I wasn’t allowed to watch scary stuff as a kid. My mum, bless her ever-loving heart, knew all too well the sort of kid I was; mainly quiet and shy, always reading, prone to overthinking and worrying (some things never change), and with the sort of imagination that would turn the watching of one scary film into a month’s worth of bedtime drama. Despite her best efforts, however, my Horrific Origin would be unavoidable.

SHARKY MALARKEY

So, Jaws was on TV for what must’ve been one of the first (if not THE first) times since its cinema release in the UK in December ’75, a memorable month as it was when I was born.

Viewing absolutely verboten in our house, which of course (coupled with the fact that what seemed like ALL our mates had seen it at the cinema and described in detail many of the best bits (one of said mates at some point in 3D; impressed doesn’t come close) made us want to see it all the more. Nope, nope, nope. Mum’s final word.

Research tells me the first time it aired on UK television was October 1981, which means my 6th birthday was two months away. Mum, you were very likely right to deny viewing privileges that day.

As a direct result of this early form of video censorship (1980’s DIY/ home version), I developed a profound and abiding interest in anything connected with sharks, deep water, the sea as a vast, merciless thing to find oneself adrift on (or floating helplessly in, limbs dangling nakedly into the depths, frighteningly visible to whatever lurked below). You name it, I was all over it. Combine it with an element of horror (particularly that of being trapped underwater with rapidly diminishing air supply as many similar films demonstrate), and you have yourself one shiny-eyed, rapt viewer.

Whilst my enthusiasm for sharks and everything shark-related led me down a path of facts that blew most of the common shark myths out of the water (to coin a rather apt phrase), it didn’t change the fact that before I even saw Jaws (probably about 8 or 9 years later) I was still in a hurry to get out of the deep end of any swimming pool I jumped into for a long, long time; though oddly enough swimming in the sea never bothered me unless I couldn’t see through the water.

That’s truly successful horror and a big part of my Horrific Origin; the power to scare someone with a film they’ve yet to see, with a story they know is 80% dramatic license.

Class.

NEVER TRICK AN INNOCENT GRANDPARENT

I can’t actually remember how I knew about this video. Mum had the album (on vinyl, of course) so I, already with the seeds of forbidden film-watching sprouting in my curious mind, had possibly seen the album cover and been intrigued. It’s also possible I’d heard other kids mention it, though I cannot imagine for one minute I’d have been as keen to see it had I a true inkling of its contents. Ghosts I knew about. Sharks I knew of. Zombies? I was totally uninitiated. Well, that was about to change forever.

Conning my sweetly-innocent-of-age-appropriate-viewing material Nanny into letting me rent Michael Jackson’s Thriller from the video shop one weekend was for a very long time the biggest mistake of my life, though like many major mistakes, I learned a hot lesson that day; film certification exists for a very good reason.

Such were the days of VHS tape rentals; off you’d trot to the local shop to gaze at the ranks of latest blockbusters (also the name of the shop for many British kids), trying to figure out which you’d be permitted to borrow and which you might be able to get hold of by asking (in some cases bribing) one of the bigger local kids to do it for you. Guidance ratings were new to us back then (as were films on tape), but we did know some weren’t allowed for pipsqueaks like us. Of course, this made them all the more desirable, which could have played a hand in my curiosity.

As with most kids who’ve successfully pulled a fast one on an adult, I felt a strange mix of pride and guilt when I left the video shop clutching a copy of said film in its anonymous black plastic rental case, and carried it back to my Nan’s in triumph.

Crawling crimson letters spread slowly across a blank, black screen and hung there glistening as the film began, and with it (as I was about to discover) my lifelong revulsion for zombies.

The whole premise of the movie got to me from the off. I shivered my way through sinister music and sound effects, unexpected metamorphoses, and highly effective almost-silent periods where the music would fade out and all I could hear was the unspeakable rustlings and scrapings of things breaking free of their tombs and roaming the streets when they should be resting peacefully in their eternal graves.

Regretting my actions more with each grim, ragged creature that wrenched its way free and onto the screen, drooling black, tar-like goo from its mouth, I knew I was in over my head–into another stage of my Horrific Origin. EVERYTHING WAS DEAD. ROTTING. PRIMALLY, HIDEOUSLY, BIOLOGICALLY SO.

Part of what repelled me most was that this was against the laws of nature. Ghosts were explainable. Sharks sometimes ate people. Reanimated corpses shouldn’t happen. Just the yuk factor alone of dozens of semi-decomposed bodies stumbling about the streets wasn’t worth thinking about. Long-dead hands which should’ve stayed buried clawed and grasped their way out of the settled earth of their graves, wearing not shrouds, but more horrifically the tattered remnants of their best suits, dresses, hats, shoes; chosen carefully by loving, grieving relatives to lay their dearly departed to eternal rest. Instead here they were, staggering and groaning in such a way as to suggest (to a fertile little mind of tender years such as mine) the worm-riddled state of their brains.

Seemingly intent on an agenda of some kind they headed slowly and unsteadily but with purpose along the street, as if summoned by some unseen authority. Spoiler: it was actually Michael bloody Jackson, known to me simply as the boy holding the dove on the cover of another of mum’s records; the kid with the sweet voice who then had some surgery and changed what I thought was a perfectly lovely face (this added to the shock factor of the transformations he underwent in this film), now as zombified as all the tomb escapees and glaring straight into my soul with horribly aware eyes set in deep, burning sockets.

With horror I realised his funky leather outfit was now showing tattered and mouldy patches, and his usually meticulously sculpted hair was greasy-looking and unruly. For some reason this struck a new level of terror into me. This was Michael Jackson. We all knew that outfit. He never looked anything other than perfectly groomed; the picture-perfect popstar.

With Vincent’s Price’s sepulchral voiceover painting a dark, bleak, and most of all unnatural picture I didn’t fully understand (but quickly realised I wanted nothing to do with) completing the deal, the stage was set for the next 6 months (at least) for me to spend every second wishing to turn back the clock or else erase the entire thing from my memory.

The upshot of all this (apart from the trauma, which finally abated after what seemed like 300 years), was an eternal aversion to zombies. I still think they’re gross, but before 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead, my opinion that they were slow-moving, dim-witted, clumsy and easy to escape from was steadfast. The most threat a zombie could’ve posed to me was TOUCH me. Or breathe on me. Ew, keep your oozing, slimy squidginess and crypt-breath to yourselves, if you don’t mind.

In spite of my poor view of their capacity to be deadly, the truly visceral horror they evoked in me that day remains (no pun intended) undiminished, slow-witted or not.

I recently watched Thriller again to see if my Horrific Origin reaction had been biased because of my age. It hadn’t; it still scared me stupid.

DISNEY DID WHAT????

So here we arrive at my final tale of my Horrific Origin, what led to my first tiptoeing steps along the haunted highway; steps which gradually sped up to a trot, then a lively canter, before reaching a thundering gallop I’m still not tired from.

Since those early forays on the fringes I’ve unwittingly defined exactly what makes a horror work for me. Just as we all have stuff in the bored bucket that petrifies others yet leaves us cold, so we also harbour our own personal demons that leave us prey to the chilling touch of the right story told in just the right way. We get to know the names of those who create our favourites in books and films alike, but what happens when you find out Disney had a hand in what still remains one of the creepiest films you’ve ever seen?

I know. Say it ain’t so! But it is.

The Watcher in the Woods is a supernatural horror aimed at young adults; Disney’s target audience at the time. Based on the 1976 book A Watcher in the Woods by Florence Engel Randall, it premiered in the US in April 1980, and in October 1981 was re-released following cuts due to negative audience and critic response, whereupon it did hugely well (enough to result in something of a cult following and 2017 remake–which I’ve yet to see).

The story follows Jan (an earnest American teen), her parents, and little sister Ellie as they move into a vast mansion in the depths of the English countryside. Their landlady is an elderly sour-faced widow (Bette Davis) who lives alone in the guesthouse next door, and displays an unnerving interest in Jan (who it turns out is the image of her own daughter, mysteriously vanished without a trace during an innocent initiation into a circle of local children thirty years hence).

Subtly chilling events begin even as the family are moving into the house; the absence of Jan’s reflection in a mirror she’s about to hang on the wall, recurring visions including that of a girl in white, her eyes blindfolded, reaching out for help (once in a hall of mirrors, later glowing in the remnants of a centuries-old coffin in the ruins of the abandoned chapel where the mystery of the missing girl began).

The frequency and intensity of these occurrences increase, drawing in the younger sister as a conduit between this world and… another. As for the final scene, well. You’ll have to watch it because I’m not a spoiler. Suffice to say this is where my foundations as an addict of all things spooky were forever established.

This was the first scary film I had neither to dupe an unsuspecting adult into letting me watch, nor be denied the viewing of altogether. Deep-sea terrors exploding out of abyssal waters to engulf hapless midnight swimmers, and the shudder-inducing, stumbling dead arisen were one thing; they were blood-and-guts territory. For the first time I understood the meaning of one’s hair standing up on the back of the neck, of feeling my blood running cold in my veins. A true Horrific Origin. So where I’ll watch a slasher or a zombie fest if I can be convinced that the storyline will offer anything I haven’t seen in almost every example of those subgenres I’ve encountered before, my personal demons, the ones to whom I am a willing, delectable, full-fat feast, are things that go bump in the night.

I am that friend who always visits the haunted house or ghost train at theme parks, even if I go alone. I am the avid reader whose walls are lined with the beaten-up works of Stephen King, James Herbert, Clive Barker and Edgar Allen Poe. I am the girl huddled by the campfire, spellbound by the telling of the ghost story before bed.

Sleep tight, won’t you, and be here next week for another Horrific Origin in our ongoing series.