How I learned to start screaming and love the horror movie

Buddy, you can keep your Christmases and your Easters, your Hanukkahs and your Eids. For someone like me, the annual celebration that really matters is the one that falls on 31 October — Halloween. This isn’t because I’m an inveterate trick-or-treater, out for candy and larks. It isn’t because I own shares in a pumpkin patch. It’s because I am a film fan, grateful for any excuse to indulge in horror movies as night’s dark curtains draw closer. No other time of the year offers such a perfect alignment of occasion and genre. ’Tis, after all, the season to be scared.

And this season is shaping up better than most. The British Film Institute has, since August, been presiding over a grand feast of horror cinema called Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film (it runs until January of next year). Screenings have already been held in atmospheric locations such as the British Museum. Hundreds more will take place, starting now, in the BFI’s cinema complex in London, and across the rest of the country. And a fine accompanying book has been published, containing essays by folk as diverse as that cultural mahatma Sir Christopher Frayling and the film director Guillermo del Toro. Horror is being taken seriously this Halloween.

And very rightly so. From the early years of cinema, serious directors have made serious films for the fright market: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), for example, or F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), or — my favourite silent horror — Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). Back then, even certain camera angles could be hair-raising, such was the novelty of the medium. Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), a western, famously closes with a bandit shooting into the camera and, by extension, into the audience.