My Life In Horror: Where There’s A Will

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.


Where There’s A Will

It is Saturday 15th September, 1984. I am six years old.


And, for my sins, I am at my Nan’s house, in London.


Ah, Nan. See, the thing is, as a kid, I never really saw it. As a child, she was kind to me and my sister, and for me, that was the beginning and end of it. I know Dad used to make pointed jokes about her, and Mum made no secret of finding her ‘difficult’, but all I knew was when we went up to see her, we got to play with the skittles in her side alley, using the door of her garage as a backstop for any stray throws, and she fed us well, home-cooked dinners and deserts. Admittedly, on one memorable evening, we were served a baked bean, erm, bake, I guess, followed by prunes and custard, which led to an evening in front of the TV which became legendary among my mother, sister and I, capable of evoking guffaws, if not outright hysteria, as we recalled The Night Of The Long Farts.


But she really was a good nan to us, at least when we were little. Sure, there was some weirdly aggressive gender essentialism around me growing up to be ‘a big strong man’, but I distinctly remember, even as a very young child, thinking of it, indulgently, as Old Person talk, and I paid it no mind, even as mum angrily insisted I could grow up to be whatever I wanted. Later, I’d see it; when we visited Uncle Edward one Christmas as teenagers, she spent the entire evening stony-faced, before saying, just before leaving ‘Well, I don’t know what happened to you both, you were such beautiful children!’. It should have been hurtful, maybe even traumatic, but, honestly, my abiding memory is one of amusement. By that point, I knew she hated me and my sister, and I’d been informed several times that we'd been disinherited, and I took that undertaking as my cue to have nothing to do with her. It turned out to be a lie, as it happened, which again, I must sadly report I regard with only a kind of wry amusement. And at some point, I got my hands on one of the carefully typed letters she’d regularly send to mum - when they were still married, my father would refer to them as ‘Letters From The Deep Freeze’ - and I can still remember how that particular missive closed out: “Edith from down the road passed away last week, and I expect I shall soon be joining her. Are your dogs still tying you down?


Love,


Mum”


So, yeah. Nan, eh? Real charmer. And that bungalow; my other abiding memory is sitting on the sofa, me and my sister, with Nan and mum on the other couch, lights down low, gas fire chucking out a stupifying level of heat, while the huge colour TV in the corner blared out at us (yeah, Nan’s hearing was definitely on the way out). That was a treat, mind; we had no TV at home at this point, and when we did finally get a small portable in time for Colin Baker's final TV season as The Doctor, it was a black and white set. So outside of the school holiday trips to Dad, this was my only chance to soak up the good old CRT rays and get down with it.


My memory is that Uncle Edward and Auntie Jill were there too, but I’m not sure if that’s true; certainly, I talked about what we’d watched with Uncle Edward; but was it that evening, or had he just seen it the next time we talked? He’d agreed with me that the theme and opening credits were brilliant and creepy.


Anyway.


The opening was awesome; the music otherworldly, but also menacing, and there were shades of Who in terms of atmosphere, for sure, but this was something different, and that green logo, spelling out the title in giant letters… there’s a thing about when you’re that age, I think, and your kid brain is wide open, and some genius at the BBC knew how to create music and images that seemed to open up a universe of sinister possibilities.


I had no idea what Tripods were. But I was dying to find out.


My memory is I only saw the first episode. It seems unlikely that we’d stay with Nan longer than a week, given how hard she was on mum, and how any trip would have been in school holidays, and thus eaten into Dad visits. I feel like I saw that first episode there, and the final one at my father's house. Which… well, it was broadcast 8th December, so clearly that can’t be right. Yet I know I did see that last episode, in colour, as I have a vivid memory of the final shot of the story, and when I recently rewatched the show on DVD, it was exactly as I remember it. So, maybe a friend's house? Seems unlikely, but maybe…


Anyway. That Saturday evening, all I knew was I was falling, damn hard.

Sure, some of it was that Tripods had a thrilling pedigree with me, what with them being part of probably the first horror story I ever heard. And yes, absolutely, the BBC/Who pedigree was also in the mix. But, beyond that, there’s… well, it’s like this. I spent almost my entire childhood to the date of this broadcast living in highly rural settings. My earliest memory of home is a farmhouse that was a 4 mile walk from the nearest (very) small town, and, a brief, single term of school in a town near Middlesbrough aside, it had all been small village life. So, seeing children walking around in this intensely rural setting hit perhaps a little different with me than for many of the kids watching it. Sure, I could tell we were meant to realise this was a low tech world, what with the way a simple pocket watch is treated with almost reverential awe; still and all, it just wasn’t that different, or distant, from what I saw around me every day.  And, I mean, head says I must have been too young for concerns about puberty/coming of age to have resonated in any meaningful way, but my heart says different. It whispers about just how much anxiety my young mind was capable of; that bottomless well of sadness that opened up in my centre at the fact of my father’s absence, sure, but also just fundamentally my ability to imagine terrifying situations, even get a kind of perverse enjoyment from this kind of imaginative catastrophizing…


And the fucking Tripods were terrifying. They were impossibly huge, and the fact that they took you up inside them combined my fear of heights with a constant low-grade fear generated by moving about in a world fundamentally not friendly to a child’s height. I had frequent nightmares at this age, about giant railings that would in no way prevent me from falling from dangerous heights, huge walls of corrugated metal with an awful, painful, whining, grinding sound behind them…


And then, again, a Gandalf type figure who turns up to suggest The Way Things Have Always Been is hiding a deeper truth felt precision-engineered to appeal to my child mind, especially as I was likely partway through my first read of Lord Of The Rings around this time, my mother and I taking turns to read pages to each other as summer turned to autumn turned to winter. It’s often been observed that creativity and originality are really just finding ways to collide pre-existing ideas in new ways; in this particular case, replacing the journey to Mount Doom with a trek to join the resistance to the alien invasion, across a world that is both recognisably Europe and also changed in inexplicable ways certainly blew many doors off in this kid’s noggin.


I loved it so much, I bought the paperback.


It was a reissue for the TV show, with a cover featuring a photo of the actors huddled around a rock that reminded me of the County Durham moors I’d spent so many hours of my young life walking over. And within, I got so, so much more than that tantalising first episode; not only did I get the trip across the channel, I got the stupifying ruin of a modern city, confirming this was my world, or at least, had been. I got the incredible sequence where the author pulls the stunning trick of using the reader's real-world knowledge to create a moment of extraordinary tension while the POV, first-person narrator is entirely oblivious. In fact, let's zoom in on that moment, because it’s instructive; Will and the gang find themselves in a subway that has been converted for military use. Sandbags and a machine gun is described (the latter without Will having the slightest clue what he’s describing, to be clear) before he talks about finding a crate ‘full of little metal eggs in straw’. Will casually pulls out the inviting ring pull, then stares at the live grenade, wondering what’s going to happen.


Gotta tell you, folks, in terms of screaming tension, it doesn’t get much better. Utter genius.


The whole first book is like that, in fact; providing the reader with information that makes more sense to us than it does to the characters; painting the picture of an invasion that has become an occupation, the human population clearly strictly controlled and rendered docile by the coming-of-age ceremony that instals ‘caps’, metal grafts attached to the skull and which seem to convince the wearers of the benevolence of the Tripods. That somewhere around one in ten of the recipients are driven insane is a nicely macabre touch, as is the fact that such ‘Vagrants’ are treated with pity and kindness by the rest of the population. By the time Will desperately throws his final grenade up into the opening inside a Tripod that is picking him up I was edge-of-the-seat invested in his ragged band hooking up with the resistance.


The trilogy also escalates brilliantly; in Book 2, we learn the Tripods have built cities; humans are taken in from all over the world (boys who win some kind of athletic challenge similar to the Olympics, girls, and I wish I was making this up, from giant beauty pageants), and none ever leave. Our gang, fitted with fake caps, undergo training to compete, and once Will and the, sigh, German kid called Fritz who’s all taciturn and Will doesn’t like For Some Unknown Reason make it into the city, man, the whole thing just kicks into another gear. The human slaves have to wear masks because the air is toxic, the artificial gravity produces a crushing weight (which makes sense of the use of physical competition to select the entrants), and The Masters themselves are utter grotesques, with descriptions that would be difficult to realise in a movie without looking laughable, but on the page, ah, the mind’s eye is free to make it all work, and it really does.


The other big escalation from Book 2 is that we learn that even the remnants of humanity don’t have much time left; there’s a huge ship on the way, and it’s going to convert the earth’s atmosphere into the same poison as in the cities. There’s a brilliant moment, here, where Will’s master expresses this plan with clear signs of anxiety; there’s a lot of political disagreement amongst The Masters, about how much of a threat humanity represents, and what the ethical thing is to do about them/us. And as shitty as the setup of women’s only selection criteria for city entrance being beauty, the payoff is monstrous, as Will is taken into a museum inside the alien city, and is suddenly brought face to face with the girl he’d fallen in love with in the first book, and who had been taken by the Tripods after being declared the queen of the tournament. I can still remember the shock of the moment, and also the sick thrill of a setup that took a whole damn book to pay off.


What I’m trying to get to here is that this trilogy taught me a lot about storytelling; not because it necessarily did anything blindingly original, but because it was well written on a sentence level, with a ferocious readability on a par with Terance Dicks on his best days, combined with a rollocking plot that piled on event and tension and escalation in a manner most pleasing. I read it several times, wanting to revisit these kids, and their long, strange, dangerous journey. I also appreciated another entirely-new-to-me-trick; that Will, the narrator, was not actually much of a hero, and was in point of fact, somewhat of a dick - selfish, whiny, self-absorbed, and jealous of the friendship his travelling companions developed. That dickishness runs right through Book 2, with his judgemental treatment of Fritz, and it’s really not until Book 3 that he starts to develop maturity enough to rise to the moment; and even then, the final moment of heroism falls to his childhood frenemy, Henry, with Will bearing witness.


And with adult eyes, there’s tons going on under the hood; in addition to the above, there’s classic anxiety of empire (similar to War Of The Worlds, actually - what if someone landed in England with the kind of firepower and tech advantage the English were landing on other shores?), a hell of an excoriation of liberal apologias for slavery and colonialism, as personified by Wills tentacle wringing Master, and a brilliantly downbeat ending where, the extraterrestrial threat removed, the resistance starts crumbling and fracturing back along nation-state lines. I love how Will’s final act is to turn his back on his dream of being an explorer to leverage his status as a hero of the liberation of Earth to try and hold everything together; something about that really speaks to me.


And sure, there’s flaws; in addition to the gender issues highlighted (and more fundamentally, the entire absence of female characters that aren't either Will’s mum or Will’s love interest, FFS) there’s plenty of Eurocentric 'national character’ stereotyping that, erm, hasn’t aged well. But, acknowledging those real and present flaws, it’s absolutely still a rip-roaring narrative that’s genuinely about bravery and heroic resistance to tyranny, and, you know what, I think that’s an important thing for kid’s fiction to do.


And that’s why, a couple of years ago, I sat and read this series to my daughter, as bedtime reading. Before we started, I told her that the lead character was a boy, and so were almost all the other characters, and would she like it if we changed him to a her, and if so, what name would she like me to use?


And so it was that my daughter heard the story of Alice; an angry, selfish but brave girl, who undertook a dangerous journey, joined the resistance, became a boxing champion to infiltrate an alien city, gained crucial intelligence, and finally led the guerilla action that destroyed the enemy base once and for all.


And it fucking rocked.


KP
27/2/22


PS - A few months before Nan passed away, she was taken into care; she’d lost the ability to safely prepare food for herself and was increasingly disoriented. While in care, she was given medication, and her personality transformed; mum reported that she’d asked after myself and my sister, sent her love, and that she’d spoken kindly with mum, too. I’d made jokes for a while, after seeing the first season of The Sopranos, that Olivia was exactly like Nan, and that Nan had borderline personality disorder. The joke stopped being funny after she’d been taken in and received treatment.


Given who she was, and the generation she came from, there’s really very little realistic chance that she could have been diagnosed sooner. And, on a selfish level, I’m glad my mum got the closure of those last few kind chats, after a lifetime of vitriol. Still, I can’t help but reflect on the enormous harm done - to Nan, and to those about her - by a lack of understanding of mental health issues. It’s a mostly hidden cost and damage, I think, but it’s very, very real all the same. May we all somehow receive the care we need to be the best of ourselves.


27/2/22


My thanks to Daniel Harper, who recorded a podcast some years ago with me on the subject of this trilogy, which allowed me space to rehearse some of the above. He’s currently doing vital work documenting the American far-right via his I Don’t Speak German podcast; please check out his Patreon, and consider throwing him some support.

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