Education in horror

When my brother and I were teenagers growing up in the arse end of nowheresville — Bromsgrove to its friend — we were mainly looked after by Nanny VHS.

When my brother and I were teenagers growing up in the arse end of nowheresville — Bromsgrove to its friend — we were mainly looked after by Nanny VHS. Every day, Mummy would take us to the rental store to hire a new video so as to keep us off her back. Sometimes it would be war porn, like The Deerhunter, which I think we must have watched about eight times — and the key Russian Roulette scene about 500 times. Sometimes it would be horror porn like Shivers or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

I’d quite forgotten I’d seen Shivers until I watched A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss (BBC4, Monday). But then Gatiss showed the key scene and it all came back. It’s the one where an attractive young woman is relaxing in the bath when a hideous, alien horror creature — imagine a large, aquatic, crawling penis made of raw liver — comes creeping out of the plug hole and moves inexorably towards her open legs. ‘Lalala’ goes the woman, sipping champagne, and generally luxuriating as if in a Badedas commercial. Nearer and nearer crawls the creature. Eeek! It was traumatising enough watching that scene as a brutalised spotty male teenager. Heaven only knows what effect it might have had had I been female.

Anyway, it turns out that all the time my brother and I were watching this stuff we weren’t at all warping our brains with sick and mindless schlock. We were having an education. We were experiencing the Second Golden Age of Horror Cinema.