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 I've
always loved
horror.
Ever since I was a little kid. While my friends got their jollies
pawing the pages of
Superman
and
The
Beano, I'd
opt for creepier material like DC's Secrets of the Haunted House and
House of Mystery. Nothing else captured my imagination as intensely
as those strange, supernatural tales of monsters, ghosts and demons,
a fact that became increasingly apparent in my English homework. I
remember, when I was seven or eight, being asked to write a story
about anything I liked, to be read out in class the next day. After
a great deal of thought I decided to tell the tale of a gruesome
underground disaster. I even called my cousin Ronald, four years my
senior and the fount of all knowledge, to ask how long it would take
a man who'd been cut to ribbons by shattered glass to bleed to
death. I needed to know how long he'd be able to crawl along the
platform before running out of gas, so to speak. Not that long, as
it turned out. My story finished, I returned to school and performed
my masterpiece. That night, I was sent home with a letter asking my
mum if everything was ok at home.
When I
was eleven we got our first VCR, a huge thing with chunky buttons
that I loved more than life itself. Suddenly I was free to watch
what I wanted, when I wanted, and the guy down my local video store had no problems
renting horror to kids. King
Kong and the Universal
Monsters I'd seen on TV. What I wanted was a little more grown
up. The more inappropriate the better. I remember watching Damien:
Omen 2 with my cousin Justin. The scene we liked the best was
the bit when the doctor gets torn to pieces in the crashing
elevator. We'd rewind that death and watch it over and over again.
That film brought out the ghoul in me, and I still adore it today.
The first time I saw it though, it really did my head in. All that
ancient, unstoppable evil. It made me nervous. Only after hiding a
toy gun under my pillow was I able to get to sleep. I'm not sure
what good it would have done had Satan come for me that night, but
to my young mind it was an adequate protective
measure. 
It takes a lot to
scare me these days, but given the right movie and suitable viewing
conditions, I can still feel my heart racing. Saw
was the last thing that really blew me away. So nasty. So inventive.
Gore Verbinski's Ring
remake is also, I think, a bit of a masterpiece. Far more suited to
my Western tastes than the original version. And 28
Days Later filled me with such an inescapable sense of dread
that it still makes me shiver whenever I think of it. John
Carpenter, Wes
Craven, Dario
Argento and George
Romero are like gods to me. Directors who have devoted their
lives to scaring our pants off. And since it would be inappropriate
to end this week's column without a bit of a list, here are my
all-time favourite fright
flicks: Alien,
An
American Werewolf in London, Braindead,
Dawn
of the Dead (the original of course, though the remake's
not bad), the entire Evil
Dead trilogy, Friday
The 13th Parts 1
and 2,
Fright
Night, Halloween,
Jaws,
A
Nightmare on Elm Street Parts 1, 3 and 7, Omen's
1 & 2, Prince
of Darkness and Silence
of the Lambs.
There's so much more horror that I'd like
to bang on about but I've run out of space so I'll save it for
another time. Besides, I wanted to give a shout out to sci
fi and fantasy
this week as well, since the third season of Smallville
is now available for you to add to your lists. And though I'm a Star
Trek man myself, the time may have come for me to open my mind
to the pleasures of Stargate, both SG-1
and Atlantis.
Just because I didn't like the original
movie is no reason to ignore its superior
spin-offs. See you next week, providing the monsters don't get
you!
See you next week!
Marshall
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Fortune Favors The Bald From one baldie
to another. Blockbuster's Marshall Julius takes a trip to
Smallville to interview Superman's future nemesis Lex Luthor.
Evil's never looked so good!
Read
our Michael Rosenbaum
Interview.
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"Well why don't you go upstairs and book
a conference room. Maybe you can talk him to death."
Guess
The Film
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