Don't Watch Alone

This is the first of a short series of blogs that will recount my mad love for the BBC's Saturday night Horror Double Bills. The repeat of Mark Gattis' personal take on the horror movie genre inspired a warm, nostagic glow for Booker T's Soul Limbo at the end of the cricket and that little plane in the earliest Universal pictures credits.
 I suppose that for many of my generation, comics and horror movies occupied much the same headspace That image of the Phantom of the Opera from a full-page ad on the back of late-60s DC comics really disturbed me- had he cut off part of someone's face?
At some stage, hoping I might be the kind of boy who had latent craft skills, my parents or my aunt and uncle bought me one of the kits. I was disappointed because I thought it was a kind of action figure- or "doll" as we called them then.

Needless to say, the Wolf Man was never assembled, although I loved Glow-in-the-Dark toys as a tot.
My cousin Jim's comic collection was passed on to me in large batches once he went to Loudoun Academy in Galston. They were almost exclusively DCs from around 1965-1966 and this model kit ad gave me a bit of a shiver:

 My very earliest memory of horror on television-aside from Troughton's Dr. Who or the Salt Vampire in Star Trek- would be the series Mystery and Imagination from early 1970: specifically The Curse of the Mummy, an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars. All I remember is people in an Egyptian tomb and I may have conflated it with Sexton Blake and the Puff Adder the same year. There was also an adaptation of Sweeney Todd in the same series and I certainly knew the barber's gruesome reputation as a nipper.
Then there was The Life Work of Juan Diaz, a Ray Bradbury story on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Set around the Day of the Dead, the mummified father absolutely terrified me (what were my parents thinking?)

Thirdly,  a 1968 Canadian production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which I think was on BBC1 in the very early 70s was my introduction to Jack Palance; later Gene Colan's model for Marvel's Dracula.
Finally, I associate Sunday night bath time with Granada's Cinema programme, possibly during Michael Parkinson's tenure. I have hazy memories of clips from  Barbarella, (which looked amazing), The Andromeda Strain, The Dunwich Horror and The Green Slime- so, any time between 1968 and 1971!

 It was my Aunt Marjorie and Uncle Jimmy who introduced me to my first horror comics. These two were from Joe Orlando's spooky anthology series:

 House of Secrets featured a text story by a very young Gerry Conway; that kind of literary aspiration flourished at early Bronze Age DC. The House of Mystery issue scared the shite out of me even with its Sergio Aragones cartoons. The bat logo is very groovy, however.
Marjorie and Jimmy also got me the Phantom Stranger; but this beauty from Charlton didn't come from Galston.

 I'm not sure if that is the Charlton comic in which a tentacled swamp creature used the corpses of people's loved ones as human lures...but it certainly ought to be. I was so freaked by that issue that I threw it away and didn't touch any Charltons for years. The cheaper paper and lack of super heroes was off-putting anyway.
This one only tangentially qualifies as horror but it was such a departure from the KA-POW! Zok! Batman that it disturbed me anyway. It's also very indicative of the Gothic flavour of pre-Kirby DC:

 Marvel's horror fare was quite tame in the early 70s. I completely missed out on Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness, the House of Ideas' response to the Orlando books. I caught up instead with the reprints of Kirby and Ditko monster books, pre-Fantastic Four.

 Fear was especially good value since it was "giant-sized!". Oddly enough, I discovered Iron Fist villain Master Khan in that Taboo issue.
 
From 1971-72, STV was showing Universal and Hammer films on Friday nights, under the banner "Don't Watch Alone", between 11pm and closedown-12.30. I convinced my dad to let me watch the first Lee/Cushing Frankenstein and then a week or so later, Dracula. I was mesmerised by the bloody logo and that three-note theme that announces "DRAC-u-LA"!

There were several others I wanted to see very badly- the Gorgon, the Curse of the Fly- because STV also screened the cinema trailers for the films- some of which were less than ten years old at the time. However, apart from Price, Lorre and Karloff in The Raven, I'm guessing my mum vetoed any more. She was still letting a few horror-themed comics slip under her radar, however:

I'd also discovered Marvel's answer to Swamp Thing, the passive and ridiculously-named protagonist of Giant-Sized Man -Thing :

When the Mighty World of Marvel launched the 70s dominance of the House of Ideas on the weekly market, the colour American monthlies disappered, apart from in the landward newsagents at Prestwick and Glasgow airports. The latter pair were obtained with a Conan and a Kull comic at what we used to call Abbotsinch:

 I found Tom Sutton's Werewolf art too mannered for my taste - a bit like Frank Robbins on Batman- but Dracula haunted me. Not only does Rachel Van Helsing have her face picked away by bats but the damsel in distress Edith Harker is turned and has to be staked! I'd never seen that kind of failure in a comic before. My family's budget couldn't stretch to the UK Dracula Lives, when it was launched just in time for Hallow'een 74.

Brian Clemens' 1973 tv series Thriller creeped me out, with its combination of fisheye lens and omininous theme music. Not to be confused with the Sixties Karloff show either.

  The first episode to scare me was Someone at the Top of the Stairs, a Rosemary's Baby-lite with a Satanic cult in a boarding house. A much later episode featured Diana Dors as a witch. Although it owes a debt to Wait Until Dark, the one I remember best is The Eyes Have It. where Dennis Waterman and the other pupils at a school for young blind people try to foil an terrorist assasination attempt.

 During the summer holidays in 1974 , staying on my uncle's farm, I saw The Man With The X-Ray Eyes and the Naked Prey, in which African tribesmen cook a man alive on a spit. There were more metaphysical chills when the BBC screened a prime-time season of 50s and 60s Sci-Fi: Forbidden Planet, The Incredible Shrinking Man (with its giant spider) and the Village of the Damned.
Marvel's b/w series seemed a second cousin to porn so buying this issue of Monsters Unleashed in Strathaven in 1975 was pretty transgressive. The close-up gruesome zombie on the second page was bad enough but a 50s EC-style story about maggots lying dormant in our skin from birth was really repulsive.

There was a second season of sci-fi in the autumn of 1976 including Them! and the magnificent British movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire. But during the late summer months, BBC 2 launched the first season of what we would later think of as the summer horror double bills, Masters Of Terror. Here's the info from one of Digital Spy's forum members:
14 Aug 1976
-The Phantom of the Opera (1925) Didn't see either of these.
-Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1932) We were probably on holiday in a guest house in Port William.
21 Aug 1976
-The Devil Doll (1936) S2 at Strathaven Academy would have started around this time.
-Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) Possibly my second viewing, after a previous screening on STV
28 Aug 1976
-The Hounds of Zaroff (1932) I think this was the one-and-only time I saw it.
-The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)
4 Sept 1976
-The Mad Genius (1931) No recollection of this whatsoever.
-The Pit and the Pendlum (1961)
11 Sept 1976
-The Walking Dead (1936)
-Dracula-Prince of Darkness (1965) The shocking throat-slitting scene is etched on my mind.

Probably the most terrifying thing on tv in '76 was Beasts by Nigel (Quatermass) Kneale. An anthology series of plays on Friday nights- on the commercial channel- the one that unsettled me most was During Barty's Party. A middle-aged couple in suburbia are terrorised by an invasion of super-rats.  I've never forgotten the sequence where they think they're safe when their neighbours arrive home- only for said neighbours to be attacked and devoured, in an off-stage voiceover.
A later episode, The Dummy was about a monster movie actor who becomes obsessesed with the part and has a breakdown. I think it was part of the inspiration to Kate Bush's song "Hammer Horror".
Of course, this was the heyday of Doctor Who's own Gothic period, which borrowed some of the trappings of Universal and Hammer horror. I'd read about the Exorcist (and Tubular Bells!) and seen photos of Dr. Phibes; I still hadn't seen Barbarella. As the strange forces of disco and punk began to corrupt the nation's youth, the Queen's Jubilee summer would witness a resurgence of horror...

Next: We are the Damned
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