Shock Horror!
November 16, 2005 at 7.45 pm
The Blair Witch popped in…
…and sat on the sofa
The King of Pop joined us too…
…as did a beserker
Last Wednesday saw the Horror Film Night at Howell’s place. Now, you may remember reading about the Foiled Night…and it was pretty much in the same vein.
As usual, I was running late, so I dashed home from work and made my costume. A bit late for Hallowe’en (as Howell had only just got back from Mexico - more about that later), but never mind!
- Take one old shirt (white).
- Rip it up.
- Spread liberally with Tesco’s Vampire Blood
- Allow to dry.
- Apply grey and white facepaint. To face. Probably.
- Apply black facepaint around eyes.
- Put on dark trousers, businesslike shoes, and aforementioned shirt.
- Find suitable tie and put that on, too.
- Apply aforementioned fake blood to face.
- Voila! One Businessman Zombie, à la Shaun of the Dead.
So, I added a fleece to hide it all and walked to Howell’s place. Met up with Torkjel on the way, and we were the first to arrive.
Howell greeted us in the dark, wearing a fantastic mummy outfit…except that I think we managed to scare him more than he did us. We’re scary chaps, y’know!
We entered the flat, which featured screams, etc. courtesy of the Omen soundtrack, and waited for the others. Guest list was as follows:
- Howell - mummy (full body bandages!)
- Julie - skeleton (face mask)
- Torkjel - skeleton (full head mask and bloody sword)
- Jo - ghost (retro chic bedsheet affair)
- Me - zombie businessman
So, let the films begin!
The Silent Scream
First up, The Silent Scream, a Hammer House of Horror episode from 1980.
In summary, there’s this bloke who comes out of prison, back into the arms of beautiful/dutiful wifey, who’s fallen on pretty hard times while he was inside. During his stay, he’d been visited by a pet shop owner, played by the great Peter Cushing, who’d been a Hammer regular.
I’ll digress for a minute, if I may. It’s my blog, so I can. I developed something of a horror film fetish in my early teens, and watched an awful lot of the Hammer films. It’s engrained deep in my psyche (and that of many others) that Peter Cushing is the good guy, whose sole purpose is to go out and kill the bad guy, invariably played by Christopher Lee.
Well, this time, Cushing played the bad guy. This REALLY confused me!
Anyway, the ex-con had been given some money by Cushing, to help him out, and he decided to go to the pet shop to say thanks. Cushing then offers him an assistant’s job there…and shows him his fine collection of exotic (and highly dangerous) pets, including a panther, a baboon and an extremely fierce kangaroo.
And the rest would spoil it for you. Suffice to say, it was a proper story that twisted and turned like an angry koala.
The Silent Scream
Night of the Demon
Once that had finished, and we did some other stuff (more later), Howell put on Night of the Demon, a classic British horror film of the ’50s, complete with cute heroine, dashing (and very American) hero, and evil-yet-companionable upper-class villain. And a great big scary monster, of course.
It’s such a classic that it’s on Wikipedia…but then, most things are!
It was a pretty good story, albeit fairly predictable. The effects would have been quite something back then, and were only let down by a truly ghastly (but not in a good way) rubber demon mask.
With the right ambience, though, it was fairly scary. The music in particular was excellent - just right to put you on edge and build up tension.
Night of the Demon
The Exorcist
No, we didn’t see this one as well! It’s just that, well, I’m digressing again.
As we watched Night of the Demon, it seemed more and more familiar. I eventually twigged - this had been one half of the double bill in which I first saw The Exorcist, way back at the Elstree Film Festival in 1995. It was something like May or June (I remember it being quite warm), and my mate Ian (of the sailing holiday) and I decided to go along. Elstree’s quite close to the ancestral home, of course. Back then, The Exorcist was most definitely not on general release, so it was a great chance to see it.
So, we turn up and I ask to buy a pair of tickets.
Ticket girl: “Are you 18?”
Us: “Yes.”
We weren’t - Ian was a month shy of his 18th birthday, and I had only just turned 17.
Ticket girl: “Can you prove it?”
Us: “Erm…no..?”
Ticket girl: “Oh, go on then.”
She shrugged, took our money, and let us in. It was a private auditorium rather than a commercial cinema, or I don’t think we’d have stood a chance!
I’d completely forgotten what the non-Exorcist film was…until now. It was the mystical Indian sidekick who came along about a quarter of the way through that did it. His comedy Welsh-cum-subcontinental accent, to be precise.
With an audience of film buffs, The Exorcist was a truly chilling experience. It’s all about the atmosphere.
The second time I saw it was when, a couple of years later, it finally came out on general release, and was shown at the Manchester Odeon. Unfortunately, the audience then was a bunch of pissed-up students with absolutely no appreciation of the genre. The crude (by today’s standards) special effects were met with derision, laughter, and even cheering. Suspension of disbelief was, well, suspended 
The Exorcist (Elstree)
The Exorcist (Manchester Odeon)
Strangely enough, I never really got into the book.
Back to the Party
So, what else did we do?
Mr Potato has no eyes in infra-red!
Apples - tastier than brains
Dolores Cranberry on a bad night
With big sharp pointy teeth!
- We got a takeaway from the excellent Globe, which offers Mexican, Italian, Chinese, Thai and Malaysian dishes as well as a selection of curries…and matching beers with which to wash them down!
- We bobbed for apples - Jo was especially good at this, while Howell…wasn’t.
- We ate lots of strange and wonderful snacks, that Howell had brought back from Mexico.
- We drank beer and blood (aka red wine) into the small hours.
- We all auditioned for the part of Cookie Monster. Howell took each one of us, in private, to the kitchen, without telling us what we were going to do. The next day, Antony (who couldn’t make it) judged the video footage, and pronounced Howell the winner.
…and I think that’s about it!
The photos taken by Howell with his camera in infra-red mode were pretty scary, especially when it was connected to the TV - when he pointed the camera at Jo, it all looked very The Ring. Eeeek.
In summary, MUCH fun.
that is one shiny potato.
Comment by hoose — November 17, 2005 @ 3.43 pm