Q: We're thinking ahead to October and wondering if there's any programmes that scared you as a child. If so would you like to cover an episode for 53. We're thinking of covering the two Dafthead Worzel Gummidge stories. Have a think and let us know.
As it’s the season for spooks and ghouls to go a-roaming again – and also because I was asked! - I’ve been giving some thought to this small matter of the television that scared me when I was younger, and, rather surprisingly it’s not quite as straightforward a question as you might think.
After all, these days I am a rather impressionable soul and, quite frankly, pretty much everything about the modern world can terrify me once I start to think about it, but back then, I can’t really remember all that much absolutely horrifying me in quite the same way that it seems to have bothered some people.
I’m sure that, if they were still alive (and not holding up the patio), my parents would disagree and recollect nights of screaming and howling and bet-wetting heebie-jeebies, but thankfully that’s all well buried now.
Deep in the subconscious, of course, and not under the rhododendron bushes.
There were, of course, those occasional moments that made me shudder that we all share, like being freaked out by that bloody hooded figure by the dark and lonely water, but, because the memory is sometimes merciful, I don’t really remember having any nightmares that kept me awake and so terrified of closing my eyes that I began to see and hear monsters and psychopaths in every shadow and creak as the alarm clock ticked its radioactive way towards another grateful dawn.
That all came later.
You see, the two films that I saw on television that most terrified me and had me leaving the lights on and wondering just what that creak I heard on the stairs might be, or whether the knife-wielding maniac was behind that door, and cautiously creeping about the house, checking “just in case,” were both watched when I was the kind of “grown-up” who really ought to have known better.
The first of these was the version of “10 Rillington Place” that starred lovely cuddly old Dickie Attenborough as real-life serial killer Reginald Halliday Christie, which I think got to me precisely because it told a story of a real-world horror, and, perhaps, because it involved a terrible injustice that led me to seek out Ludovic Kennedy’s book which, quite obviously, disturbed me even more!
I saw that film very late at night on the black and white portable set that I had in my bedroom, and, whilst I’m now very glad that I did watch it, on that particular night, I really wished that I hadn’t, if you see what I mean.
There’s something about that quiet menacing voice that Attenborough uses that still disturbs me whenever I see that one, but I also think that this particular subject matter, where people can be so cruel to each other, says a lot more about the kind of stuff that I find far more terrifying than all of the shockers and jump-scares in the so-called horror stories ever could.
The other was Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” which I taped off Channel Four one night and then watched alone in my flat on another weekend early evening, just as the twilight failed and the shadows thickened, and was an experience which disturbed me so much that I genuinely lay awake for hours and, despite my dire financial straits at that time, kept the light burning brightly enough that nobody, I believed (although it’s clearly nonsense), could sneak up on me unawares.
I’m sure that dyed-in-the-wool Horror Film fans would find both of these examples decidedly tame, but they both got inside my head which is, I suppose, what good horror does.
After all, despite the fact that they can appear laughable to the modern viewer, all of those Universal Horrors of the 1930s and 1940s were probably just as shocking to some of their audiences when they were first released into an unsuspecting world.
Oh, I do miss those late night double bills that used to turn up on the weekends when I was at an impressionable age. There was something about the shared experience of them – or even the anticipation of them too - when discussed in the playground during the week that downloads and streaming doesn’t quite manage to capture any more.
And, when it comes to other late-night horror films that still resonate, whilst there are several well-known reasons to find much to enjoy in THE WICKER MAN, that final, cruel fate is still deeply, deeply disturbing, and sets in mind a train of thought that haunts you.
Of course, we are more concerned with television in this dark and spooky corner of the internet, and whilst those films being on television is precisely why I got to see and be disturbed by them, it is our memories of small screen terrors to which I ought to be turning my red-eyed evil gaze.
That said, I think these days I’m actually more bothered by the idea of being frightened than the fear itself. I’m still looking at that unopened copy of Nigel Kneale’s version of THE WOMAN IN BLACK and thinking “Maybe another day” because I’ve been told it’s terrifying (and I’m no longer all that fond of being terrified – no matter how much I admire the writer’s work), and also because, to be fair, the stage show has already deeply disturbed me on two separate occasions that were – thankfully – diluted by the journey home from those theatres, even though each time that particular version has triggered “dark thoughts” just as I’ve been trying my best to get off to a fitful slumber.
Much the same can be said of that very pricy “GHOST STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS” set that has stayed safely wrapped up in its cellophane skin for several Christmases now because I know that both WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU and THE SIGNALMAN will bother me on a deeply disturbing psychological level.
Fear of the fear.
It’s strange that I have this, and that it’s getting worse.
Especially as some of the reasons often given for why such stories are so popular is that so many of us quite enjoy being frightened…
Apparently.
We still hang on to the recordings and watch the more recent GHOST STORIES on a bright afternoon at the height of summer, you know.
To be honest, I’ve become far more susceptible to such worries the older I’ve got, and I’ve become less tolerant of the cruelty to other people that used to be all the rage in those Horror Films that other people seemed to find so appealing when I was hiding under the cushions. That said, the famously banned “Evil Dead 2” bothered me far less than walking home in a rainstorm after watching “The Omen” and my friend James leaping out at us in the car park after going to see “Jagged Edge” terrified me far more than any of those late night double bills that used to keep us up looking for thrills on BBC2.
Thinking about it, however, “The Fall of the House of Usher” did disturb me though. I think it was those scratch marks on the coffin lid that did it, or maybe it was just those pointed silences that racked up the tension to the point where you either just couldn’t bear the suspense, or you dozed off after one too many pints on a Saturday night out.
Because, for me at least, these films were either a shared experience after a trip to the pub via the video rental shop, or a lonely experience on a late-night flickering screen.
Funnily enough, one of the television horrors that I remember quite shaking me up was from the otherwise quite ridiculous vaults of THE HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR. For me it was the one called THE HOUSE THAT BLED TO DEATH featuring Nicholas Ball, and who was quite a big name at that time – 1980 – after his starring role in the popular HAZELL TV series.
The director Tom Clegg and writer David Lloyd would no doubt be delighted to discover that their “shock ending” did indeed shock this particular viewer to the very core upon its original transmission. I think I’ve had a deep mistrust of the sudden appearance of bloody great big knives ever since.
And, given that I’ve become such a wuss, the older me probably wouldn’t even tune in to such a thing these days – although we did rattle through Netflix’s THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE earlier in the year and that did have its moments – and as for the younger me, well, I’m still not convinced that he was all that bothered by anything very much.
Either that or I simply wasn’t drawn to that kind of television.
You see, I am absolutely certain that I remember watching THE CHILDREN OF THE STONES on first transmission, but the theme tune doesn’t trigger quite the same disturbed reaction as it seems to have with some other viewers.
Equally, I do remember being quite gripped by THE CHANGES ten-part serial, and seeing it right through to the end, but my abiding memory is of what a waste of television sets the opening episodes featured, which probably says more about how much I wanted my own TV set than anything much else.
Perhaps oddly, one of the children’s serials that did disturb me was the adaptation of Alan Garner’s THE OWL SERVICE which had such a freakish opening sequence, coupled with a disturbing soundtrack largely made up of edgy sound effects, that it took me until a Sunday morning repeat several decades later before I could finally summon up the nerve to watch the thing.
Interesting that, I suppose, that ordinary sound can be so much more chilling than you might expect.
It’s a little bit like that opening to CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERONS in which the footsteps stalking their way along a dark street late at night was the thing that most disturbed me, and stuck with me long after those haunting Mysteron voices had done their macabre thing.
I’m certainly no fan of hearing footsteps following me on a dark night even to this day. But then, I suppose, that few of us would be, really.
Perhaps that’s the secret, really. Making the ordinary and everyday seem sinister and disturbing is precisely what it takes to frighten the wotnots out of us. Does a series like TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED or THE FRIGHTENERS frighten us less simply because there is a clue in the title. Does a GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS actually make our skin crawl less because we know that it IS a Ghost Story before we’ve seen one frame? Are the more disturbing things that lock into our fevered imaginations those ordinary things like Public Information Films that just popped up unannounced, hiding in plain sight amidst the adverts for fizzy pop, LP Records, and Christmas must-have toys?
Certainly one of the things that made DOCTOR WHO so compelling for us kids was that idea of monsters from outer space lurking, as the great man once so eloquently put it, on our loo in Tooting Bec.
Suddenly, our own adventures down by whichever local wasteground we used to play on suddenly had the air of possible excitement and danger when the alien menace might have been lurking beneath the ground waiting for the next young tearaway to come along and be offered whatever form of dubious immortality was being offered that week.
It must have helped that, within such tales, it was often those dubious bullies that might otherwise have been making our real lives hell that tended to suffer the consequences of playing on the wrong side of such tracks.
Being a DOCTOR WHO fan from an early age ought to have given me my fair share of shocks to seer themselves into the subconscious, but none of them really stick in my mind as having done so.
I think I simply enjoyed the show too much to be frightened by it or, if I was frightened, I was more fascinated by that continuing unfolding text enough that SUTEKH BRINGING THE GIFT OF DEATH TO ALL HUMANITY or a servant of the Master holding our hero’s head underwater certainly caused me little in the way of sleepless nights, I seem to recall.
Although…
Yes, I definitely DO remember JO GRANT being stalked by that lethal giant maggot whilst she was sitting there oblivious to the fact that it was coming closer and closer and closer.
Now that was disturbing, but, when you think about it, I would have been just that couple of years younger then and, let’s be honest, I’m still more than a little freaked out by maggots and similar creepy-crawlies to this day.
It’s probably why I never saw any appeal in taking up fishing.
My dad, of course, used to have this theory that he needed to “protect” me from possible nightmares that might be caused by things that I might have seen on the television.
So, for example, if we were watching SPARTACUS and there was a particularly gruesome and bloody death coming up, I would be sent out of the living room to wait in our chilly hallway until I got the all clear, and this happened every time he thought something might be about to appear on TV that might disturb me.
Somehow I got to associate that vast mirror we had on that end wall above that tiny gas heater with all sorts of unpleasantnesses, and this, for some reason that still escapes me, is why I got to see the final scenes of PLANET OF THE SPIDERS through the open door of the living room from a safe spot looking through the banister rail from near the top of the stairs.
Odd that.
All the bloody great spiders – No problem!
But the big farewell, the “death scene” of my television hero, and I was banished outside, just far enough for me to be convinced that Tom Baker was actually the puppet Lord Charles, complete with monocle.
Emotions, you see.
Farewells.
Difficult things.
Obviously my father knew me too well.
Weirdly, of course, with both my parents and my sister all out at work, I spent a lot of my school holidays watching the television instead of going out and playing football or whatever it was the other children my age were supposed to get up to. Christmas holidays featured the milder thrills of FLASH GORDON and HOLIDAY STAR TREK in the wintertime, and all manner of unsupervised television action throughout those long summer mornings.
But the thing is, once the lunchtime children’s entertainments were done and dusted, I’d stick around and watch all manner of those “grown-up” dramas that filled summer afternoon schedules, and so I was probably exposed to far more of those banishment-worthy moments than my father might have realised, a visual diet, of course, that probably explains why I’m doing exactly this sort of thing today.
Oddly enough, however, I think I was an unusual child in that real world events were actually more likely to disturb me and haunt me, and, because he would sit and watch the news every evening without ever feeling the need to banish me from the room for that, perhaps he didn’t know me that well at all after all.
When I was at an impressionable age, you see, there were lots of major air crashes all over the news, and every bulletin seemed to be full of burnt twisted metal, debris and scattered suitcases on strips of tarmac and hillsides, and that sense of fear of flying, that everything that was you could be stopped simply by your parents deciding to take you off on a foreign holiday was one of the most disturbing ideas that I can remember picking up as a child.
So my parents would book a holiday and, although possibly they never knew this, I would spend the subsequent three or four months convinced that I was approaching my end, and the relief of safely arriving at some foreign hotel resort would immediately find me fretting about the return journey two weeks later.
Such a fun and well-adjusted child I must have been.
It didn’t help that my mother was as avid a holidaymaker as she was a nervous flyer and such things are infectious I suppose. We subconsciously pick up on the things that frighten our parents, don’t we? And I guess that’s as true about our television choices as anything; If there’s nervous tension in the room, we sense it, and it feeds into our own responses to the stories unfolding on the screen.
There was some sense of comfort in turning away from the screen and finding the normality of armchairs, or beefburgers and chips, still there, just as they always were, as the terrors unfolded on the TV.
Equally, if the rubber monster is seen as being hilarious by the others watching with us, then we find them less terrifying, too. This possibly explains why we allegedly “grow out of” programmes like DOCTOR WHO – because others around us started to find such things childish and silly and, as we all want to be accepted by our peer group, we would pretend to as well, and feign an interest in grown-up “acceptable” things like football and beer.
That said, my big sister may have grown out of DOCTOR WHO, but she still borrowed my TARGET books to read, and, let’s be honest, a great many of those people who might have at least pretended to grow out of such things ended up adoring it with their own children a generation later on.
Personally, I think a lot of us look back with a kind of fondness to those childhood scares and we feel a kind of nostalgic glow for those moments of family bonding through the comparatively mild scares and release of tension we got from watching them all together.
I still get convinced of my imminent impending doom every time I fly, by the way.
Interestingly, this same sense of superstitious doom meant that I never completed reading DOCTOR WHO AND THE CRUSADERS which was bought for me at the time of first publication by my Auntie Bessie when she was visiting us. For some reason I got it into my head that I would be in mortal peril if ever I finished it, which meant that decades later when I finally played the audiobook version, I still got a little bit twitchy about whether to let it play on.
But, despite all the efforts the programme makers were making in trying to terrify us – whether deliberately or accidentally (after all, the things that some people claim freaked them out were probably intended to be quite benign and even friendly) for me it was the news stories that continued to haunt me after dark.
Names like “Moorgate” and “Summerland” and “Piper Alpha” still resonate with me when I think back to the things that concerned and bothered me back then, and I know that at least some of them seeped into my playtimes, too.
The drawings I drew to try and comprehend the compression of that first carriage down to thirteen feet at Moorgate; the bonfire that consumed my toy garage which disappeared in some re-enactment of Summerland; the toy cars that got mangled as I tried to come to terms with the latest motorway pile-up – all these things were fed by the news monster, and those tragic stories remain just as vivid in my memories now as the Cybermen finally arriving at Nerva Beacon and mercilessly gunning down our heroes before the credits rolled.
And then there were those documentaries, because, when it comes to outright horror that takes deep root in a young mind, then it’s going to take something like THE WORLD AT WAR to plant it.
You see, having been there, my father took a lot of interest in the Second World War. For many years there was a great big leather-bound set of a part-work magazine he collected called THE WAR ILLUSTRATED that sat on one of the bookshelves which I would occasionally browse through, but that interest meant that he would always sit down and watch a war film if one was on.
For my sister it was cowboys – chiefly for the horses I suspect – but with dad it was a war film, and, quite naturally, the rest of us would watch it too – even though I’d occasionally be staring at my own reflection in that chilly hallway when things got too desperate.
But this means that when THE WORLD AT WAR was on, he’d have been there, glued to his seat every week and, to be honest, even if most of it was edited to make it less horrific for domestic consumption, there’s one episode – the GENOCIDE one about the Holocaust – that no amount of editing could remove the horror from.
And that’s perfectly acceptable because, and I mean this sincerely, I still believe that being exposed to such horrors at a young and impressionable age was probably a good thing for me, and I genuinely believe that occasional reminders of the terrible things that human beings can do to each other is possibly the best way to prevent them from happening again.
Cruelty, you see? It still bothers me.
Perhaps that’s the real problem. I’ve become far more bothered by the idea of humanity’s ability to be cruel to other human beings. The notion of torture, and cruelty, and the horrible possibility that I might actually be put in such a position one awful day if the human beings around here start to display a lot of the horrible tendencies that other human beings have done to each other throughout history.
Such programmes, full of such terrible images as they are, did, at least, get us thinking, and talking, and certainly didn’t prompt any playtime re-enactments and, with the way the world seems to be changing these days, I can’t help but think that being shown such things, not to glorify them, and learning just how wrong they are, might not be the worst thing to be doing.
But these things are not shown any more. Perhaps we’ve decided that young minds are too impressionable and, in protecting them, we start to suggest that these real-life horrors are just myths and legends like the werewolves in those late night movies, or the “common sense” we all have.
The same “common sense” that meant that those terrifying Public Information Films disappeared and people started to wear black outfits on dark country lanes, or started to drown in reservoirs, all over again.
Nowadays my own fears are very different, and are often brought to vivid life every time I switch on the television news. The actions of the unthinking mob, or the ignorant thug, or just the thought of someone unexpected being there in the room when I wake up bothers me, as does the idea of being the person seen to fail, or, perhaps, even being a person who is seen at all.
You might be surprised given all this audio nonsense I’ve been doing, but I’m still intimidated if someone is in the room watching me do it, and I clam up.
Obviously, when my copy of Scarred For Life turns up, I’ll be reminded of a hell of a lot more of the things that once bothered me, but for now, I’m prepared to believe that it was the real-world horrors as seen on TV that shaped me and stuck with me.
That, and that two-foot long maggot making its way across the floor to where Jo Grant is sitting.
Martin A W Holmes, September, 2020
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