By Nia Edwards-Behi
I wasn’t a horror ‘fan’ as a child, per se. I certainly didn’t have anything against the genre. However, I was an avid fan of the Goosebumps series of books. More than that, I’m fairly certain that the Goosebumps series was my first contact with the horror genre. I know I read a lot of them, but only a few of the titles still stick in my memory – namely, Piano Lessons Can Be Murder, because, at the time, I was learning to play the piano, got a bit stuck at that awkward grade 3 point and hated it. The catchiest titles – Say Cheese and Die! or Night of the Living Dummy – are the ones I remember, and even now if I look through a list of titles I barely remember many of the others. I suspect this has more to do with my terrible memory than the quality of the books themselves, which I know I adored. I once read nine Goosebumps books in one day. My dad was going away for a few weeks, so I’d had the day off school so I could see him off, and so spent the whole day reading Goosebumps. The covers, though, I do remember quite well. They all had the same ‘goo’ background, in garish colours, and with raised bits so they were a bit more gross. A striking illustration was always in the middle of the cover for each individual story. I remember the publishers ran a competition to design the cover for The Barking Ghost, which I entered, and frankly my design was much better than what they finally used (except for maybe the fact that I couldn’t really draw all that well). Although it was a long while before I got into horror proper, and in all honesty I still haven’t read all that much horror literature, I do think that Goosebumps set me up well.
On the whole, though, my tastes when I was younger were, shall we say, a bit more conventional. I did however, often and increasingly dip my toes into the world of nerdery and that allowed more frequent exposure to horrific(ish) content.
Perhaps my slow start in horror had a lot to do with the fact that I was a massive wimp. In some regards, I still am, but some of the things that frightened me when I was younger, as outlined here, are just plain embarrassing. Some of my esteemed colleagues at BaH were reading Poe at a young age, and then there was me, cacking bricks reading Sweet Valley High: The Christmas Ghost.*
I have it on good authority that Disney’s Snow White terrified me when I was tiny. Not so much the actually scary bit, where Snow White first gets lost in the woods, either, but it was just the Wicked Witch in her old lady guise. Now, I confess I don’t directly remember Snow White scaring me, but I’m told it had to be switched off on various occasions. Now, Disney films can indeed be quite scary, so I’m not too ashamed of this one. The Disney film that most definitely scared me the most, though, was Fantasia. I’m a very big fan of Fantasia. It’s no doubt got some hand in my persistent love of classical music. In fact, I still think that the concluding Night on Bare Mountain segment of the film is a really effective bit of spooky animation. It took me a long time to get that far into the film as it was the Rite of Spring section which scared me silly. No, not the extinction of the dinosaurs, their various forms wiped from the face of the Earth, but the bit where the T-Rex hunts the other dinosaurs and then kills the poor Stegosaurus. I was big fan of dinosaurs when I was little (who wasn’t?), so eventually I got over my overuse of the fast-forward button and confronted the full horror of planet-wide extinction. It goes to show the effectiveness of that film, though – as a fan of the Rite of Spring both as a piece of music and as a dance work, the dinosaurs’ dance of death was a wonderful adaptation of it. Skip forward several years and I sat, completely enraptured, if not so much scared, watching Jurassic Park, a sandwich forgotten in my hand, but massive fingerprints left in the bread from my enthralled death grip.
Although by my early teens I had become a full-blown TV nerd (yes, one of those ones), before The X-Files ever got half a chance to scare me silly (more on that later), it was Strange But True that left me quivering behind a cushion. Generally, I know I really enjoyed the programme. I remember one episode which included an account of a haunted hotel of some sort, and a woman hearing footsteps on stonework out in the corridor, only to later realise the corridor was completely carpeted. Shudder. The episode I remember having to have switched off, though, was one about poltergeist recordings and white noise. NOPE. To this day, such recordings scare me silly.
Before becoming a horror fan I was most definitely a sci-fi geek. The main reasons for this were Star Trek and The X-Files. Before I became a fan of The X-Files proper, though, I would occasionally catch the odd episode when it aired on the BBC. One episode in particular freaked me out, namely Detour from season 5. In it, Mulder and Scully get lost in the woods while investigating a murder, and find themselves hunted by mothmen, who have glowing red eyes and damn good camouflage. I watched this episode with a friend from school, and after the episode my dad drove us to take her back home. Being the joker that he is, he proceeded to pretend the car broke down. Now, in a built up area this might not have been effective, but on a pitch black Welsh B-road, when the car slows down and the lights go off, it’s a bit bloody scary. Luckily, I knew he was joking quite quickly. Probably for the best, otherwise I might have been a bit more traumatised by the prank. The episode remains effective, and one of my favourites, and provided the inspiration for my current internet pseudonym, thanks to one Agent Carla Stonecypher. You might wonder how the heck Star Trek managed to scare me, but it did. It was one of the films, First Contact, that did it. The Borg. The Borg! I’m not sure I’d seen The Borg on the TV show prior to seeing the film, but they did scare me so much that I had to ask for all the lights to be switched on upstairs before I’d willingly venture up to bed. You know. In case there were cyborg aliens up there wanting to assimilate me.
Luckily, by the time I hit my teens and started watching stuff like The X-Files and had, you know, teenage friends, I did start watching a few actual horror films. I distinctly remember me and friends from school sitting around my little TV/VHS combo in my room and watching Final Destination and The Bone Collector (!) and jumping out of our skins. I wasn’t quite ready for the big boys, though, as I remember a friend and I switching off Halloween, of all things, when we were having a sleep over at her house, because it looked far too scary. Quite right, too.
I think I can identify some turning points in my relationship with horror. When Channel 4 broadcast the now-certified The Exorcist in 2001, I wanted to see it, and my parents agreed to let me watch it so long as we recorded it and watched it together during the day time. Fine, I was 14 by then, but it didn’t scare me too much, and if anything I remember being impressed rather than frightened. I went to the cinema to see the director’s cut of Alien when that happened in 2003, and a friend lent me Blade on VHS. I was well-behaved, see, and still got my parents’ permission to watch it, as it was an 18, and I was not. My reasoning was that I could hardly go back to school and say I didn’t watch it because my parents wouldn’t let me now, could I? Perhaps the greatest turning point of all was my instant love for The Silence of the Lambs. I can’t remember when it was I watched the film, but I loved it, and that Hannibal Lecter fast became one of my favourite characters. This was helped along by all the hype around the release of Hannibal in 2001 (which I didn’t actually watch until much later, and to hell with you all, I really like it).
It wasn’t until several years later, and the very first Abertoir Horror Festival, that my love for the genre really cemented itself, but even though my childhood was not one filled with classic horror literature and illicit film viewings, I think it’s easy to see where some seeds were sown for what would come.
*For the record, though, I’m pretty certain that was the only SVH book I ever read, and I’m not even sure it was that particular Super Chiller that freaked me out so much, but the cover seems familiar.