MY LIFE IN HORROR: I’LL SPEND IT ALONE

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’ll Spend It Alone
​

It’s been a year since my first experience of a horror movie at the cinema. I remain scarred and hungry. And since then, there’s been the utterly remarkable Superman III (most likely on TV, over one Christmas, but clearly an experience that lingered). And it’s the summer of 1985, and I’m staying with my father, which means it is, once again, time to Go To The Cinema.


Now, dad’s taken a bit of stick in this series, in an affectionate sort of way, and I’m not really in a position where I could roll that back and remain remotely intellectually honest; at the same time, I feel like, as we’re getting close to wrapping up, some kind of apologia or contextualisation is needed.


So, to be fair to the man, it’s not actually his fault that it took the UK five years, following the hilarious debacle of giving Temple Of Doom the PG certificate to realise what the US clocked immediately; the need for something in between that says, effectively, ‘this one’s ***really*** PG, go see it first’.


In the US they invented the PG-13 certificate. Over here, we had to wait until Burton’s 1989 Batman for the existence of the now-standard certificate for superhero movies with any kind of bite at all, the 12 certificate. I can still remember The Sun headlines on that, incidentally - ‘Film Censors Ban Kids From Batman’, because moral panic only extends as far as gay teachers, and not in any way towards kids seeing potentially traumatic media, like, well, let’s be honest, Jack Nicholson, full stop.


And, again, the old man was strict about this stuff; if there had been 12’s back then, he’d have vetted, and likely we wouldn’t have seen either Temple or tonight’s topic. And in his further defence, alongside the ‘Spielberg presents’ tag, practically guaranteeing family popcorn entertainment, this was also connected to a franchise which has, rightly or wrongly, both feet planted firmly in mainstream, acceptable pop culture.


So, there’s that. On the other hand, Spielberg had a pretty heavy involvement in last summer’s Temple debacle.


So, should he have known?


Anyway. The lights go down, and we’re in Victoriana. I am almost certain this predates any Granada related experiences, but I’m an English child, so the imagery and iconography is, at seven years old, already familiar almost unto contempt; I can’t be sure, but I suspect part of my much-lamented antipathy towards Dickens is the degree to which it seems to me that English pop culture is so infatuated with and saturated by Victoriana it feels like you’re a member of the world’s biggest cult.


Still, given who the lead character is, at least I know it’s not going to be boring.


Hopefully.


Be careful what you wish for, kid.


So, cobbled streets, fog, gas lamps, horse-drawn carriages, yadda yadda, oh, look, it’s a gentleman with one of the tall hats, guess we’re following this dude, okay, let’s follow him. Truth to tell, I can't picture him, even having broken with tradition and completed a rewatch recently, but the folk memory is slightly portly, ruddy cheeks, and sideburns, so let’s go with that. And before long, we note that this gentleman has a shadow.


A figure, completely shrouded in a dark brown cloak that is hooded and falls to the floor, meaning the figure appears to glide as it follows the man. Also meaning we can see only darkness where the face should be.


I’m a Doctor Who fan, even at this age, so you can bet my SpideySense is tingling a three-alarm warning down my spine already; a feeling that spikes deliciously as… something slides into view, out of the hood.


I mean, it’s clearly a weapon of some kind, probably made of wood. At the same time, the smooth motion as it appears puts in mind a robot, to me, some piece of machinery opening to a firing position. And what the hell can you shoot from your face, anyway? I mean, it’s a period piece, so it can't be a robot, but… but on the other hand, I’m too young to know what canon is, but I’m not too young to understand that this story was made now, even though it’s based on stories from ago, so, maybe…?
Everything about the cloaked figure screams mystery, that’s the thing, and again, Whovian, mystery = alien/robot, I guess. Anyhow. The nozzle, as I think of it, comes into view, there’s a noise of some kind, and the man slaps his neck, as though bitten, and the nozzle slides back into place, in a reversal of the old movement, and the figure glides away.


We follow the man into a restaurant. There he is seated at a fine table, tucks in a cloth napkin, and is brought out a succulent roast bird (it’s the Victorian era; if it’s roast meat, it’s succulent, I’m only seven but I’m not stupid). He’s clearly wealthy, clearly happy. Even at seven, I have ambivalence about that, given what I know about Victorian poverty. It’s literally as I come to write this that I wonder if that wasn’t actually the point, if my teachers weren't trying to smuggle in class consciousness the only way they felt safe, via the medium of Ago, when Things Were Bad. In a week in which the Tory government of the United Kingdom have done the not-at-all Fashy thing of declaring we should no longer teach ‘a version of history’ that ‘does Britain down’, it’s hard not to look back on admittedly traumatizing and in many ways indefensibly insensitive teaching with a kind of weary acceptance that, yeah, better that than this ahistorical nightmare. A nation so strong and proud we need commissars - excuse me, freedom of speech champions, of course - in Universities to make sure the racists get equal time with the anti-racists, with presumably the flat earthers and creationists queuing up behind.
Very Unity. Much Strength. Not at all the screaming insecurity of the ignorant bully, terrified above all of being found out.


I swear to God, this fucking country.


Anyway.


He grabs his carving, erm, fork, I guess, and stabs it into the dark roast flesh, knife raised in the other hand, eager to get with the delicate rending of flesh.
And that’s the moment when, accompanied by a nerve-shredding attack of violins on the soundtrack, the bird grows a head and launches himself at the man.
It’s the mental shock of the moment I remember most clearly. I can't tell you if I dropped/launched my popcorn, flinched, what have you. But I remember that stab of cold, right in my gut, as the clearly-roasted-and-dead-and-equally-clearly-very-much-not-dead-and-profoundly-cross bird launched itself at, and I really can’t emphasise this enough, the man’s fucking face, there to peck and scratch and draw blood.


I mean, are you out of your fucking mind? Or am I?


As I think that, literally as I think it, we cut away to bemused restaurateurs, staring, the soundtrack snap-cutting from strings-in-full-fucking-Psyco mode to a Christmas carol, then back to the man waving his hands in front of his face, apparently wrestling with thin air…


Except then, no, the fucking bird is in his hands, and it is evil, twisting and pecking and writhing at supernatural speed, and his face is bleeding and holy shit it’s going to take a fucking eye out…


Sidebar: I’m watching this with kiddo, 10, and the second the cutaway happens she says, with engaged delight “Oh! He’s hallucinating! He must have been drugged!”


And I don’t know how to feel. I mean, glad, I guess, even proud; sure, she’s a couple of years older than I was, but still, that’s film literate, right enough, and that same glee carries across the rest of the sequence; for her, it’s the safest possible thrill ride, and they can chuck as much scary shit they want at the screen because fundamentally, it’s Not Real.


The rest of the sequence was burned on my brain, in no small part because I would describe it later, for weeks, to anyone who showed the slightest interest, and likely many who did not, doing what I always did (hell, looking at this two-volume series, what I am apparently still compelled to do); trying to exercise power over that which had scared me by retelling it for others, trying to convey my terror faithfully, and in doing so, by some process not entirely clear or remotely examined, to gain mastery over that fear, even as I relieved it.


So, the snakeheads on the hatstand, coming to life and attacking, the gas lamps rippling and spitting fireballs, the man’s final, frantic plunge from his apartment window; there's a good chance that some of the kids I went to school with have nightmares about what they imagined that film was like, based on my telling.


Or, I dunno, maybe not, maybe that’s hubris. Probably that’s hubris. Nice to imagine, though, that my world’s youngest Ancient Mariner shtick had a shelf life beyond the immediate. But the truth was and is; it’s a compulsion, nothing more. When something gets as deep under my skin and fucks me up as gloriously and completely as Young Sherlock Holmes did, I’m going to speak to it. Repeatedly. At length.


Welcome :D


And I think kiddo ultimately nailed it; she got it, straight away, and I… didn’t. This movie may have introduced the notion of hallucinogenic substances to me; it’s certainly clear that the idea was obscure enough, and the immediate impact of the moment so visceral and all-consuming that my own kid’s simple, obvious observation didn’t occur to me.


Which left me with… what?


Was the chicken invisible? Had the alien/robot shot the man with something that meant he’d be attacked by furious undead chickens and hatstand snakes that only he could see? To which the answer, from a certain point of view, was yes, but that was how my kid brain interpreted the moment when the man was flapping his arms in front of his face, clawing at the air. Not that there was nothing there, but that the others couldn’t see it.


My memory is that I didn’t finally work out what was going on until the characters did, which was some way into the narrative, and by that point, I’d half-watched several more hallucination sequences, peaking between fingers that I could snap shut over my eyes at the slightest provocation, and sure, some of that was no doubt Temple trauma revisited, but also, this damn film earned its keep, I think. The stained glass window Knight was eerie as hell, of course, but oddly, it was the ostensibly more lighthearted moment of Watson being attacked by cream cakes (no, really, that happens) that drove the terror levels all the way back up, for reasons I'm not sure, even now that I can fully articulate.


Well, okay, fair enough, I should try, shouldn’t I?


So as a kid I had a somewhat uneasy relationship with food. I’m not sure why, but especially restaurant dining would, sometimes, lead to me becoming suddenly nauseous and throwing up. Sometimes, I’m sure, it was a simple case of overeating food slightly too rich for me; and I think, over time, some kind of low-level negative feedback/anxiety loop was kicking in.


Which means a kid being attacked by food is going to inherently ring a little more sinister for me than maybe the average kid. Also, though, it’s a sinister sequence; the cream cakes have tiny, black, angry/evil eyes, and the chittering non-language is skin crawling, and they do end up using one of their own number as a cream horn battering ram, trying to literally ram it down Watson’s throat and make him choke, and, oh, look, I can hear you laughing from here, ok, fine, I was a weird kid, let’s just leave it there, but it freaked the fuck out of me. Again.


Despite (or let’s be honest, because) of the abject fear, and many, many nightmares, Young Sherlock Holmes became a vital part of my childhood pantheon of cherished movie memories, and though the relationship with the source material is, oh, let’s be charitable and call it tenuous, nonetheless I’m sure the film was at least part of the reason I ended up diving into the complete short stories as a young teenager. I loved them then, and love them still; enough that Patreon backers are getting to hear Jack Graham and I discuss each of the stories, in order, via a podcast series.


So, there’s that.


But I think I’ve discovered, in the process of writing this, that it’s that first moment of pure shock, the jump scare in the opening of the feast-turned-predator, that did the most damage. Both on its own terms; as a terrifying and inexplicable image, and for the deeper horror that lurked behind it; the notion that the world didn’t have to make any sense at all; that, something incomprehensibly weird and awful could not only happen, without warning, but happen and then immediately try and eat your face off while everyone else stared at you, bemused.


In retrospect, a pretty good warning, for secondary school, adolescence, and the world of ‘gainful employment’ in general. And, perhaps, the perfect object lesson for someone who wants to write about what scares him, and you.


You just never know when your Sunday Roast is going to decide you’re on the menu.


KP
19/2/21