Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

We humans seem oddly hardwired to believe in the presence of worlds separate to, but overlapping with, our own: this notion forms the bedrock of a whole wealth of folklore and ritual practice throughout history, and it has persisted, although the places and the means of admission have shifted over the centuries. The Celts thought that the Otherworld was accessible via water, with pools, bog and lakes proving fertile space for sacrificial offerings to be made; when the Abrahamic religions bumped the old gods to the back of the queue, a dizzying array of other worlds appeared, particularly in Catholicism, and although these were ostensibly ‘from whose bourn no traveller returns’, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo still seemed oddly present. Not only that, but each could be reached from Earth, with those in Heaven aware of life on Earth and the living able to pray to influence the lot of the dead, to give just a couple of examples. The world as we know it swarmed with other worlds, with beings like us yet not us, or even beings that were us, once – worlds we could feasibly influence or even end up inhabiting. Little wonder that popular literature embraced this notion; kids’ books have long cherished their Narnias and their Lands of Do As You Please, and fantasy stories aimed at older readers have exploited the idea for darker, more disturbing fare…because, if hidden worlds can exist, then might not monsters also exist therein?

Clive Barker’s novella, Cabal, formed the basis for Nightbreed (1990) – and developed the idea that, on Earth, there could exist a place sacrosanct for monsters, a city hidden apart and safe from from humanity. This place he called Midian, a home and sanctuary for bizarre beings (the Night Breed alluded to in the title) who have been routinely and aggressively drummed onto the fringes of human society by human cruelty, resentment and fear. It is here that a young man called Aaron Boone finds himself, having long been haunted by dreams of the place and its inmates; Boone is a troubled young man, prone to nightmares, and seeking psychiatric help from possibly the one person least likely to help him: Dr. Decker is a fraud, a man literally and figuratively hiding behind a mask whilst he frames Boone for a spate of murders which he himself has committed. Boone, reduced to a renegade, eventually manages to find his way to the city of Midian. His welcome there is …minimal, at first, and it is only via his death that he can first gain admittance – however his presence in Midian, his relationship with his girlfriend Lori, and the rising power of the daemonic Decker, forces a series of events which lead to a last stand – a war between human and monster.

It’s a powerful and equally, quite a simple story in its barest form, one which Barker was keen to direct himself on the big screen (and it’s a sad thing that Barker has directed so little in latter years): however, the film which we long considered the finished article fell far short of the mark for Barker himself, and has perhaps understandably impacted on his desire to direct. It’s an age-old story of fundamental misunderstandings between director and studio, one which could form the basis of a book all its own, but perhaps (and I freely admit my bias here) it’s particularly galling when Barker’s vision gets so deeply compromised, as was the case – sadly – with Nightbreed. Barker’s imagination is one of a kind; its energy and complexity deserve careful handling, lest the spell, if you like, be broken. With Nightbreed, the studio seems to have decided they wanted a conventional horror yarn and insisted upon the film being shorn by around an hour in length; miserable with the results, the planned trilogy never occurred and the film remained in its clipped condition until 2009, when it began to get pieced together again with the replacement of the removed footage, long presumed lost. The director’s cut is now intact and available – which is a great credit to the work of all concerned, and something of a miracle, all considered.

However, in 1990 I didn’t know any of that. I was ten, perhaps obviously I hadn’t read the novella, and I had no concept of what the film should have been, or shouldn’t have been. All I knew – in common with my earlier and equally influential awareness of a certain film called Hellraiser – was what the video shop posters and covers later told me, aided and abetted by seeing the trailer on something else I probably shouldn’t have been watching. Did I even realise that the director was the same guy? That’s something I can’t say for sure now, but in terms of the style and subject matter, I was equally intrigued. I didn’t know how it had done at the Box Office; I’d been to the cinema maybe twice up until that age, as we didn’t have one in my town and my family didn’t own a car. I was a reasonably switched-on kid, but I’m not confident I even knew what a box office was. But monsters; secret worlds; that was what interested me, with that child’s level of focus and imagination – the loss of which I mourn as an adult and always want to rekindle. I wanted to see Nightbreed. I wanted to know more about Midian. I used to have a recurring dream, as an unhappy kid, that I took a shovel to some waste earth to try and dig for treasure. When I dug down low enough, I didn’t find any gold, but I struck a hole through the ceiling of a hidden community of people – strange people, dressed in ways I’d never seen, playing musical instruments I didn’t recognise – and they welcomed me, helping me climb down to them. Midian was like that dream only more complex, more formidable; it’s not hard to see why the idea appealed to a nascent horror fan with a certain fascination for these ideas. In Nightbreed, it’s okay to empathise with what in many other stories would be the villains – you can’t help but do otherwise, in fact. It’s a war-cry against human cruelty, and kids know cruelty as much as they’re also drawn to fantasy, to horror, to ways of playing that out.

The film itself, although the studio cramped its style somewhat and the challenges of bringing to the screen that which is quite abstract on the novella’s page proved difficult, is a nonetheless striking piece of work. On re-watching Nightbreed, I was struck by just how differently it looks compared to Hellraiser – only three years apart, and with the same writer, director and some of the cast, yet Nightbreed is warm and colourful in many places, almost like a picture book. Midian is located in a dilapidated cemetery reminiscent of old-school Gothic paintings, but its inmates are gloriously lurid and its spaces are well-lit as often as they are dank and fearsome – this is a horror film unafraid to play with its aesthetics, and it has other revolutionary aspects too. Getting into Midian may be a gruesome process (say ‘I have to show you my true face’ to any Nightbreed fan and they’ll immediately think of a key scene which does this very, very literally) but it’s not just some far-flung cesspit; it’s a functional community which operates by rules and traditions. Whilst the film looks very different to Hellraiser, they have in common the fact that it is human interference with the monsters’ rules which causes unrest, whether it’s preordained (as in this case) or otherwise. Here, it’s Lori’s – and Decker’s – attempts to infiltrate Midian which initiate a series of events threatening to its very survival. Decker is of course utterly emblematic of human callousness and cruelty: played with softly-spoken menace by none other than David Cronenberg, he’s a man who abuses his trusted – even venerated – position in society in order to murder without purpose, and his methodically cruel treatment of Boone surely resembles the doctor/patient relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham in the series Hannibal; as the later doctor explains, he ‘just wanted to see what would happen’. There’s some parity there with Decker, and again we’re made to reconsider exactly what it means to be monstrous.

Humans are dangerous; humans are flawed and thrall to their own petty ambitions; humans are also finite, and another idea which provides Nightbreed with much of its power is in its exploration of mortality. To again return to the often childlike conception of hidden places and secret worlds, for many children – and a fair few adults – the concept of death is best explained as being a distant place, a destination, just somewhere …different, rather than a lack of being altogether. Children talk about ‘heaven’ and they often think of a geographical location – you have to ‘die’ to get there, but to get there, you take a trip. Midian plays with this idea and takes it to a more grisly conclusion, where you get your passport via the morgue – and then you live on forever, agelessly. Aaron Boone has joined the ranks of the Night Breed but he had to die, and violently, to take his particular trip. Lori and Decker’s quest to find out what happened to Boone is tinged with incredulity but also, they seem to crave what he has. Boone is now forever. Covetousness and intrigue pursue him, however, until even the creatures of Midian are not safe. Monsters may not exist under our rules, but human intervention can exorcise them anyway.

Or can it? Ultimately, Nightbreed is a film in which our heroes and our villains are inverted, giving us a film which is compelling and horrific. In true Barker style, we are shown human cruelty refracted through a grotesque, fantastical and lurid mirror; a persecution epic, a crime thriller, a fairy story, Nightbreed touches upon all of these distinct elements, but bundles them up in a new set of ways, making them recognisable and original all at once. Whilst it wouldn’t be the first or the last time audiences would be invited to sympathise with monsters, it had certainly never been done like this before, and Nightbreed remains a deeply influential piece of film – for all of its flaws or issues upon its initial release. Midian has exercised a hold on Nightbreed audiences ever since, a hidden other world to rival all others, and more evocative in its way than anything which has followed.

By Stephanie Scaife

This is a story that I’ve told before, but it bears repeating. When we first got a VHS player in the mid-80s and I started frequenting the local video store, I was quickly seduced by the lurid covers of the horror section and the age restrictions that applied to these titles. I became obsessed with the idea that these films contained something that I wasn’t supposed to see, that there could be something so awful and disturbing that I’d have to wait ten plus years to find out… it was all just too much for my seven year old brain, fuelled by every possible horrible thing I could think of that might be contained in titles such as Chopping Mall, Creepers and Ghoulies. Just thinking about what they could be about made me scared, but also extremely curious.

One of the most popular playground games at around this time (at my school anyway) involved re-enacting scenes from Robocop. I’m sure an older sibling was responsible somewhere along the line, but someone had seen the film and everyone quickly became desperate to be Robocop in the game. Unfortunately for me as the only girl willing to play along, I was usually cast as the victim that Robocop saves from would-be attackers by shooting the guy between the legs, through the woman’s skirt. Of course through much exaggeration and Chinese whispers, what I heard second-hand about Robocop made it out to be the most unbelievably violent film ever made, which just made me want to see it even more. Similar games popped up around A Nightmare on Elm Street and that ilk; it’s crazy to imagine such a thing today where instead of a film being verboten you can just watch it online or on your smartphone.

My young mind swam with imagined horrors, often way worse than any film ever turned out to be and soon my fascination took on the form of nagging my mother. I was unrelenting. I just had to know what was on these video tapes that I’d heard about in the playground and had been hypnotised by in the video store, which often felt sort of illicit in itself, just looking at them. Eventually she caved, and in her infinite wisdom decided the best tactic would be to rent something terrible to throw me off the scent, believing that if I was bored or unimpressed then I’d give up on my mission to watch every horror film in the store. So, what did she rent in a bid to persuade me that my fascination was unfounded? It was The Howling III: The Marsupials. This movie is awful, there’s no two ways about it, but of course I absolutely loved it! That’s where it all began and there was no going back after that. Of course, if something particularly horrible was coming up, my mum would instruct me to go to the kitchen to make her a cup of tea or some other distraction. I was undeterred though and from that day on I have ploughed my way through every horror film, anything that’s sparked any sort of controversy and anything that’s just sort of weird I could get my hands on. It’s a love that as lasted more than twenty five years and shows no signs of slowing.

I miss the anticipation though: reading about movies in magazines or seeing clips on TV and of having to really seek something out that you wanted to see. Another early example of my interest in things I wasn’t supposed to see was when moving to the States aged 13 – the first thing on my to-do list was to head to Blockbuster and rent everything that had been banned in the UK. This included A Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and A Clockwork Orange. This was an odd experience as I mostly just discovered that they were really good movies, not some awful vision guaranteed to promote moral decay (which is what I’d imagined them to be). I’m glad that as a child there was still an element of the unknown, and that ultimately is what I have to thank for my lifelong interest in the horror genre and counter culture as a whole. Perhaps it wouldn’t have sparked my imagination to such an extent if it had been as easy as tracking down controversial or banned cinema today (which let’s face it, we all did with A Serbian Film and Grotesque).

Realising that I was actually a fairly sensible kid who knew that movies weren’t real life, as I grew up my mum was intrinsic in introducing me to firm favourites like David Cronenberg, David Lynch, John Waters… she even took me to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show live on stage for my eighth birthday! If that isn’t top parenting, then I don’t know what is. Now I’m not saying you should show The Brood to your ten year old – I was just pretty self-aware and precocious from a young age. Most kids dreamed of becoming doctors or lawyers, but all I wanted to be was Rick Baker.
What I soon found out, though, was that what I had imagined was oftentimes not so much the reality and whilst there were (and still are) many films I saw that I loved, there were very few that scared me. The films that really left a lasting impression, that truly were the stuff of nightmares, were not the Hellraisers or the Friday the 13th movies… it was movies that were actually aimed at children that scared the bejeezus out of me!

Here are the films that had the biggest, longest lasting impact on my subconscious. Tapping into something, more often than not it was the idea of a child in peril, it’s perhaps those first introductions to something tangibly relatable that terrified me the most. So whereas monsters and demons and decapitations didn’t faze me, a lost or vulnerable child almost certainly did…

5. Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Although the whole of Alice in Wonderland is actually pretty weird and creepy, it was the angry blue caterpillar that really scared me. I’m not entirely sure why but I had recurring nightmares for years about him. Who… are… you?

4. Labyrinth (1986)

Even though Labyrinth was a firm favourite of mine growing up and David Bowie’s skin tight leggings were almost single handily responsible for my sexual awakening, I was completely freaked out by the Fireys and the fact that they wanted to take Sarah’s head off!

3. Cat’s Eye (1985)

The final chapter in this portmanteau movie where a young Drew Barrymore battles against a troll scared me so much that I would check my skirting boards every night before bed, making sure that there were no tiny troll sized doors. It’s also why I insisted on having the cat sleep with me, just to be on the safe side.

2. Various Public Information Films from the 1980s

Looking back through these, it was amazing just how many from the late 80s and early 90s were cemented in my subconscious. I particularly remembered the football one where the kids are electrocuted. I certainly never went anywhere near a pylon ever again.

1. The Sandman (1992)

Now, this scared the absolute crap out of me… so much so that I literally didn’t sleep for months. I would keep my eyes tight closed listening intently for any unfamiliar sound, just in case the sandman would come and pluck my outs out during the night!

By Keri O’Shea

As I alluded to in the introduction to our Childhood Terrors series, the bookshelf has long been (and hopefully still is) a formidable presence in children’s lives – a rich seam of ideas at the threshold of a room, teeming with characters and forces which command real power. A book is, all at the same time, wonderfully simple and wonderfully complex – a glimpse into imagined worlds, worlds which have a particular resonance when they have the ability to scare. One book which had such a hold on me is Vivien Alcock’s The Stonewalkers, a chance find in a provincial library in the depths of the Welsh valleys…

The first thing to say, although in a feature such as this it may well go without saying, is that The Stonewalkers is a wonderfully frightening story. It was read to me by my mother when I was seven or eight years old and, thinking about it with the full power of hindsight, it wasn’t the best choice for a bedtime story. It stopped me sleeping well for weeks – a fact I hid, because I wanted to find out what happened. I found out in later years that while I was hiding how scared I was, so was my mother! That’s one of the great strengths of this novella: it gets straight down to that archetypal horror of portraits or statues, these great immovables, coming to life. Children recognise and adults remember that awful ‘what if?’ at the heart of this tale. This is a fast-paced book which delights in delicious understatement: Alcock’s economical and thereby incisive style allows a lot of scope for a child’s (and an adult’s) imagination to play with the macabre goings-on, with lots of potential to create some tangible and terrifying mental images of the events as they unfold. I’m very surprised that The Stonewalkers has never been brought to the screen; some of its scenes are as clear to me as if they had been, and it would surely make for an engaging horror movie.

Poppy Brown is a lonely twelve year old, and not automatically a sympathetic character. Renowned as a fibber and wary of other kids, she keeps herself to herself – often spending her time pouring out her woes, punctuated by the proverbs she has so hopefully learned by heart, to ‘Belladonna’, a statue of a girl in the grounds of her mother’s employer’s house. Using a length of a chain she finds in the cellar of the house one day, she attaches it to Belladonna’s ankle like a piece of jewellery. Then, the hot July day gives way to a thunderstorm: Belladonna is hit by lightning, the metal chain drawing the strike. She’s knocked from her plinth but, somehow, the stone girl comes alive.

At first, Belladonna is benign, and Poppy is keen to prove that, this time at least, she isn’t a little liar. She entices Belladonna back to the house and ushers her into a room to wait…where Belladonna sees the stone bust of a girl. Touching her own neck, Belladonna;s self-awareness sees her move from friendly innocence to suspicion, fear – and terrible rage. Finding her way into the cellar, she finds a coil of the same chain which was instrumental in bringing her to life, and she takes it, escaping into the world outside.

In some ways an alternate spin on The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Stonewalkers also skirts close to the Frankenstein story, albeit refracted through the eyes and actions of a group of terrified children – one of whom definitely didn’t mean to be a creator and is at first such an uncongenial character that, as Belladonna’s first model of humanity, she is bound to cause problems. For the statues aren’t evil – they’re emulatory, curious, trying to act like the organic beings they resemble but aren’t. Some of them seem to learn, however, adding a layer of poignancy to the end sequences of an unsettling and memorable tale. Poppy, too, has the opportunity to develop and grow.

And well she might, considering the way the growing army of statues begins to behave and how hard she has to work to literally save her own skin. I said that Belladonna was curious, in a very human manner – well, when you think about some of the behaviours justified by human ‘curiosity’, it shouldn’t surprise you that Belladonna soon shows she has the capacity to act viciously, and many of the scenes here are pure horror – showing to readers an unflinching, unsettling menace, the acting-out of that special sort of helplessness which stems from knowing utterly that you are physically vulnerable to something bigger, heavier, even more belligerent than you are. It’s been the mainstay of horror cinema for years, and it’s here in abundance too – in a book, let’s not forget – that is about kids, as well as targeted at kids.

However, perhaps more in line with children’s literature (and even a lot of horror cinema), for all its scares – the scares which stopped me sleeping – by the close of The Stonewalkers, there’s space enough for a restrained, but happy ending. This is something of a counterweight to all of the nightmarish images which precede it…of living statues, bathed in moonlight, purposefully and slowly crossing the moors…though this ending never, fully, dissipates the terror of all this. The Stonewalkers achieves a great deal in its few pages, and it continues to stand out as one of the seminal reading experiences of my childhood.

By Guest Contributor Helen Creighton

Published in the early 1980s, The Unexplained – Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time was a magazine perfectly designed to impress the young and credulous mind. It looked grown-up and vaguely ‘scientific’, although it was the absolute opposite. It avoided crass, splashy headlines and sensationalism for lengthy, scholarly-looking articles, laden with the kinds of anecdotes from far-flung parts of the globe (OK, the USA) that suggested a good deal of journalistic research (as opposed to pure fantasy and urban myth) had gone into their writing. Best still, it was priced at a whole 60p an issue!

The Unexplained set out to cover every aspect of the paranormal and the mysterious – and as such, its range was wide in scope. Some subjects – such as alien visitation and UFOs, simply fascinated. UFOs and aliens – at least until Whitley Strieber put out his book Communion and the still ludicrously credulous and eager-for-novelty teenage me ate it up with saucer-eyes and an endearing lack of scepticism – were fun! Other subjects, such as ESP, inspired us to conduct our own fruitless experiments using playing cards and drawing books in the hopes that we too were psychic and special (we weren’t). An issue devoted to the alleged true phenomena that is Spontaneous Human Combustion, complete with gritty-looking crime scene photos, made me curious but rather uneasy…

Others still put the absolute frighteners on us (Okay, me) in a way that still lingers to this day. I’m talking about that Voices From the Dead record.

Voices From the Dead was a lovely lime green flexi-disc that came free with an issue of Unexplained in the early 1980s. A little research now tells me the original recording was made by one Konstantin Raudive and included with his 1971 book ‘Breakthrough – An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead’. The idea was that Mr. Raudive had recorded the voices of dead people, including a few famous ones such as Winston Churchill, using super-special, cutting edge, high frequency recording equipment.

Of course he had. Anyway, at the time I couldn’t wait to hear such a miraculous recording. I grabbed my sister for the inaugural broadcast, set the disc on the turntable (a huge early 60s thing that hummed, buzzed and slowly overheated into uselessness on a regular basis, lending a certain character to the process of playing our vinyls that nothing has ever quite matched since) and we set the needle down. Within a couple of minutes I had run from the room, hands pressed over my ears, shrieking, “Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off!”

It turned out that the recording comprised a mixture of horrible static white noise with bursts of eerie, scratchy voices, moving about the sound picture in a way that immediately burrowed its way past all my rational filters into whichever part of the brain doles out excruciating, adrenaline-soaked fear. The stentorian, BBC tones of the presenters lent everything an air of respectability and seriousness that made it all utterly convincing and unquestionably real to me. It gave me a fear of strange, disembodied voices that last for a very long time.

Today, via the internet and an ever more advanced array of sound recording technology, we live in a world where the dead can speak to us via EVP – or ‘Electronic Voice Phenomena’ – a phenomenon which has a dedicated base of believers, all of whom can talk to one another and share their ‘evidence’ on a whole host of websites. It wasn’t always the case – and as creepy as some of the EVP recordings can surely be, they have nothing on the singular experience of the Voices From the Dead vinyl.

Anyway, I wouldn’t go downstairs in the dark at night for years without thinking of that record. If you’re unacquainted, check out a sample of the recording below…

By Keri O’Shea

(For the first part of this article, please click here.)

Signs of the Times

Although Misty focused on supernatural and fantastical goings-on in its stories, between the lines it was still very much a product of the late seventies and early eighties, with plenty of evidence of the social and political situation of the time. Indeed, the comic itself was stopped from being published at several points during its lifespan due to union strikes. Despite the fact that we are again, at the time of writing, undergoing financial upheaval and the threat of recession, the world at large is still tremendously changed, especially with regards to our attitudes to children. Looking back on the views and conventions unconsciously reflected in the Misty comics, some of these changes are particularly striking, such as the following…

In the story ‘Rag Doll’, not only has our heroine Rachel spent her life in an orphanage where she is expected to work in the kitchens as payment for her ungrateful ‘moping’, but she is also repeatedly caned by one of the workers simply for being miserable. Although this is evidently intended to make the readers feel pity for Rachel, the casual inclusion of the corporal punishment angle reminds us that when this story was printed, it was an accepted part of a child’s life, and remained as such for the whole of Misty’s tenure. Corporal punishment in state schools in England and Wales wasn’t officially banned until ’87. State involvement with childcare was altogether more hard-line in Misty’s day: in the story ‘Somewhere’ (printed in the same 1981 annual as Rag Doll) the female character is warned about wandering the streets while a ‘Borstal boy who’d escaped from a working party’ was still on the loose. It’s rather a different state of affairs to today’s increased emphasis on non-custodial punishments, ostensibly to avoid the shadow of institutionalisation. Yet the very name ‘Borstal’ once conjured up parental fear of the types of kids who might have ever been sent there.

Poverty, social alienation and strikes are also represented in Misty’s pages: for example, a bus strike means a girl has to cycle to a nearby town in ‘The Thing in Chains’, inconveniencing her and throwing her into the path of a spectral dancing bear, all at the same time. But perhaps most of all in Misty, the most sympathetic characters on offer were those having a distressing time on account of their difference to their peers, which usually took the form of an impoverished background. Threading through many of the stories are the girls’ feelings of frustration and sadness, often on behalf of their families as much as for themselves. In ‘Stranger in my Mirror’, Mary Mallory struggles to be a good girl, holding down a paper-round just to give the money to her mother. They’re in rent arrears, the landlord is harassing them, and their life isn’t easy. For most of the girls, school is definitely not a supportive environment, but a world of draconian punishments, bereft of sympathy and understanding. Bullying, though this takes place both in and out of school, is a common theme in Misty.

It’s also often the impetus behind the kind of desperation which frequently afflicts our heroines and thus drives the plot in the comic. One of the most poignant – and popular – Misty serials ran under the title ‘Winner Loses All!’ The story, basically the Faust myth updated to 70s England, featured some of the most macabre artwork the comic ever ran. Its protagonist, Sandy Morton, lives with her widower father, once a renowned show-jumper, but now a humble stable-hand battling alcoholism and poverty. Determined to restore him to his former glories, she accepts the offer of a Mr. Dayville (‘Devil’) who promises to do just that – in return for her soul – leading to a battle of wills between a teenage girl and Satan himself. For this troubled teen, the road to Hell really is paved with good intentions…

For the comic’s original readership, being able to identify with the protagonists in the stories was vital to making them engaging. Sharing aspirations, experiences and attitudes with their heroines doubtless made the stories seem more believable for Misty’s young fans, even when other supernatural aspects of the plot stretched plausibility. For the modern reader revisiting the stories today, this identification has inevitably largely changed to nostalgia – or perhaps more accurately, an interest in the time-capsule effect of exploring the publication anew and recognising the many changes. Of course, the stories themselves are still a lot of fun, but reading between the lines has also become a pleasure. At times, spotting the differences between life then and now moves into the foreground, ahead of the tales told: what was taken for granted when these were written is now noteworthy for us.

Of course, it wasn’t all peril and plight. There was some comic relief available in Misty: the comic strips which provided it were also the only strips to appear on a regular basis. These were: Miss T – a much more orthodox, pointed-hat-and-broomstick-crone who often fraternised with cartoon versions of the famous Universal monsters amongst others, and Cilla the Chiller, a schoolgirl ghost. These were much more in the vein of traditional British comics like the Dandy or Beano in their style of humour, and divided the Misty audience somewhat. Some readers felt that the lighter tone of these strips didn’t fit very well with the rest of the magazine.

There were also more practical activities and gifts for Misty fans: the first three issues came with free gifts which reflected the comic’s distinctive flavour, being a charm bracelet, an Egyptian Bast ring (as featured in ‘The Cult of the Cat’ in the very first Misty) and a fortune-telling wallet. There were also plenty of things to make and do. Perhaps one of the most fun sides to Misty were the horror-styled spins on what are considered more conventional feminine pastimes, like cooking and crafts. The popular BBC TV kids’ show Blue Peter, for all of its focus on making things at home, would only dare allow itself to cover the same ground at Halloween. At Misty, the distinction between Halloween and the rest of the year just wasn’t there. Enjoy baking? Misty could help you to make a Devil’s Cake, or if you had ‘a sweet fang’, a Dracula’s Dream Dessert, with raspberry purée for the blood and bananas for the fangs. The 1985 annual taught us how to make chocolate coffins, and the ’86 annual invited girls to use foodstuffs for a spooky touch-test; savoy cabbage leaves made convincing ‘bats’ wings’. Of course, if you preferred handicrafts you could be shown how to do anything from ‘monsterfying’ a margarine tub to creating masks to making your own shrunken heads with papier mâché (‘Why not make a whole bunch of them to hang by the hair on a hook on your bedroom wall?’) The types of stories and characters referenced in these activities evidenced the wealth of horror and New Age archetypes all happily co-existing in the pages of a girls’ comic. Alongside references to Dracula, Frankenstein and lycanthropy were how-to guides on herbalism, palmistry, ESP and ‘How To Make Your Own Priestess’s Jewels’. Under the Misty remit, a whole host of characters, phenomena and ideas from within the horror genre and beyond were used to pitch ideas for games and activities to an eager readership. And, if readers wanted to write their own ghost stories, or go on their own ghost hunts, Misty offered ideas there too.

Misty’s Legacy

Sadly, before Misty was really an established force majeure, the downturn in the comics industry struck and in a cost-cutting measure the publisher merged it with their more traditional Tammy. It proved a miserable arranged marriage that saw the Misty content and logo gradually shrink into the background. Because Misty had such a short tenure, and because its supernatural stylings were diminished so soon after the Tammy merger by unsympathetic editorial decisions, it’s difficult to judge whether this girls’ comic could have gone on to greater things. While many of the readers who loved it like to think so, this will always remain speculation. However, although Misty was no more, there were still talented British comics professionals who had seen a future for innovative titles with a darker edge that treated their readers with a little more respect than the tired, conventional titles lined up on UK news-stands. Not least, one Pat Mills.

Mills who illustrated for Misty – including the popular serial Moonchild – had also been involved with a seminal comic which we would all probably recognise. This title was 2000AD, a now-legendary title home to popular characters, like Judge Dredd. Despite the wavering market, 2000AD was a hit. Misty may have taken a final bow, but comics as a medium were not dead, only changing. Pat Mills had helped spearhead a new generation of comics writers and artists who pioneered a more mature tone and style, which in turn paved the way for comics which were cool for sophisticated teens, and ultimately legitimate entertainment for adults. Perhaps there’s a nice circularity here; it could be that the enduring legacy of a legend in the field, who once drew for Misty, once encouraged the recent interest in reprints and the rediscovery of old comics – not least Misty itself.

For a comic which lacked longevity, Misty has endured with great tenacity in the hearts of its original fans. This is borne out by its reappearance in recent years, thanks to the efforts of mistycomic.co.uk, a fan-based site who started by creating an online archive of the comic in 2002.. The popularity of the archive was such that, within a year of being live, the site owners were looking into publishing a Misty Special, featuring new stories and artwork. A Halloween Special did in fact appear in 2006, another Special hit the shelves in 2009, and now – who knows – perhaps the Child of the Mists may yet venture back again… As someone who can thank Misty for the understanding that creepy could be fun, I sincerely hope she will. Bela Lugosi once said, ‘It is women who love horror’; I think we can agree on that, and perhaps for many of us, it all starts when we are young, sometimes with something as simple as a comic.

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.