’m drawn to a pile of annual-sized books piled on their side. Asterix? Tintin? Something in that wheelhouse, I think.


And then, next to them, I see…


What is that? The cover says Venture, and it’s book-thick but the size is all wrong. Plus the cover - a colour image of an old, white man’s face surrounded by stars, under a title in yellow letters - Space is a lonely place, apparently, which, you know, probably that’s true - is paper thin, like on those Commando comics I sometimes saw in newsagents.


It is a comic, then? A space comic? I pick it up, carefully. The top left corner of the cover next to the spine has been torn, and the pages are yellowed with age. As I open it up and take a quick flick through, I register disappointment at the pages of small type text. ‘No comics, Harry’, I think, in Tom Baker’s voice from Genesis Of The Daleks. I turn back to the table of contents. Just what exactly is a Novelette, anyway? And how can a 128 page book possibly have room for three of them, plus short stories?


And then I read the story titles.


And on one of them, I feel The Pull.


It’s gotta be a horror story, surely; a title like that? And I’m sure my mind is also cross referencing Bruce Springsteen’s Downbound Train, a heartbreaking short story for the ages.


And so it is, at nine years old, that I read my first short horror. The author is Robert Bloch, and the title is That Hellbound Train.


And I’m captivated from the off.


It’s the voice, of course; colloquial, welcoming. I wouldn’t have recognised how quintessentially American it is, but the simplicity would have appealed; there’s a Just So quality to it that really pulls me in. And the efficiency of the storytelling is astonishing; by the time we’re turned the first page, we know Martin is, effectively, an orphan (father dead from a combination of drink and railroad tracks, momma run off, and Martin an escapee from the state home he was put in), in his early twenties, and has recently done time, it’s heavily implied as a result of committing petty theft in an effort to keep body and soul together. The telling is neither cold nor cloying; Martin is not unsympathetic, but his simple stoicism seems to transmit itself to the reader; or, at least, this reader. I’m caught up, that’s all; same way Terrence Dicks and Stephen King and John Christoper and all the greats will catch me up; my father’s house and library and TV and Amiga 500 are fading away, and I’m instead walking with Martin down a cold railroad track, wondering what’s next. And Martin is just considering signing up with the Salvation Army - anything for a warm set of clothes, at this point - when he hears a train coming; and from the wrong direction, given the hour.


We’ve already heard, in the opening paragraph of the story, that Martin’s father would sometimes sing a song about That Hellbound Train when in his cups, and how Martin would sometimes envisage the passengers, imagining what a fine bunch of fellows they must be; how nice it would be to hang with them, if not for the destination… and when the train pulls up, the brakes screaming with suspicious levels of menace, I knew exactly the same time as Martin what was going on.


The conversation that follows is glorious; the Devil is never named, referred to by Martin as ‘The Conductor’, and the verbal jousting delighted my child’s mind - especially the moment where Martin refers to the devil as a ‘used car salesmen’ before immediately apologising, seeing the hurt look on the conductor’s face. It’s brilliant, as is the Devil’s reason for turning up, namely Martin’s consideration of approaching the Salvation Army - ‘I’d hate to lose you after thinking of you as my own, all these years’, he says, wistfully. Initially, The Conductor initially merely offers Martin a lift, but eventually allows himself to be drawn into a bargain.


The layers, here. Martin frankly admits that he’s given this moment a lot of thought. The Devil jousts and feints and feigns, and I remember feeling this incredible push/pull, because Martin can’t be smart enough to have worked out an angle… can he? The Devil must surely have his measure… right?


And then Martin lays out his proposition.


Martin wants the ability to stop time. For him only, obviously. The world will continue to turn, time’s arrow will continue to fly forward… but not for Martin. Martin will remain, frozen forever, at the moment of his choosing.


And the Devil agrees. He hands Martin a pocket watch. Twist the stopper, says the Devil, and when the clock runs down, your moment will freeze.


My memory - treacherous thing, this far out, not something we can rely on, but - is that, delightedly, I’d seen it before Martin articulates the point - once he uses the watch, time, for him, freezes forever, and he’ll never have to ride The Train.


He’s made a deal with the Devil, and he’s already won.


Goddamn.


And does the Devil know it? As he turns his back, his voice is choked, and his shoulders shake with what could be sobbing.


I remember the thrill of this moment so, so clearly. I knew he had the devil beat, you see. It was simplicity itself, and my child mind delighted.


And, at the same time, I think I was just old enough to pick up on the ambiguity in the moment, in the Devil’s reaction.


Crying?


Or laughing?


We’re almost exactly halfway through the word count.


What follows is one of the most elegantly-told stories-of-a-life-lived I’ve ever encountered. With a purpose - in point of fact, that most American of purposes, as I reflect upon it, The Pursuit Of Happiness - Martin sets off to Chicago, where he becomes, as the narrator wryly notes, first a better class of panhandler, then, eventually, scores a job.


Employment secures a place of his own, a promotion secures a car, and a car allows for the possibility of taking ladies out on dates. And with child’s eyes, the contours of the story felt instinctive, a needle following a well-worn, familiar groove. It’s only now, with adult eyes, I see the shape of a way of life that must have seemed eternal to the post war generation, and yet turned out to be a chimaera - for many of that generation too, of course, but most assuredly for those of us that came after. It's a simple fate, destiny, utterly unremarkable; get a job, get a place, get a better job, get a girl, eventually meet the right girl, fall in love, get married, get a yet better place. It’s the circle of life; or, actually, the death spiral of capitalism, but here in good old 1953, whomst could have predicted?


I think it’s the moment that he has a child that I start to work out maybe he’s screwed up. I’m young enough that sex is effectively an abstract concept, but also steeped enough in the pop culture of the 80s that I understand it’s basically The Best Thing Ever. So the moment he doesn't pull the pin while consummating the love of his life, I suspect the first trickle of unease started to creep in for me. But when the kid turns up…


I saw it in my own parents, is the thing. My mum, and most especially my dad, who, in retrospect, clearly could barely wait for me to get to the point where I was capable of more-or-less rational conversation. I saw how both of them, in their own ways, centred my sister and I, and I understood that (again, pop culture playing its part) to be the natural order of things. Once you have a kid, I thought, you’re always going to want to see what happens next.


Interestingly, it turns out for our Martin that impulse only lasts until the boy is of age, at which point his concerns become once more about the material. The facets of the character that I’m sure the author intended to be, and saw as, weaknesses, rear their heads, and the moment with his mistress is cut short by the private detective and then the divorce lawyers, and once his wife has cleaned him out, it turns out the mistress is less enamoured than she might have led him to believe.


And that’s his last opportune moment; the slide from there is slow but sure. He makes back his money, but he’s too old to really enjoy it, and also too old to make the lifelong friends that might have provided the companionship he realises now is the real key to happiness. And anyway, it’s too late; he overdoes it trying to make friends at some holiday destination, and his body gives out.


There’s an amazing moment, right near the end of the story, where Martin finds himself outside, near the trainline, almost exactly back here he started, reaches for the watch… and then the stroke or heart attack that is to end him hits, and he has the chance to complete the action, and he realises the notion of forever in this state does not compare favourably with hell… and so he doesn’t.


And the train pulls up. And the Devil pops out.


And Martin has lost.


I felt crushed for him, but also like I’d encountered something approaching wisdom; how his pursuit of The Moment meant he actually completely lost track of Now, of being. That happiness, contentment, whatever such weasel words even mean, are both states that coexist with other feelings, impossible to isolate; but also that these terms actually describe a process, not a state, steady or otherwise.


So sure, I was sad for Martin, as he boarded the train and the Devil asked repeatedly for his watch back, but I also felt the tale had been just; and, at the end of the day, when you deal with the devil, you kinda do always lose, and probably you should, at that.


But Bloch, that bloody genius, had one final card to play.


As Martin finds himself in the pullman carriage, he looks around. At his fellow travellers. The gamblers. The womanisers. The drunks and dreamers. The sinners, all bound for the same dark destination, all determined to wring every last drop out of their journey.


And at that moment, Martin realises, at last, he’s found his moment. And he turns the key.


Amazingly, In the copy of Venture in which I first read the story, the text ends at that precise moment, with a rather bland notification to turn to page 183 for the rest. And it’s doubly odd because there’s just one paragraph to go, a couple of sentences, the Devil incensed - ‘we’ll never reach our destination now!’ - and Martin taking on the role of brakeman on That Hellbound Train, on its never ending journey to the underworld.


And really, what finer a place could there be to end My Life In Horror? My first short horror story. A meditation on life, and the living of it, and what we pursue, and what we win and lose in the pursuit. How we all face the same destiny, at some unknown but all-too-soon future moment.


And how a story, well told, can crystalise a moment in time.


These columns, and the two volumes of books that came out of them, are my Hellbound Train. My modest hope is that they live beyond me; a signal across generations. A faithful attempt to describe the contours of an fundamentally unremarkable life in a manner that commanded your attention for as long as I demanded it - and, sure, an attempt to scratch my name, however faintly, in the hard rock of human history.


I was here. We were here. We lived, and this is what it was like, to try and live, in this time and place.


This was My Life In Horror.


Thank you for choosing to share it with me.


KP
30/10/22

A short postscript from Jim Mcleod 

To think that My Life in Horror has been running for just short of ten years, is a treatment to Kit's brilliance as a writer and a friend, we have gone through hell and high water during the time we have been working together.  And throughout this time Kit has been the voice of reason, the guiding light that kept me from doing really stupid things, and one of the people most responsible for my growth as a human being.  I have changed beyond recognition, since Kit first reached out and asked if he could write a monthly column for Ginger Nuts of Horror.  And for that I thank him.  

It has been an honour and a privilege to host these articles, they are some of the finest pieces of genre writing you can ever hope to read.  

Thank you my friend, your friendship means more to me than you will ever know. 

 May the best you've ever seen Be the worst you'll ever see; May a moose ne'er leave yer girnal Wi' a teardrop in his e'e. May ye aye keep hale and hearty Till ye're auld enough tae dee, May ye aye be just as happy As I wish ye aye tae be.

Slàinte mhath my brother 

And I’ll never forget the way I feel right now… with you… no way…


I’m somewhere between 16 and 19.


I’m lying in his bed. It’s early afternoon and I haven’t been awake long. I have, blessedly, nothing to do, and nowhere to be. No college to go to, no parents to bug me, no flatmates to wind up or disappoint.


I’m free.


I stick on Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell II album and slide back under the thick, warm duvet, light up a Marlboro Red, and let the music wash over me.


Later, I’ll say to The Ghost's roommate (a kind and blameless man, to be clear - he didn’t know what was going on, and how could he? I didn’t either) how great it is to smoke a cigarette whilst listening to Meatloaf after a long sleep, and he’ll tip me a wink and grin and say something like ‘it’s even better if you’ve had a reason to wake up!’ and I’ll grin and nod back and work out his actual meaning about a day and a half later.


But that’s later. For now, I’m in that room, in that warm bed, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs, snuggled in the warmth of the sheets.


The Ghost is an early riser. I am, at this point in my life, not so much a night owl as a creature of chaos living a series of 28 - 30 hour days. There’s a mattress on the floor, my ‘official’ bed, but I’ll often share his, or else take his spot when his early start inevitably wakes me; preferring the firmness of his mattress, and the thickness of his duvet.


I remember the smell. In the room itself, it should be air freshener vs. cigarette ash, a titanic, whoever-wins-we-lose battle for the ages, but it isn't somehow; or at least not to me and my smoker's nose. I like it. And then there’s the smell of him on the sheets; soap and store own-brand deodorant with just the mildest undercurrent of his own odour.


This smell, too, I like. It’s a smell of comfort. Of safety.


Of love.


At this point, we’ve been together for somewhere between five and seven years. In this room, so much of my ultimately futile magical training will take place.


Hanging from the wardrobe door is an oil painting his brother made. It depicts the flying creature from the Donnington ‘94 Monsters Of Rock poster, complete with the circled, winged A symbol of that year’s headliner, Aerosmith. We’d attended that show together, camping out the night before. It was one of the best live shows of my life.


On my left, in the space where the fireplace used to be in this Victorian London house, is his altar. There is a chalice, a tarot card (The Magician, of course), other things I can’t recall, probably an owl ornament of some kind, and a bronze spearhead.


I grew up around altars. My mum had one. I, at this point, have one. It’s normal.


One evening, before or after this cigarette, this morning, we will be having one of our rambling conversations, and he will ask me about my night obsession, and I, full of teenage bullshit romanticism and faux darkness, will describe Night as containing ‘a wondrous savagery’.


The Ghost straightens up, becomes commanding. ‘Come here’. I’m in bed, in just my boxer shorts, or possibly nude (‘anyone who sleeps in clothes when they don’t have to is an idiot’, he’s always insisted) but I immediately go to him.


‘Turn around.’


I do. He takes my shoulders, pulling me back and down, so I’m sat on the edge of his bed, facing the wall, back to him. He moves away, rummages. I sit, looking forward, waiting. This is instruction, he’s in Telling Mode


(earlier, he’ll tell me about The Voice, the power to command - his gran had it, he explains, and it’s something he can do too; he’ll claim he used it on me when he caught me attempting to steal his cigarettes in my mum’s house, and I’ll believe him)


and so I wait.


His arm comes into view over my shoulder. He’s holding the arrowhead in his fist.


(it has Celtic designs on it. He claims it’s ancient, that he found it hiking on Dartmoor. I believe him)


He presses the tip to the centre of my chest, not hard. The cold, blunt, rounded point of metal rests at the top of my collarbone. Then, slowly but deliberately, the point moves down. It traces the central divide of my ribcage, then down to my stomach. He brings it to rest just above my belly button. He holds it there. Then he says okay.


His arm goes away. I turn around. As he replaces the arrowhead on the altar, he explains; that my statement had made him worry that I might be moving toward The Dark; that what just happened was a test; ‘nobody of The Dark would allow that, you’d have stopped me when it was clear where it was going, you wouldn’t have been able to help yourself’.


He asks me how I’d felt during the test. I told him the truth; that I felt calm, but at a heightened, elevated level; intense. He nods, smiles, happy.


I think we smoke. I ask him what would have happened if I had reacted, pulled away. He tells me our training would have trailed off gradually, and he’d have found a way to drift away from me. I accept this without further question.


In this room, he’ll lead me on many guided meditations, attempting to get me to astral project; the breakthrough proof he knows I’m craving, that will move the magic from something I desire and infer to something tangible. In this room, he’ll explain to me how lowering my inhibitions is crucial to my obtaining the openness I need to let go. In this room, under his verbal guidance, and the power of my own imagination, I’ll experience something agonisingly close to the things he’s described to me in vivid detail, only to find myself surrounded by a roaring, booming sound that starts me out of my trance. He’ll explain it was my heart; that I’d Travelled Within, as the meditation led me to, but I’d ended up inside a chamber of my heart, and the experience had overwhelmed me. He’ll tell me I’m really close to a breakthrough, though in reality, this is as near as I ever get.


In this room, he’ll tell me to masturbate in the bed on the floor, while he lies in his own bed.


He’ll tell me it’s part of the training. That sexual energy is a kind of magic, and masturbation is a way to channel it. He’ll advise me that there might be magical spells or rites I’ll be able to complete as part of sexual congress with my then-girlfriend, if I want - ‘you might be sitting face to face, fully inside her, but not moving’ I remember him saying, a stray fragment from conversations in The Room.


He’ll tell me, too, that my own sexual energy is potent, can affect the mood of others. One evening, after I’ve masturbated, lying on the mattress on the floor next to his bed, he’ll tell me about how he’d heard the man in the flat upstairs reinitiate sex with his girlfriend, triggered by my jerking it in the room below. I believe him. Later, I’ll try and deploy this power to get his flatmate to go to bed with his girlfriend so I can play on his PC, jerking off in the bathroom next to the living room where his flatmate and the computer are situated. I will be disappointed when it doesn’t work, and when I tell The Ghost, so is he.


In this room, he’ll give me instructions on how to masturbate better. He’s backed me into a rhetorical corner, by this point; there’s no logical reason for me to resist the lesson. It won’t be sexual for either one of us, and he’s concerned I might be hurting myself, wants to help.


As I present my erect penis to him, he explains that the skin is unusually tight and that I should  be gentle to avoid chafing. I can’t remember much of what he told me; I can mainly recall how my concentration was on breathing normally, treating the situation with casual indifference, no big deal. I do remember at one point his finger touches me, as he points out an area of particular sensitivity.


Two decades later, I’ll see the two women police officers exchange a glance at the moment I describe this, an unspoken communication passing between them.


In this room, we’ll have countless conversations. I’ll pour out my heart, my desires, my hopes, my fears. We’ll talk about things fantastic and mundane.


Among many other things - computer games and role-playing games, and music, and books - we'll talk about maturity and the age of consent.


He’ll patiently explain to me that it’s arbitrary; that different people mature, physically and emotionally, at different ages, so the law just draws a line because it has to be drawn somewhere, and that’s okay, because children do have to be protected against predators.


He really doesn’t like paedophiles.


In one of our conversations, he claims he, with some friends (the implication is magical friends, fellow shaman, but I can’t remember now if he ever made that explicit) castrated a paedophile once, in Ireland. I don’t remember if I asked if the man survived, or what his reply was. I suspect I didn’t ask. I suspect I just nodded at this obviously just turn of events.


Anyhow. Consent is important. Consent is key. Physical and emotional maturity might make a sexual relationship possible, but never without consent. Rapists must die.


How old, he asks me, must someone be before a sexual relationship can be considered?


I know it sounds like a copout, but I swear it’s the truth - I cannot remember what reply 16, or 17, or at the outside 18-year-old me gave.


But I do remember his answer.


Twelve years old. Not, in point of fact, because of physical or emotional considerations, it turns out (some girls start puberty as young as nine, he tells me, and I nod, believing him), but because ‘nobody under the age of twelve can be trusted to keep it secret’.


Yeah.


What about your childhood? It’s defective!


I was ten years old, I think, when I first met The Ghost.


I met him at a Live Roleplaying event put on by my local youth theatre group. He was attached by some means to a local troop, even though he was living in London at the time. I can’t remember, now, what his role was; he had a wizard character who was quite powerful and involved in that system, but was he any part of that first event? As I think more, I suspect not. Kez was, for sure, a bear of a man who had the job of guide for our party. And that event was the primary kids Vs the teenager theatre kids, and they massacred us in the final encounter.


Yeah, I think maybe The Ghost wasn’t at that event, but a later one.


Anyway, the LARP bug had well and truly bitten, and for the next ten years, attending LARP weekend events would be a significant part of my social calendar.


And The Ghost would take me.


It’s the summer of 1992. I am 14 years old.


Summerfest has loomed large in my imagination since I first heard the name; a vast event taking in thousands of attendants for a weekend of drinking, bonfires, and latex swords and silly costumes. It sounded like heaven, and The Ghost, possibly already dating my mother at this point, scores permission to take me. Due to a political and/or rules-based schism, a new group is formed, and so, for my first large event, I am attending not Summerfest, but The Gathering - the first event to hold this name.


In the long car journey from North Devon to the Derbyshire scout camp that hosts the event, I smoke my first cigarette.


I just ask him if I can have one, and he says yes. I smoke it like I know what I’m doing, but of course, I don’t, and when I confess at the end it was my first, he tells me he knew. I remember the feeling so clearly; a warmth in my cheeks, the flush of the forbidden, the comforting smell of tobacco smoke, now reborn as a taste, my mouth full of saliva.


“If you start to feel like you actually need them, cut back, and if you feel your breathing being affected, just stop,” is his sage advice. I nod. When I get home and tell Bev and Freddie, they'll both be delighted, and we’ll immediately form the village underage smokers club, sneaking cigarettes from the vending machine in the village pub - Marlboro Reds, same as Slash smoked.


…I want show you how to use it…


Either that trip, or the next one, we’ll become blood brothers.


We’ve been talking about it for months. He’s told me all about it; how we’re both old souls, who have shared many past lives together. ‘In many of those lives, we've been lovers. You can call me a dirty old man, I don’t care’ he says at one point, defiant.


I don’t say it. I don’t even think it.


I don’t want a physical relationship, but I do love him. It’s all the cliches you’d expect; he combines the best elements of my mates with all the advantages of being a Grown Up. Sure, access -  to cigarettes, whiskey, LARP events, concerts, plus a pretty mean music collection on cassette. But it’s not just that. It’s access to wisdom. The ghost knows stuff. He’s from the adult world, but not really of it; he tells me what my secret heart already knows; that all that grown-up bullshit is bullshit; magic is real, hidden just beneath the surface, and those of us that can do it, ah… the rules don’t have to apply to us. And of course, I’m not just a magician, but one of unusual power; there are just seven this generation that have the kind of power I do, and I haven’t been this powerful since I was Taliesin.


And he and I have known each other before. Life and life again, we find each other. Sometimes men, sometimes women, sometimes one of each. Always friends, always together, often lovers.


And I feel it.


So we do the ceremony. Naked, at his insistence, we sit in the tent, facing each other, lit by candle flame. We use needles in our fingertips to draw the blood we mingle. ‘Normally, at the end, we’d have an open-mouthed kiss. To prove our trust in each other,’ he’d told me earlier, and I’d snorted before replying ‘yeah, that’s not going to happen’. We do embrace, naked, in the tent, blood brothers now, the ceremony completed again, ensuring the cycle will perpetuate, and we’ll be connected in the next life.


We sleep together, naked, in two sleeping bags zipped together. We smoke in the pitch dark, and he teaches me to read symbols in the glow of the ember.


…it’ll kill you right back…


It’s the summer after, 1993. Two amazing live shows in the space of a week - my beloved Guns N Roses, on the third leg of their mammoth Use Your Illusion tour, with The Cult as the main support band, and Metallica touring the black album (with Megadeth in tow) the following Saturday. I’m fifteen years old. I go to these shows with friends. The Ghost is not in attendance. I stay with my father, and I have an amazing time at both gigs.


In the week in between, The Ghost takes me to another show. Ugly Kid Joe, at The Island in Islington. Screaming Jets in support.


At the show, there is a group of girls, a similar age to me. I think they are beautiful. The conversation starts teasing, but they actually warm up to me after a while. I tell them The Ghost is my father, and that he lets me smoke. They’re venue regulars, and they flat-out do not believe Ugly Kid Joe are actually playing there. ‘They won’t show up, I mean, why would they?’, she insists.


But they do, and It Is Good.


After, we’re walking back. I remember - God, it’s wild, what comes back - passing a Burger King, the lights on, but the door locked. A leather-jacketed man rattles the door angrily, drawing wary glances from the staff inside. He turns to his companion, and with a tone of whining exasperation and an angry smile says ‘If they’d just had a little imagination…!’


On the way back, I talk about the girls a lot, excited. They really seemed to like me. I wonder if we could go back sometime. He demurs, saying the acts there are usually dance bands. I cool on the idea quickly, but not without regret. He laughs and says ‘anyway, you’re getting a bit ambitious for someone that hasn’t even painted the ceiling yet!’


I’m taken back to The Ghost's house. He lives with his parents in a block of flats. He explains that they’re not here, and they don’t know I’m staying. He explains that he won’t tell them, because his dad’s brother had a thing for boys, and so his parents were hypervigilant about that kind of thing.


I smile, laugh, nod.


We share a bed that night. Naked. We laugh and joke around. At one point, he pulls me onto his chest, so we’re lying face to face, me on top of him. ‘Come here!’, he says. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Because I want to control you!’ he says, still smiling.


Something in my stomach flips over.


I say something, and flee the bed. He immediately apologises, says it was a joke. He says my reaction was good, He says it was a test, and I’ve passed. He says that if I’d responded positively, he’d have known he was on for a love affair, rather than a magical trainee. ‘It’s a shame, though, I could have done with a love affair,’ he says, mock wistfully, and I laugh at his silliness.


And looking back on moments like this, knowing what I know now, for just a second, I can feel a glimpse of what it must have been like, for him. What he must have imagined, desperately hoped, was about to happen there. I don’t know if he really loved me - to be honest, I’m not sure he’s capable of love, in a way you or I would recognise - but I do believe that he believed that he loved me, and that his desire came from that love. It’s the only way I can make sense of his fetishisation of consent; though as I type that, of course, it’s possible it was nothing more than survival instinct, right? Consent makes the waters muddy, if it ever comes to that; gives shame as leverage, makes talking at all less likely.


Let’s face it, I was never supposed to write this down. You were never supposed to read it.


The next morning, the conversation ends up coming around to self-defence, a perennial obsession of mine at that age, in the final year of an unhappy school career. He says he can help with that. He holds a large cushion against the wall and instructs me to punch it.


Naked, of course. So he can properly see what my body is doing, how it moves. Boxers often train naked, he assures me.


I believe him.


… they’ll never let a night like tonight go to waste…


It’s the only way it’ll work, he tells me. We’re back in The Room.


The meditations are going nowhere; following the Big Heart moment, I can’t get close to that state again. I’m frustrated. So is he.


He insists the issue is sexual. By this stage, I have a girlfriend. In point of fact, he’s in my home, the night I lose my virginity, and the following morning, he sits on the end of the single bed we’re curled up in, beaming with pride. That she took this in her stride seemed inconsequential at the time, and seems nothing short of miraculous today.


Anyway.


I need to ‘really let go’. I can’t do that with her, but I can with him, because he’ll let me. He lays it out. ‘You can do whatever you want. If you want to touch me, you can. If you want me to touch you, I will. If you want to penetrate me, you can. If you want me to penetrate you, absolutely not.’ It will be safe, he insists. I need it, he is clear, and it’s the only way it’ll work.


And there’s simply no way.


The proposition is the opposite of appealing. I don’t want to ‘let go’, be out of control sexually. Why would I? Why would anyone? I’ve only been having sex for five minutes, but it’s already clear to me that the more attentive and responsive you are, the better for both of you. And anyway, it’s him, and as much as I love him there’s not a single remote spark of physical attraction.


Do I want the astral projection, that power, that proof? Sure… but, you know, not that much.


I’ve been unsparing in terms of showing you my credulity to this point, but I have to give myself a bit of credit, here; I was firmly in touch with my own desires, and, despite years of careful path laying and preparation and manipulation and lies; despite that enormous investment of time, and energy, and imagination, it all crashed against the solid wall of implacable Do Not Want, leaving not so much as a mark.


I don't know for sure where that selfish, unmovable core came from, but, obviously, I’m grateful.


There’s much more I could tell, but the hour grows late, and honestly, I don’t think he’s worth it. But I do need to share one further moment because it’s very, very instructive; and a big part of me finally writing this out is, as always, an attempt to answer a question. Unusually for this series, however, the question this time isn’t ‘why’, but ‘how’.


So.


…baby, we could talk all night…


It’s sometime between 2009 and 2010. I’m married, and settled, baby on the way or possibly recently arrived. And I get a phone call out of the blue from one of the old LARP crew that’s stayed in touch.


And he’s got questions for me about The Ghost.


Turns out, The Ghost has gotten cosied up with another family. This time, it’s a girl child he’s getting close to. The parents are concerned; the kid won’t talk.


And it’s at that moment, over twenty years after we first met, ten years after I stopped living with him in London, in the flat we shared and split the rent and ran D&D games and bickered like an old married couple as we drifted apart; as I became more and more aware of how regularly and pointlessly he lied, about everything; as any talk of magic and magical training faded before drying up entirely; ten fucking years after we parted, still on friendly terms, still Facebook friends, still the guy I thought of as my brother…


It’s that exact fucking moment, and not one second before, that the scales fall.


And, you know, I’ve gotten better at this writing gig, thanks in no small part to eight years at this particular coal face (thanks again, Jim), but, sorry, gang, I cannot fully put it into words what that moment did to me. Hell, real talk, what it’s still doing to me.


Because, all at once, it was so gobsmackingly obvious - what he’d really been, what he’d done, what I'd almost done -  that the overriding initial tide of emotion that hit me - before the shame, before the baffled anger, before the sorrow - was embarrassment.


‘You were a kid. You couldn’t have known. You’re not supposed to need to. That’s how it works.’ Well-meaning loved ones and counsellors. And of course, they’re not wrong… but it didn’t happen to them. It happened to me.


And I fucking should have known.


I should have. It was screamingly obvious. I mean, You’ve come this far, you know. And, not a clue; not as a kid (understandable), but also not as a grown ass, in-his-thirties-with-a-wife-and-career-and-kids adult; and that’s the part that’s still a little hard to swallow, some nights.


And then there’s the guilt.


As you’ll have gathered, I went to the police, the phone call from my friend ringing in my ears. The two officers were incredibly sympathetic and sensitive. I told as much of the story as I could remember - less than I’ve told tonight, as I’ve had more time, since, to think about it, and the events that surrounded it, to piece together at least some of the chronology - but enough.


A couple of weeks later, I get a phone call from another officer. They tell me they’re not pressing charges. They interviewed him, and he denied everything, and it’s word against word, and that’s it. They were tempted to go for it anyway, they said, because I was a compelling witness, but in the end they felt without a single piece of corroborating evidence there was no way forward.


I think about that a lot. About the fake secret I knew I was carrying, and the real secret I didn’t. How he hid in plain sight so well, I couldn’t see it until I found out I was neither the first, nor the last


Yeah, I think about that a lot, when I can’t help it.


The police said they’d keep my testimony on file; they’d made it clear to him that they had an eye on him, and he was no longer welcome at live role-playing events. ‘You came forward because you thought it might corroborate what was going on with someone else, but sadly it looks like it’s the other way around’ said the officer, on the phone; or something very like that, anyway.


And at some point came the twist of the knife I should have expected. The officer told me that The Ghost had denied it all, of course, and then; ‘he did say that he’d always thought of you as like a younger brother’.


Yeah. Yeah, me too, you fucker.


Me too.


Anyway.


Oh, he had at least one prior conviction for child sex offences, I learned that, too. That’s where the ‘not the first’ revelation came from. And if the stories his daughter told me are true - and I have no reason to disbelieve her - his father was also an abuser. I remember replaying the conversation in his parent’s flat, about the dodgy uncle.


Right there, in plain sight. Fucking hell.


I don’t know what happened with the family he was cosying up to, the child he’d clearly started working on. They were not people I knew or had direct contact with. I don’t have their names. I do know he vanished from social media days after I went to the cops, and my understanding is that he can no longer take part in UK LARP events, though I don’t know how they’d enforce that.


I suppose, technically, I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. Though my money’s on alive. Sure, he was starting to develop a middle-age spread by the time we parted company, but he was in pretty good shape. Maybe the smokes got him in the end, or will do soon; but I think, if he were gone, word would have gotten back to me by now. Hell, there’s even a part of me, a holdover from that believer kid, that thinks I’ll know, when it does finally happen.


Still, I hope he is dead, or dying. Not because the thought gives me any satisfaction - I’d say if it did, without shame, it just doesn’t - but for a simpler reason; once he’s dead, he can’t do it anymore.


Because that’s the weight of this thing that I can’t ever quite shift. I remember a friend actually saying to me ‘I don’t feel safe having him around my niece’ and thinking, hard, and replying ‘I don’t think he’d do anything intentionally to harm her’, and God help me, I meant it, and what the fuck does that say about me? I knew about everything you’ve read above, and I fucking said that. And, you know, not for nothing, but I went through an aggressive, ugly New Atheist phase, around 9/11, and somehow I was also carrying this entire doublethink about my ‘brother’ in my head that exact same time, and I dunno, you guys, I think maybe, in certain fundamental and important respects, I’m just not that bright.


…endless winters, and the dreams would freeze…


I don’t like knowing he’s still out there, and still a danger, that’s the beginning and end of it.


And I guess this is where we draw the lesson, right? And I think - I think - the lesson might be this; no secrets.


Or. no, that’s too proscriptive; too radical, even for the guy who wrote A Song For The End.


Okay, how about this? Interrogate your secrets; and, especially, the secrets others want you to keep.


Because it felt so plausible. That’s the thing. Because I was bright, and imaginative, and angry, and rebellious, and a kid. And because he knew just what to say. ‘You know if you’d been into football, it’d have been football’, a wise friend told me, and she was right, of course, but I couldn’t see how it was tailored for me, because it was tailored for me; such a perfect fit, I’d carry it long and far past the point I should have known better.


There's one last thing I’ve got to share, too, because it’s too perfectly macabre, and I’m a horror writer, but also, it’s a true thing, and it’s this: increasingly, I look like him.


I’ve got long hair (though mine is already thinner than his was, damn his eyes). I’ve got the glasses. Since lockdown and working from home, I’ve even started working on the belly, now I’m not cycling 40 miles a week in commute. And when the beard’s short, it’s okay, but I gotta tell you, lately, when it fills out, and I catch myself in the mirror… well.


Because I’m about the age he was when he met me.


And that’s when the sadness comes in.


What I think is, he was empty, in some fundamental way. Empty in a way that can't be fixed, can’t be filled. I don't think he was capable of love, as you or I would understand it.


But I was. I am.


And I loved him.


And that’s why nobody knew what was going on. Because I didn’t know what was going on. Because I trusted him, and I loved him, and so I knew the secrets he needed me to keep were good, were right.


I dunno. I’d hoped when I got to this point, I’d have something useful to say. I’d imagined there’d be something I could say to the parents and kids who don’t know they’ve invited a predator into their lives; some wisdom from what I lived through that might stop some kid from making bad choices, or help twitch the antenna of some well-meaning parent.


I really thought I’d get there.


Well, okay, how about this? My sister - who knew nothing of any of this until decades later - told my mum, at the time The Ghost was courting her, that, if he moved in, she’d run away. And mum broke off the relationship, though whether or not it was in response to that, I don’t know, and frankly don’t want to ask, at this distance.


But.


She didn’t know. Obviously.


But she knew something.


And who knows how this story plays out, if he’d moved in?


I’ll say this too, for whatever it’s worth, and if you’ve come this far, you may see this as a weakness or defect rather than a strength, and fine, whatever, but; I refuse to reject my capacity to love. Because love may have trapped me into lying for someone who didn’t have my best interests at heart… but it also saved me, over and over. And it’s still saving me, as I spend the rest of my life wrestling with the fact that the most important relationship to me, in my most formative years, was with a man who was a pathological liar with a sexual interest in children.


…does it get any better, can it get any worse?


I am acutely aware that, as I type this, there are people - children and adults alike - who are suffering at a level that renders what I’ve described as trivial. I say that neither to aggrandise or diminish my own story; merely to acknowledge reality. I wouldn’t wish what was done to me upon anyone, and I was profoundly lucky, and both these things are true.


Just… look out for each other, okay?


And okay, maybe, maybe...


Maybe we need to be even more fearless about expressing what we know to be true.


Because this is a dark time; maybe the darkest our species, and our planet, has endured since a big space rock did for the dinosaurs. Our kids, if they live at all, are going to live through cataclysms not merely outside of living memory, but actually unprecedented. And, as a father, I can relate on a cellular level to the desire to protect, to shield.


But.


I think, maybe, that’s not always the best way to go.


Because I think, maybe, that if we resist that urge, and instead speak painful truths, we’ll give those kids a fighting chance to be the beacons of hope we’re all desperately going to need, in the decades we’re cursed to face.


And, as an added bonus, we will, hopefully, leave them less vulnerable to those skilled, brilliant operators who will mix lies with truth, in service of appetites incomprehensible to those of us with souls. Because, while such people are blessedly rare, they do exist; and, left unchecked, they can do an awful lot of damage.


And I feel like that’s probably worth doing. Given where we are.


…objects in the rearview mirror may appear closer than they are…


Thanks for coming this far. Good luck out there.


KP
19/10/22


PS - There are a few - a vanishingly few, I suspect - who knew me back then and might come across this. Know that I’m okay, and also, respectfully, I don’t want to talk about it. If you know, you know. If not… let’s leave it here, okay? Thank you.

My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.


Am I Too Loud For You?


Content note: discussions of violence, including sexual violence, misogyny, homophobia and the use of homophobic slurs.


The first time I heard the name was the year 1999. I was still working in the pub.


It was White Natalie who told me about him. We were talking about music, and I was trying to explain to this early 20’s London girl about metal, and she was trying to tell me about chart dance and hip-hop, and I don’t think we were really communicating at all, to be honest, but we had much time to pass, so we talked.


Or, more accurately, she talked, and I mocked.


“Like the chocolate?”


“No…”


He’s named after a fucking sweet?”


“No! It’s…”


“What’s his first name, peanut?”


“Fuck off! His name’s Marshall…”


“Like the amplifier?”


“I don’t know what that is. No, Marshall Mathers, that’s where the name comes from – m in m, see?”


“That’s the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard.”


“But he also calls himself Slim Shady…”


“I stand corrected.”


“Piss off!”


And so on. The conversation turned to acts whose names may have seemed less silly to me at the time, but were clearly less memorable at 20 years' distance, and, secure in my metal meathead snobbery that she didn’t have the first clue what she was talking about when it came to quality music, I gave it not a single moments further thought.


Sorry, White Natalie. You were right, and I was wrong. At least about this chap.


Fast forward a year. I’m now working at Guildhall University, earning a grand a month and feeling like a millionaire. Monday night D&D is the highlight of the week; The Ghost has assembled a great bunch of lads, all late twenties/early thirties, and I take over DMing, running an epic classic D&D greatest hits campaign, hitting the party with a Quantum Leap curse so I can take them through Castle Greyhawk, The Temple Of Elemental Evil, and any other campaign I can get my mitts on, continuity be damned. The Ghost has an extensive collection. I have ambitions to take them into Ravenloft eventually. And, as previously mentioned, after the wage poverty drought of The Pub Year, I’m making up for it now by dumping a non-trivial percentage on my disposable income in HMV Oxford Street every month.


And one of the gang – let’s call him Drew – mentions the name again. Drew has music taste a lot wider and a fair bit more Indie focussed than me, but he knows his onions, and he says Eminem is Actually Good, and this time, I listen, but mentally add an asterisk that reads ‘for a rapper’, because yeah, sure, Kid Rock’s cool (and, yes, Eminem’s verse on that album is superb), and Bodycount are awesome, but rapping without guitars? I dunno, man, life is pretty short, you know?


And then, Marilyn Manson happens.


I mean, he’s been happening for some time, for me, as previously mentioned. And, yes, to address the elephant in the room, I am aware of the many credible accusations that allege him to be a gigantically vile asshole, I believe victims and no longer consider myself a fan… but it's the year 2000, and I know about none of this, but I do know Holy Wood, his third-in-a-trilogy album that started with Antichrist Superstar and whose second entry, Mechanical Animals, was at least partly responsible for lifting me out of a pretty deep teenage depression, is coming out that summer, and hoo, boy, the Marilyn Manson BBS service is buzzing with the dripdripdrip of promo images and sound clips and whatnot. And somewhere in that pre-hype moment, Manson makes reference to having completed some collaboration with Eminem ‘that nobody knows about yet’ and sad to say, that did the trick for me.


And look, in my defence, like Anton LeVay before him, Manson had an absolute genius for attaching himself to bigger cultural figures, who, likewise, were titillated by being photographed with the Antichrist Superstar. And the ‘collaboration’ turned out to be no more than a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance in Eminem’s The Way I Am video, as Em, in a bar talking about Columbine, says ‘They blame it on Marilyn, And the heroin, But where were the parents at? And look where it’s at’. Chuck in a hilariously pixilated video clip from Mansons’ site where he joined Eminem on stage for the final chorus of the song, followed by an embrace between the two stars, and suddenly I’m very interested in this rapper named after a chocolate.


Drew lends The Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers LPs to The Ghost, he burns me copies with colour photocopies of the cover art, and all of a sudden, Eminem takes up residence in my stereo and my internal cultural landscape.


I quickly gravitated to MMLP. It’s not that SSLP is bad (and these days, settling into mellow middle age, I actually prefer it, in all its wild Tex Avery On Angel Dust Technicolour energy) but the darker edge of Marshal Mathers is obviously going to exert the stronger pull to a twenty-year-old Marilyn Manson fan. And so it goes.


Not that it’s not funny; there’s a thick seam of dark comedy that runs through the whole album. I have a vivid memory of sitting with The Ghost’s daughter, one of my early listens, and I think her first, and the pair of us collapsing into delighted giggles all the way through Kill You. It’s an instructive moment; up until then, the song had always hit me queasy. I couldn’t fully parse it, was the thing. I mean, It was clearly, obviously a joke. Trivially so. It’s also a manifesto for the album, in a lot of ways – ‘oh, you thought The Slim Shady LP went too far? Strap in, kids!’...


And yet.


The anger in the performance is visceral, as are the descriptions of violence. By the end of the first verse, he’s described strangling a prostitute and ‘raping his own mother’, before flinging it back in the face of the audiences and critics who have turned him into a megastar ‘”Oh, now he’s raping his own mother, abusing a whore, snorting coke, and we gave him the Rolling Stone cover?” You’re goddamn right bitch, and now it’s too late! I’m triple platinum and tragedies happen in two states!’ and on, and sure, in his sober career he’ll achieve linguistic gymnastics and pacing that put this in the shade, but…


There's still something uncomfortably breathtaking about it, for me. There’s a relentlessness to the delivery, and the start-stop, sparse, almost nursery rhyme beat creates so much space that you can’t help but hear each machine gun syllable as it’s delivered. And I remember just… not knowing what the fuck to make of it. The anger called to me, as it had with Guns N Roses and all the rock and metal bands since. And along with that, the cartoon misogyny did trigger a laugh impulse. Given how I was raised, woman hatred was both alien and a powerful taboo, and so art that was, to me, transgressive in this way (and I do of course now realise that it’s anything but transgressive in the wider world, and that’s a significant part of the problem, but) had an incredible impact.


But it was scary, too. Because on The Slim Shady LP,  the comic leaning is more clearly signposted, from the nasal, childlike vocal delivery down to the cartoonish imagery. Gross things happen on SSLP, for sure, but it’s done with a playful glee, the sound of a kid delighting in saying shit (and, indeed ‘shit’) for the sake of it. And on one level, Kill You (and the MMLP taken as a whole) is just that turned up to eleven… but the act of turning it up to eleven changes the delivery, and created, for me, an uneasy sinister undertone that made/makes me queasy.


What’s really amazing is, right now, I’m listening to the album, and I can still feel that reaction. Normally, I can’t revisit the initial emotional impact of a work once I’ve seen it in a new mode; Like we discussed back in Pulp Fiction, that overdose scene fucked me up the first time… but only the first time. Once I was in on the joke, I’ve only ever been able to enjoy it as one of the greatest comedy scenes in modern cinema; not a complaint, just an observation.


What’s incredible to me about The Marshall Mathers LP is that, even following that listening with The Ghost’s daughter, as her laughter allowed me to see that the shock was the joke, that the po-faced angry delivery was that of a comedy rant and the laughter came tearing out of me, an explosion of relief and joy as, suddenly, I Got It, I can still flip back to that stomach sunk discomfort of those initial solo listens.


One of the interesting things about Eminem, I think, is how he’s simultaneously massively commercially successful and, in many circles, considered a kind of embarrassing artist to admit to liking. I’ve joked a couple of times with the couple of friends I have that I know are fellow fans that it's music you love to listen to on your own, but would be mortified to listen to in company. And that’s true in one sense; I’ve reconnected with Eminem’s more recent output over the last year, and I think a lot of it is absolutely phenomenal, but I honestly cannot imagine sitting and listening to it with my wife or kid. The same shit that makes me grin ear to ear as it blasts through my headphones while I walk the dog or endure an exercise session on the hated cross trainer would make me curl up with embarrassment in the company of many of my nearest and dearest. Hell, that may even be part of the pull, right? Slim as a persona is pure id, pure self-destructive impulse, pure ‘say-the-thing-you-think-but-would-never-say’ smart arsery; dude’s the fucking court jester of pop culture, poking ribald fun at everyone and everything, including himself.


At the same time, it took that communal experience, listening with another, to unlock the comedy reaction, and let me make the mental flip from uneased awe to grinning enjoyment. The permission to laugh at the most awful, heinous shit, because that was the point.


I wasn’t laughing because it wasn’t horrible, but because it was.


And we’re in this strange cultural moment, right now, in 2022. A billion bullshit column inches have been spilled about ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, and almost all of it is fucking awful scaremongering non-issues… but artists, especially artists of A Certain Age (like, to be precise, my age and older) remember perhaps a little too well the moment in the 90’s when the PMRC were trying to shut down Metal and Hip-Hop, or at least make it inaccessible to kids, while in the UK, the ‘video nasties’ scare was outlawing movies out of some preposterous suggestion of moral corruption. And, to be clear, these actually were dark moments for freedom of speech and artistic expression; we were right to be worried and fight back against government encroachments on those freedoms.


The trouble is, the muscle memory of those days runs deep. And so, in 2022, when members of marginalised communities start talking about problematic portrayals, especially in art created by artists not part of the community that they are writing in/commenting on, or YA publishers start employing specialist editors to try and ensure that such issues get identified and fixed prior to publication, a lot of artists my age and older have an almost knee-jerk negative reaction.


It’s not a good or healthy reaction, of course, and a second’s thought would tell you why. Because the difference between a community exercising its freedom of speech to interrogate and criticise art and congressional hearings and confiscation of videotapes by the state is, ah, I can’t even be bothered to complete the sentence, you’ve got the point.


Still, I bring it up because one of the things people my age and older seem to say an awful lot about the art of our youth is ‘oh yeah, but/and you wouldn't be able to get away with that these days’. And Eminem’s often held up as an example; the number of otherwise intelligent reaction video makers who say endless variations on ‘if Eminem was coming up today, he’d be so Cancelled’.


And, like, newsflash, motherfuckers: four years ago the US managed to elect a racist to the highest office in the land, and despite then having one of the most hilariously corrupt and inept terms of office in the history of the presidency, as of the time of writing, that motherfucker still isn’t wearing an orange jumpsuit, and may indeed run again next time, and win again. So get the fuck out of here with your bullshit ‘both sides are just as bad, you couldn’t do that These Days’ cause it’s fucking happening, you can literally do that shit in the white house, and appoint supreme court justices who will do that shit from the bench,  and one side wants to introduce fascism to the US, and the other side wants you to know that Lovecraft was a racist, and those are not equivalent fucking problems.


And in the specific case of Eminem, it’s worth noting that Bill Clinton was slagging him off in speeches in the late 90s, The Feds almost certainly opened a file on him when he started going after Bush on his The Eminem Show and Encore albums, and Trump got so upset by his later work that Em got a visit at his studio from the Secret Service at one point; all actual threats of ‘cancel culture’ that are fucking dangerous coming from government overreach, and, mostly from, surprise surprise, the authoritarian right. The other problem with this argument relating to Eminem is that he’s still going strong, and still putting out cartoonishly offensive songs, with a level of technical ability so high as to have become peerless. Cancelled my “the wokeratti” entire arse.


And, look, yes, absolutely, The Marshal Mathers LP contains a lot of misogyny, and lyrics that describe misogynistic violence. There’s also a lot of homophobia, including numerous uses of ‘f*g’ and variants as an insult, and do I have to say that’s clearly Not Okay? Because it’s clearly Not Okay, and I’m fine saying it, and I have no interest at all in getting into some spurious justification/apologia about whether or not he ‘really means it’ or is ‘just’ saying it for shock value (or even, at the far end, ‘playing a homophobic character’ which I’m sure someone’s tried on as a justification), for the simple reason that, in context, it doesn’t make any difference, because it’s clear we're meant to laugh along with the homophobe, and not at him, and once more, that’s Not Okay, earlier point about taboos notwithstanding.


In fact, let's put a finger right on the squirming hypocrisy of this moment; in the song Criminal, Eminem spends the entire first verse on a homophobic (and, in an ahead-of-his-time-in-a-bad-way moment, transphobic) tirade, claiming gay people don’t like him not because he’s homophobic but because they’re ‘heterophobic’ (and also want to fuck him, obviously). And I want to be clear, here; I do think, like with Kill You, he’s playing it ‘for laughs’ (the introduction to Criminal has Em stating ‘A lot of people think that because I say something in a record, I believe in it, or I’m really gonna do it’), and I will admit that, like with Kill You, I can ‘hear’ it in both modes, the intended comedic and the grossly offensive and disturbing versions.


But here’s the thing; if we’re going to defend this song on the basis that it’s ‘okay’ for him to perform this verse because ‘freedom of speech, he’s playing a character saying slurs’ (which in and of itself, yeah, I buy that’s what’s happening) what are we to make of the moment in the second verse where he edges right up to saying the N word, leaving the tape blank at the crucial moment?


(‘I drink more liquor to fuck you up quicker,
Than you'd wanna fuck me up for sayin' the word …’)




I feel like a real commitment to the bit, you say the word. But of course, he doesn’t. Because, of course, he knows there are some things he ‘can’t’ say.


Except that’s not quite right. He could say it. But he knows that it would be bad. It would have material social consequences. And, presumably, the black artists he had around him made it clear to him that saying that word on a track was a really terrible idea. Or he was bright enough to work it out for himself.


But an entire verse of queer-bashing, using homophobic slurs? Go for your life, mate. And an entire album where women as punchline punchbags? Genius.


And yet. I call myself an Eminem fan. I listen to his music, a lot, especially lately.


And I can point to why. He’s an insanely talented songwriter and performer, and some of what he does lyrically, here and especially later in his career, leaves me breathless with the skill and audacity deployed. If the word genius has any meaning when applied to art, Eminem is a genius hip-hop artist.


That’s not a justification, nor is it an excuse. It’s just a thing that’s also true.


And I can appreciate and enjoy the man’s work without defending the bullshit.


Which brings us neatly to the dark heart of The Marshal Mathers LP, and the reason I can justify talking about one of the biggest Hip Hop albums in the world as part of an essay series ostensibly about horror. Because MMLP contains, for my money, one of the most straight-up brilliant dark non-supernatural short horror stories in all of genre fiction.


It’s time to talk about Kim.


Let’s first observe, with a dark humour worthy of the subject, that this isn’t the first song on which Eminen spins a narrative in which he murders his then-wife, Kim. On The Slim Shady LP, there’s a track called 97’ Bonnie and Clyde, in which Em baby talks to his infant daughter Hayley, and it gradually becomes apparent that:

• He and Kim have separated
• Kim has hooked up with a new man, who has a son
• Eminem has ‘fixed’ this by murdering Kim, her new boyfriend/husband, and her new boyfriend/husbands son, and the bodies of all three are in the trunk of the car he’s driving
• He’s taken Hayley to the pier, where he’s going to dump the bodies before driving off with his daughter into the sunset

And it’s hilarious.


Okay, okay, sure, humour is subjective, my giggle is your yuck, probably should have gotten into that earlier. If you find 97’ Bonny and Clyde horrific and/or disturbing, I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong to do so. But I’ve got to say that it absolutely cracks my shit up.


It’s mainly about the deployment of voice, I think. His tone is so soft, loving, cooing at his infant child as she gurgles and giggles, at one point interrupting his flow to ask her if she needs her diaper changing. And that same tone describes momma having ‘spilt ketchup down her shirt’ and how there’s ‘a lovely bed for momma at the bottom of the lake’ and when I type it out this sounds skin-crawlingly creepy, so maybe I am just a hilariously sick and broken person, but eh, we’ve come this far; I find it both funny and brilliant. YMMVWV.


Kim starts the same way. A piano plays a melancholic but childish melody, evoking nursery rhymes, and Em’s talking-to-baby voice cuts in, describing how his daughter has grown so much, telling his sleeping two-year-old how proud he is of her… And then suddenly he’s yelling, angrier than we’ve ever heard: ‘Sit down bitch! You move again I'll beat the shit out of you!’.


In an album not short of shocking moments, this is next level. All the smirking gleefulness is gone, and what's left is pure fury, hatred. It’s the moment in the crime thriller when the mask of the charming stranger slips and we see the killer beneath. As he continues to rant and rave, his voice begins to crack, running through a litany of grievances; she’s left him, moved her new man into their house. A woman sobs as his fury builds, as he screams at her to ‘look at your new husband now!’. It’s not stated explicitly, but the picture is painted; I see him grabbing her head, forcing her to look at the body on the floor, face red and flushed, tears in his eyes, spit flying as he yells. The sound of shattering furniture adds to the scene, as the woman begs him to stop, telling him he’s drunk, and that he’ll never get away with it. The fear in her voice is absolute, abject; as much a prisoner of miserable emotion as he is; two snarling, sobbing animals.


I realise this is probably a redundant statement, but it’s absolutely fucking horrifying.


After a chorus sung in a dead flat monotone that is, if anything, scarier than the yelled verses
(“So long, bitch you did me so wrong, I don't wanna go on, living in this world without you”) the couple are in a car, driving. He’s still yelling, she’s still begging for her life; the row is intercut with moments of road rage, Em unravelling, mind racing, distracted, yelling at other drivers, at the song on the radio, at her; there’s an absolutely gut sinking moment when he shrieks her name, voice crackling and distorting, before asking, in a quiet, childlike, teary voice ‘Why don’t you like me?’. She tries to reply, but he cuts her off, fury building again; ‘You think I’m ugly, don't you? You think I’m ugly! Get the fuck away from me!’.


By this point in my life, I’ve already had my one sustained brush with a human being I genuinely believe was both sociopathic and wished me harm, and while the circumstances were very different (and the outcome, of course, considerably less dramatic) I can tell you that the psychological realism of this moment has me fucking reeling every time. It is viscerally, elementally shocking; and, if we’re going to be honest (and we should, because the wordcount grows long and the hour late), it’s also shocking because while I’ve never physically attacked anyone in my life outside of self defense (my preferred outlet for this kind of pain and despair being self-destruction, a path not without it’s issues but one I find, on the whole, preferable morally), I’ve sure felt angry enough to do so on a few occasions, and this is a pretty accurate description of what the inside of my brain sounded and felt like in those moments of rage.


And, like, here we are, horror fans, and is this not (part of) what we’re here for? Beyond the sick thrill of getting to witness monstrosity unleashed in a ‘safe’ environment, aren’t we also here to be challenged by these moments of even more sickening recognition, as something of the darkness we are encountering in the text finds a resonating frequency with a darkness within ourselves?


I think so. It’s certainly part of what I’m here for, part of why I write horror and dark crime, and it is my sincere wish that at least some of you, sometimes, will wince when you read a tale of mine not just in sympathetic shock, but also uncomfortable recognition. And, to go even deeper, writing can be an act of radical empathy, an attempt to make sense of that which we don’t immediately understand or find relatable; some of my best work, fiction or non-fiction, comes from my reading or seeing something and thinking ‘I can’t imagine how/ why someone would…’ and then just digging in and saying ‘well, let’s find out’.


Kim is absolutely one of the most viscerally disturbing pieces of art I’ve ever encountered. The fact that Eminem is playing both voices in the song, his own murderously jealous self-destruction and his crying, screaming victim heightens that skin crawl, as does the fact that Kim is the name of his real-world then-wife. And again, for the avoidance of any doubt, that’s a very fucked up thing indeed, and morally reprehensible. Do I think he had the right to write and produce the song? I think so, on balance. Morally, should he have done it? Absolutely fuck no, he shouldn’t.


Would I rather he hadn’t, then?


Ah, fuck.


Kim is horrific entirely on its own terms, as a depiction of something that happens with depressing regularity; an angry man murdering his wife. It’s as raw and unvarnished a depiction of this particular mundane, pervasive toxic masculine horror as I can immediately recall, and when you consider it’s happening within the structure of a Hip-Hop song, complete with a need for coherent rhyme scheme, internal rhythm, and all the other structural constraints that implies, I feel like that makes the case for describing this piece as an authentic masterpiece. It’s also a song written by a man about his real-life wife, at a point when their marriage was in turmoil in part because of infidelities and incidences of domestic violence and abuse on both sides.


Here’s where it gets super, super messy. Because the authenticity of Eminem’s rage, both in the lyrics and performance, comes from what sounds and feels like an authentic place. It’s the guts of the power of the piece. At the same time, when it was recorded and released, a real-life actual woman had to deal with her megastar husband putting out a song which depicts him dragging her out into a forest and cutting her throat. And at the risk of repeating the endlessly obvious, that is incredibly fucked up and wrong and hurtful and he shouldn’t have done it.


And Kim is a masterpiece; of hip-hop, of storytelling, of horror, of performance art.


And it may sound like a copout, but what I really want is a world where people aren’t so fucked up that this horror is a part of everyday life. I want a world where jealous husbands murdering their wives is exclusively an occurrence of fiction, as opposed to an annual statistic that makes me want to see the entire species wiped out and go back in time to single-cell organisms and just figure out a  whole different way to get to guitar solos and chips that doesn’t also contain All This. And I do not accept that it’s some irreducible part of our nature to be like this, either. The fuck away from me with that defeatest, hand washing, fash adjacent essentialist bullshit.


Ramsey Campbell says of horror that it is the one genre where it is sometimes permissible to go Too Far. I don’t think there is a reasonable yardstick by which anyone could claim Kim, and by extension, the Marshal Mathers LP as a whole doesn’t go Too Far.


Was there a way a version of this song could exist that hadn’t targeted and traumatised a real-life woman? I feel like the answer has to be yes, but I can’t actually say that for sure, because Eminem’s creative process is utterly inaccessible to me. So much of what he does is excoriating self-exploration, he’s such a prominent character in his own work, that it’s impossible to say he could have accessed the same emotional depth if he hadn’t put her in the song. And if his creative process is such that abstraction wouldn’t have worked, should he simply have not written it, not recorded it, not put it out?


I think, morally, on balance, yes, he shouldn’t have.


Would I be without it?


Reader, judge me if you will, but I would not.


I would not.


KP
19/9/22


PS, My friend, Holly, is about to produce the best piece of sustained critical writing on the work of Eminem the planet has ever seen. Follow her now on Twitter - @fireh9lly - so you’re set for when the awesome starts flowing. You won’t regret it.

My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.


I’m Not Scared Of You Anymore. You’re Scared Of Me.




Shit, man, I dunno. Young. Probably just teen or cusping it.


It’s Devon. The village. Population 450. And my memory has it that it’s a late night showing my mum’s let me stay up for. Like for The Sting (and, for no reason I can fathom at this stage, the Eastwood flick FireFox). It feels like one of those, but maybe I’m cross-referencing from seeing a later TV listing for a late-night showing; shit, maybe it was a lazy Sunday afternoon.


No reason why not, after all. This may have been banned for 13 years in the UK upon release, only scoring an X certificate thereafter, but there’s nothing in here you couldn’t show at teatime on TV in 1990/1/2/3, in all honesty. The past isn’t just another country, it’s another fucking planet.


And yet.


Years later, I’ll see Rebel Without A Cause, as part of a Moviedrone season. And, you know, it’s fine. Good, even. James Dean is everything you’ve read, for sure; angst and pain and strength and vulnerability and fundamentally a lost puppy in a world that makes no sense to him. At the same time… Well, let me put it like this; I watched these movies on consecutive weekends with a friend of mine, the essay subject first and Rebel second, and her observation after Rebel was ‘It’s good, but you could tell it was made by normies’.


And she was - is - right. That’s not to damn Rebel, nor to yuck anybody's yum, but Rebel is, at heart, ‘A Very Special Episode Of…’ sure, done about as well as anyone has ever managed such a format, but that’s what it is.


And then, there’s… this.


We open with black and white on that most American of images; an open highway, stretching back as far as the eye can see. Some text appears on screen, strongly implying what we’re about to see is both a true story and carries with it the whiff of scandal. The final line of text reads ‘It is a public challenge not to let this happen again’. Which, you know, points for being possibly misleading and definitely ominous.


And then we get the voice-over.


‘Mostly, I remember the girl’.


And, I mean, come on.


By this age, I’m sure of very little. Two facts I am pretty confident about are that I am a massive Springsteen fan, and that I’m basically heterosexual; or at least, that women hold an at this stage not well explored but absolutely soul-deep fascination to me; a fact that, in my case, I can date with some confidence to seeing Belinda Carlisle perform Heaven Is A Place On Earth on Top Of The Pops in 1987. I was 9, but I’ll never forget how that moment made me feel. If you know, you know.


Anyway, the point is this; we’re combining two of my essential cultural obsessions in one single line/image combo here - the open road of the US fucking A, legendary backdrop to so much of Springsteen's epic triumph and heartache (often both in the same song), and ‘the girl’; also a Springsteen staple (Mary, Wendy, Bobby Jean et al), but also a pop culture and pulp fiction staple that has captivated me since long before puberty (if, indeed, I’m meaningfully through that process by the time this movie surfaces, which I frankly doubt). This is not just totemic, in other words; it’s close to elemental. And, sure, with adult eyes, there’s a ton of deconstruction work I could do on literally every single element we’re talking about, here; but I’m not an adult, I’m a kid, and, for whatever the word even means, these concepts are still pure; by which I may mean nothing grander than ‘uncomplicated’, but okay, whatever, this is feelings we’re into, and I am feeling it.


And then there’s this voice. It’s beautiful. He’s beautiful. I mean, in about 60 seconds or so, we’re going to be hit full bore with that fact, as the muttering becomes a rumble becomes a roar and the dark cloud on the horizon line becomes a swarm of bikes that hurtle towards us before passing with seemingly inches to spare, and then a smash cut to Brando in the jacket and hat and shades and the score crashes in and the title ‘The Wild One’ appears over that impossible figure in words that feel 100 foot tall and written in fire…


But even before then, there’s this disembodied voice, talking about The Girl, wondering at her and how she affected him, before going on to muse about fate and happenstance and odds. And the tone, the delivery, they are velvet. Soft. Almost musical. It’s the voice of a man so utterly secure in who he is that he doesn't have to worry about sounding high or even effeminate; the voice is confident because it’s sexy and sexy because it’s confident, and, among many other things, I’m suddenly even more secure in my sexuality than I was five minutes before.


Because I don’t think it would be possible to have even a minimal attraction to men and not find Brando in this movie anything less than devastatingly sexy.


And I don’t.


I understand, intellectually, that he is, to be clear. And I do periodically catch myself wishing I had an ounce of his swagger, his appeal, his apparently effortless cool - especially as a teenager, but, let’s be real, even now, once in a while, sure. And my heart fucking soars pretty much every time he’s in the frame, throughout the running time of the movie. But, without wishing to be crude, my heart is the only part that does soar. I wouldn’t be ashamed if it were other. But it isn’t.


(Sidebar to gay men reading this; I’m doing a bit. Of course you’re still gay if you don’t want to fuck Brando in The Wild One. Though if you also don’t want to fuck Slash, I do Have Questions)


(Second sidebar: That was also a bit. Sorry. I’ll shut up now)


Anyway.


Following the frankly stupendous opening, we follow Johnny and his club - B.R.M.C. on the back of the leather jackets, and not a fucking clue, but I wanted one so, so bad - to a speedway racing meet. They watch the racers, for a while, Brando theatrically blinking dust from his eyes as the racers scream past…. And then, seemingly on a whim, he walks across the racetrack, hands nonchalantly in his jacket pockets, elbows sticking out. Of course, the rest of the club immediately follows him, causing at least one contestant to almost crash, disrupting his run, and causing an announcement across the tannoy; ‘Please, don’t cross the track!’


At this point, one of the club climbs a few steps up a nearby ladder on the side of one of the PA towers and, leaning forward with a mocking voice says ‘Please, don’t cross the track! We wouldn’t want you to get hurt! Blood makes everything slippery!”, which earns a round of laughter from the club. Following this moment, they have a confrontation with one of the officials, then one of the racers, then finally a cop, who moves them on.


I want to zoom in on this moment because it happens early in the film and it serves as a microcosm of so much of what is to follow.


The first is the positioning of the film's sympathies and the way that positioning is passed to the audience.  So let’s get into what I first heard Joe Hill talk about as ‘duckling theory’ - the idea that an audience will imprint, like the eponymous duckling, on whatever character they first encounter. It’s not a cast iron law of storytelling, or anything (pulp horror writers like James Hurbert delighted in playing with it, for example; not to spoil any Hurbert books for you, but I’d advise against getting emotionally attached to anyone you meet in chapter one of most of his novels, and God help anyone in a prologue); but it is a tendency, and one that I feel like even in ‘53, movie makers had to understand. Given this, having Brando’s voiceover be the first thing we hear, and the man/icon on his bike the first we see is pretty suggestive. I don’t want to keep banging on about how he looks in this movie, because we’ll be here all day, but if that overused word iconic has any meaning left, it must surely apply to Brando in biking leathers astride a road hog. I mean, come on.


So. Of course I’ve imprinted on Brando at this point, as a budding metalhead in a tiny rural village all but surrounded by Squares who Just Don’t Understand - but I’m pretty sure that not only am I meant to, but so are you, whoever you are. And let’s just take a moment to admire the enormous balls of making a film in 1953 that invites the audience to primarily identify/sympathise (both weasel words, but still driving at something real, I think) with an antisocial biker club.


And then, look at how this scene plays out. Firstly, the official who confronts them is effectively mocked out of the conversation. Next, the racer, initially dismissive, is forced to walk away when faced with a straight-up challenge to try his skills against Johnny one on one. Finally, the cop does exert authority, moving the club on.


The cop figure echos very neatly the movie’s conclusion, of course, but it’s the first two confrontations I want to focus on, because I rewatched this recently, and it was the damndest thing, in that I found myself seeing the scene via two conflicting perspectives at once, whereas as a kid, I’d only had one.


Because, dig it; as a kid, the duckling principle was in maximum effect. Hell, I had a leather jacket; the BMRC were my tribe, spiritually. I felt this to my core. So when they walked across the track and fucked up the race, my heart sang, and when they mocked the safety announcement and the racer, I laughed along with them. Because, yeah, man, fuck these squares and their cornball races-by-the-rules. Johnny can beat them all. He just don’t wanna, because he’s too damn cool. And as a kid with undiagnosed ADHD in a rural secondary school who had enough raw intelligence to be able to coast on the class and homework, and who’d just started to develop a sense that maybe all of it was bullshit hoop-jumping for hoop jumping’s sake, let me count the ways I related. I loved it. I loved Johnny and the boys Sticking It To The Man, and  fuck that cop moving them on, they weren’t doing nothing.


And I still agree with that last part, for the record.


But.


I think that old saw about how you drift right politically as you get older is mostly bullshit. Personally speaking, I’ve never held more radical politics than I do in the year of our lord 2022, at age 44. But I think the kernel of truth around which that particular puffball popcorn of bullshit has grown is that as you get older, you do get more tired of all forms of bullshit, including cynicism, and maybe especially youthful cynicism. It’s not that I can’t, still, relate to the nihilistic impulse to just walk the fuck across the track because you feel like it; it’s just that tempered against that is an understanding of the futility of it, the pointlessness, a feeling that there are more important, meaningful conventions to fuck with that might have more impact and power, and that, given the current state of play, this kind of adolescent nonsense feels like… well, adolescent nonsense.


And I can feel him howling in my breast as I type that; the scared kid with a stomach full of lies that he’s desperate to puke up and a heart full of fuck you for everybody and everything that conforms to a system that’s trying to kill him. I feel him. And his heart is absolutely in the right place.


But there is such a thing as wisdom. And that’s not an old man cop-out. That’s life experience, an understanding of The Finite that’s almost impossible for the young, immortal mind to grasp. It’s a calm, kind, rational voice, but not one devoid of the rage that fuels the entirely justified youthful piss and vinegar, and it simply says ‘pick your battles’.


God, I’m so fucking tired.


Anyhow. Point is, watching it now, sure, fuck the cop moving them on. And sure, fuck the racer, too; there’s a gatekeeper quality to his arrogance, and at this point in my life, I’m so very far over wankers who have expertise in one area acting like it makes them lords of all creation. He chickens out because he knows Johhny will hand his arse to him, and also because he has everything to lose and Johnny has nothing, and fuck him for that, too.


But then there’s the official.


And what’s changed between then and now is I’ve been given shit jobs to do, and I can’t help but feel for the guy. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve been required as part of a paying role to tell people things they don’t want to hear and even gotten a bit of verbal and physical abuse as a result; nothing serious, nothing life-changing, but enough that my instinctive sympathies rest, these days, with anyone in a customer facing role. Because I know from first-hand that a person in that spot is never responsible for the rules they’re being asked to enforce. ‘You can always pay one half of the poor to kill the other half, as the old saying goes, and this ain’t that, of course, but it's somewhere on the spectrum that has that as the endpoint. And it fucking sucks. So, as much as my gut instinct pulls me towards the BMRC, yeah, I’m going to allow that being dicks to the official is, well, a dick move.


As I think about it more, there’s this riff in Easy Rider where Jack Nicholson's lawyer talks about how the reason people hate Fonda and Hopper’s bikers is because they represent freedom, and how everyone likes to talk about it, but nobody likes to see people actually living it, embodying it, and here’s the BMRC in ‘53, personifying what Easy Rider doesn’t have the confidence to keep as subtext, and that’s… interesting.


The bike meet is important for two main reasons; firstly, because it’s the source of the stolen racing trophy that’ll instigate so many of the fateful (and fatal, I guess) turning points of the narrative, right down to the final scene denouement, and the smile that broke a million hearts. The fact that it’s stolen is enormously important, and delivers layers throughout; for now, let’s just observe that it serves a duel symbolism from the get-go. On the one hand, it’s literally Stolen Valour, that most dishonourable of deceits, giving Johnny an entirely bogus and unearned aura of achievement - sure, his crew is in on the gag, but wild horses wouldn’t drag it from them to an outsider, they stole it for him, and his valour is theirs. But there’s a flip side to that, right? We’re back to ‘fuck your rules’. Why shouldn’t Johnny steal it, wear it, wield it over the squares? It’s all meaningless, all stolen valour. It only means something because we say (pretend) it does. By stealing it (well, it’s stolen for him, which in some ways is more poetic), Johnny underlies the trophy is what it ways was; a lump of dipped-gold metal, just like a sheriffs badge is a lump of shaped tin, just like a uniform or flag is… ah, you get the idea.


And you know what I’m realising, kids? We’re nearly three thousand words in and we’re barely past the first scene. Meaning if I’m gonna say everything I want to about this movie, it’s gonna end up as a damn book. Okay, so let’s not do that (at least not here - if you’re an editor and you like the idea of Kit Power on The Wild One, drop me a line and we’ll talk).


Let’s just zoom in on The Girl.


Because I think part of why this story hit me so hard was that I was on both sides of the love story. Johnny spoke to my soul; angry, lost, bright enough to see the size and depth of the hole, but not clue one how to get out, angry at the world for simply existing, configured as it was, and utterly convinced of the impossibility of anything resembling happiness, let alone contentment. A man for whom there is only the temporary relief brought when rage is allowed to drive action, burning out, temporarily, the baseline feelings of futility.


But then there’s Mary Murphy’s Kathie.


And I was her, too.


I didn’t have the same deep roots in the village I was mostly raised in, and looking back, that was my saving grace; I knew I didn’t belong, and it was the most basic article of my faith, so solid as to go utterly unexamined, that I would, one day, leave. Still, though, at age twelve or thirteen, the gap between here and now and leaving is essentially infinite. So, sure, it’ll happen, of course… but if Now is Forever, what, exactly, is going to be left of me, by the time my life finally has a chance to begin?


So, sure, I’m Johnny. But I’m Kathie, too. And I’m sure an analyst would have a field day with that, but it is what it is. Her doe-eyed romanticism is mine, her naivety is mine, but so is the war between those desires, hopes, dreams… and the crushing mundanity of day-to-day life, closing off thought and possibility, feeding the romanticism whilst also underlining the essential fantasy nature of the dream. It’s just now striking me that I can’t think of any narrative convention that gender swaps this situation very often; and I can’t help but wonder what a romantic female biker club leader might have done to my young heart and libido, (except exploding it beyond any possible repair, obviously). So, maybe it’s just as well. Regardless, what the BMRC represent to Kathie is exactly what they represent to me; a kind of impossible freedom that is both desperately attractive and clearly utterly unachievable; they may as well have come from the moon, for all the good their visit will do me when they inevitably roll out of town.


And that’s kind of my relationship with music, with movies, with art, at this age, in this time and place. I’m perpetually drawn, moth to a flame, to the art that lights up a whole different way of being, a mode of existence I can romanticise with a fiery passion and ache, because I know it’s forever unattainable. There’s pain there, of course, but there’s a safety in that pain; it reinforces the inevitability of the status quo, which, sure, is shit, but at least, underneath that knowledge/pain, the sneaky voice that says there’s nothing you can do.


And, of course, if you believe that, it’s true.


And it’s a pretty potent horror story, I think.


The Wild One is, I have discovered on a recent rewatch, about enough things that I’d need a book to do it all justice (and, seriously; commission me, my rates are very reasonable). I’ve only touched on how the entire piece is suffused with a sense of alienation; sure, between tribes, but also within them; The BMRC may have started off as Beetles, but it’s clear Johnny feels almost as distant from the rest of his current crew as he does from his old club; Kathie is alienated from her father, and her town, but also Johnny, to object of her desire, the fantasy-made-flesh-rendered-nightmare-but-still-yearned-for (a journey that you can track based on her peeling back the layers of meaning in the racing trophy, as I think about it). The townsfolk and the BMRC are mutually alienated, of course; but the town is equally clearly as fractured as the bikers, if not more so, with ancient animosities and cycles of behaviour playing out against the psychodrama of The Night The BMRC Came To Town. That Easy Rider riff about the nature of freedom is here, as is everything Rebel Without A Cause didn’t have the bottle to keep subtext, and there’s also a nihilism that leaks out from Johnny himself, infecting everything and everyone he comes into contact with.


But for young teenage me, I think it was mainly about the impossibility of romantic love, both on its own terms, and as a stand-in for all the things I might desire for myself and could never, ever have. The freedom I knew I’d never have the courage to even try and live. The inevitability of a life of indentured servitude to the almighty Machine we pretend is called society, but whose true purpose is to grind us to dust and extract and syphon our life force as Value, to be drunk by an elite to whom we, in the words of Henry Rollins, ‘look like ants, and our flesh takes just like chicken’.


And do you know, in one way, I was kinda sorta right?


But in many other far more important ways, I was as wrong as it’s only possible to be when you’re young, and you’re burning with a fear that All That Is is not just Awful, but Inevitable.


There are things this project has reminded me about being young that I’ve been glad to rediscover, to savour, and to try and nurture anew in my adult life. But that particular feeling?


Sorry, kid. You can keep it.


It does get better.


KP
31/7/22

​My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.


Fairness Would Be To Rip Your Insides Out And Hang You From A Tree

So. It’s Haloween, 1997. The town in which I am living in benefit poverty while slowly but surely failing college has a cinema, praise Milenko; one screen, old school seating; the place vibed theatre, though I have no idea if it ever was. It was a genuinely beautiful building and space. There was even an old-school Ice Cream lady who appeared at the front of the stage in between the trailers and the main event, just in case you had a sudden craving for a comically overpriced choice or Calippo to go with your movie of choice.


Being poor, I didn’t go very often; I did catch the Star Wars special editions there (and loved them, especially the first two, which I’d only ever seen on TV in pan and scan before; I know the CG in the new scenes has not aged well, but it blew my tiny mind at the time). And I discovered later that Spawn was maybe the worst first date movie ever (we bailed after 30 minutes and went for burgers).


But it was Halloween. And it was Wes Craven. And, do you know, despite being a childhood fan of the Elm Streets, Hellraisers, and related concerns, I’d never actually seen an 18-certificate horror movie at the cinema?


Plus, I mean, just look at that poster (the version, to be clear, preserved in my head, though I can't find an exact version of it on a Google image search, so, you know, whatever) The white space, the blood red writing at the bottom, spelling out the single word title below the face of the transcendently beautiful Drew Barrymore, eyes wide with fright, hand mostly covering her mouth (and also blood red lipstick), features fading into the white background.


I-fucking-conic.


And so I settled into my seat, probably not with popcorn, given the tight budget, and as the lights dimmed and the movie certificate and title appeared on screen, I felt an honest-to-God gut thrill; after endless years of VCR, here was, finally, horror as intended twenty feet high and ninety wide.


It was time for Scream.


And, you know, I am aware that The Blair Witch Project was about to set new levels in terms of marketing hype and misdirection - hell, by 97, they may have already started with the websites that would cause such a sensation in the run-up to release. But I gotta say, whichever genius asshole put Drew on the posters did an absolute number on me.


She was a star, is the thing. Probably about as big as she ever got, in 97. So of course it made perfect sense that she’d be the star of Wes Craven’s massive slasher movie. And when the film opens with her and her creepy phone call, I am absolutely delighted and thrilled, but not remotely scared. I appreciate it, of course - no fucking about, we’re in, archetypical, young woman, home alone, creepy man on the phone, a sense of building dread… better yet, both the creep and the woman seem to know it; the conversation revolves around scary movies, and my memory is that I guffawed when Drew’s character talks about how much she liked the first Elm Street, but not so much the sequels. I know I was hip to the joke, and, at age 19, almost insufferable in my smug pride at getting it. I mean, what a delight, they’re banging on about Friday the 13th, there’s a superb gut-drop as Drew realises she’s being watched, and then the reveal of the bloody boyfriend on the patio, bravo, good people, bravo. Most excellent entertainment.


And I think I picked up on the role reversal - the boyfriend in peril rather than the girlfriend, and if so, no doubt nodded in similarly smug approval. And when the chap does get eviscerated, it felt suitably bloody and shocking (though interestingly far less so on a rewatch). And when Ghostface finally made his entrance, I was suitably thrilled, envisaging a frantic tussle, then escape for our heroine. I even remember wondering if the whole movie was going to be some real-time stasher/stalker a la Halloween, with Drew legging it across town, pursued by a relentless knife-wielding maniac (who would, naturally, dispatch several innocent bystanders along the way).


And do you know what? That would probably have been a fun movie.


But Wes Craven, the magnificent bastard, had quite other plans.


I can still remember the visceral shock when Drew Barrymore was stabbed. I remember, just like a living cliche, sitting bolt upright in my seat, eyes wide. No fucking way. No fucking way is this happening.


And her crawl! The movie teases us one final time, oh, sure, look, there’s rescue, just out of reach, but she’ll get there, okay, this is like the Halloween opening, we’ve got a 5 years later caption coming any second, Drew looking all haunted and hardened by her near brush with death. And she can’t scream. That’s the final brilliant touch. Her lung appears to have collapsed, she can only whisper, and it’s not enough, and then, just like that, she’s murdered, and we are off to the fucking races.


And I know I’ve just spent a thousand words on the opening five minutes, but in my defence, it’s pretty clear I’ve never gotten over it. And it’s a good microcosm for the film as a whole - a horror movie that’s about horror movies; or, to be more specific, a slasher movie that’s also about slasher movies. Like my beloved RoboCop, Scream manages to be both of genre and commenting on genre; and, sure, these days pretty much every single show and movie has some moment of wry self-reflection. But in ‘97 it was a lot less common, and I would argue it’s very rare indeed that a horror movie does it this blatantly and this well.


The kids know they’re in a slasher movie. They talk about it constantly, the way kids would; sure, in the famous ‘rules of a horror movie’ scene, with a teenage Jamie Lee Curtis having a spectacularly bad pumpkin day in the background, but elsewhere, too. In the video store, they’re picking each other apart, looking for suspects, and there’s a level of casual cruelty that felt painfully real to me, watching it as the last of my own teenage months bled away.


The adults, interestingly, don’t, for the most part. Courtney Cox’s reporter is obsessed with the murders, but she thinks she’s the star of a movie about a plucky reporter who lands The Big Scoop (hilariously, she doesn't seem to much care what the scoop is, as long as she lands it). As for the cops, they fall into a proud tradition of Wes Craven police going all the way back to Last House On The Left; they’re hilariously inept, totally fucking useless. Which, given recent events in the US, I’d say is hard to argue with as the best-case scenario, honestly.


And as for Henry Winkler…


It’s a Goddamn genius piece of casting. I recently found out it happened at the last minute; that the part was written after filming started when the film-makers realised that after the opening, they didn’t have another murder happen until they hit hour two of the script, and they, I think correctly, assumed this might raise some eyebrows with the audience. So Winkler's part was written, cast and shot pretty damn fast. And it’s a great example to me of the magical power of cinema as a storytelling medium, because I genuinely can’t conceive of Scream without his presence. Taking the ultimate icon of teen cool and turning him into a stick-up-his-ass high school principal - the ultimate teen cop, if you can dig it - should have earned everyone involved in the decision-making process awards and bonuses. It works brilliantly. Winkler chews the scenery, a take-no-prisoners hard ass for the ages, coming over so ludicrously angry at one point he becomes a semi-plausible red herring himself… right up to the point where he’s murdered in one of the finest it’s-behind-you jump scares in slasher history, complete with an Elm Street reference that almost certainly made me punch the air in the cinema (it sure did on the rewatch).


There are few, if any weak links in the cast, to be fair; sure, David Arquette’s character is a goofoff, but again, this is Wes Craven and cops; he’s supposed to be. Neve Campbell grabs the lead with both hands, managing to make naturalistic-yet-self-aware look easy. Rose McGowan is superb as her best friend (and scores my favourite death of the film, a spectacularly over-the-top encounter with the dog flap on the garage door).


And then there are the killers.


Skeet Ulrich is great as Billy Loomis. He has a tricky part to play, as the red-herring-that-isn’t boyfriend, and he does a good job throughout the movie hitting the pivot points. In particular, his seduction of Campbell’s Sidney towards the end is perfectly pitched, making his ‘murder’ and final reveal a superb twist moment, at a point where such twists are landing thick and fast.


But, hoo, boy, Matthew Lillard.


Lillard’s Stew is brilliant because he’s demented from the off, gurning and cracking gross in every single scene, right out there hiding in plain sight… and yet he does hide, and I remember the visceral shock I got when he’s revealed as one of the killers. And from the moment he is revealed, he just opens up the crazy can and spills it all over everywhere; a scenery-chewing for the ages that manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely unnerving all at once.


It’s another microcosm of what the film does so well, actually - he and Billy trade psedojustifications (Billy blames Sidney’s mother sleeping with his father for causing their marriage to fail and is therefore enacting revenge; Stew, hilariously, claims to just be easily led) and it’s both a commentary on the arbitrary nature of slasher villain motivation and an expression of it, at the same time. And, again, it absolutely is funny, but Stew in particular is also absolutely creepy as fuck, especially when the scheme takes a turn for the seriously deranged and he allows Billy to stab him as part of the plan to ultimately frame Sid.- The blood helps; we’ve been treated to ‘corn syrup’ effect blood when Billy was fake-stabbed, and the filmmakers ensure the rest of the blood spilt in the scene is of a different shade and consistency, and it’s absolute genius because, even in a scene that is highlighting and pointing out artificiality, it manages to play that against the viewer, subconsciously selling you on the ‘real’ blood by showing it differently, and I’m sorry, but that’s genuinely clever filmmaking.


It’s interesting to look back at Craven’s grimy, deeply disturbing debut, Last House On The Left. The hype text for the poster there reminded you, if you were feeling faint, to repeat to yourself ‘It’s only a movie’.  Scream spends its entire runtime yelling at you that it’s a movie too; using the conventions, naming them, playing with them, having characters call out the cliches, and then finding ways to subvert them, play with them, spin-off them. And yet - at least for 19-year-old me - in doing so it didn’t in any way sell the horror short; rather, it uses that awareness to play with the audience, confound expectations, and deliver something brilliant and funny and scary all at once.


Wes Craven was a massive part of my childhood horror experience. And as much as my revisit to Elm Street for this project wasn’t the unqualified delight I’d hoped for, I was forcibly reminded of how strong the core concept of those movies was, and how mind-melting some of the effects work was.


When Wes Craven passed away, there was a lot of commentary among horror fans on social media about the man and his legacy. It’s absolutely true that many of his movies didn’t live up to the high tide marks of his best work, but I have to say I felt some people overcompensated for that a bit, in some of the critiques they offered. Like, Last House On The Lest may not be to your taste - it sure wasn’t to mine - but it’s kind of hard to deny the baseline awful power parts of that movie have to shock you in ways cinema rarely does (and you could make a case that The Hills Have Eyes delivers similar levels of shock with less issues relating to storytelling, and I’d certainly entertain such an argument). And caveats duly noted for A Nightmare On Elm Street, it defined an entire decade of horror cinema, and remains one of the best ideas for a horror movie anybody has ever had.


So it seems fitting that I’m wrapping up my coverage of Craven’s work, as this project as a whole nears conclusion, with Scream. Because, like LHotL and Elm Street before it, Scream set the standard and conversation in horror cinema for the next decade, for better and worse.


And with all due respect to the critics, that means Wes Craven was responsible for making one of the most important horror movies of the decade for three decades in a row.


We should all fail so well.


KP
22/07/22