I’m not sure when it started—this fascination with dark things. It might be in the blood.
Halloween was quite a big thing in Scotland. The guising is an old tradition. Dress up as a demon, to scare the real demons away. We do it at Samhain.
Trick or treat, as we know it today, comes from the guising. If you turned up at someone’s door in costume, if you wanted a treat, then you had to perform for it; either tell a joke or sing a song. I think I dressed up once as a plumber—I guess someone has a phobia of plumbers, somewhere—and another time, I hesitate to say, as a “Mean Arab”. Not my idea, either of these, I should stress. Whatever you’re picturing, the reality was less impressive. Different times, folks.
Santa saw fit to bring me Dick Smith’s Scary Faces make-up kit one year, and I delighted in the fake blood, the Dracula teeth, the gelid moulds that you had to leave in the fridge. That same Christmas, the BBC showed a midnight double bill of the old Hammer movies—Curse of Frankenstein, and Horror of Dracula, one after the other, and both fitting neatly onto a three-hour VHS cassette, if you timed the recording right. To me, these were “safe” horrors – not exactly Scooby Doo, but a world away from the video nasties then in vogue in the playground and on the front pages of the papers.
My dad enjoyed the Hammers, and boasted of having seen Christopher Lee’s first stint as the Count in the year it was released. Along with David Attenborough documentaries, these movies form a cherished bonding memory of my father.
I always loved monster movies, especially Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion marvels (again, thanks to my dad for that). Scooby Doo was also a part of the picture, not only for the monsters, but the fact that they were humans, unmasked by the gang at the end. This was usually done by Fred, after Velma had done the hard yards.
On top of this, a short-lived comic that I adored appeared on British news-stands. Scream! was an EC-style publication that was aimed at children aged eight to 14, if you can imagine that. With video nasties being all the rage, the comic’s editors (including the great Barrie Tomlinson), shrewdly identified a clear need for an accessible horror publication for children. I was seven when it appeared in the newsagents, having been widely advertised on television. I begged my mum to get it for me, and I was rewarded. I read every issue from cover to cover. It had Dracula, werewolves, giant spiders, killer cats, monstrous uncles locked in attics, leprosy-riddled gravediggers, and a killer hotel computer called Max who created a virtual reality nightmare zone for wrongdoers in The Thirteenth Floor. This latter, in 1984, was a long way ahead of its time.
There were only 14 issues of Scream!, for a variety of reasons. Apparently it was caught up in industrial action involving printers. Another story goes that the comic was simply too chewy for children, with IPC magazines still smarting from their experiences at the hands of the tabloids a few years previously on the notorious Action! weekly. Whatever the case, it was folded—unannounced—into the Eagle, reappearing in summer specials all the way up to 1989.
Scream! wasn’t too bloody but it was gruesome on occasion, and certainly the stuff of nightmares. A 40th anniversary edition collecting every single issue in hardback has just been issued by Rebellion, and you can bet I was one of the first little ghouls in line for a copy. It still has its moments—particularly the one-off story The Drowning Pool, in a which a skeleton of a persecuted witch appears in a pond to strangle the unwary, with fresh roses in its hair.
“Ye Gods!” indeed.
We move onto real world horrors all too soon—and my dad was a connoisseur of these, too. Jack the Ripper was a subject of interest to him, and he also recorded the Michael Caine/Lewis Collins mini-series when it was broadcast in the autumn of 1988, on the 100th anniversary of those ghastliest of crimes.
Again, I was too young to be watching these, but I did, and I never forgot that handsome, if bloody, production. But in adulthood, we know all too well that the stuff of corn syrup gore and faux-Victorian whiskers is a fraud committed upon real life, and real-life victims. Your conscience pays a price for ghoulishness. Modern day studies of the Whitechapel killings are more focused on the victims, with Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five being perhaps the key work in this regard. We may never know the real name of the killer, but we do know the names of the victims, and we can’t let their lives be reduced to a simple number, as if they were a score to be totalled.
Just 10 years after watching that dramatisation, I was working in newspapers, reading about true life monsters carrying out sordid crimes that you wouldn’t have thought possible in a well-educated, well-ordered society. But as any police officer will tell you, it happens every single day. And the person behind the mask—or worse, the person in the tragic handout photos—might look very like you.
My dad’s ghoulish tastes followed him all the way to the grave. When he was very ill, he had my sister buy him magazines he saw advertised on his satellite TV package, as he devoured true crime documentaries. These were publications about famous murders; sensationalised headlines, stories of multiple killings, grim photography, the appalling business of homicide and its investigation. My sister was quite embarrassed about queuing up in shops for these, but god bless her, she did, routinely and faithfully. It seems extraordinary to me that my dad was reading about forensics and what happens to your body after life is gone when he was so close to his own mortality. But I guess you’re into what you’re into.
So now I write about fictional crimes, as well as real ones. “Masquerade” takes us closer to those early days, and the thrill of horrible things. It’s intended as confectionary, perhaps something sweet to be enjoyed after trick-or-treating. Not too close to the business of real life, the ugly stuff that I hear about in my day job… but close enough. Looking back on the drafting of the story, I feel a chill when I consider the “last seen alive” flashbacks. That’s as it should be.
Perhaps scary stories are a vital part of human life, stretching all the way back to when we huddled around fires in caves, keeping the shrieking wind and howling predators at bay. A warning from the frontiers of human behaviour. A reminder that monsters are very real, and sometimes very ordinary. It’s a matter of blood.
Trace Evidence 