Family Horror Films

Cover via Amazon

This great little piece and listing from Empire magazine shows why many of my generation had such a dark childhood. The '70s and '80s were a quirky time for kids with many films precariously set between childish imaginings and adult violence. "The Monster Squad" was a 15 certificate horror comedy featuring the Universal Studios group monster favourites being battled by a bunch of children. The film featured adult humour, including the revelation that "Wolfman  has nards!", and a fair bit of gore too. "Robocop" was not a horror movie, but it wasn't really a superhero movie either. It was an 18 certificate dark satire about consumerism and capitalism, where everything had a price, but it was marketed at children with action figures and toys associated with the movie on sale in time for its release. Its sequel also bore an 18 certificate and was even darker, but eventually we had children's cartoon series.

Ghoulish Nostalgic Nightmares

As this is the eve of my favourite festival and in the tradition of "Throwback Thursday" I thought I would re-visit an old nightmare and up-light the stage with the ghoul... 
 
The ghoul ranks amongst the highest of the unreal terrors that haunted my childhood imagination. These grave-raiding spectral monsters seem to be the bestial vestige of the almost neutered vampire figure of today's popular media. However, unlike vampires, werewolves and ghosts, there isn't a linear line to trace its development through fiction. Its iconography has branched off in several different directions and I think we probably could do with a mainstream horror story focusing on a purer form of this monstrosity. The closest I have seen of this happening appears to be in the anime series, "Tokyo Ghoul".

It is common for generations of adults to complain about the violent content of children's fiction, but I pretty much learnt the bulk of my horror education back in the 1980s before I left primary school. In fact, I read about it in primary school! This terrifying poem by Jack Prelutsky was in a book of general children's poetry I bought from our school's Puffin Book Club. The humour is dark and unrelenting. There isn't even a moral core to the story that is often used to offset the grisly content or horrid fates of children in cautionary folk tales. Like the ghoul itself, the poem is relentless in its onward progression through horridness climaxing with a chilling enough thought to give a child nightmares for weeks to come. Is it any wonder that my generation easily lapped up Roald Dahl's contributions to children's fiction.

My "Case" for Halloween

Image via WikipediaUnless you are a Christian fundamentalist or a neo-pagon, the celebration formally known by the ancient Celts as Samhain will have little spiritual meaning to you. Perhaps that's a rather sweeping statement, but I think for the most part if Christmas is losing the battle with commercialization (and my opinion on that is complex) then Halloween lost it a long time ago. In fact, “Halloween”, for all its association with the supernatural, is generally regarded as a secular holiday – and that suits me fine. Our middle class torch-bearers of the "old religion", bless every sky-clad and Hermetic spell-weaving one of them, look to this like a Christmas – except I guess for those also assert, with justification, that Christmas is also a hijacked European pagan festival. Whereas some of the even wackier members of the Christian Right would have us believe that this is the time Satan or the Enemy rides out. And the sight of people - worse still, children! - wondering the streets dressed as the many representations of supernatural evil must be enough to confirm their long held belief that we are all approaching the prophesised End of Times.

The Many Nightmares of Elm Street

Image via WikipediaWith Halloween approaching, what time would be better than to have a look at one of the most popular horror movie franchises of all time. I was way under the legal age when I first saw one of the worst installments of the series, "A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge", and was mildly disappointed. The whole build-up had been too much. School friends had told me it was the scariest horror they had ever seen and to this day I see reviews written saying pretty much the same thing. Of course, they weren't talking about this particular part - although some had seen the sequel and had just got carried away by the impact of the original. I borrowed my VHS copy off one of those adults who let's kids borrow that sort of stuff. In fact, I saw most of my first B movies off this guy. The whole taboo and decadence of the experience was enhanced by the stink of Raffles cigarettes that always seemed to cling the cases.

That Day Again

Friday the 13th did not even have a completed script when Sean S. Cunningham took out this advertisement in Variety magazine (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cover of Friday the 13th Uncut [Blu-ray
So, we arrive on the day when superstition runs rife in the western world. 13 witches in a coven, Judas Iscariot, the treacherous member of JC’s gang, made the number of participants at The Last Supper 13, the Knights Templar were arrested on Friday 13th and so on. “The Thirteenth in the Series” is a great episode of the Alan Simpson and Ray Galton brilliant comedy show “Hancock’s Half Hour”, and is a wonderful satire of how the number 13 can set off a chain reaction of superstitious confirmation bias in a gullible individual followed by buying into any amount of New Age nonsense. In 1980 director Sean S. Cunningham had both horror and humour on his mind when he directed and produced the slasher film, “Friday the 13th”. The humour was designed to relax the audience and the horror came in the form of cheap shocks. It was a pretty bad film in so many ways. It was unoriginal and it kick-started a cynical franchise