Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

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.

By Keri O’Shea

What got you into horror as a child? Most of us can chart our love of the genre back to our early years, and we can probably identify one or two fundamental fandoms that set us along our own individual paths into darkness. While horror cinema almost inevitably takes centre stage, back in the days when it was tough to track down the movies which tantalised us so by reputation – or via equally tantalising stills in books and magazines – the hungry nascent horror fan had to make the most of the other resources available to him. Or indeed her… Comics offered just such an opportunity: they were cheap, easy to find, and – despite a general downturn starting in the 70s – still prolific, in a broad range of genres to suit most adolescent tastes. Not least, of course, horror. Yet it would still surprise many to learn that a British title existed, aimed at teen and pre-teen girls, which thrived by thrilling its readers with tales of mystery and horror. Welcome to the world of the Misty comic.

Misty first appeared back in 1978, brought to the stands by esteemed children’s publishing house Egmont. The comic ran weekly until 1980, when it underwent a merger with another girls’ comic, the more traditional Tammy, which meant a gradual decline in the horror focus over the following years. But there was enough of the Misty content to generate a series of dedicated holiday specials and annuals – which is how I first encountered the publication. The year was 1986, and I received the last Misty annual as a Christmas present. Needless to say, I was hooked. I can credit Misty with introducing me to the delights of scary fiction, the London Dungeon, Edgar Allan Poe, and Vincent Price, to name but a few. My early education in horror had begun, initiated by a comic which dealt nearly exclusively with female characters and female perspectives – albeit refracted through tales of the supernatural, some of which had the real potential to terrify…

‘Welcome To My Midnight World’

Misty wasn’t just the name of the publication, but also a character in the comic, with her own mythology and her own followers and fans. Reading something like an allegory, albeit one which wasn’t very strongly delineated, our timeless, ageless ‘gatherer of stories’ existed in a ‘Cavern of Dreams’ near to a ‘Pool of Life’. From time to time the publication featured letters in which readers asked questions about her domain, where and what she was (the 1982 annual featured a long Q&A with the character, for instance). Misty didn’t feature as a character in the stories, however, but operated more as a horror hostess – introducing the stories to follow, and sometimes commenting on their conclusions. Upon reflection, Misty’s appearance was at least as significant to the character’s impact upon her fans as anything she might have said or done in the comic. The Misty aesthetic was anything but conventional, particularly for a mainstream girls’ magazine of its day, and it must surely have had an influence on her readers. It definitely did on this writer.

With long, dark hair, alabaster skin, a flowing pale gown and even a pentacle necklace, Misty’s appearance recalls several possible influences. One of these must be classic horror (although in keeping with the medium and the target age group, Misty was more of a benevolent supernatural creature). You can see something of Carol Borland’s character Luna Mora in her looks, right down to the heavily-lined eyes and flowing hair. Borland played Luna opposite Bela Lugosi’s Count Mora in the 1934 film Mark of the Vampire, in the process becoming the prototypical Gothic vamp. There’s also something of the inimitable aesthetics of Hammer horror there too. Hammer’s period Gothic had become part of the fabric of British pop culture in the mid-20th century, and Misty no doubt owed something to the studio’s stable of glamorous Gothic leading ladies. The image of her ghostly figure, swathed in a shroud-white gown, beneath a full moon and the silhouette of a bat is pure Hammer. Also significant in establishing the look and atmosphere of both Misty and her comic were the Gothic Romance novels that had reached a peak in popularity in preceding decades. Seldom offering more than a hint of the supernatural, these pulp paperbacks aimed at a female readership featured damsels in distress in grandiose, if gloomy historical settings, with dark, Byronic anti-heroes ready to sweep the heroine off her feet against a backdrop of thrilling mystery. While the romance element took a backseat in Misty (boy-meets-girl storylines usually concluded with the ghostly twist that one partner was dead) the comic clearly took a few stylistic pointers from the Gothic Romances issued by publishers like the Paperback Library’s Gothic imprint in the 1960s and 70s.

Another possible influence on Misty from the same era might be the flood of lurid occult pulp paperbacks and magazines, themselves informed by the occult revival of the late sixties and the rage for all things weird and ‘witchy’. The interplay between the Age of Aquarius and the mainstream had generated a new and recognisable look for the modern witch – young, enigmatic and darkly beautiful – a sexy collision between hippy mysticism and creepy cuteness. This hip 20th century sorceress duly found her place on many of the covers of the countless books and periodicals which flooded the market. Right down to her necklace, Misty appears to owe a great deal to this phenomenon, as well as to the vogue for supernatural goings-on and their representations in pop culture, a well-established phenomenon by the time the comic appeared. Yet, as much as its heroine had an almost hip look, there was a strong streak of conservatism at the heart of the comic itself. Unlike the comic’s titular heroine, the sympathetic characters in the stories tended to be conventionally pretty ‘straights’, whilst most of Misty’s villainesses tended towards the witchy look.

The infamously bloodthirsty Countess Bathory herself even makes an appearance in one issue, looking incredibly proto-Gothic, all raven hair and kohl eyes, not unlike a certain singer named Siouxsie. Misty’s run coincides with the rise and fall of the original Gothic Punk movement in the UK. The term ‘Gothic’ was coined in reference to the bands Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus just a year after the first issue of Misty hit the news-stands. By the time the title was fully extinct in 1986, Goth had fallen out of favour with trendsetters. Of course, Misty catered to a very different audience than the fishnet-and-eyeliner aficionados buying Bauhaus records, but Goth drew from many of the same pop culture inspirations as the teen comic, exploiting perhaps similar dark and morbid fascinations. But if the Gothic Punks thought their music was selling subversion, Misty’s publishers certainly didn’t see their spooky stories in that light.

That conservatism suggested by the dress of the title’s heroines found expression in the stories. Misty offered a moralistic species of the supernatural: although the tales were fantastical, they were often fables which warned against selfish behaviour, and the inevitable punishment was made to fit the crime. While a million miles away from the infamous EC horror comics of the 1950s in terms of graphic gore and gleeful ghoulishness, Misty shared their relish for poetic justice. While they were being playfully spooked, Misty’s young readers were also being shown how to behave. In ‘The Green China Man’, a spoiled young girl called Tina Swanson finds herself drawn to a strange antique ceramic figure, one which seems to have the power to literally grant her every wish. She uses this to her own advantage, until she decides to condemn a school-friend to “get lost” and an unfortunate echo bounces this message back at her. Only the accidental destruction of the green china man allows her to return, and to atone for her behaviour, of course. Idols and strange artefacts usually spelled trouble, as did strange mirrors, which featured a lot in the comic. Such magic props were usually employed to demonstrate that you should be careful what you wish for, and that appearances can be deceptive. Too much vanity is inevitably rewarded with hardship.

Also frequently in the firing line in Misty stories are greed, duplicity and cruelty: ‘Mountain Girl’ tells the tale of a girl and her grandfather who have the uncanny ability to make abundant crops grow near their isolated woodland home, despite the relative poverty of their nearest neighbours. When residents of the nearby town find out about this, they demand their presence in the town so that they can benefit from their strange powers and generate wealth for themselves. However, their cruel treatment of their unwitting guests leads to the girl taking a violent revenge on the town, because her ability to control nature extends to causing earthquakes. Often, when strange, supernatural powers stem from the protagonists of the story, we witness the heroine having to decide whether to use her powers for good or for evil. The text story titled ‘The Takeover’ reads like a parable against envy. A girl called Louise has the ability to replicate the traits of others. When she employs it to supplant the talents of her kind-meaning sports mentor Miranda, it leads to a grisly comeuppance when Miranda falls ill. One of the most popular Misty stories was a lengthy serial called ‘Moonchild’. The main character in the series, Rosemary Black, discovers she has the powers of telekinesis, linked to a crescent-moon shaped birthmark underneath her hairline. She has inherited these powers from her maternal grandmother, but Rosemary’s mother has spent many years trying to keep her strange offspring as low and subdued as possible in an attempt to head off the arrival of any strange abilities. Yet, rather like in the classic horror movie Carrie, it proves to no avail, leaving Rosemary to decide how to use her telekinesis. Can she resist the temptation to use it against a group of school bullies who are making her life hell?…

Although many of Misty’s stories took place in contemporary Britain, the comic commissioned a significant number of stories which took place in the more distant past, usually, though not exclusively (and again, rather like many of Hammer’s horror films) at some point after the turn of the Nineteenth Century, though up until the first decades of the Twentieth. Often, these stories have obvious precedents in classic literature – and definitely show an awareness of sensation fiction, which was perhaps the comic’s equivalent in earlier times. For instance, ‘The Weird Sisters’ (1981) with its discussion of female insanity and treatment in Victorian England has echoes of the novels of Wilkie Collins, particularly The Woman in White. ‘Strange Heritage’, with its Yorkshire setting and themes of thwarted love, bears some resemblance to Wuthering Heights, albeit with a bang-up-to-date message about the importance of nature conservation (!) Yet as well as using period settings in its pages, Misty also devoted space to excerpts from classic literature itself.

One of the most ghastly of these – and perhaps most surprising, given the age of the readers – was an excerpt from M. G. Lewis’s notorious work of Gothic excess The Monk. (In a 1796 review, the poet Coleridge observed that ‘the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale’!) The excerpt included in Misty is a poem from the novel entitled ‘Alonzo the Brave and fair Imogene’. This tale of chivalric love between a Crusading knight and his lady gives way to horror, as Alonzo takes Imogene at her word when she declares that, should she ever love another, he must attend her wedding feast in ghostly form, and ‘bear [her] away to the grave’. The description of Alonzo’s unvizored visage riddled with worms has retained its power to disturb, and doubtlessly would have had an impact upon its young readers. Keeping company with the ghastly Alonzo and Imogene (or Imogine, as spelled in the original) through the course of Misty’s existence were diverse examples of literature by writers like Wordsworth and Poe, alongside tales of Ancient Greece, Arthurian legends, and suchlike. It’s an impressive introduction to writing which might not otherwise have found its way into the reading habits of pre-teens. In addition, many girls would have their first history lesson on subjects like the Borgias here, as well as finding articles about alleged real-life hauntings and other spooky locales.

Better than Bunty, eh?

For the second part of Keri’s feature, click here…

By Keri O’Shea

It’s been some time since we’ve run a series of special features here at Brutal as Hell; those of you who have been reading for a few years may remember that it used to be a reasonably regular occurrence – and so now, for the first time in a while, as the nights are at their coldest and darkest, we pause to take a look back, to think about where our love for this genre came from, and why it turned into something so important in our lives that it’s become part of our make-up as adults. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Childhood Terrors – a set of articles and special features which will be unashamedly personal in nature, because they’re all about our own nostalgia, our own favourites and our own key influences.

Horror is one of those genres which, for the most part, boasts a long-lasting affection from its fans, and is often linked to some of our keenest early memories. There are of course many reasons why this comes to be, but certainly, children seem to be drawn towards what scares them. Daring themselves to reach down the scary book from the bookshelf…turning to the page which they remember, yet fear…or avoiding the frightening film, or the daunting character, whilst all the same asking a million questions about it and mythologising it in their own ways, as I did myself with a film which has a cherished place in my adult life now. Horror provides the first real love-hate relationship for a lot of us, way before it cements into a personal passion in adulthood.

Certainly, although child-friendly horror has long existed, for many of us as horror fans (particularly those of us who are a bit older), our first and most formative scares probably derived from things which we just plain should not have seen. I will forever remember the rare thrill of sneaking a peek at even a few moments of films being watched by my parents, and the aftermath of bad dreams which they caused; the dream sequence at the end of Carrie, where her hand darts out of the ground…the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London…hell, it’s not even horror as such, but some scenes from Troll fascinated and terrified me (and it’s a real sadness to revisit such scenes in adulthood and see that the intervening years have stripped them of their magic, even if it means their power to scare, too).

But did all of this do me any real harm, I wonder? Did it any of us? Bad dreams are one thing, but even the briefest contact I had with horror at a young age fuelled my imagination like nothing else: things that actively scared me prompted flights of fancy, childish art projects, stories, and a definite learning curve, as strange as that may sound. My growing love of the genre definitely developed my reading skills, too, as I sought out ever more challenging and memorable books and comics. If I saw a picture which grabbed me, then I wanted the necessary reading ability to find out everything I could about it. In effect, I wanted to be scared – because it also meant escapism, creativity, growth and change. Those of us who have stuck with horror may, like I do, always feel like they’re chasing that thrill of fear, trying to get it back again. Ultimately too, I knew it was fiction; horror provided many kids with a safe space to experience a whole host of emotions and ideas which couldn’t cause us material harm, whatever the powers-that-be said.

With all of this in mind, I can’t help but wonder if modern society’s well-meaning attempts to cocoon children from seeing anything which might alarm them might, in effect, be starving them of the kinds of imaginative lives that many of us had. I used to work in daycare (yeah, laugh it up) and I remember getting a warning that reading through ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ might be too much for some of the little darlings, and they didn’t want parents to complain, after all. If you know the book, you might well be as perplexed as I was. On a more serious note, last week many of you will have read about the substitute teacher in the US who has been found guilty of ‘disseminating matter harmful to juveniles’; just what was going through Sheila Kearns’ mind when she decided to play the anthology horror movie ABCs of Death to several classes we can only imagine, and certainly, her actions were complacent at their absolute best, but the fact that she has wound up in court over it, when you’d assume her 14-18 year-old charges would have accessed far, far worse in their time, seems to set a worrying precedent. Won’t someone please think of the children? I’m not suggesting that kids of all ages should be parked in front of any and all horror films, of course. But any insinuation that fiction on-screen can really cause ‘harm’ sets my teeth on edge somewhat, because – haven’t we been here before?

Many of us found quite enough scares as children, however, whether they were intended, or very much not intended for kids’ consumption; many of us found horror where it was never even intended to be at all, come to that, getting creeped out by things which screened way before the watershed, shows and films deemed suitable for family entertainment. We all once found our scares in a wide range of sources, regardless, and the articles which will make up Childhood Terrors are our affectionate celebration of these. I hope you’ll enjoy our trip down Memory Lane; just don’t look behind you…