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 favor 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.
 
If Only There Is Something We Could Have Done
 
It’s 1997. Or 1998. I am 17, or 18, or 19. It doesn’t matter. Nothing much really matters.
 
My life revolves around precious little. In theory, I am at college, but really, I’m just existing; claiming Jobseekers Allowance whilst aggressively not studying or looking for work.
 
I don’t drink. I don’t smoke anything stronger than Boars’ Head rolling tobacco, at least not very often. Can’t afford it, no other reason. I don’t eat well, but I eat often enough, the poverty diet of noodles and chips and Brian Ford’s breaded Beef Cutlets.
 
I am miserable, but there are chinks of light. I have a small but tight-knit social group, and we have a regular roleplaying game. And, of course, there’s the music - music that speaks to me, and later, music that saves me.
 
And there is also addiction.
 
I sometimes think, as I reflect upon my life, that I have in general been very fortunate in the addictions I have been drawn to.  Whilst compulsive behavior is almost by definition not healthy, and while a side effect of my various obsessions has been persistent issues with sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and the occasional psychological issues such tiredness can bring, it’s very rare they’ve been destructive beyond the time sink factor. Poker held me for about 3 years, but while I sunk many hundreds of hours into the game, I was good enough to break even over that period. Ultimately, while I wasn’t quite good enough to make money at it, it at least only cost me time. I know that it cost - and still costs - a lot of other people a lot more.
 
Similarly, my obsessions with various pieces of pop culture seem to have done little harm - in the cases of Doctor Who and horror fiction, they’ve led to some amazing friendships, and of course the enormous privilege of writing a monthly column for the biggest independent horror review site in Europe. In Stephen King’s IT, adult Eddie (always my favorite, bless you Eddie) talks about how the secret of life is to find the little bastard who lives in your head, fucking everything up, and get your hands around the little bastard, and then.... Don’t choke him out, but put the fucker to work. I’m not going to claim to have fully mastered this advice - or, indeed, that I don’t still have the issues that I am working through, and the odd wobble - but I’ve certainly found that turning that compulsion towards getting words on a page has done a pretty spectacular job of replacing a still-entirely-absent work ethic. “I don’t know where you find the time!”, people often remark. I normally make some joke about sleep being for the weak.
 
It’s not really a joke.
 
Anyway.
 
There is one other item that keeps me going during this 1997/98 period. It’s a 384 PC, ancient even then, a hand me down from a University that’s upgraded the student PC lab. It’s a gift from The Ghost. Of course. Austensibly for study, and for writing - even back then, writing feels like something I should be doing, though my output is pitiful in both scale and content, only happening when the mental pressure feels so strong that I literally can’t help but get something down, and I know how that sounds, but I was there and it’s how it was.
 
But really I only cared about it because it could run games. Not many. Not Doom, much less Quake, which was just coming out around then. But it could run Wolfenstein 3D just fine.
 
More importantly - all-consuming important - it could run UFO: Enemy Unknown.
 
UFO - later rebranded XCOM - is, in your humble correspondents' opinion, one of the greatest PC strategy games of all time - maybe the greatest. The premise is simple;  aliens make first contact with Earth, and they are not friendly. The player takes of the role of commander of the hastily assembled XCOM - an international military project established with the explicit goal of combatting and eventually defeating the alien threat.
 
To do this, the player is given a base, some interceptor aircraft for shooting down UFO’s, and a small army of soldiers for assaulting the downed ships and killing any remaining aliens. The player will also end up building laboratories for researching the alien artifacts that are recovered from the crash sites (and hiring the scientists to work in those labs), and workshops and engineers will be employed to manufacture more of these items once they’ve been researched.
 
So it’s a combination of strategic base/resource management (funds are limited, as are alien materials, which cannot be synthesized and must instead be recovered from sites), and a hypertense turn-based combat game, where you sneak your soldiers around a procedurally generated map, with the geography very loosely based on where the UFO crashed on the planet, and try very hard to kill a better armed, tougher opponent.
 
This is, I think, the core of the genius of XCOM. One aspect of game design that I am really coming to appreciate as I get older is that of balance. The deck building game Legendary is a perfect example of this - it’s essentially a cooperative game where you work with the other players to beat a villain and their scheme - and the genius of Legendary is you usually win… and it’s usually really, really close. You normally feel like you just squeaked it, just got it put away in time. Pandemic is another excellent boardgame example of this.
 
And in XCOM, you basically always feel like you’re on the back foot, up against it, struggling to hold ground. Every combat mission feels like it could end in disaster (and it often does), you never have enough money to do all the things you need to do, and if you screw up missions (and you do, frequently), you lose funding from those countries in subsequent months, further putting the squeeze on your options - indeed, one of the main ways you can lose the game is by having enough countries leave the project that you’re no longer funded. Additionally, your soldiers improve with each mission, becoming more effective, but that very effectiveness leads you to end up putting them into more and more dangerous positions.
 
And most of all, there are the aliens.
 
They get smarter, for starters - or, at least, it feels like they do. They certainly get tougher - there’s more of them per spaceship, and there are a lot of species, each with their own weaponry, movement, threat. The first few months are a near constant exercise of perpetual what-the-fuck-now as you round the corner of some farmhouse or gas station and see a reaper or cyberdisk - or one of the aliens starts flying, or one of your troops suddenly falls under enemy control and starts shooting his compatriots.
 
And the game fucks you over in other ways. Example: your scientists inform you that in order for the research to really progress, you’ll need to capture one of the aliens alive. And in order to do that, you’ll need to use a stun prod - which as the name implies has no range at all, meaning that you need to be adjacent to the aliens to use it. So now, you’re taking your most experienced troops (with the most movement and health) and giving them a weapon they can only use at point blank range, and running them up to aliens to zap them, hoping it works.
 
It doesn’t always.
 
It’s an exercise in sadism, is what I’m trying to say. The game delights in finding new ways to punch the player in the face. Oh look, now the aliens are sending huge super-tough forces into cities to murder civilians, and if you don’t try and stop them the country will leave the project, but if you go you can’t use any of your explosive weapons without killing civilians yourself. Oh, look, the alien UFOs are tougher now and can shoot down your interceptors. Oh, look, they’ve figured out where your base is and are attacking it. Oh look, you lost. Again.
It’s punishing even on the lower difficulty settings, and on anything from ‘normal’ up, it’s downright vicious. And holy shit it’s a slog. An average winning game will have engaged in well over 50 combat missions, each taking around an hour to complete. You will have researched huge numbers of items and tech. You will have - somehow - taken out one of the giant UFOs and captured its commander alive - or assaulted an alien base on earth and somehow captured the leader from there, instead. Then you’ll have built a new ship that can take your soldiers to Mars, where you will finally assault the alien base there and - if you’re lucky - destroy the huge beating heart at the center of that base and win the game.
 
I loved it. I loved it because it was so fucking hard. I loved it because it was such a fucking slog. I loved it because it was a series of repetitive tasks with endless slight variation, constantly escalating challenge. I loved it because even when you’d played it through once, it took so fucking long that you’d forgotten the tech tree and had to guess at how best to assign research all over again.
 
Most of all, I loved it because I could become absorbed in it. By it. The world around me, the crowded, dirty bedroom filled with black bin bags and stinking of cigarette ash, and the house outside the room with the dodgy electrics and moldy shared bathroom and filthy kitchen, and the town outside the house that was rapidly becoming the limits of my imagination and understanding, a town full of callous indifference at best and a kind of dull-minded sadism at worse, a town/world that seemed pretty well personally tailored to grind me into a fine powder and scatter me to the wind, never to be seen again… it all went away. And so did I.
 
I’m not saying it wasn’t fun. But my abiding memory isn’t of fun, exactly. It’s more of a   blankness, where all the challenges are abstract; a space where there is still complexity and difficulty and unfairness, but where all that can be overcome by rigorous application of understanding.
 
Addicts talk about this a lot - the blankness that lies at the core of it, at the bottom - doing the thing so hard and so long that everything else vanishes. And I still think there is, or can be, a therapeutic value to that, at least in theory. No-one can spend 24/7 inside their own head, after all. The human mind is kind of the opposite of a safe space.
 
But it was absolutely a compulsion, too. I’d lose days to the game, playing until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, sleeping for 12 hours, waking up, shoving some food down my throat, and then straight back to it. Whilst I was nominally attending college, the need to attend the odd class held it in check a bit, but once I’d given up the pretense of ever passing anything, there was also nothing to keep me from turning on, loading the latest save game, and dropping all the way out.
 
And - newsflash - I’m not cured. Not even close. Because it’s now 2018, and I am 40 years old, and over the last few weeks, I’ve lost hours - hours of sleep, hours of potentially productive writing time, hours I can ill afford - playing the PlayStation 3 iteration of XCOM, in the name of beating the Ironman Classic version of the game - a particularly sadistic setting where the game saves after every decision, overwriting the previous one, so you can’t simply reload if you fuck up. It took me over 30 attempts to finally beat it, and more late nights than I am prepared to admit. All for a couple of PlayStation 3 trophies that mean absolutely nothing to anyone that isn’t me, and the ability to be able to say ‘I beat XCOM on Iron Man mode, classic difficulty’.
 
Quite early on in this writing thing, I remember talking to a mate about how I was struggling with balancing PS3 time and writing time. My rationalization for the time I spent playing was that it was when I was too tired to write.
 
Well, guess what? That was bullshit.
 
Turns out, if I am awake enough to game, I am awake enough to write. Right now, I am fucking exhausted, and half cut on my second beer of the evening, and in less than two hours I’ve gotten over 2000 words out of my recent relapse into XCOM addiction.
 
The truth is, I can always fucking write.  And the next truth is, when I do it, I always end up feeling better  - much better than I end up feeling after a three week XCOM binge. And as a bonus, I have something to show for it at the end; something that might bring other people some kind of pleasure.
 
And yet.
 
I still feel the pull of it. The platinum trophy. The two sequels. XCOM is a near-perfect game, in both the original version and the recent remake, and a part of me wants to shut this down, right now, and just go and fire up the PS3 and play until I can’t see straight.
 
It’s absolutely a compulsion. It’s absolutely an addiction.
 
And as much as my life is, thankfully, transformed from that time in 1997 and 1998, when I was adrift, and essentially alone in my own skull, afraid and terrified and desperate to just disappear, it’s clear to me now that part of me lives there still. And that part of me is still terrified, and adrift, and uncomprehending of the life I’ve built for myself. Still expecting it to all come crashing down, and leave me back in a single room in a deathtrap house, with no money, no hope, and no future.
 
That part of me will always see play, not as a pleasant diversion, but an escape, a lifeline. A welcome isolation, a blessed cell.
 
And I rather suspect that I am no more done with XCom than XCom is done with me.
 
KP
11/9/18

As I noted in my last column, historically this was my least favourite of the franchise. My memory of why is that it basically didn’t get what Elm Street movies were really all about. The core idea is a guy who visits you in your dreams, kills you there, and then you wake up dead. So why have a plot that revolves around that same guy trying to come into the real world? Like, why would he even want to do that?

That said, I do remember that I watched this film a lot, and there were elements of it I really enjoyed. I have vivid, if disjointed memories of a school bus suspended over a firey pit, shower room heads extending from the wall, jetting out scalding water… and a clear image of Freddy emerging from Jessie’s stomach, slicing open the kids skin and sloughing it off to stand tall and glowering, finger blades ready to rock.

I also have a sense that the real hero of the piece is not Jessie, but his girlfriend - and I don’t know what it  says about the film, or my memory, that I can remember nothing about her; not her name, not what she looks like, not what she does.

I’m pretty sure there’s a sadistic gym coach, and his fate is connected in some way to the shower scene…. And that’s it. That’s all I got.

I suspect it’s a bad sign that the rest of the movie has slid so effortlessly off the surface of my mind with nothing sticking… but I can’t also deny it’s made me keenly anticipate the re-watch, because there’s certainly ample space to be surprised. So, let’s see how it goes…

Now

Well, holy shit - what a delight that turned out to be.

I mean, I can see why it’s not universally beloved. There’d be quite a good argument for saying it basically falls outside of the cannon of the rest of the series, at least as I remember it, what with the drastic change to Freddy’s MO outlined above, which the series going forward completely ignores.

Relatedly, the metaphysics are a bit muddled - not completely broken, to be fair, but certainly a little inconsistent and under-explained. Why, for example, is there this constant manifestation of heat as a byproduct of Jesse’s possession - especially when some of the most dramatic of these occurrences (the flaming toaster, and my favorite, the exploding attack budgie) happen without any actual Freddy activity accompanying it, and indeed no visible involvement from Jesse at all? I mean, I guess they sort-of indicate there’s something wrong with the house, and that Freddy has poltergeist powers that don’t require Jesse to be asleep… but that’s sort-of contradicted later when the coach is murdered when Jesse is clearly fully awake (and not in the house), in a storm of inanimate object activity which we will return too, because, erm, yeah, there’s some stuff to talk about with that scene.

This also muddles the return to the ‘don’t fall asleep’ motif from the first movie, with Jesse chugging caffeine pills because it’s when he sleeps that Freddie gains control over him… Except he wasn’t sleeping during the coach murder scene. And then, later on, when he asks his mate to watch him while he sleeps… I mean, why, given the above?

There’s also the problem that the cops in this town are clearly incompetent on a quite epic scale. I mean, at the point at which you find a naked teenager wondering around ‘near the freeway’, clearly disorientated, return him to the family home with no questions asked, and then do not return to question him after his gym teacher turns up murdered that same night... this really isn’t trying to have even the most tenuous of connections to the real world - a shame, since a closing-in police investigation could really have ratcheted up the stakes for that third act.

So, flaws? Sure. Mind you, Part 1 wasn’t without its issues either, and for my money those flaws - especially the acting - are significantly less bad in the sequel. Freddy may not yet have become the full wisecracking, grotesquely imaginative killer he’ll become in Part 3, but that character is starting to emerge here, with his ‘you’ve got the looks, I’ve got the brains’ moment a startling example of that shock gross out ability.

Similarly, Jesse’s family are a goddamn delight, jettisoning the ‘sins of the parents’ issues from part 1 and instead having what appear to be a late 50’s (the decade, though in age too) nuclear family - complete with kid sister who really isn’t a character at all, and unfortunate budgies. And they’re a joy to watch - especially the father, whose line in keeping-up-appearances aging salesman (with a Nixonian eye for a bargain, hence buying the house no-one else would because, well, the last movie happened there) generated actual laughs out loud on more than one occasion.

I need to talk about the unfortunate budgie sequence, actually, because it’s hilarious. The setup is fun - the covered cage, vibrating - but the execution? Man, When Budgies Attack! The dive bombing camera work, the ducking, cowering family, occastional quick shots of the bird in flight - it’s so gleefully, energetically absurd and wonderful and I loved it. And then the damn thing explodes, and I mean, what do you want, people? Exploding budgies! Are you not entertained?

And then dad tries to blame Jesse (in the process uttering the immortal line “Animals just don’t explode into flames for no reason!”, which, come on, people), and it becomes even hilariouser. Because the dad’s performance is so good here. You can see he doesn’t really believe Jesse put firecrackers in the budgie, but he’s trying to intimidate his kid into saying he did because the alternative makes no sense, and the way Jesse responds is perfect, and the way his mother ‘now, dear’s the dad is a goddamn work of art, and seriously, this entire movie justifies its existence just on the basis of this wonderful, wonderful sequence.

But there’s still so much to talk about, and I gress we need to talk about the Big Gay Subtext, and Jesse’s relationship with Lisa.

I’ll start with the relationship, I think, because it’s a really stark example of something that’s on-paper kind of awful and on screen totally charming. Lisa loves Jesse. Like, no greater love hath anyone for fucking anything than Lisa for Jesse. I would suggest making it your life goal to have someone look at you the way Lisa looks at Jesse, but I don’t want you to die alone and lonely, and you will if you wait around for this, because Lisa’s love for Jesse is a once in a generation phenomenon.

Consider this; Jesse is meant to be meeting her for a date, but is unable to go as his father has decided that given they moved in several weeks ago (long enough ago for Jesse to meet Lisa, and Lisa to decide this guy is The Only One Ever) he should actually finish unpacking his room. Jesse proceeds to do so in the most 80’s goofball teenager way imaginable - by putting on a cassette tape, literally upending the boxes into drawers and cupboards, before getting distracted by his sunglasses collection and miming along with the song.

And then Lisa turns up. And instead of yelling at him for standing her up, or at the very least having some words about his tunes/glasses combo… she joins in helping him unpack.

No purer love than this, people.

More seriously, she exhibits a stand-by-your-man mentality that would make Tammy Wynette blush and mutter something about taking it too far, as it increasingly becomes clear that Jesse is, at best, someone suffering severe multiple personality disorder featuring a homicidally violent alter ego, and at worse… well, honestly, if that’s the best case scenario, who cares what’s worse? And yet when he  turns up to her party, sweating and terrified, all but confessing to having murdered a man, her response is take him into the nearest empty room and try and sex his blues away, and I know how that looks on paper, but Kim Myers as Lisa just sells the shit out of it. She manages to make this patently absurd level of devotion feel real and righteous, and I still don’t know how I feel about that but it’s something to see.

And then there’s the gay subtext.

Which, to be clear, the movie’s star and writer have both admitted to, though the history of this is convoluted and contested to a degree. There’s a superb long piece about it here, and I understand a documentary is forthcoming at some point. I’m not going to be able to top these or other sources, but I will note that it’s a) blindingly obvious and b) something I was totally blind to as a kid.

Well, and also c) kinda muddled, I think. Like, for starters, if the notion is that Freddie’s possession of Jesse represents Jesse’s own repressed homosexiality… is that not a kind of negative view of homosexuality? When Freddie takes over Jesse, he murders people, let’s not forget. And Freddie himself is, well, not to put too fine a point on it, a child murderer himself. Equating male sexuality with child abuse has a long and disgusting history amongst bigots and homophobes, so it feels like an odd choice for the metaphor here, to put it mildly. And of course if it’s the case that Freddie represents homosexual urges in Jesse, what on earth are we to make of the fact that it is the hetrosexual love of his girlfriend that ultimately delivers him from that possession? And then there’s the actually-gay gym teacher, who is also a sadist, and dies after first being stripped down to literally his bare arse and flogged by wet towels wielded by an invisible force. That’s a thing that actually happens in this movie.

To be crystal clear here, I am a dorky straight guy  - I have no answers, only questions. And I’m honestly happy saying this was written by a gay man and stars a gay man, both of whom know a shitload more about being gay than I ever will. It’s perfectly fine that I don’t get it. I’m just saying. I don’t get it.

But oh, man, I really do love it. A lot. I found Freddy’s Revenge to be a gleeful delight from start to finish, all more keenly felt for the unexpected nature of that joy. I don’t know what it says about me now vs. me then how much my opinion has changed, but I’m already sold on this project as having been a great idea, just so I could discover this maligned gem.

Next up, The Dream Warriors.

RankIng so far (2018):

1. Freddy’s Revenge
2. A Nightmare On Elm Street

KP
25/8/18

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.


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


This is my life in horror.


“We Will Bury You” Part 3


So, then.


It’s late Autumn, 1999. The confrontation between Loz and I happened over the summer, and things have been quiet since. I still mainly work the Public Bar, though at weekends I’m back in the Saloon, and much as I still hate the place… no, actually, there’s no turn happening at the end of that statement - I still hate the place.


And a couple of nights before, I met Ben.


I’ve changed names throughout this trilogy to protect the guilty, but in Ben’s case, I can’t remember his name, so for all I know, he really is called Ben. Anyhow, if you’ve read my novella Lifeline (currently available as part of my novella collection, Breaking Point )  , you already know what Ben looks like - he’s a white skinhead, early to mid twenties, slightly above average height, slightly above average pitched voice, single silver hoop earring, black puffer jacket, combats, army trousers.


He was related to one of the regulars - one of the few decent ones, a painter named Tom. Tom was his uncle.


Anyway.


He’d made his first appearance in the public bar earlier that week, and he put me on edge almost immediately. He was loud. He was, on the surface, gregarious, but there was a performative strutt that was unsettling. It was an old man boozer, with old and well respected hierarchies, and he sauntered in like he owned the place. We were regaled with graphic details of a recent sexual encounter where he’d performed oral sex on a woman (something he talked about doing a lot, for some reason) before having sex with her, only to later find a soiled tampon on the floor that she had removed just before the act. “I fucked it, I went down on it, it seemed alright to me!” was the grinning punchline. In fairness to the old boys, they didn’t seem terribly impressed.


It’s like that old gag about how you think someone is Satan, then the real deal turns up, and you realise the guy you were so scared of was just the guy who goes down to the corner shop to buy Satan a pack of cigarettes. Within about 5 seconds of meeting this guy, Loz was relegated in my mind instantly to annoyance.


This was threat.


He took an instant dislike to me. - as he would shortly make explicit, mostly on the basis of how I looked. That, and refusing to gamble with him for a pint over a hand of… see, I can’t remember the name of the card game, only that you were dealt 13 cards and had to make 3 card brag hands and play them in descending order of strength. I actually already knew how to play, but had feigned ignorance because I didn't want to - which meant he’d felt obliged to teach me. We’d ended up splitting the hand, two tricks each. I’d felt the need to loudly proclaim as we started that there was no wager on it - partly because I wanted witnesses in case he won and cut up rough, partly just because of the intensity he brought to creating his hands just plain made me nervous.


He started in on my personal appearance not long after. The hair, obviously. The earring too - and again, credit where it’s due, the regulars wern’t standing for it. When he said, of my earring ‘Bit faffy, innit? Want more a plain hoop around this manor, right?’ I can clearly remember one of them calmly replying ‘not really - it’s all a matter of personal style, innit?’


I remember smiling at that. Which may have been a mistake.


He made immediate friends with Loz and Trev. Obviously. And I’m pretty sure what followed was on Day 3 of Trev’s Epic Bender - the same one that led to him signing for his purchase and cashback with an x, and me meekly handing his money over.


It’s cold and dark outside the pub. One of the many shitty things about working in a pub in London in 1999 is that by the time the kicking out hs all been kicked, and the glasses cleaned and drip trays polished and stored, the busses had stopped, and the taxis were rammed. And if, like me, you have a shitty boss who lives on the premises and wants to go to bed as soon as the last ashtray is wiped clean, you find yourself sat outside a locked up, lights-out pub, in the cold, waiting for a cab that could take anything from 30 minutes to an hour to arrive.


And this evening, the door has hardly shut behind me, and I’ve barely had time to settle on one of the outside benches, zipping up my coat and plunging my hands into my pockets for warmth, when Ben comes around the corner, arm in arm with a girl.


I smile a greeting, but my stomach is already tightening. It goes into freefall as he opens with “What’s all this about complaining about me behind my back to my family?”
It’s a perplexing opening gambit, and I stumble partway through a reply when he cuts me off with “Don’t give me that! My uncle’s been giving me earache about calling you a poof! I don’t even remember calling you a poof!”


“I don’t, either…”


“..then why is he saying you did? Are you calling him a liar?”


“No…”


“Are you calling me a liar?”


“Of course not…”


“Then why did you say it?”


“I didn’t…”


“Look I don’t even remember saying it, right? I don’t even remember calling you a poof, right? But I’ll say it now, yeah? You’re a poof! Allright?”


I shrug, honestly perplexed, as well as miserable. I do know it’s supposed to be an insult, but it just… isn’t, for me. Probably just as well, in retrospect.


“He ain’t a poof” His lady friend pipes up, looking me up and down with sleepy eyes and smiling.


“He turns to her, eyes rolling, “No, I know he ain’t…”


“You can tell. Tell just by looking at him!” (and I have to admit to the fact that, in the moment, with all the terror I was starting to feel, I found that assertion curiously gratifying, though with a gun to my head I couldn’t pick apart why, exactly).


“I know he ain’t, but I’m just sayin’... look, don’t worry about it…” He turns back to me “Are you gonna be here for a bit?”


“I mean, I’m waiting for my cab…” which can turn up any second now, really, I think, frantically but with no real hope.


“I’m just gonna…” he points at the girl, and mimes wanking - I can’t tell if she sees or not, cares or not - “...we’ll finish this after, okay?”


“Sure,” I say, with as little sincerity as I think I’ve ever felt.


“Good.”


And then he’s gone.


And in retrospect, so should I have been, but here’s the thing; no mobile phone. Limited funds. The nearest bus stop is a ten minute walk, and if I have missed the last one of the evening, it’s more like 30 minutes to get to the high street, and again, no phone, so no cab, and it’s fucking cold, and here, now, I know someone is coming to find me - I imagine being out walking the street when he sees me again, chasing me down…


So I sit and I wait and I smoke and I hope that a vehicle is going to pull in. And eventually, one does.


Trev’s white van.


He’s sat behind the wheel, and as the door opens, the dome light hits his face, and he looks like a corpse. I don’t really have time to absorb this, though, because as the door slams shut again and the light goes out, Ben is striding across the carpark towards me, yelling “I’ve just had a fucking ‘nother one come up to me!” and it’s obviously pure bullshit, and worse, he knows I know it and doesn’t fucking care, and there’s something about his eyes and demeanor that tells me he’s wired on something but I don’t have enough experience to know what, but I know there’s shit out there that’ll make you angry and pain immune, and he’s clearly a well skilled scrapper in any case, no Loz, this is the real deal, and I think about what I know about self defence, and I look at this guy, and I realize I am probably good and fucked.


I buckle in. Try and go cold. It’s an effort.


He stands over me, leaning forward, telling me he can’t ‘ave it, all these relatives, why go behind his back, I’ll call you a poof now, to your face, what you gonna do about it?


I offer him a cigarette. I say I will do nothing.


He tells me he wants to hurt me.


To beat me. He delights in describing ‘smashing my skull into pieces’ and his voice distorts with emotion before he can finish saying it. What colour were his eyes? I can’t remember, I want to say brown, but… I can’t remember. I do remember looking up at the van, straight into Trev’s corpse face. No help there. Back to Ben’s angry scowl, angry eyes. Getting angrier. I remember dropping my cigarette butt and grinding it out with my boot, making sure that my knee is ideally placed for a groin shot, but I look again at his frame, his fluid, easy motions, and his something-not-right eyes, and with a tired, sinking dismay, I realize that such a shot is very unlikely to work.


See, there’s something worse than bullies. That’s what I learned that night. Bullies are horrible, of course, and they inflict misery, but most bullies, fundamentally, don’t actually want a fight - they want to deliver a beating, exert dominance. I’m not saying that wasn’t also the case with Ben - it transparently was, he sweated insecure, need-to-prove alpha - but there was also, underneath, a bass feverish love of violence for its own sake.


He stared me down and smoked my smoke, and I stared back because I knew if he was going to go, his eyes would tell me at least a little before he went, or his shoulders would, which were in my peripheral vision. His repetition loops were getting shorter, more angry - he had me trapped rhetorically, between calling either him or his family a liar, or admitting to talking behind his back, and he’d made it clear either conclusion would lead to violence, and I remember an awful drowsiness starting to settle, a distance, a numbness. I knew it was happening, could feel it - like being hypnotised by the world’s angriest man - but I could do nothing about it. Everything was draining away, including my basic focus, and as some point, mid rant, I groaned and said ‘What do you want from me?’.


His nostrils flared at that, and he leaned closer, scowling. “The fuck you talkin’ bout? I don’t want nothin’ from you, man! Nothin’! I’m just tellin’ you, I’m gonig to break your fuckin’ skull in to pieces! Talkin’ about me to my family like that!” He leaned forward, slapping my jacket with the back of his hand, and I was too numb to flinch, as the final barrier began to crumble, “You may be able to handle yourself, I dunno… nah, you might,” he said as I laughed a hollow laugh “...but I promise you, I will fucking break you!”


I didn’t say, I don’t want to fight you. I didn’t say, I’m not going to fight you. I thought both, but said neither, thinking them dangerous. He leaned forward again, tapped me again, a little harder, said something else, I could feel him winding up, the spring inside now lethaly tight, my whole sense of self pulling away and away…


The headlights from the cab almost blinded me as it pulled in. I jumped, grabbed my shoulder bag, mumbled ‘that’s my cab’, and not-quite ran. My last image of him was turning away from me, face half light in brightness, the other in black shadow, furious, and then his back as he strode towards Trev’s van. I told the cab driver my destination, leaned back in my seat, and waited for the shakes to come.


I didn’t have to wait for long.


KP


27/3/18


Postscript: I went back the next day and worked the 12 - 6pm shift. It feels crazy to write that, but it’s the truth. I phoned in and  - again, I can’t believe it, and I did it, but - asked the asshole landlord if I should stay home, and he insisted I shouldn’t, and I believed him, as though he ever for one second had my best interests at heart.


And Loz and Trev were apologetic, in their own ways, and uncle Tom told me if it ever happened again, to tell Ben that Uncle Tom Said No - as though something similar hadn’t caused the whole fucking mess in the first place.


I never saw Ben again. Not awake, anyway.


And autumn turned to winter, and I kept working, and the public bar got emptier and emptier on the 12 - 6 shift.


And one day I’m dealing with a toothache, and there’s no painkillers of mine in the house, and my flatmate lends me asperin, which I am unused to. I take them, fall back to sleep, and end up late, so I skip breakfast and haul arse. My bus hits the stop with 5 minutes to shift, and I run as hard as I can to get to the bar for 12. I make it, and I open up. It’s cold enough that I light the gas fire. I’m sat by it, and all of a sudden the world goes weird again. Suddenly, my head feels swollen and my body is coated with sweat and my heart is pounding and a strange synth tune is playing from the jukebox, a million miles away, and a high male voice is singing about conflict, and I stand up on legs that feel too high and too thin, and I fucking wade to the toilet through the song Russians, and as someone says ‘we will bury you’ I throw up and instantly feel better, just aspirin and a brisk run on an empty stomach, but Loz sees me and asks if I’m all right, or if I am on something, and I say no, and he says okay but it looked like I was, and if I was, I should stop, and I say that I’m fine, and I am, but for a second there, I really, really wasn’t, and I’ve never forgotten it, and I never 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.
 
Don’t. Fall. Asleep.
 
So, we’re back for an extended session with teenage me for this next set of essays. Early teens, at that. Back in the village (population 450, lest we forget) and Bev, Freddie, and me.
 
Freddie, as previously noted, was something of an unusual child. He had a tendency towards mindless destruction, both self and objects (though rarely other people), and a certain obsessiveness about things. Music, obviously, and predictably, later cannabis (which, given his stoner parents, you’d have to say was a habit he came by honestly), but also certain TV shows and movies. For TV, his particular obsession was The Young Ones, and later Beavis and Butthead (for the former, he overidentified with Vivian, for the latter, Beavis).
 
For movies, it was, of course, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.
 
He had the first five movies on VHS, and he watched them over and over and over again. For a brief period over a summer, due to a complicated falling out between he and Bev due to another girl who lived in the village for a few months, I’d spend most evenings and weekends at his house, and we’d sit and play Mario 3 on the NES… and watch the Elm Streets over and over again.
 
My memory is that I rented The FInal Nightmare myself from the video van man, but I know for sure Freddie had those first 5, and boy did we watch the hell out of them - I can still recall the smell of the room, a mixture of joss sticks and milk just starting to spoil.
 
I have seen them since. About 15 years ago, back when the exchange rate was so favourable a holiday to Manhattan could be justified on shopping grounds (theoretically, anyway, I wasn’t earning that kind of money at the time) I ordered the complete box set (with region 1 encoding) from New Line, when it was released on DVD. I worked through the set, once… and then it sat on a shelf, until I started writing this column, at which point I dug it out, knowing I’d want to cover this series at some point.
 
See, the reason these films are so significant to me is because they represent the point where horror became unambiguously pleasurable to me, as opposed to something that had a weird push/pull revulsion/fascination. Desensitization is, for my tastes, a much overused word, and in any case I don’t think it accurately describes what I’m talking about - there’s still effects shots in this series that squick me out (one in particular from the third movie I can picture in my mind right now, and I can feel my teeth grinding at the memory). No, it’s just that, at some point, these movies became… well, familiar. Comfortable. A comfy pair of slippers, sure, but also an escape into a world that was… well, okay, also scary, but maybe a little less so than the one I lived in, if only because there I understood the rules, and it always ended the same.
 
It’s a paradox of horror fandom, I sometimes think - we come here to be scared, disturbed, discombobulated… and yet, there are these monster (haha) franchises that utterly dominated the 80’s and 90’s, with endless sequels as various maniac and supernatural fiends carved their ways through the teens of america - and I think the primary attraction of these franchises is the thrill of the familiar. It’s maybe part of why vampires, werewolves, and zombies hold such strength in the public imagination; sure, they’re scary, but they’re also… safe, somehow, or at least known, with rules that make them strong but also give them fatal weaknesses.
 
Anyhow. For many kids of my generation, it was Pinhead, or Michael Myers, or Jason. For me, it was Freddy Krueger, so he’ll have to stand in for all.
 
And I’m going to shake up the format for the next 6 months, as I cover these films (New Nightmare I didn’t see until I was well into my 20’s, and therefore falls outside the scope of the project, though I may cover it separately). I’m going to start with what I remember, then go and watch the movie, and come back and write a second part where I talk about what (if anything) I’ve learned.
 
I’m really looking forward to it.
 
Then
 
So, the first Elm Street. I remember Freddy is much less of a wisearce than he later becomes. The essence of him in this one seems to be to disturb and horrify his victims before he kills them. An image that I have very strongly from this film is of him slicing off his own fingers, staring at Nancy as he does so, revelling in her disgusted, horrified reaction. It’s very reminiscent of the kid at school who’d eat his own bogeys to gross out the girls, and I remember being as disturbed by the look of his face as the blood pumping from the severed digits.
 
What else? Some brilliant effects. Freddy coming out of the bedroom wall over Nancy’s sleeping form, the gonzo death of Tina, a tongue coming out of a phone, Tina’s doofus boyfriend being hung in his cell… oh, yeah, Nancy disappearing into the bathtub, holy shit, that was something, seeing a chink of light above her as she was pulled down into an apparently bottomless ocean of dark water.
 
Still… it wasn’t my favourite, that’s for sure (that was Dream Warriors). Ranking movies in a franchise was a business I took incredibly seriously at that age, for reasons passing understanding, and I remember thinking this was good but not quite great. (Oh go on then, just for fun and as I remember - the Elm Street movies by rank, according to teenage me:
 

1. Elm Street 3
2. Elm Street 4
3. Nightmare
4. Freddy’s Dead
5. Elm Street 5

Elm Street 2)
 
 I’m sure at least part of that would be the body count metric - do I really remember rightly that only four people actually die in this one? That would certainly have been a demerit from teenage me. Beyond that, and the aforementioned sense that Freddy was still underdeveloped, I suspect that there was also the fact that the effects work got better as the series went on. Like, aside from the finger slicing, and Tina’s death, I can’t remember any outright gross out moments, and some of the effects, like the death of Nancy’s mum, were just plain goofy. Again, it’s not that it was bad, at all, just that it would later be done better.
 
The memories are fond - Johnny Depp’s fountain of blood death, burning footsteps leading up Nancy’s steps - but there’s not the passion or visceral connection that I have to some of the later entries.
 
I have a fairly strong feeling that teenage me is full of shit on this one, however.
 
Let’s see, shall we?
 
Now
 
Well, now. That was surprising - I think teenage me may actually have had a point.
 
I mean, let’s start with the positives - it’s conceptually brilliant. He comes to you in your dreams, and anything that happens to you in the nightmare is mirrored in real life. That’s just an all-time fantastic horror movie idea. And Freddy is a menacing, freakish figure - even in this first movie, the makeup is incredible, and the dirty sweater, hat, and knife glove iconic. Our very first shot of he is in silhouette, and he’s instantly striking and menacing.
 
Additionally, the movie is superbly paced - I mean, it really zips along, starting with a dream sequence that sets up Freddy and the stakes admirably, and wastes very little time introducing the characters before starting to kill them off. The dream sequences themselves are undeniably the stars of the show, too, with a good grasp of the way dream logic works in a nightmare, allowing events to twist around against the person dreaming. The hall monitor who turns into Freddy was a really strong example of this, as was the staircase where the carpet suddenly becomes pits of glue... as was Tina in a body bag, centipedes falling from her lips and worms/snakes crawling in mud at her feet. And the final action sequence, with Freddy pulled through to the real world, running into boobie traps and eventually being set on fire.
 
However, it’s not without its flaws. I found the teenagers to be uniformly bad performances, for starters - even young Johnny Depp isn’t especially strong, and Tina’s roughneck boyfriend is really poor throughout. Similarly Nancy I found to be disappointingly melodramatic - she’s a character I had very fond memories of, but far too many of her line readings felt overplayed, if not outright clunky. The parents are better, especially Nancy’s father, who has a good line in shifty attentiveness and guily glances, but even there, Nancy’s mother is saddled with some pretty horrible lines, and while the actor does a decent job with them, it’s still a tough sell (doubly so with the alcoholism that feels almost crowbarred in to the plot).
 
Most worryingly, there’s parts that just plain don’t make any sense, I don’t think. Like, why do Nancy’s parents put a ton of extra security around the house? They believe that Rod killed Tina and then killed himself in jail, after all, so why bar all the windows and doors? For that matter, why isn’t Nancy sectioned after her meltdown at the dream clinic? That’s entirely leaving aside the impossibility of rigging an entire set of home defense booby traps in 10 minutes, because I’m assuming given how the movie ends that all of that is actually occuring in an extended dream of Nancy’s, though that’s not explicit in the movie.
 
I’m conscious there’s a dangerous potential fallacy here, in terms of preferring a sequel to the original. I’m reminded of the joke (was it from Bad News or somewhere else?) where a guitarist claims to be better than Jimmy Page, because Page wrote Stairway To Heaven at 27, but he can already play it and he’s only 24. So it feels surreal, if not outright blasphemous, to be suggesting that the first movie (the one by Wes Craven, for crying out loud) is actually not the best of the sequence… but here I find myself, based on this recent rewatch, and my memories (which may well be flawed) of what’s to come.
 
This movie will always have a place in my heart, and Freddy a place in my horror pantheon. But while A Nightmare On Elm Street is a brilliant idea, and one with some superb horror set pieces and often brilliant effects work, it’s also a more flawed movie than I’d hoped/remembered.
 
Still, next up is Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. So I’m sure everything will be fine.
 
KP
 
20/5/18

 
Between December 1998 and December 1999, I worked in a pub in the east end of London, as a barman. It was my first ‘real’ job - I’d done short term leafleting for a second hand book shop back in Devon, but otherwise, paid employment was alien to me - and given my (lack of) educational qualifications, this kind of work was as high as I felt I could safely set my sights.
 
I can still remember the rush of excitement I felt after being told I’d secured the position straight at the end of my 10 minute interview for the job. It kind of hurts my heart to remember.
 
Anyway.
 
I learned a lot that year. Having fled to London based on an understanding that to stay in Devon was to begin, at the at of 20, the business of dying (aided and abetted, as always, by music, in reaching this realisation), this was, initially, where I landed.
 
And, you know, initially I was excited. I thought bar work could be fun, and would help fund the stand up comedy career I fondly imagined I’d be able to start any day now, just by turning up at an open mic night, opening my mouth and being funny. Not that I was doing anything as grand as working on material, you understand - or for that matter, finding out the location of a single open mic night in the city. What was the hurry? I was 20, and I was out of Devon. All things were possible, and there was no rush. Anyway, probably the bar work would help provide material.
 
On that last point, I was certainly correct in general terms, though the genre would not end up being comedy. Suffice it to say that The Debt, short story Valentine’s Day,  and the protagonist from Lifeline would not exist in anything like the form they do now if it hadn’t been for the experiences I had working this job. It was a year of my life I’ll never get back, mostly spent in boredom, with occasional side forays into despair and the odd shot of fear for my physical safety (and on one occasion, for my life) - but I’m also not sure I’d trade it. Like so many of the artistic traumas I’ve documented in this series, I learned so much, for good and ill, about myself and my fellow man, about the hells that people construct for themselves, partly through circumstances and partly through outlook - and most of all, perhaps, just how dark and bleak and joyless ‘normal’ can get.
 
It started with the staff, actually. The Landlord was an oddly charmless man - a Tory who smoked Marlboro Reds and was a big fan of Peter Hitchens (then writing in The Express, copies of which the pub carried for free, as part of a deal with the chain). His marriage seemed permanently strained, with sniping and often mean spirited sarcasm the order of the day, and yet neither seemed to show any signs of actually rethinking the arrangement. To me, they seemed more like squabbling siblings than a husband and wife, and I found their mutual antagonism mystifying. 
 
He was also a man who would look for marginal edges wherever he could. Realising I didn’t understand the difference between being on a salary or an hourly rate, he put me on salary for Christmas, and then proceeded to load me up with 6 day weeks, all for a flat rate weekly wage. Then, come January, he informed me by phone that he was unhappy with my performance and might need to let me go, before pushing me onto an hourly rate and reducing my hours (which he could do easily,  January being a very quiet month in the trade). He similarly wasn’t below purchasing stolen goods - specifically, food items stolen by a white van driver (from his employer) who drank regularly in the public bar - and selling them as special menu items in the restaurant attached to the pub. He’d also occasionally throw temper tantrums, when someone was late or off sick - sudden rage filled outbursts that would come and pass like summer lightning. I remember describing him to a friend as having a ‘hands off’ approach to management - to which she responded ‘sounds more like the ‘fuck off’ school, to me’.
 
But he was a walk in the park compared to Loz.
 
Loz came from Brighton, worked the bar, and lived in the pub. I never got a 100% clear story on his background, but he’d apparently left under a cloud involving drugs and possibly owed money. He was a bit older than me - I’d guess mid to late 20’s - and he’d treated me with laughing contempt and hostility from our first encounter - literally, as he’d laughed and turned his head when we first shook hands, having been introduced. He proceeded to order me about, giving me cleaning jobs he didn’t want to do under the guide of ‘training’, and then not actually explaining how they were to be done, meaning I ended up getting grief for not doing them ‘properly’. That particular hazing didn’t last long - once I’d actually had the tasks explained to me, doing them was easy enough - but there was an underlying low level hostility through my time there, which bubbled under for months before, inevitably, exploding.
 
It came to a head when he started stealing. By this point, we’d both been banished to the ‘Public Bar’ area of the pub, which was mainly frequented by the hardcore drinkers who lived on the local council estate - Loz, for his general incompetence and frequently hostility to other staff, me as punishment, I suppose. Traffic in the bar was light enough that there was never more than one member of staff required, so we worked lone shifts. I can’t speak to Loz, but it suited me just fine - I got a lot of reading and smoking done.
 
The only problem was, we shared a till, and around the same time that Loz started showing up for his shift cataclysmicly stoned, money started going missing from that till. He was canny enough to make sure it only happened when he and I shared a shift. The first time, it got written up as a mistake, but the second time, we were both called in by the covering manager (the landlord was on holiday). I knew that for the shift in question I’d had at most half a dozen till interactions - the bar was dead from 12 - 6pm, when the workers would come in on their way home for a swift pint or six - and I knew damn well I’d not made any mistakes, let alone a £10 one. Loz, on the other hand, clearly still high, admitted he had made a £10 mistake, and so we were asked to pay back half the missing £20 each, to cover the till shortfall.
 
 In other words, I had just put £10 - the best part of three hours wages, in these pre-minimum wage days - into Loz’s pocket.
 
I was raging. I remember - oh to be 20 again - putting together a mix tape made up mainly of tracks from Metallica’s Load and Reload albums (with a smattering of the more aggressive Garage Inc. punk covers) which I listened to on the way to work every day, keying myself up for a confrontation. We’d moved to separate tills following the last incident, and we only saw each other at shift swap over, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before some confrontation happened - not least because I’d categorically decided I was done taking his shit, and I knew he wouldn't be able to resist dishing more out, sooner or later.
 
It was only a week or two later that it happened. Some guy had come around calling for Loz (the later gossip was it was someone Loz owed money to, but I never got that 100% confirmed) and I’d knocked on his door, as requested, to no response. Later he came at me raging, threatening violence if I ever went to his room again. I made it clear I was not going to pass on any more messages (the phrase ‘not your fucking errand boy’ may have been used) and also made it clear I wanted nothing more to do with him. This in front of a small handful of customers in the early afternoon - the lunchtime drinkers, I seem to recall.
 
That evening, as we had the 6pm handover, I was heading towards the urinal, when Loz called to me from the bar from under a dark glower ‘See you later’.
 
I paused, at the toilet door, just like in a bad western. Then I turned and said, with a shit eating grin, and my heart pounding so hard in my ears that I could barely hear my own voice ‘Take care of yourself, Loz!’
 
I said it loud.
 
With just a little extra swagger, feeling the eyes of the dozen or so regulars on me, I walked into the toilet. I can recall the adrenaline, but also an odd kind of ultra high, elevated calm. I felt ready for whatever was going to happen, and sure I was better prepared than Loz was capable of being.
 
I heard the door bang open just as I was starting to piss. He was yelling about what I’d said, and how I’d been off with him, and when he grabbed my shoulder to turn me around, I was calm enough to consider carefully whether or not to keep urinating and piss on his shoes or not. I opted for not, and tucked myself away as he continued shouting, flushed and angry.
 
I was calm, arms loosely by my side, Not listening to his words, focussed only on his eyes, and his shoulders, waiting for movement. I had set then what seems to me now a suicidal code of conduct when it came to violence, and the first rule was to never throw the first punch. It was partly about moral high ground, and partly because I believed it wasn’t possible to swing a blow without also making yourself vulnerable to a counter strike, and indeed, I had in the past had some success with just such a move.
 
So I waited, calmly, not backing down but not hitting his go button either, and eventually he made his move.
 
He was lethally quick. If he’d actually swung a fist with any kind of power, I’d likely still be out cold. But my confusing solid-but-not-aggressive stance had made him unsure, so instead he grabbed me around the waist - to push me back into the trough urinal, maybe. I was standing is a good, stable stance, so his efforts didn’t have much result.
 
We grappled for a second or two, my arm around his neck, his around my waist. I remember that the initial shock of his sheer speed had worn off, and I was just wondering if I could allow one of his pushes to bring his head into contact with the hand dryer behind me, when a regular who’d clearly realised what was going on came in and separated us.
 
I’ll never forget that moment. The man held us apart, and I looked into Loz’s flush face and furious eyes. I looked at him, and he looked at me. Into my eyes. And his expression dropped from fury into something else… and he just said, very quietly, ‘Oh!’.
 
It went to the replacement manager, and the regulars denied seeing anything - one word against another, nothing further to be done. Loz got a telling off, and after that, he really did leave me alone. I came out of the experience with a little more self respect, and a feeling like I could handle myself okay, if I had to - at least against a bully like Loz.
 
That was the first lesson in confrontation that I learned in that job. The second would come not from a member of staff, but a customer. The only real negative result of my confrontation with Loz was an aversion to Fahrenheit - the aftershave he wore, which was all over my hands after the fight, and the smell of which to this day sours my stomach.
 
The next one would teach me a little of what it feels like to face mortal terror at the hands of another.
 
To be continued…
 
KP
13/3/18

As I mentioned up top, this one got less play. Even back then, finding a full 90 minutes to listen was not easy, So much to do. But we got there often enough. I remember a skip in The Trial, one time, where the prosecution's down slide note into a verse kept repeating. That won’t happen tonight - I’ve cleaned up mum’s (or possibly dad’s) record, and the tone is clear as a bell, and warm as an oven.
 
The dynamics are amazing. I know for classical music fans, all this shit is old hat - themes that repeat with different pace or decoration, instrumentation, but I’m a rock and roller to the guts, and this stuff is, I suspect, as near as I’ll ever get to that transcendence that Ken Russell felt from his beloved composers. It sweeps me up and along, that’s all. The screaming sax in Is There Anybody Out There? Just made me shiver ,and now the acoustic guitar outro is making me feel like crying, and oh shit, here’s Nobody’s Home.
 
It’s desolate. And sure, he’s a rich, white rock star with the world at his feet, doing what he loves every night of his life, cry me a fucking river, I feel, you, I do… but I feel him too. I feel the yawning, gasping emptiness that owns the edges of everything, squeezing, flexing, crushing, you are alone, now and forever, welcome to the desperate hearts club, there’s only one way out and no-one ever comes back to tell you if it’s better or worse or nothing at all, and nothing might be better, but it might not, but here is now and now is fucking empty, and yes, yeah, I have felt it, I feel it, sure I do, once you’ve tasted from that river, it never entirely leaves you, it flows under everything and through you, cold and dark and mostly silent, but you’ll always feel the cold a little more than others, always want to be warm, because there’s that small part of you that will always be shivering and alone.
 
Critics hate Vera. Critics can kiss my arse. Twice. WWII was a gaping, bleeding, psychic wound on the landscape and minds of everyone who grew up in the immediate aftermath of it, and if your empathy is so malnourished that you can’t get to the desperate and pathetic nature of this plea… well, that’s okay, but don’t make an idiot out of yourself by decrying those of us who can, okay?
 
At least no-one is going to try and argue about Comfortably Numb. The only thing for me is the oddness of hearing it out of sequence, divorced from the whole. If there ever was an album that felt basically single proof, this one would have to be it - but, so it goes. It’s beautiful, and I think it’s hard to fully appreciate that beauty without (*humblebrag*) having heard it without comprehension - with no conception of the existence of words, let alone what they mean. Though, of course, then you’re left with a devastating shift as the guitar turns blue in the exquisite final section, and you might find yourself crying without knowing why, or feeling that painful swelling in your chest that has no words either.
 
Fitting that it fades to silence. End of side three.
 
I kind of marvel at my kid endurance. It just didn’t bother me, sitting and listening to 90 minutes of music in one sitting, outside forces permitting. I do remember being weirded out by the return of the albums opening riff on side four - loving it, but still, definitely thrown. Songs don’t get repeated, as a rule. And of course, the fact that the vocal doesn’t come in when it’s supposed to - something is wrong. Fever dream again - familiarity, but fractured, twisted into unfamiliarity. Am I supposed to sing along, fill in? Is it broken somehow?
 
And then the familiar lyric kicks in, but the drums tell you something’s gone wrong - confirmed when they build to take us back to the riff, and instead they don’t. We’re back to the strained angry vocal, and something is horribly, horribly wrong. When the riff does come back, I miss the aeroplane, the sense of explosion and chaos. This is far, far worse. The familiar rendered alien, and the crowd noise - are they cheering or screaming?
 
The next riff has a familiar tone and rhythm too, but it also quickly goes off program, dropping into something else. The kick of the bass drum feels like a punch, like a stomping boot. I’m somewhere between two and three years old, so obviously I have no fucking clue what’s really going on. Equally obviously to nearly-40-year-old me, I know exactly what the fuck is going on. I may not be able to articulate it, but I know where it counts.
 
Fuck fascism, and fuck fascists. Always and forever.
 
Oh, right, yeah, we’re in that 2018, aren’t we? A year where the story of a wealthy misanthrope and possible sociopath who embraces prejudice and builds a wall around himself to keep out the world of ‘undesirables’ - which basically translates to ‘anyone who doesn’t look and sound just like me, with a million or two in the bank’  - doesn’t sound so much like fictitious parable as it does presidential fucking biography.
 
Waiting For The Worms, infuckingdeed.
 
God help us.
 
Listening to it now, it’s skin crawling, obviously - but I think even back then, the sinister combination of the loud speaker vocal and the nightmare riff bleeding through the lullaby will have gotten to me. This is the sound I heard in my head as I watched Trump’s inauguration speech. If you ever wondered to yourself what you’d do, if you were a German in 1932… take a fucking look around. Time to shine.
 
Ah, The Trial.
 
I have a vivid memory - connected to the aforementioned skip, but that’s dangerously convenient - of pouring over the double gatefold of the album as I listened, seeing the cavorting barrister, and then looking over the others - The Mother, The Lover, my, look, all the baddies are women, how interesting - The Judge as a giant towering… well, arsehole. Literally. It seems likely my fascination with and repulsion from caricature art stems from this oft repeated moment. And then there’s the chorus about being crazy - the band still working through their seemingly endless guilt over Sid, obviously, but to my child self, was anything more horrifying than the concept of one’s own mind becoming the enemy, not to be trusted? There was not. If I’m honest, there still is not.
 
And then the verdict is delivered, and to the chanted demands of the crowd, The Wall is torn down.
 
And the lullaby from the beginning kicks in, as the rubble slowly settles.

Memory and imagination -both components of the same circuit- conspire powerfully to evoke senses of place for me; psychological landscapes in which I can conjure textural and sensory details such as the feeling of old clothes chafing, sweat on my face, soil between my fingers, wet grass under my feet...all so vivid, so real...
 
All fantasy, all stories, no matter how enduring or significant such details seem to be. A derivative of the same pheneomena that makes us cling to childhood memories so intently, conjuring days in which the Summer sun seemed brighter than it could ever possibly be, when colour was more vivid, smells more intense, pleasure less ambiguous and so on and so forth.
 
Edenic myths, gardens we never walked, save in dreams that insist on themselves. If we could somehow contrive to operate in the original situations again, to view them outside of our -apparently- recollected selves, we would find the reality to be very different from what memory paints; circumstances no more or less remarkable than any other, the qualities that make them especial contrived and distorted and embellished rather than actual or innate.
 
It therefore becomes a matter of storytelling rather than recollection when we recount the experiences that purportedly make us who and what we (fallaciously) presume to be, but also a fun imaginative exercise:
 
A place that has particular associations in my (for want of a better) “memory” has the quality of Aladdin's cave to the ghostly, child self that wanders there: a darkened room on the upper floor of a local shop, reached by a set of narrow stairs that wind perilously up through the building. Darkened, no windows, its walls, floor and ceiling black, pelted with something not unlike the fuzzy, itching carpet one sometimes finds in cars, what illumination it boasts consisting of purple hallogen strip-lights, casting a hazy, head-ache-inducing murk throughout.
 
I recall (RE: “imagine”) strange angles, the room not square or rectangular, but receding to odd points and vectors, one corner ridiculously narrow whereas others bloomed wide open (a definite delusion, the shop's upper floor consisting of perfectly symmetrical spaces of banal structure and dimension, as I have learned since), the back of the room seeming to recede into the distance at times, the space between it and the counter varying, depending on the child's state of mind when it wanders there.
 
Throughout the space, raised shelves, oddly shaped and proportioned (almost coffin-like, though what manner of corpse they might contain, I wouldn't like to conjecture), lined with every species and genre of VHS casette one could imagine (the walls similarly decorated). ​

That place...a Dario Argento scene, with its strange, ephemeral images, its distorted dimensions, its architecture that makes no logical sense to the ghost child's distorted perceptions...a sacred arena, a temple in memory and imagination, that sustains precisely because it was a place where imagination was fed and informed, where the excess of riches on display often bewildered and left breathless, where choice seemed impossible and lingering a joy.
 
A place that no longer exists, in any physical sense; the reality long since destroyed, along with the redundant medium it was constructed to celebrate. Now, the only place it exists is in the abstract arena of memory, the playgrounds of imagination; a place where the ghost child, its shades and siblings, can walk as and when they wish, which can be altered or re-written as and how they see fit, and no doubt will be even more than it already has in years to come. That will recur and express itself in stories, in mediums such as this, where the recollection of it seems so viscerally acute, the sensations and ethos it evoked so intense, I could close my eyes and wake there, no longer merely an abstract parasite in the brain of a dead child, but something other; a ghost in my own past, my own dreams, happy to experience those distortions again and again.

BY KIT POWER

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 – 30 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.
 
Whadaya Gonna Do?

 
It’s not like I don’t make plans. That wouldn’t be a fair observation at all.
 
It’s more just that life keeps happening.
 
Example: I have a list. My Life In Horror has a distinct shelf life, with a very definite end game, and a final essay I’ll almost certainly chicken out of writing, when the time comes. By the time I’m done, there will be 60 articles (and eventually, two books, is the plan), and we’re already over the halfway mark.
 
So, there’s a list. And, sure, it fluctuates. Things get added and, due to the finite nature of the project, that means other things have to come off. It’s a useful process, in a lot of ways - it forces me to focus a little, in a project that could otherwise become utterly and unforgivably indulgent - I have to keep asking myself, what are The Big Ones? Those moments, in childhood, as a teenager, in my twenties, that really got me where I lived, made me think, made me feel?
 
And this movie has been on and off the list from the very start.
 
There’s a lot to not recommend it for the project. It’s certainly not a horror movie, for starters (though regular readers will probably be chuckling at that - and no, you’re right, that’s never stopped me before). More seriously, the standard opening spiel just won’t fit. I can’t tell you how old I was, when and where, any of that. Truth to tell, though I’ve seen the movie a fair few times (being married to a woman who loves gangster movies has it’s perks), I really don’t have a clear picture in my head of much of the piece as a whole, if I’m honest. Though I know it’s not true, it feels quite a lot like a film I’ve only ever seen from the middle, tuned into halfway through and then been unable to tune away.
 
That said, there’s a reason I feel that way. There’s a gravitational pull about the back half of this one - a black hole of awfulness that seems to eat light and crush mass. Which I suppose explains how it stuck around as long as it did, and why it flickered so often, on and off, on and off, as other ideas jockeyed for attention.
 
Still, it had recently come off the list. I thought for good.
 
And then Frank Vincent died.
 
I was surprised by how upset I was. And then, not long after, suprised by my suprise. After all, he’d peopled some of my favourite art of… well, shit, my life, really. Raging Bull, Goodfellas…. And, of course, a show-stealing turn in the final couple of series of one of my Top 5 TV shows of all time, The Sopranos.
 
Sure, he was a character actor, and sure, the roles all had certain elements in common. That didn’t change the fact that he was there, and not only did he not let the side down, he was an amazing asset to whatever story he was a part of. He had everything you’d want - charm, ruthlessness, intelligence, pride, even arrogance, and an aura of power and menace. He may never had had the lead role, but he was always a powerful addition to any crew, always someone you felt you had to watch.
 
So, yeah, I was sad. And as I thought more about why, I thought about him telling Pesci to go home and get his fuckin shine box, and I thought about how he explained to Tony Soprano about how he’d ‘compromised’, the chilling fury juuuuuust under the surface. The look on his face when he finally cornered Vito in the hotel room.
 
Most of all, though, I thought about this movie.
 
I thought about Casino.
 
Now, if you’d taken a look at the list of things I was going to write about for this column, and you’d seen Casino, I’m betting that you’d nod and say to yourself ‘the vice scene’. Like Reservoir Dogs and the ear, it’s the kind of totemic cinema moment that was whispered about on the playground - ‘Oh my God, did you see the bit where he…?’
 
And I’m not going to deny how fucking horrible that scene is. Nor am I going to deny how utterly gruesome the emotional car wreck of Rothstein's marriage to Ginger is, Sharon Stone and De Niro knocking it out of the park with their merciless, unflinching portrayal of a poisoned, poisonous relationship.
 
As you’ll know, if you’ve seen the film, there’s all of that and more - brutality upon brutality, and misery feeding misery.
 
It’s all true, but none of that is why this movie sat on my list for so long, or why we’re talking about it now.
 
We’re talking about this fucking movie because of the climax in the wheatfield, and the execution of Nicky Santoro and his brother.
 
Nicky - played by Pesci - has been pretty much vileness personified the entire movie. He’s cheated and murdered and murdered and tortured his way all across Nevada and back. The head-in-a-vice scene? Nicky was the one cranking the handle.
 
Nicky is unrepentant. Nicky is irredeemable. Nicky is self destruction in an expensive yet still tasteless suit. Which would be sort-of fine, if he wasn’t also such a voracious, malevolent cancer for everyone who comes into contact with him.
 
By the closing of the movie, even he realises he’s going to be persona non grata in Vegas for the rest of his life. Too many hits, too many missing people, just too fucking much. He understands this. In voiceover, he accepts it. And as the scene opens, he’s driving up a dirt track in a corn field. The corn is tall - eight, ten feet maybe. The track leads to a clearing at the end. There’s a few cars, maybe a dozen mobsters waiting. Nicky’s crew.
 
With them, Nicky’s right hand man - the man who's been by his side throughout his decades of carnage. The man who lied to the big bosses about Nicky’s transgressions - covered for him when he was fucking his best friends wife.
 
The man’s name is Frank Marino. Played by Frank Vincent.
 
As they drive up, Nicky explains the score to us, in voiceover, in that same arrogant, hectoring voice he’s used throughout the movie. Sure, Vegas is too hot for him, so he’s here with his brother, to hand over the reins. He’s going to introduce him around, make sure the gang - his gang, Nicky’s people - know what’s what. As he and his brother get out of the car, and the group starts to huddle around them, he says, to us, ‘what’s right is right…’
 
And then, mid sentence, there’s a dull clunk, and he says ‘Oww!’.
 
He drops to his knees, clutching his head, a look of stunned confusion on his face.
 
My stomach drops right with him. An express elevator, going all the way down.
 
Two of them grab Nicky’s arms, hold him down on his knees. They grab his brother, drag him away. His brother is yelling, furious, scared, ‘You rat bastards!’.
 
They force Nicky’s head up. Nicky looks.
 
He looks at his brother. Maybe the only other human being on the planet Nicky has any genuine feelings for. Helpless. Trapped. Yelling.
 
He looks up, eyes following the baseball bat, up to the impassive face of Frank.
 
His friend. His right hand man.
 
Frank looks back at him. And his face…his face is a mask.
 
Nicky - this sociopath, this monster, this vile brutal killer, hardened by a lifetime of unchecked fury and sadism…  Nicky starts to beg.
 
Frank nods, once. Then he swings the bat.
 
The bat falls again and again. Others join in. The sound is relentless - metal colliding with meat. Nicky sobs. He tries to look away. They won’t let him.
 
By the time they stop, his brother is unrecognisable - his face a mask of blood, his body shattered. Nicky, sobbing, keeps begging. ‘Please, he’s strong, he’s still breathing, leave him…’ Begging Frank. Frank looks at him. ‘Yeah?!?’ He brings down the bat once more on Nicky’s brother's skull.
 
He walks over to Nicky, now just begging, the same word ‘please’, over and over, a broken machine. Frank shows him his brother’s ragged, still breathing form once more. Then he swings the bat at Nicky’s head.
 
The cuts start to fracture now, as the attacks rain down on Nicky. Freeze framing, then cutting forward - as though we’re sharing the concussive effects of the blows with our former narrator. Finally, De Niro comes in on voice over, telling us what we already know - that Nicky had taken it too far, and that an example was made.
 
As the bodies are stripped, torsos blue and purple from their battering, as the two no-longer-men are thrown into a hole in the ground, there’s a final, gut twisting moment. As a shovel of dirt falls over the blood basked faces, a puff of breath from one of the broken jaws disturbs the soil, sending it out in a plume.
 
“They buried them alive”, De Niro intones, just in case your mind is somehow refusing the information your eyes are sending it.
 
And sure, it’s horrific on a number of levels. The sadism of it reaches levels even Nicky couldn’t - yes, he trapped a man’s head in a vice to get information from him, and he murdered lots of people… but battering a loved one beyond repair in front of someone, forcing them to watch, in the knowledge that they are next - and, crucially, that there is nothing they can do to stop it, escape it, even hasten the outcome? Even for a sick fuck like Nicky, that is some next level brutality.
 
And let’s not forget the extra/meta-textual fuckery that Scorcese pulls, here. Every time I think about that voiceover being interrupted by the thunk of a bat, and the surprised ow that follows, the hairs on my arm stand up - and not in a good way. It’s a rule of cinema so iron clad, so ingrained, we think of it not at all, never examine or question it. And then he oh-so casually violates it, in a moment absolutely calculated to deliver maximum shock. It’s a bold, punk, brutal, unfair moment of unbridled cinema genius, and I cannot immediately think of a better example of understanding just when, and how, and how hard you can break the rules, providing that you are doing so with a purpose. It’s also a trick that can probably only be done once - but fuck me, what a moment.
 
So there’s that. And there’s also the fact that it plays on the mind, long after it’s done. Because, dig it: It’s a lesson for who, exactly? Nicky? His brother? They are going in the ground and they ain’t coming back. If the lesson is for them, a bullet would do the job.
 
No, this horror show is to send a message. But to who? The men who did this would have to be very fucking careful who they talked to about it. Orders came from on high, sure, but still, loose lips sink ships. They will talk, of course - worse than a sewing circle, as a future moll will memorably put it, in a movie that may or may not make a future column, as the list shifts and the last 30 move inexorably to the last 20 and I need to make some very tough evaluations about what, exactly, fucked me up the most - still, it’s not something you’d exactly feel good bragging about, I don’t think.
 
No, the real horror is this: the message is for each other. For Nicky’s whole crew.
 
And the message is: fuck up like your friend did, and this is what your friends will do to you.
 
Which brings us back to Frank. Nicky’s right hand man, who has protected and enabled and shielded and covered, again and again.
 
Frank Marino. Played by Frank VIncent. His face a mask, as he meets Nicky’s eyes. Telling him everything he needs to know about what the rest of his short life will consist of. There’s little emotion - either regret or rage, sorrow or anger.
 
But there is something. Something glittering, deep down in those eyes. Something dark and strong and real.
 
It’s a look I will never, ever forget. It’s a look that will haunt me, as long as I draw breath.
 
Here’s to you, Frank Vincent.
 
Here’s to you.
 
KP
15/9/17 

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 – 30 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.
 
There’s No Real Magic, Ever
 
The following was, in part, informed by a far longer and more wide ranging conversation I had with the excellent Daniel Harper, as part of the recent Wrong With Authority footnote podcast. For (much) more, including discussion of other movies by the same director, see here: 
 
Because here’s the deal: the second your kid has a TV in their room - or, shit, a PC/iPad - any device that can connect to broadcast medium, the war is over. You waved the white flag. They can pour literally anything into their brains, now. Whatever human horror you can conceive, they can watch, in 1080 resolution. And almost certainly in porn parody form. All you can do is hope that whatever you’ve given them to that point, whatever you’ve nurtured inside them, will be enough for them to tell right from wrong, know their own limits, to survive whatever cultural assault they’re about to self inflict.
 
Truly, hope. That’s all you’ve got.
 
Do you know it, as a parent? Sure you do. As long as you remember being a kid, how could you not?
 
No internet in the bedroom for this kid. Back when I were a boy, dinosaurs roamed the earth, and the internet only existed to tell a computer scientist in some posh university that the kettle in the other room had boiled.
 
All I had was a black and white portable TV (with, crucially, a headphone socket) in my room that I’d bought from a neighbour for the princely sum of £25, and the 4 terrestrial channels it could pick up.
 
Turns out, that was plenty.
 
I’m pretty sure I can trace back my lifelong issues with maintaining a sleep pattern, and in particular my seemingly chronic inability to get to sleep on a Friday night prior to 2am even now, at 39, back to that giant heavy lump of plastic, wire and glass.
 
There was this program called Raw Power, see. On at 3am, it was the only broadcast show in the UK dedicated to rock and metal. Every week, it sat there in the listings, a mortal challenge to my tired pre-teen arse - you want the life source? Gotta stay up late.
 
And more often than not, I did.
 
But we’re not here to talk about Raw Power (or the replacement show Noisy Mothers). Nope, this is about what I’d sometimes end up watching while completing my lonely vigil to the hallowed hour of 3am.
 
This is about Channel 4 running a series of previously banned or censored films, and the night I’d catch one that would cut me deep enough that, even on a recent rewatch, I’d still find myself stunned by it’s power, it’s darkness.
 
We need to talk about Martin.
 
The film opens with a woman getting on a train. She’s beautiful. She’s being followed by a strange looking young man. He’s… not ugly, but odd. My 11/12/13 year old mind latches onto him instinctively. I talk a bit about this on the podcast above, and also, obliquely, here: To rehearse the argument, I, like I suspect 95% of the rest of the population, was an awkward kid. I knew I liked girls - even at 11, I knew that. But I was, as is normal, not equipped emotionally or biologically to really know what that meant, or to do anything about it.
 
And yet, I yearned.
 
I was drawn to girls I perceived to be pretty or beautiful. I wanted to be someone’s boyfriend, without knowing that meant or could mean any more than holding hands, (or maybe, in a fever dream, a kiss on the lips). I guess that innocence is something to be grateful for - I wonder how many post-internet children get to stay that innocent, that long.
 
Still, I felt... Something. And I couldn’t understand it or explain it, but thanks to pop culture, I knew what it was called: love.
 
So I loved. A lot. From a distance, after a couple of utterly crushing instant rejections. I loved, and I yearned to be loved, and I didn’t have a fucking clue what any of it meant.
 
So then there’s this boy. And the title card helpfully tells us he’s called Martin. And he looks at the pretty girl, just like I look at pretty girls, knowing they do not, will not, look back.
 
He finds out where she’s sleeping - it’s a sleeper train, which I know all about, on account of being a male child in Britain in the 80’s and this chap called James Bond.
 
Then he goes into a bathroom. Opens a wash kit, which contains razor blades, syringes, and drugs. He fills a syringe with fluid. And between Bond and Casualty, I know what’s going on here - he’s going to drug the girl, knock her out. It’s what the baddies do in Bond films, like, a LOT.
 
Only he’s Martin. He’s not a baddie - almost can’t be, he’s practically still a kid, very childlike, and there are not bad kids in movies, ever.
 
Until now.
 
Because, of course, Martin goes to her carriage, and after a brief black and white shot (which even at the time I read to be his imagining what was happening behind the door, the pretty girl in a nightgown calling his name), he breaks in and attacks her, drugs her, struggles with her until she passes out, then strips her naked, has sex with her, and for an encore takes a razor to her wrist and drinks her blood.
 
We’ve yet to pass the ten minute mark.
 
The assault is horrific, by the way. It’s a scene that would have to make most women’s top 3 worst nightmares, I’d have thought. She physically fights him off, he wrestles her to the ground. She panics as the drug starts to take effect, pleading to be told what it is, and he gives gentle calm assurances that he’s ‘careful’, that she’ll just fall asleep and then wake up again.
 
And the worst part is, you believe him.
 
No. the worst part is; I believed him.
 
And sure, it’s an amazing performance. John Amplas is all big eyes, sad vulnerability. Even when he’s telling her not to scream, it comes out as pleading - as though he’s more concerned about her inner panic than the chance of getting caught. That apparent empathy for his victim is so sincerely delivered that, first time around, I was half convinced he meant it, that this was all some kind of misunderstanding.
 
This is where we must pause, and admire the horror of the moment. Because as a young woman is drugged, raped and murdered, my 11 year old boy brain is centered, not on her and her terror, pain, and violation, but on the apparent ‘sensitivity’ of her attacker.
 
 
Because fucking hell, George Romero, man.
 
And look, sure - this is not a movie for 11 year olds. Emphatically not. But just take a look at some of the cultural criticism made of this movie, and you’ll see variations of this theme, again and again - however much the male critics know what’s going on is sick, wrong, evil… there’s this massive sympathy, bordering on identification, with Martin.
 
Do we see more of Martin? Sure we do. A lot more, The movie is, in a sense, his life story. We get to see the different sides to him, his struggle to fit in, his possibly-crazed family situation.The performance opens up like a flower, and the rest of the cast is superb, and there’s a home invasion sequence which, I agree with Daniel Harper, should be taught in film school, as an example of what you can achieve on a low budget with enough skill, vision, and editing skills.
 
Still, though, the film starts with a basically contextless assault, sex crime, and murder.
 
And it was Martin my mind went to.
 
I’ve mentioned before here that I was raised feminist, and some of what that meant. Like I said up top - parents do their best, then set you loose and hope. And between you and me, I think mum did a pretty fucking good job.
 
But Martin happened. And at the time, I thought it was a brilliant movie, but also at the time I didn’t have the tools necessary to realise just what a monstrous, incredible feat of filmmaking it represented.
 
There’s this saying that I absolutely hate, that goes like this; porn tells lies about women and the truth about men. Well, fuck that gender essentialist bullshit, and fuck you if you believe it.
 
But. And. Also.
 
I think no matter how well we are raised, there’s a wider culture. And while it’s vibrant and messy and complex and multifaceted and self contradictory and even often in argument with itself, there are a metric shit-ton of untested assumptions that underpin a lot of it, about gender and what being a man means and what being a woman means. And as much as I recoil in horror from the notion of objectification, the idea that we can see another human being not as a funhouse mirror of ourselves, but instead as a thing to be enjoyed or consumed…
 
Well, there’s 11 year old me. Watching Martin. Watching Martin rape and murder a girl, and thinking only about Martin.
 
Martin was George Romero’s favourite of his own movies, according to the always-reliable wikipedia entry on the subject. I have no idea if it’s true or not, but I believe it. Certainly of all his works, it’s by far and away my favourite.
 
Not - to be crystal clear- because Romero was any kind of misogynist or rape apologist or objectifier of women. That’s the very opposite of what I believe.
 
No, because he knew how to make a movie that would force us - us men - to examine that part of ourselves that is capable of objectification. He did it in the way that’s true genius - they way that makes you slap your forehead and say ‘well, of COURSE!’
 
He makes the protagonist like you. Like virtually any male that’s ever lived. A child, yearning. Reaching for something he cannot understand, but craves. Desire, without understanding. ‘Love’ without awareness.
 
Hunger with only a facsimile of compassion.
 
I love the Dead movies, and The Crazies. And I know that, with Night..., Romero damn near invented a genre of horror fiction that is, at this point, probably a billion dollar entertainment industry. And honestly, as much as I love good zombie fiction, for my money nobody has ever beaten the source for sheer visceral impact. He was a monumental talent, a world class storyteller, and by all accounts, a lovely man in person, too.
 
But for my money, if the only movie he’d ever made was Martin, he’d still deserve the mantle of genius.
 
It’s that fucking good.
 
 And so was he.
 
KP
1/9/17