BL-24 - Flipbook - Page 109
C U LT U R E & A RT S
By Tom Parker Bowles
Tom Parker Bowles is an awardwinning food writer, restaurant
critic of The Mail On Sunday
and the author of nine cookery
books, the most recent of which is
Cooking and the Crown, featuring
royal recipes from Queen Victoria
to King Charles III.
I
lost it at the video shop. Well,
that’s not technically true. I
昀椀rst really lost it watching The
Amityville Horror on late night
telly with my friend Jake, way past
our bedtime. Or was it Children of
the Corn, where the kids in a small
Nebraska Corn belt town slaughter the
grownups, to appease “He Who Walks
Behind the Rows”.
It could have been the bit in Raiders
of The Lost Ark when the bespectacled
Gestapo agent melts before our very
eyes, or Bette Davis in The Watcher
in The Woods, or the skeletons in the
pool in Poltergeist, or most 1970s
episodes of Dr Who. Or the whole
of bloody Jaws. But to misquote
Goodfellas, “as far back as I can
remember, I always wanted to hide
behind the sofa.” I love horror 昀椀lms
like Norman Bates loves his mother.
With an all-encompassing obsession.
I grew up in the splatter glory days,
those heady, pre video censorship
days, before the prim, pious and
altogether pants Video Recordings Act
(VRA) of 1984 gave the British Board
of Film Censors (BBFC) the right to
rate, cut and ban any 昀椀lm on video that
offended tabloids, sanctimonious Tory
MPs (I’m looking at you, Graham
Bright), or ghastly old puritans (RIP,
Mary Whitehouse). Back then, just
a wander around Forward Video in
Corsham, Wiltshire (or any other VHS
emporium) could fuel a young boy’s
fascination (and nightmares) for years
to come.
While 昀椀lms shown in cinemas were
rated from U (Suitable for all) to
X (adults only), 昀椀lms released on
new-fangled VHS or Betamax had
no such restrictions, meaning that
an entire world of blood-soaked,
brain-splattered, breast-enhanced
exploitation excess was available to
all.
Well, if you could sneak it past your
parents, that was. No 昀椀lm was too
sick, sleazy or deranged, and with so
much 昀椀lth to choose from, the poster
art needed to be lurid, exploitative
and a whole lot of fun to stand out. It
mattered little that the cover bore little
relevance to the 昀椀lm within.
But then the VRA became law, and 39
昀椀lms, from Absurd to Zombie Flesh
Eaters, were deemed “obscene” by the
Director of Public Prosecutions, and
illegal either to sell or own. A further
34 (including classics like The Evil
Dead and Shogun Assassins) were
put on “parole”, while the likes of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and
The Exorcist were simply refused a
certi昀椀cate until the end of the 1990s. I
wanted to see them all.
To a gore-hungry teenager – who
had already worked his way through
everything from Carnival of Souls and
Night of the Living Dead to Hellraiser,
Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm
Street – these “video nasties” became
horror’s Holy Grails, only available
from dodgy men in dodgy pubs on
dodgy pirated VHS. God, those were
the days.
Many were pure crap. Some,
like I Spit on your Grave and
Anthropophagous the Beast, simply
too misogynist and hateful to ever
watch again. I 昀椀rst saw The Evil
Dead at The Scala in King’s Cross,
The Exorcist (along with Salo) at the
ICA, which – as an “arts club” – was
exempt from the usual certi昀椀cation
law.
Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
No, one glance at The Toolbox
Murders (“Bit by bit … by bit he
carved a nightmare!”), The Beast in
Heat (“Horrifying Experiences in the
Last Days of the SS!”) or Zombie
Flesh Eaters (“When the earth spits
out the Dead … they will return to
tear the 昀氀esh of the Living …”) and
I was hooked. I’d pore over Radio
Rental video catalogues like rare
vellum manuscripts, dreaming of
Mardi Gras Massacre, Twitch of the
Death Nerve (aka Bay of Blood, and
actually very good), 2000 Maniacs
and Bloodsucking Freaks. And
collect Video Today magazines with a
reverence verging on awe.
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But it wasn’t all hungry cannibals,
psychotic handymen and merrilyslashed jugulars. I also rented,
recorded and bought any horror I
could 昀椀nd, inhaling every work by
every great director: James Whale,
Tod Browning, H. G Lewis, George
A. Romero, John Carpenter, Tobe
Hooper, Wes Craven.
From them, it was a short hop to the
Italian maestros: Dario Argento, Lucio
Fulci, Mario Bava, Joe D’Amato and
Ruggero Deodato, and on to the sexy
Euro sleaze of Jean Rollins, via some
crazy, balls-out bonkers Mexican,
Japanese, Filipino and South Korean
昀氀icks. Now, of course, everything
is available at the touch of a button.
Even the most rare and extreme stuff,
from Thundercrack (don’t ask) to A
Serbian Tale (really, don’t ask).
