I wants to make yer flesh creep! The scary stuff that turned me into a horror writer

My son went to the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith to see the play Ghost Stories recently to celebrate a friend’s birthday. It certainly shook them up, and given that they’re normally pretty insouciant about this sort of thing, it must be really scary. (And, yes, I’m going to see it.) 

That got me thinking about works of fiction – books, films and TV - that had scared me enough to turn me into a full-time writer of horror fiction for the best part of a decade. 

Classics Illustrated Dracula

The first time I remember being terrified by something I’d read was the Classics Illustrated version of Dracula (bring back that excellent series, I say – a terrific introduction to literature at an early age). I must have been about ten at the time. My childhood home was devoid of anything even vaguely resembling a horror or ghost story in any shape or form. I had a growing stock of DC comics –Superman, Flash, Green Lantern and suchlike – but nothing which had prepared me for the brooding menace conveyed by the illustrator of Dracula. (Of course, it looks a bit tame now.)

I did a lot of sleeping with the lights on for a while afterwards, and generally gave horror a wide berth for several years. I did, however, catch the original film version of Don Seigel’s Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (adapted from Jack Finney’s novel) on TV around that time – the first of at least twenty viewings. It remains my favourite horror film to this day.

When I was twelve, I noticed that Psycho was playing at The Globe Cinema, a splendidly run-down fleapit in Putney. I toddled along there one rainy afternoon on the 94 bus and managed to talk my way in (I was big for my age – I still am). There were about four of us in the audience, and we had to keep changing seats to avoid the rain coming through the holes in the ceiling (no, really). The film was, of course, mesmerizingly scary and I was relieved that it was still daylight when I emerged, damp but enthralled, some four hours later (I seem to remember it was, weirdly, on a double bill with War of the Worlds). 

A few weeks later, a trip to Streatham for a 1940s’ double bill - Son of Dracula(featuring Lon Chaney Jr as the rather porky Count Alucard - geddit?) and House of Frankenstein (Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein all crammed together into the same movie!) - but the leather-jacket hoodlums in the audience were a lot scarier than anything on the screen.  

Then it was back to The Globe for a double bill of Hammer’s first Dracula andFrankenstein interpretations. Christopher Lee as Dracula was by far the scariest monster on offer: Lee is still, by far, the most menacing actor ever to play the part, except, of course, for Max Schrek, who played Count Orloc in the silent German take on Dracula, Nosferatu. And it was a clip of that film shown on TV around that time that fundamentally and viscerally creeped me out more than anything since the Classics Illustrated Dracula: the monster’s shadow on the stairwell, his rodent face, the way he glided to a standing position, stiff-limbed, from his coffin ,the film itself all jerky and splotched  with what looked like smears of old blood, and looking as if it had been filmed in a peculiarly horrible parallel universe. Mummy! Help!

After that, I became seriously hooked on supernatural horror. Edgar Allen Poe’sTales of Mystery and Imagination and Herbert Van Thal’s superb Pan Book of Horror Stories series sealed the deal. On TV,  Alfred Hitchock Presents and The Twilight Zone fanned the flames, as did the copiously-illustrated American magazines, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and the short-lived (because more scholarly, although it doesn’t look it) Castle of Frankenstein. 

Then on to M.R. James’s short stories and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the creepy bits in Wuthering Heights and Heart of Darknessand Macbeth (“Good things of day begin to droop and drowse/While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse”), culminating in Jonathan Miller’s heart-stoppingly terrifying TV adaptation of M.R. James “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad”in 1968, which remains pant-wettingly disconcerting to this day (the roiling, indistinct shape chasing Michael Hordern’s antiquary on the beach; the bedclothes in the spare bed in his hotel bedroom forming themselves into a writhing human shape as he gibbers in fear). That same year saw the release of Roman Polanski’s brilliant film adaptation of Ira Levin’s 1967 masterpiece, Rosemary’s Baby (“What have you done to his eyes!”).

Rosemary’s Baby represented  a rare example - in that era - of a book and its film  version managing to crawl out  of the horror ghetto into the mainstream. The feat was repeated in 1971 by William Peter Blatty’s bestseller, The Exorcist – the only book I have ever stayed up all night to read, having realized that sleep was out of the question – and Wiiliam Friedkin’s stunning 1973 film adaptation.

The impact – the sheer power – of these two works lit a fuse that would lead to an explosion of horror fiction in the late Seventies and early Eighties: a conflagration in which I would be lucky enough to play a tiny, insignificant, but highly enjoyable role.