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…