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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 29, 2012 20:26:10 GMT
in 1964, accidentally meeting a friend from Sixth Form - Michel Parry - in WH Smiths ... And he suggested I buy the Panther paperback of HPL's Haunter of the Dark...
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jan 29, 2012 21:11:42 GMT
I was an avid reader and had big brothers so at some point I picked up the Pan books and became hooked to the extent that I even drew pictures of the covers but my Granny who looked after me, allowed me to watch Hammer House of Horror. I distinctly remember one where the guys eyes had been gouged out with a trowel. It may well have been one with a kids party where they played pass the murdered parts of the body - this is an eye this is his liver etcetera - bearded fellow. I would be about ten then. Scared me senseless for which i am eternally grateful. Couldn't get enough of it.
The main thing that fueled the obsession for me was the horror stories that my brothers and the kids at school told - the Mars Attack Cards, the Civil war cards passed around the playground. At ten I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and from that point moved more onto Sf but I couldn't pass a Hammer Horror film without being desperate for more.
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Post by jamesdoig on Jan 29, 2012 23:53:09 GMT
There were a couple of books I remember as quite a young kid that got me started:
More Tales to Tremble By, which seems to have been a fairly influential anthology in the early '70s - a few people have listed it as an influence, the cover and illustrations as much as the stories
Stranger than People, a picture book that I haven't been able to trace since
Mystery Comics Digest issues of Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff comics in the early '70s
Much later, in the late '90s it was Douglas Winter's Faces of Fear, a collection of interviews, that led me to TED Klein's The Ceremonies, which sparked a renewed interest.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Jan 30, 2012 0:14:15 GMT
Apparently my interest in horror began in the womb - at least according to my mum, who claims she watched a lot more horror films than usual when she was carrying me. She half-jokingly 'blames' herself for the way my tastes developed, though I prefer to think it was the unborn Lurker's influence that made her want to watch the films in the first place.  Truthfully, I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't into scary stuff, and I suppose "Doctor Who" has a part to play in that - I would've been 3 when giant maggots and the like were on the screen, and about 5 when Tom Baker was revisiting all the gothic, Hammer horror motifs the production team could mine. The first proper, spooky book I can recall, amongst my diet of Target "Doctor Who" novelisations, was "The House of The Nightmare and Other Eerie Tales", which I borrowed time and again from my primary school's library - I think it was left over from when the primary and secondary schools had shared premises. It features "A School Story" by M.R. James, and may be the first place I encountered MRJ, as that's the first story of his I recall. But what I definitely remember is the traditional tale, "Mr Fox", and the line about the chamber filled with 'bodies and skeletons of beautiful young ladies all stained with blood', which prayed on my mind for ages. Aside from that, there was the Christmas where my parents bought me "The Hamlyn Book of Horror", with Dracula bloodily staked on the cover, and "The Pictorial History of Horror Movies" by Dennis Gifford, where I would obsess over pictures of Lugosi and Lee as Dracula - I was obsessed with Dracula more than any other monster, and was by now well used to BBC2 Horror Double Bills - where I'd enjoy the black and white first film but really be waiting for the Hammer or Amicus film that was the more exciting second half - and STV's Friday night horror seasons. Hmm... maybe my mum is to blame, with my dad as her accomplice. I think I owe them a hug. |
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Post by ramseycampbell on Jan 30, 2012 12:14:56 GMT
in 1964, accidentally meeting a friend from Sixth Form - Michel Parry - in WH Smiths ... And he suggested I buy the Panther paperback of HPL's Haunter of the Dark... Gosh, I didn't know you were at school with Michel! I corresponded with him when I was. As for the topic question - it was 50 Years of Ghost Stories for me, borrowed from Childwall Library on my mother's ticket when I was no more than six. |
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Post by dem on Jan 30, 2012 14:14:24 GMT
Apparently my interest in horror began in the womb - at least according to my mum, who claims she watched a lot more horror films than usual when she was carrying me. She half-jokingly 'blames' herself for the way my tastes developed, though I prefer to think it was the unborn Lurker's influence that made her want to watch the films in the first place. Ha! my mum is forever playing the martyr about how it's all her fault, she should never have gone to see Dracula at the cinema while she was pregnant. The way she tells it, she fainted and had to be taken out on a stretcher. All good preparation for what was to come. Nobody could get me to read anything that wasn't either a comic or a football programme until i was around fifteen - just wasn't interested. Watching late night horror films on TV with my stepdad - A Friday night Psycho/ Dracula Has Risen From The Grave double bill, The Devil Rides Out and, the only one to really terrify me, Night Of The Hunter - and Alice Cooper circa Billion Dollar Babies did as much to convert me as anything, but before that, there was a teacher in primary school, Miss H-----. She'd read to us in class, and the single story to spark me from catalepsy concerned spooky goings on in a Scottish churchyard. Years later, i finally nailed it as The Man Who Walked Widdershins Round the Kirk by Sorche Nic Leodhas in The 2nd Armada Ghost Book, which coincidentally, also includes lurker's favourite, Mr. Fox. Better still, the same teacher told us a 'true' story about zombies attacking railway staff drilling a tunnel on the London Underground. It's not a nice thing to lay at any one person's door, but Miss H----- is at least as culpable as Alice Cooper's I Love The Dead for the way i turned out. Thanks much, the both of ya's. So, we're about nine or ten at the time and Miss H----- divides the class into groups of four. Each group has to write and perform a play. i cringe now, but we cast a guy in a leg brace as the Frankenstein monster on account of his height and mysterious 'special big shoe'. My best mate (in drag) played "the woman", there was a mad scientist called Geoff, and i was the local vampire (not even ten and already f**k**g typecast). God knows which of us came up with the horror theme, but we got a nice big clap for our performance, were conscripted en masse into the school nativity play (as a band of gypsies, no less), and i would so dearly love to see the "script". When i finally got into reading the stuff in a big way, for years i laboured under the delusion that Frankenstein's monster had gone on to contribute a story to 21st Book of Pan Book Of Horror Stories until i did my sums, realised there was probably more than one person by that name on the planet, and ours would have to have been around six when he was being published in The London Mystery Magazine! When i eventually got around to reading Stoker's novel, it was the self-same Signet edition as cauldronbrewer posts overleaf, though admittedly, it's unlikely that it was his mum's copy. Dan Farson's The Hamlyn Book Of Horror did it for me, too, and another from the same publisher to leave a huge impression was their rip-off of Herbert A. Wise & Phyllis Fraser Great Tales of Terror & the Supernatural from 1949, The Best Ghost Stories, which introduced me to, among others, Lovecraft, Walter de la Mare's Mr. Kempe, Arthur Machen and Guy de Maupassant's Was It A Dream. Some collection. It was a gradual process with Poe, and in truth i doubt i was ready for him. M. G. Lewis's The Monk was everything i'd hoped it would be, so then i thought it was time to try this guy who was supposed to be the all-time greatest horror author. i read two-three on the spin and thought he was the most boring bastard ever to commit pen to paper. After a lengthy break, i tried The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar, Berenice and The Black Cat in quick succession and we were finally on terms. And my first Manly Wade Wellman was either The Devil Is Not Mocked in, i think, one of the Zacherley-edited Ballantine books or The Horror Undying in Michel Parry's Rivals Of Dracula |
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 30, 2012 19:58:17 GMT
[quote author=ramseycampbell board=general thread=4639 post=31390 time=1327925696[/quote] Gosh, I didn't know you were at school with Michel! I corresponded with him when I was. [/quote] Yes, I think he told me at the time that he corresponded with you. You were things he read under the desklid, I recall in the mid Sixties. But memory is getting vaguer as the years pass.  |
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Post by blackmonk on Jan 30, 2012 21:03:08 GMT
...I distinctly remember one where the guys eyes had been gouged out with a trowel. It may well have been one with a kids party where they played pass the murdered parts of the body - this is an eye this is his liver etcetera - bearded fellow. I would be about ten then. Scared me senseless for which i am eternally grateful. Couldn't get enough of it. I, too, recall this. It was an episode of Late Night Horror from the late 60s. It was titled The Corpse Can't Play based on John Burke's short story Party Games. I recall it in particular because I was so shocked by the conclusion - the lights come on and all the party guests see that they have real body parts in their hands - that I threw up as I went to bed! "That's the last time you watch anything like that," shouted my mum. Of course, it was only the beginning! John Burke would give me nightmares again when I saved up enough spends to buy More Tales of Unease with that hideous child ascending the stairs on the cover. |
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jan 31, 2012 2:38:41 GMT
...I distinctly remember one where the guys eyes had been gouged out with a trowel. It may well have been one with a kids party where they played pass the murdered parts of the body - this is an eye this is his liver etcetera - bearded fellow. I would be about ten then. Scared me senseless for which i am eternally grateful. Couldn't get enough of it. I, too, recall this. It was an episode of Late Night Horror from the late 60s. It was titled The Corpse Can't Play based on John Burke's short story Party Games. I recall it in particular because I was so shocked by the conclusion - the lights come on and all the party guests see that they have real body parts in their hands - that I threw up as I went to bed! "That's the last time you watch anything like that," shouted my mum. Of course, it was only the beginning! John Burke would give me nightmares again when I saved up enough spends to buy More Tales of Unease with that hideous child ascending the stairs on the cover. Thanks blackmonk. It's over forty years ago but I still remember the time distinctly, Ten years old. Old train clock ticking in the background, high ceilinged Edinburgh tenement with an open coal fire and shadows playing on the walls. Granny dressed in the old floral pinny obliviously pretty new to telly which she must have regarded as theater. Scarey film, sudden vision of head with gouged out eyes. Granny didn't react at all. A bit later I lay in bed with her and couldn't get to sleep because her snoring reminded me of werewolves. The thought crept in my head - what if Granny changes into something horrible? Welcome to vault of evil.... |
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Post by pulphack on Jan 31, 2012 7:21:01 GMT
My parents have everything to do with it, directly and indirectly. My mum always read a lot, though she gave up a bit in the seventies as there was little time after my dad died and this fifty plus woman had to go and find a job after years as a housewife to support us - I was a late arrival and didn't leave school until after she'd reached retirement age. Anyway, she was able to start reading again when she did and it was nice to share stuff with her then. She'd read Edgar Wallace pre-WWII as a school girl, and now here I was handing her every junk shop find I'd devoured for her to say 'Ooh, I remember this one!'
But I digress slightly. My dad died when I was five, and his legacy was a bookcase stuffed with books from the Companion Book Club and the Crime & Thriller Book Club. Companion had uniform dust jackets until about a year before he died, and their books were therefore mysterious and unguessable until you actually started one. It was the more middle class end of popular fiction and non fiction, but it did have lots of Alastair MacLean, Desmond Bagley and Hammond Innes. CP Snow, too, but nothing's perfect. Excellent biography and autobiography of the pathologists Bernard Spilsbury and Sidney Smith, which covered every gory crime in the first half of C20, mind.
Ah, but the Crime & Thriller Book Club... their dust jackets were luridly painted and usually repro's of the originals. They did a hell of a lot of John Creasey, some Christie, and American and faux American writers - I particuarly recall what seemed an incredibly hard boiled (at 8) Vernon Warren 'Brandon' PI book that was one of a series p/b'd by Digit. Of course, the covers suckered me in, and then there was Len Deighton - The Ipcress File and Horse Under Water with their great graphics, and just what did those titles MEAN? And of course there was the Odham's Fifty Famous Detectives Of Fiction, which was (though I didn't realise it) a primer of Golden Age British crime fiction and had some great illustrations, too.
I loved any Gerry Anderson series and UFO gave me the creeps whenever any of the green-skinned aliens prowled the backlots - one episode where an alien inhabits the same house as a blind old woman, keeping out of her way, springs to mind still.
I had an uncle who worked as a postie and ran a kind of paperback and skin mag (though that bit I didn't discover until later) exchange at work, and so things like Nick Carter came through my hands. Which made me a natural for the Woolies bargain bins, I guess. Also, lots of tv tie-ins as I loved all the ITC shows and this was way before video.
Horror came later. The Popular Book Exchange in Tottenham was a regular haunt for comics and books, and he used to have Warren magazines, too. I'd never watched a horror movie, and hadn't read any horror stories (that I can recall), but it was Lon Chaney as the Wolfman that hooked me. I used to read them avidly when he had them in stock, and knew all about the Universal horrors and stuff like Godzilla ages before I got to finally see them - when, of course, they were a let down first time out as nothing could ever live up to the half-imagined horror beyond imagining (maybe that's why HPL made perfect sense when I first read him?). But there was enough for a second bite, and then came Hammer, and there you go...
I still prefer horror on screen to in print, and crime and thriller vice versa. How does that work??!!
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Post by doomovertheworld on Feb 1, 2012 19:12:29 GMT
i blame two things for the start of my interest in all things horrific:
my dad reading to me and my sister M.R. James's Count Magnus. i think that i must have been about 8 and it absolutely terrified me. although strangely enough i remember thinking about a week later how much i had enjoyed the feeling of being scared
the second was a couple of years later when i was becoming to become interested in second hand books. i would spent my Saturday afternoons poking around in the charity shops to see what i could find. the horror boom of the 80s had come to an end and remember seeing loads of James Herbert / guy n smith et al for sale. The more lurid the front cover the more it interested me. being slightly naive when a book claimed to be "the most terrifying book i have read" I tended to believe them. I couldn't wait to read them and see how scary they were suffice to say when i finally got round to reading them i tended to rather disappointed.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Feb 2, 2012 12:36:30 GMT
Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful:Let's haunt a house / Manly Wade Wellman -- The Wastwych secret / Constance Savery -- Jimmy takes vanishing lessons / Walter R. Brooks -- The mystery of Rabbit Run / Jack Bechdolt -- The forgotten island / Elizabeth Coatsworth -- The water ghost of Harrowby Hall / John Kendrick Bangs -- The Red-Headed League / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- The treasure in the cave / Mark Twain -- The mystery in Four-and-a-Half Street / Donald and Louise Peattie. I saw some scans of the interior illustrations for this book and have decided that I must buy it. I especially liked the illustration for "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall" (which is a funny story and my favorite of the Bangs pieces that I've read). |
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sara
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 69
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Post by sara on Feb 3, 2012 13:07:07 GMT
My obsession with horror most likely started with being made to stay up and keep my brother company while he watched Night Gallery. Some of those images haunt me to this day – that doll with the black eyes! I still have nightmares about her.  When we moved to the UK it was my mum who collected the Pan Book of Horror series. I wasn’t allowed to go near them at that age, but she thought it perfectly ok for her to read then recount the stories back to me - her lurid retellings veering off into all sorts of strange and macabre directions. She had a fondness for embellishing the tales with her own vivid recollections of the more gory cases she had treated as a nurse (the man dragged along the motorway under a truck, the child forced by her parents to drink lye), often adding some morbid detailing related to the Moors murders or Sweeny Todd for good measure. Needless to say when I actually did get round to reading them for myself, they weren’t half as horrible as my mum’s versions! |
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Feb 3, 2012 17:22:22 GMT
My obsession with horror most likely started with being made to stay up and keep my brother company while he watched Night Gallery. Some of those images haunt me to this day – that doll with the black eyes! I still have nightmares about her. When we moved to the UK it was my mum who collected the Pan Book of Horror series. I wasn’t allowed to go near them at that age, but she thought it perfectly ok for her to read then recount the stories back to me - her lurid retellings veering off into all sorts of strange and macabre directions. She had a fondness for embellishing the tales with her own vivid recollections of the more gory cases she had treated as a nurse (the man dragged along the motorway under a truck, the child forced by her parents to drink lye), often adding some morbid detailing related to the Moors murders or Sweeny Todd for good measure. Needless to say when I actually did get round to reading them for myself, they weren’t half as horrible as my mum’s versions! Its that retelling of the tales by others that increases the imaginative sparkle - It must be buried deep in the psyche from ancient times. Love it! |
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Post by Shrink Proof on Feb 3, 2012 19:17:09 GMT
When we moved to the UK it was my mum who collected the Pan Book of Horror series. I wasn’t allowed to go near them at that age, but she thought it perfectly ok for her to read then recount the stories back to me - her lurid retellings veering off into all sorts of strange and macabre directions. Needless to say when I actually did get round to reading them for myself, they weren’t half as horrible as my mum’s versions! I think the extra frisson is added by them being retold by someone who we're conditioned from an early age to believe is going to protect us from the horrors, not embellish them... |
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