Madman in the Attic

I became slightly obsessed with Italian horror director Dario Argento about five years ago. I don’t know how it happened – we were only ever casual acquaintances before.  I can’t say it was love at first sight. My first taste of his work was  Suspiria  way back in the late eighties. This encounter took place at the wonderfully seedy Scala Cinema in London’s Kings Cross. The cinema is now a night club, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere seedy in this rejuvenated district. I thought the film was fun, but I didn’t really get what all the fuss was about. Of course, I may have been distracted by the drunks, punks and pot smoking patrons that littered the floors and seats of the Scala. Whatever the reason for my lacklustre response, there was no second date – not until that fateful evening five years ago when Dario and I just seemed to click. I started warming towards him during  The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). This was Argento's directori...

I can’t believe it took me until the age of 45 (five years ago) to watch  Zombie Flesh Eaters . This gory Italian flick from director Lucio Fulci was the stuff of legend when I was in secondary school in the early 80s. “Have you seen it…?” awe-struck 12 year-olds would ask and I, having seen nothing more horrific than Doctor Who at the time, would reply, miserably, that I had not. I don’t know if the mini horror fans of my school days were even aware that it was an Italian language film – the version I saw was dubbed, and pretty obviously – or if they would have cared that much. While today it seems pretty tame, thirty-odd years ago it would have been a gore fest, satisfying even the most blood-lusting teen. Fulci is today recognised as a horror maestro, although  Flesh Eaters is an out-and-out B movie, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It crams a lot in – zombie fighting and then eating shark, zombies eating doctor’s wife, zombies eating nurse…basically, this fil...

My love of horror films was a bit like a sexual awakening. It’s hard to pin down the exact moment I became a horror lover, just as it’s hard to say the precise point at which I realised my sexuality. It was a love that developed gradually. Before I was ever allowed to watch a horror film, I pined for them. They were a forbidden fruit that I was desperate to taste. I remember dying to stay up late on Saturday nights to watch the horror double bill on BBC2, but my parents were strict about bed times. I managed to catch the odd glimpse on the black and white portable in my bedroom, but my clandestine viewing was usually discovered before I had a chance to enjoy more than a few minutes. Then, on Saturday 28 June 1980, I was allowed to stay up and watch the first of that evening's double bill (I had to look up the precise date on Wikipedia). The movie was   Night of the Demon  (1957) and it remains a firm favourite to this day. It was followed by   The Ghoul   fr...