My general dispostion when watching a horror film is one of enthusiasm and joy. Typical behaviour includes hysterical laughter when a flesh eating beast bites off somebody's fingers, or bouncing up and down, pointing at the screen whenever there are zombies. It may come as a surpise to anyone who has experienced a scary movie in my company to know that it was not always thus. In fact, the truth is this: I used to be very, very scared of horror films.
In the early 1980s I was a nervous and insular child, scared of almost everything. And I mean everything. Old people, young people, trees, the sky, breakfast cereals, insects, bits of fluff that might be insects... everything. And I soon found that, as if the world did not contain terrors enough, some vile peddlars of fear had decided to make films with the express intention of making me piss myself into oblivion.
Clearly I avoided these things as best I could, fleeing in terror if the television looked like it might be about to vomit some hideous tale of monsters into my mind. Fate, however, had other ideas. By some confluence of economic, technological and societal factors, the onset of my childhood anxiety coincided exactly with the advent of the home video recorder. My dad had just started working at Rediffusion - cutting edge home entertainment supplier - and one day he came home with two things: in his hands a shiny new VCR, and on his face a mental grin that I had hitherto associated with alcohol.
The first - and in all honesty only - thought that went though my head was 'Hurrah - I never have to miss Doctor Who again.' (The previous year I had sulked all the way through Raiders of the Lost Ark at the cinema because I was missing part 4 of Doctor Who - The Visitation. In retrospect, my priorities were perhaps in need of some refinement.) I was most excited at the idea of videoing Doctor Who and watching it endlessly, repeatedly, forever, until I died.
My dad had other ideas. To him the VCR was a wonderful new device with which to torture his eldest and most disappointing son. Every night he brought a fresh stack of terrifying films home from work to insert into the yawning, evil maw of the Betamax. And what films! This was the early 80s, remember, in that brief but astonishing period when there was no regulation for the video industry, and so all manner of nightmares clawed their way onto magnetic tape. Barely 24 months would pass before a number of these films would be banned outright, but for now they were all free to roam the land, crawling into my house, my television and my dreams.
Many fearful monstrosities flickered their fuzzy way across the screen in those months. Michael Myers was present, though not yet beloved. Zombies of all shapes and sizes. Men with axes, drills, machetes. All glimpsed briefly as I hurried back to the comforts of a Dalek paperback in my bedroom, muffled screams and 80s synths chasing me up the stairs.
Grandaddy of them all, though, was The Evil Dead. Possibly the most concisely and brilliantly named film ever (unless Bikini Ski School is any good, I never got round to renting it), Sam Raimi's masterpiece became the poster child for the video nasty scandals of the mid 80s. It was famously withdrawn from rental shops, lest it corrupt the brains of those watching. And though I now deplore the weak-minded reasoning that went into banning the film, my twelve year old self was all in favour of such knee-jerk moral conservatism. Yes, ban the thing. Make it go away. I'd seen a clip of it, in which a woman's leg went all spider-webby and she started cackling and her eyes went weird. For weeks afterwards I literally could not sleep, staring at the foot of my bed where I expected the demonic visage to rise up any moment. Whatever needed to be done to protect the children - me - was a good thing. Damn the long term aesthetic consequences. Withdraw it!
Well, as it turned out, my dad was in charge of withdrawing it from Rediffusion, and he withdrew it to our house. Great. So now this giggling horde of demons was living in a plastic case under the VCR in the living room. The tape itself seemed like a living thing - or perhaps more properly an undead thing. I hardly dared touch it. My brother, who has always been way cooler than me and was instantly fine with the film, used to chase me about with it when arguments got out of hand. Tosser.
And the, one day, The Evil Dead changed my life forever. I was in by myself, and I was bored. I went into the living room, picked up the tape, and looked at the monster. What would happen, I wondered, if I just watched the thing? Now? With massive trepidation I inserted the cassette, sat down, watched the thing from start to finish and fell in love with horror films.
The Evil Dead is brilliant, and funny, and scary, and horrific. There is something about it that I find profoundly disturbing, even now. It is, in places, truly horrible and it deals with demonic possession in a way that knows no boundaries. It is not a film I would freely recommend to all comers. Some will find it gratuitous and unnecessarily nasty. It is well made, but in a very different way to the cinematic craftmanship of Halloween. This is a kind of insane, primal film-making that has rarely been seen since, and it is deservedly regarded as a classic of the genre.
Halloween is an interesting time for me. It used to be a time when I was genuinely scared of the supernatural. Part of me is still afraid, and fascinated, by the idea of a world just underneath the one we see, and of a time when the walls between the two worlds are thinner than normal. I like to remember the scared child I used to be, and I hope he hasn't gone away completely. Films like the Evil Dead remind me of him, and that is, I think, a good thing.
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