Something wicked this way comes...

Thursday, October 30th, 2014

Halloween. Or, more accurately, Hallowe'en. Or, most accurately, All Hallows' Evening. A celebration of all that is spooky and dark and scary and twisted. Some people might think it distasteful to celebrate a day that wallows in death in such a way, but you know what? I love it!
I love Hallowe'en more than Christmas, more than any birthday I've ever had or ever will have. I'm not one of those people who dresses up, knocks on doors and scares the living statins out of little old ladies, but I do love a good scare. Fear is one of the basic emotions, and it makes you feel very alive to be scared. Especially when it's all artifice, as Hallowe'en is. Obviously, if there really was a crazed knifeman banging on my window to get in, and it was the height of summer, I'd be as petrified as the next serial killer victim.
Many years ago, when Gareth and I were in the pubescent stages of our relationship, we used to mark Hallowe'en night by settling down and watching a spooky horror film.
But that tradition has grown over the years, and these days we have expanded to marking what we've labelled Hallowe'ek - seven days of spooky goings-on!

American Horror Story: Coven.
Not one for ophidiophobes.
Or, indeed, gynophobes

To mark Hallowe'ek we choose a selection of supernatural and horror genre titles we'd like to be entertained and spooked by and watch them each night, leading up to the day itself. We usually watch American Horror Story (one of the most twisted and unsettling shows on TV at the moment) and almost always break out the M R James adaptations, whether they be the Ghost Stories for Christmas from the 1970s (by far the best supernatural television ever committed to videotape) or the various other interpretations that have emerged over the years. My supernatural archive television collection brimmeth over!
Although this year life seems to have got in the way of Hallowe'ek somewhat, we're still doing our best to uphold the tradition. Last night we watched the 1982 John Carpenter film The Thing - visceral, gory, gooey and thoroughly entertaining (how I wish Carpenter could get his mojo back - it's been lost for decades now). We're also wading through American Horror Story: Coven (Jessica Lange at her crazed best) and have been dipping into the 1986 M R James readings for TV by Robert Powell too.
The crowning glory of Hallowe'ek 2014 will be seeing two productions at The Lowry in Salford Quays (regular readers will know that place is my second home!).
First of all we're seeing The House That Stank of Death (Volume 4), a "unique multi-media comedy/ horror experience featuring short plays and films which will make you scream with terror and laughter". I love the alternative stuff they put on in the Studio at The Lowry, so this should be a real treat (or trick).

Secondly, we're seeing a faithful reading of M R James's Casting the Runes by Nunkie Theatre Company's Robert Lloyd Parry. I've seen Robert recreate James's fireside readings before, and he really does bring the essence of telling a ghost story to its unsettling fundaments - it's just him in period costume, in a big leather armchair, and the whole studio theatre illuminated by candlelight alone.
And it is M R James's expertly crafted words which lift the hairs on the back of the neck: "He put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow. Only it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth. With teeth. And with hair about it. And, he declares, not the mouth of a human being..."
Shudder!
And I have other spooky films lined up too: Hammer's The Plague of the Zombies (one of their B-movies which really exceeded the main feature at the time); the silent German Expressionist horror Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari; and Jack Clayton's 1967 overlooked spook-fest Our Mother's House.
So what are my favourite Hallowe'en films of all time, I fail to hear you scream? Well, one of my favourite films of all time, of any genre, is 1963's The Haunting with Claire Bloom and Julie Harris. If you've never seen it, seek it out. It's by far the spookiest, eeriest, most unsettling ghost story I've ever seen committed to celluloid... and the scariest thing is, you never see anything. But my God does it give you the willies!

Michael Myers from Halloween

On the other end of the spooky scale, I think John Carpenter (it's that man again!) produced the best modern day horror flick with the original Halloween in 1978. The direction is flawless, the music really gets under the skin and the terrifying creation at the heart of the film - namely, Michael Myers - is, to me, the fictional embodiment of my nightmares. That face, that mask... That point of view shot at the start of the film. Yes, the ultimate slasher film for me, and Carpenter was quite right when he said there should never have been any sequels. With a few exceptions (which I could probably count on the fingers of one gnarled hand), sequels are never a very good idea.
What's that I hear? The chiming of a distant clock telling me it's time to get to bed... or my coffin!

Me, when I wake up in the morning...

Bad dreams in the night...

Wednesday, March 5th, 2014

Me. Exactly me.

I had a bad dream last night. I don't have them very often - or at least I very rarely remember them - and neither do I like having them. Dreams, good or bad, unsettle me, because it demonstrates to me that the unconscious mind has a power over me, that my mind does things I cannot control, and I don't like that thought.
When I was a child I used to have a recurring nightmare which makes little sense to me now, and I've always wondered what it meant. I was in a vast empty black void, but standing on a train track which crisscrossed many other tracks shooting off into the inky nothingness in lots of different directions.
Then, thundering towards me along one track came a giant ball of what I can only describe as Plasticine or clay, intent on crushing me. I would shout "Press the button! Turn the switch!" out loud in my sleep, prompting my mum or dad to rush in and wake me up to stop the nightmare.
I had this quite often for a period of time, always ending, like a Doctor Who cliffhanger, with me shouting to press the button and make it stop. Weird.
Last night's bad dream really did feed into something buried deep in my psyche from childhood. When I was a schoolboy in the 1980s they used to show us schools programmes on the TV - Look and Read, Middle English, that kind of stuff - and they used to have a serialised story called Interference, which absolutely terrified me as a nine-year-old.
It was about a family which went away to stay in a cottage for the summer holidays but discovered that there were problems with the electricity and at night the power would go off. It transpired there was a ghost in the generator in the cellar, and it would manifest in different ways, most pant-wettingly of all as a scarcely-glimpsed crying face of an old woman through the interference on the television screen (even though there was no power to the TV!).
Last night's bad dream involved Gareth and I going to a cottage in the countryside to visit what I seem to recall from the dream were supposed to be quite an odd couple, a man and his wife.
Then the dream started twisting and changing, as they do, until people and situations changed and the cottage became my mum and dad's house, and the odd couple became my parents (I think - even as I type it's fading!).
For some reason I then tried to discover if my mum and dad's house was haunted by asking out loud if there was any spirit in the room, and we established that there was the spirit of a young boy.
I asked whether the ghost boy had been haunting my mum for some time, and then a scratchy moving image of a young boy's face came up on the portable TV, in and out of a haze of interference, and it answered each of my questions my making the interference hiss loudly.
I asked: "Have you been with my mum for a year or more?"
The TV hissed.
"Have you been with her for two years or more?"
It hissed again. My mum was now getting quite hysterical with fear, with the though that she'd been followed by the ghost of a little boy for all this time.
I asked: "Have you been with her for three years or more?"
It hissed again. At this point we all got really spooked because, in the dream at least, it was a fact that my parents hadn't been in this house that long, so the ghost had obviously followed them there from somewhere else!
It was at this point that I was woken from my bad dream by Gareth moaning loudly in his sleep, obviously having a bad dream of his own. I nudged him to disturb him from his nightmare, and when we both woke properly a few hours later I asked him if he remembered having a nightmare. Sadly, he didn't, but I do wonder whether he was "sharing" my bad dream in some way.
Needless to say I won't be telling my mum about this incident, but it demonstrates the reason why I really don't like dreams and nightmares. They are uncontrollable within us, like demons of the mind.