It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (6 page)

That first viewing passed in an almost orgasmic whirl of fear, and remains one of the most genuinely transcendent experiences of my life. Rarely have I been more aware of being
alive
and
in the moment
than in the two hours that it took the movie to run through the projector that night. People talk endlessly about the damaging effects of horror movies but too little is heard about the life-affirming power of being scared out of your mind – and, in those very rare cases, out of your body. You ask me if I think there is more to this world than the grim ‘realities’ of ageing, disease and death, of mourning and loss, and I will refer you to that first viewing of
The Exorcist
during which my imagination took flight, my soul did somersaults, and the physical world melted away into nothingness around me. I don’t
think
that there is a spiritual element to human life, I
know
it because I have experienced it first-hand, and I have horror movies to thank for that blessing.

Since then, I have seen
The Exorcist
about two hundred times (I stopped counting after the first hundred) and I can honestly say that there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about it, even if only for a moment. I know that sounds mad, and I fully appreciate just how boring I have become on the subject of ‘that film’, and how little sense my obsession with
it makes to anyone else. I have written books about it (three editions of a ‘BFI Modern Classic’ which my friend Alan Jones has dubbed ‘everything you never wanted to know about
The Exorcist
but were scared Mark was going to tell you anyway’), made radio and television documentaries about it (
The Ghosts of Prospect Street
and
The Fear of God
, the latter of which now adorns DVD copies of the film) and even been vaguely instrumental in prompting the creation of an extended cut released in 2000 subtitled ‘The Version You’ve Never Seen’, of which director William Friedkin said ‘You’d better like it, because it’s kinda your fault it happened.’

And, of course, I’ve stood outside that house on Prospect Street, stepping into the shadow of Max von Sydow, putting myself into the picture that haunted my childhood and which will surely follow me to my grave. Worse still, I have forced my entire family to make the pilgrimage to Georgetown just to parade up and down the precipitous steps which plummet from Prospect Street to M Street and which feature so prominently in the film – first my long-suffering wife Linda, then more recently my kids and my mother, who haven’t even seen
The Exorcist
. Friedkin was once quoted as saying that on his gravestone would be engraved the words ‘The guy who made
The Exorcist
’. He meant it self-deprecatingly but at least he actually
made
the damn movie, of which he should be proud. On
my
gravestone it’ll just say ‘The guy who bored his family and friends to death with
The Exorcist
’.

Of course
The Exorcist
is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my obsession with horror movies. Writing in the
Guardian
, the journalist and broadcaster Mark Lawson once asked ‘Did
someone jump out of a cupboard and frighten [Kermode] at an impressionable age?’ I can recall no such event (and nor can any other self-respecting horror fan I know) but from a very early age horror movies struck a chord deep within me. As a kid I remember sneaking downstairs after my parents had gone to bed to watch ‘The Monday X Film’ on ITV. To avoid detection I had to have the sound turned right down, but even without words the silent shapes and shadows of those old chillers made perfect sense to me. It was, indeed, my first real experience of discovering something that was uniquely
mine
, something that existed outside the domain of my parents’ control and authority. And, of course, it was forbidden, secretive, taboo – and therefore irresistible.

When I think back to those furtive nights in front of the cathode ray, the titles that stand out are old Hammer flicks like
The Quatermass Xperiment
(aka
The Creeping Unknown
) and
The Curse of Frankenstein
, alongside the Vincent Price frightener
The Fly
which became my ‘favourite movie of all time’ for about a week. I clearly remember walking to school one windy morning and reciting the entire plot of
The Fly
to a goggle-eyed friend who got so creeped out by my animated description of insect heads transplanted onto human bodies (and vice versa) that he literally started to cry. And I vividly recall returning home one afternoon to find that my father had left
specific instructions
with my mother ‘not to let the kids watch
Village of the Damned
’ which was playing on BBC1 that evening. The next day was hell on earth for me because it seemed that every other kid at school had stayed up to watch this tale of alien children taking over a small English village,
and no one could talk of anything else. There were even kids who had brought in the book (John Wyndham’s
The Midwich Cuckoos
) just to relive some of the more terrifying moments in the playground. I was mortified – it was (to quote the underrated farting kids’ fantasy flic
Thunderpants
) ‘the worst day of my life – ever!’

It is surely no coincidence that I spent many subsequent years obsessing about
Village of the Damned
, tracking down articles about the film in old movie magazines, reading everything John Wyndham had ever written, from
The Kraken Wakes
to
Chocky
to
Jizzle
and more, and even surreptitiously attempting to persuade my parents to ‘take us for a nice day out at Letchmore Heath’ where I
knew
that many of the key scenes of
Village
had been filmed. When I came to write my PhD thesis about modern English and American horror fiction fifteen years later, I would devote a lengthy section to
The Midwich Cuckoos
and its place within the canon of ‘paedophobic’ literature. To this day, the very thought of
Village of the Damned
gives me an illicit tickle. Significantly I can’t remember where I finally first saw it – only where I first
didn’t
see it.

If there is a moral behind all this it is surely that attempting to repress something will only cause it to resurface elsewhere, bigger, stronger, and
nastier
. I am living proof of the inherent failure of censorship – if you tell me that I
can’t
watch something, then my desire to see it
immediately
will be equal and opposite to the force of your refusal. You know, like that law you learned about in physics lessons; let’s call it ‘Newton’s Law of Motion (Pictures)’. I’m
honestly certain that if my father had never told my mother to tell me that I couldn’t watch
Village of the Damned
I would have forgotten about it long ago. As it is, at the age of forty-six I still feel an irresistible urge to slam my old VHS copy of the movie into the machine
right now
– just because I
can
.

This electrifying awareness of the forbidden was clearly hard-wired into my psyche at an early age and frankly it has never gone away. Nor would I want it to. I have had
fantastic
times watching things I was told not to watch, and I pity those who have never known the delicious pleasure of good honest visual
guilt
. Look at Lars von Trier, whose recent movie
Antichrist
has been (wrongly) dubbed ‘the most shocking movie ever’. Von Trier reportedly grew up in a fantastically liberal Danish household in which rules were frowned upon and look what it did for
him
– he is now a self-confessed neurotic depressive who is ‘afraid of
everything
in life’ and makes movies about people cutting their genitals off with scissors. As for me, I was told clearly from an early age that certain things were just plain
wrong
, and I am now a very happy horror-film fan who has derived hours of harmless pleasure from watching people pretend to disembowel each other with chainsaws.

And I sleep like a baby, since you ask.

Righto then, there’s no point putting it off any longer. It’s time to deal with the man and the woman and the mysterious piece of lace corsetry in
Krakatoa: East of Java
. Or maybe
not
in
Krakatoa: East of Java
. Let’s see.

I’ve popped into HMV and bought a copy of the film on DVD – a snip at £5. Astonishing that such a valuable piece of
my childhood can be purchased so easily, and so
cheaply
. Nothing seems to have value any more.

I slip the DVD into my laptop so that I can watch it while I write – another modern miracle. The film starts with a split-screen montage of a volcano exploding, and a hot-air balloon skittering through the skies which, as we have established, is pretty much all I remember about the movie other than that primal scene which probably isn’t even there anyway. After that, the first fifteen minutes are taken up with plodding plot exposition; the loading of the ship, introducing the passengers, establishing their personal needs and quirks – the usual disaster-movie fare. At some point in all of this we meet a vibrantly attired Barbara Werle whom I vaguely recognise from a couple of Elvis movies. I pause
Krakatoa
and check the Internet Movie Database and there she is, hot from supporting roles in
Charro!
,
Harum Scarum
and
Tickle Me
, the last of which has the honour of being the very worst film The King ever made – which is really saying something. Ms Werle looks great, but she’s blonde and her travelling companion is a clean-shaven Brian Keith, so it’s clearly not going to be them getting their fingers caught in the corsetry. A far more likely pair of canoodling candidates are Maximilian Schell and Diane Baker who take top billing and fit the physical description of the film playing in my head – he is dark, brooding and bearded, she is auburn and mysterious. Yup, the more I look at the pair of them meeting on the gangplank the more I can imagine him being heroically injured and her nursing him back to health with the aid of a piece of string. Or lace. Whatever.

That is, of course, assuming that the scene is in the film – which it almost certainly isn’t.

But guess what – it
is
, and a mere nineteen minutes into the action.

I wasn’t making it up!

I am stunned.

Maybe this book isn’t going to be a bunch of half-remembered falsehoods, fictions and outright lies as predicted.

I got the people wrong, however. And indeed almost everything else (so probably ‘falsehoods, fictions and lies’ after all). But there’s just enough of an echo of the scene which I described earlier to suggest that the fantasy film playing in my head actually
was
‘inspired by real events’.

Here’s what
really
happens.

During that early scene with Barbara Werle, her character Charley meets the manly Maximilian Schell on the gangplank and gives him her card, boasting that she is a popular singer available for ‘Weddings, Social Occasions and Smokers’ – whatever ‘smokers’ were (and even before I knew the answer to that question, they sounded saucy). It is also established that her partner Harry (Brian Keith) is a diving expert of some renown and is embarking upon this voyage in order to earn money through his legendary salvaging skills. She is flirty; he is grumpy; they are both broke. And thus, when they retire to their cabin below decks, they begin to bicker. We, meanwhile, find ourselves hiding in the closet (oo-er) in which Ms Werle promptly starts to hang her clothes, the camera peering out in an eerie pre-echo of Kyle
MacLachlan’s peeping Tom from
Blue Velvet
while Harry playfully badmouths Charley’s singing career.

‘You were so lousy,’ he says dismissively, throwing himself fully clothed on to his bed, ‘you put your piano player to sleep!’

‘Maybe,’ she says with a minxy smile, slamming the closet doors shut.’But I knew how to keep
you
awake, Harry.’

And suddenly, this putative disaster movie turns into a musical, replete with non-diegetic orchestral accompaniment as Charley grabs the end of the four-poster bed and starts to sing, swaying suggestively.

‘I’m looking for an old-fashioned boy,’ she trills, ‘who’s looking for …’

The camera angle changes and
there it is
! There’s the shot I remember; the shot with the man lying prostrate on his back, seemingly disabled (by sleep, or booze, rather than injury), his head to the left of frame, her body in the background, the camera skulking behind the bed, peering out from the skirting board.

‘…an old-fashioned girl.’

As she sings this last line, Charley turns her bustle toward the bed and (let’s not be coy) gently shakes a tail feather, looking over her shoulder as she does so, slightly lifting the hem of her jacket to accentuate the ribbon tied somewhere other than around the old oak tree.

Harry yawns theatrically, but I’m starting to doubt his disinterest.

‘Just a nice old-fashioned girl like me.’

Stirred from feigned slumbers, Harry reaches out his hand (as I had remembered, only quicker, and with far less
ambiguity) and pulls on the ribbon with practised dexterity; in a flash the ribbon comes undone and the camera follows the falling skirt swiftly to the floor, revealing ample light-blue petticoats beneath.

He yawns again, and then snorts like a braying horse.

Hmm. This is a lot racier – and a lot less ‘symbolically suggestive’ – than I had remembered, No wonder they upped the certificate from U to PG for the DVD.

Back to the action. Charley kneels to pick up the red dress and starts to walk away from bed, singing ‘I want a boy who’s happy that
I
…’

On the word ‘
I
’ she gives a suggestive dip and holds the discarded skirt up to her bosom, apparently hiding behind its crumpled pleats in a gesture that stretches the boundaries of coquettishness.

‘…can blush, because I’m bashful and shy …’

And with that she drop-kicks the skirt across the room toward the bed, its silky folds opening in mid-air like a giant crimson butterfly as it soars straight toward the camera which rests once again behind the man’s bed.