To understand my attitude to horror, it is important to understand the world I grew up in. It was populated and controlled by adults who’d lived through World War 2. We were surrounded by remnants of the war, both physical and mental, but as children, our world was carefree, and the adults didn’t like that. They wanted us to suffer like they’d suffered, because prolonged suffering had won them the fucking war, after all. Of course, my upbringing went deeper than that, because it was also firmly rooted in my father’s upbringing.
If this was a television show, it would be now the picture went all faded and wobbly, signifying a step back in time.
In a cottage kitchen in County Sligo, in the early 1920s, Granny Caffrey (she had no first name, because she was poor) was hunched over the kitchen sink, preparing dinner. Her gnarled and calloused fingers gripped the shard of grey flint which substituted for a knife, scraping over the potatoes, flicking off scab and the green eyes. These were hungry times: not hungry as in ‘I missed breakfast’, but hungry as in nothing to eat at all for days upon weeks upon months. It was the sort of hungry that filled graveyards rather than meant you dropped a dress size.
My father’s family was poor, but it was that self-righteous type of poverty; the one that some people nurture and carry proudly as a beacon to show their future offspring how ungrateful they are. Often these people will hold regular suffering cake-walks, demonstrating to their children how they will never be able to hold a candle to the sacrifices of their saintly parents.
But enough of such things; let’s get back to my grandmother. Her stomach growled as she eyed the half dozen spuds which had to feed her seventeen growing children and her hard-working, never-complaining, husband. Then, mid peel, something landed on the floor, splashing amniotic fluid onto her bare feet. She looked down and saw my father looking back up at her. She was more than a little put out, as his arrival meant the spuds had to feed one more mouth.
With something approaching tenderness, she reached out to the newly arrived baby, stood him upright and pointed out of the door towards the fields that needed ploughing. He’d done a day’s work before anyone considered cutting the umbilical cord. I know this to be true, because in later life, he told me so. Repeatedly.
My father’s childhood is shrouded in mystery. It wasn’t that he never talked about it. Sometimes he talked of nothing else. On occasions, you couldn’t get him to fucking shut up about it. It was mysterious because much of what he told me about his upbringing—usually in order to illustrate how useless a son I was—didn’t make any sense. There were, however, two things of which I was certain: his family lived miles away from anywhere, and they had no fucking shoes.
As a young boy, if I complained about having to wait for the school bus in the rain, my father would recall how, when he was my age, he’d walked fifteen miles to school, in the pouring rain, barefoot. If I decried the savagery of making me get out of bed at six o’clock on a Sunday morning to sit on a hard bench in a cold church, he’d remind me how when he was my age, he’d walked twenty miles to church, through the snow, barefoot. If I tried to evade going out to buy his newspaper on a Saturday morning, he’d point out when he was my age, he’d had to walk twenty-five miles across the stony field, barefoot, to get his father a newspaper.
He never explained why they had a twenty-five mile long field of stones, nor why they elected to live in a house which was too far from anywhere to be of any use, nor why they had no shoes. To be honest, I didn’t dare to ask. If I did, he’d go on about it for fucking hours.
When my father first took his brood of ungrateful whelps back to the Auld Country, I expected to see armies of fit and clean-living young men, striding purposefully from one good deed to another, all barefoot. I expected them to blaze a trail from their work to the houses of their mothers, where, once having said a Novena for her carbuncles, they would whip through a string of household duties before heading home to another string of chores. They would do so silently, without complaint, and without shoes. What I actually found was a nation of lazy fuckers adorned with comfortable footwear. Times had obviously changed.
Anyway, I digress. As the years passed, his siblings turned their backs on the hard work, poverty, and religious intolerance that represented Ireland in the late 1940s, heading for new lives in the US and Australia. My father stayed out of loyalty to the family. However, such was the extent of the exodus, he soon found himself isolated, a solitary young man surrounded by the old and infirm. With no company apart from a few cows, a donkey with split hooves, and a blind sheep dog (that’s a sheep dog with no vision, not a dog trained to herd blind sheep), he yearned for something better.
In the late 1950s, he finally gave up on farming and, desperate for shoes, headed to England. He told me he walked all the way to London, barefoot. Personally, I think he caught the boat.
I would imagine that when he first pitched up in London, he must have been shocked how the English went about their daily lives without complaint, despite being burdened by shoes. A stickler for fitting in when abroad, he would have found himself wandering into a cobbler’s shop at some point.
‘What do you call these yokes again? Shoes, you say? Well, I can’t see them catching on. Okay, I’m in your part of the world, so I’ll take one. What? They come in pairs? Go on then; I’ll have a pair.’
To be honest, I think my father must have been quite taken with the whole shoe thing, because for a man who had climbed Flinty Rock and run across Jagged Mountain barefoot, I never once saw him without footwear. Okay; maybe there was one time on a beach, and the rare occasions he would use secateurs to clip his toe nails while watching the horse racing, but generally he was always shoed.
Anyway, once in London and having purchased some suitable footwear, he arranged to lodge with a cousin, a nurse who’d moved to England a few years earlier. On his first night in the capital, she took him to a hospital dance, where he met a radiographer. In the darkness of a linen cupboard, my father had his first ever clumsy sexual encounter. Six months later, they were married, due to the fact he hadn’t worn a sheath!
Note to younger readers: if you don’t know what a sheath is, ask your grandmother, very loudly, while in the supermarket.
My father was a staunch Catholic (hence no sheath), and his understanding of faith was based on the violent implementations he endured as a child. He didn’t question what he was told; he just followed orders. He believed anything which the church didn’t actively endorse had to be heresy. It was black and white for him. If it wasn’t praised from the pulpit, it was certainly a shortcut to hell.
My mother didn’t share his dogmatic beliefs, nor did she share his enthusiasm for a family of the scale he’d been born into. After three children, she adopted nocturnal headaches after he refused to consider the sin that was contraception.
For all the wrongs my father displayed, laziness was not one of them. He worked hard to keep his family in food and essentials. He’d get up for work at five o’clock in the morning, wouldn’t get home until seven o’clock at night, and after dinner he’d doze in the armchair until the nine o’clock news came on. After watching the headlines, he’d go to bed. With him and the children all asleep, my mother was left alone at night, and she got bored easily. Night after night of sitting alone with no company started to affect her mind.
Her salvation came at some point in the late 1960s, when one of the few TV channels of the day decided to show horror films after the usual shut-down time on a Friday night. That’s right, children of the modern age: we had two television channels, growing to three by the end of the decade, and they stopped transmitting when the powers-that-be thought normal folk should be in bed, usually around half past ten.
Back to the point (yes, there’s a fucking point). Her joy wasn’t because she loved horror, but the lateness of the films gave her something to do when everyone else was asleep. It was nothing more than a distraction, and a late TV film in those days was quite the rare thing. As my father didn’t work weekends, she foolishly asked if he’d stay up and watch one with her.
The response wasn’t what she expected. Horror films were blasphemy, he declared. Ungodly and vile, they were heresy of the highest order, tantamount to devil worship and demonic sodomy. He’d blind anyone in his house who watched such sinful nonsense. My mother tried to argue her case, but to no avail. To prove his point, my father consulted a priest, and after being told the angels cried every time a horror film was shown, he forbade the watching of such heretical materials.
Of course, my mother watched them anyway. Well, she watched one, and it scared her shitless. As I said, she wasn’t really a horror fan, but the films offered a double attraction, in that her husband had forbidden her to watch them, and they kept her entertained when the only other option was staring at the wallpaper.
Too frightened to watch further films alone, she came up with a plan. The following Friday, after my father’s snores echoed through the house, she came and woke my sisters and I to watch them with her. The first time she did this, the eldest of the three of us was nine years old. Despite being the grown-up, she screamed at one point, so was sent back to bed in case she woke the old man. Myself and my other sister sat through the film; it was better than being in bed.
Friday nights became an adventure. We lived with the creeping terror that Dad would wake and realise we were defying his holy orders. We didn’t know what punishment he’d dish out for heresy, but we knew it would be extremely violent. That gave our nocturnal viewing an edge. We also knew we were privileged. No one else in the school playground knew about the House of Usher.
Every Friday night, as the Hammer House time arrived, we’d be hauled from our beds, our mother still too frightened to watch the films on her own. We became immune to horror and didn’t find the films scary. We grew up immersed in blood, gore, monsters and demons. It was like Tom and Jerry to us.
Time passed, as it does, and the success of the Friday night horror films took the TV execs by surprise. Realising there were other ways to exploit the potential audience, they moved on to show more mainstream films which didn’t include the excitement of defying our father’s orders. Friday night horror was taken away from us, or so we thought.
The next Friday evening, expecting a full night of slumber, we were shaken awake despite there being no film. Strangely, our mother was more cautious than usual, extremely anxious we didn’t wake our father. We crept downstairs and into the dining room, which didn’t have a television. However, things were about to get a lot stranger. Laid out on the table was a circle of Scrabble tiles with the whole alphabet represented, along with two pieces of paper marked Yes and No. Amongst all this was an empty glass, turned the wrong way up.
Sitting at the head of the table was a large, flamboyant, Caribbean lady who my mother knew from her previous life as a radiographer. The woman explained to us what the Ouija board was, and how it was used to contact the dead. That was the first time I met Marlene (you can find more out about her in Cock-A-Voodoo-Doo).
I’ve always had a fascination with magic, ever since a relative bought me a basic conjuring set one Christmas. My real passion wasn’t performing magic; it was watching the magician and spotting how the trick had been done. Once I’d seen the ruse, I’d point it out to the twat in the top hat. For me, it was sport, and anyone with the audacity to claim to have magical powers was fair game.
Despite my young age, I immediately had the Ouija pegged as bullshit. It was a trick, and tricks were there to be cracked. I watched Marlene during the so-called seance, and I noticed two things. The first was the Ouija only worked when she was involved. The second was when the glass moved, her knuckle changed colour. It became a little paler in the wrinkles on her index finger joint. Slowly, carefully, almost imperceptibly, she was pushing the fucking thing.
I practiced what she did until I was good at it. Then I had a power. I controlled the channel between the living and the dead. I could manipulate people through the Ouija board. I prophesied death and pain, I turned my family against people I disliked, and I even ensured my mother bought a better brand of cheese. I was young, but I appreciated a good cheese!
The result of all of this nonsense is simple: to me, mainstream horror, in its conventional sense, is nothing more than comical entertainment. Ghosts and ghouls and vampires and werewolves hold no fear for me. Instead, my fear is saved for the true horrors of the world, the evil that man does unto man, the diseases of the body and mind, the cruelty and greed and maliciousness which infects some of those who walk amongst us.
That’s true horror, not some cunt in a cape!