Scarred - Simon Clark
Author Simon Clark has been terrorizing Britain and the world at large for nearly 2 decades. His visceral, doom-laden prose is so relentless that it’s almost a miracle he manages to cram a little hope in there. I especially recommend Mr. Clark’s evolutionary takes on the zombie archetype, Stranger and Blood Crazy, both of which freaked me out. His latest includes The Rage of Echoes, a twist on the vampire mythos which just hit North America in paperback form last month, and if you’re lucky enough to live in the U.K. you can grab Lucifer’s Ark, a tale of psychosis on the high seas, on sale this month.
GHOSTWATCH. A MASTER CLASS IN HORROR.
Halloween Night, 1992, saw the broadcast on BBC 1 of GHOSTWATCH. It pretended to be a tongue-in-cheek investigation into a haunted suburban house hosted by familiar light entertainment celebrities. It all looked like harmless fluff with a jokey Craig Charles providing the comic relief. And there lies its brilliance. It fooled most of Britain into believing they were watching a cheesy real-life ghostwatch. After all, there’d been a whole run of naturewatch and seawatch programs that genuinely observed British wildlife and piped it live into our living rooms via the TV. So we watched and we believed. But then it all got very dark and scary.
We let our son, then aged eight stay up late to watch it. It was funny and light-weight until it got to the point when viewers phoned in to say they’d spotted a shadowy figure standing in the back a room in the ‘haunted’ house. That was enough for my son; his eyes filled with tears he was so frightened. Come to that, I was frightened, too. It gave me a genuine scare. One of the reasons for that was my defences were down. I didn’t expect GHOSTWATCH to be remotely scary. It was presented as a live investigation of a haunted house by familiar light entertainment folk. Within a moment of the appearance of the ghost I realized we, the viewers, had been duped, and this was FICTIONAL DRAMA not fact. Even so, it was too late, it had implanted the fear bug. It just got scarier and scarier. Strange noises filled the house. People onscreen were attacked by some invisible entity. The presenter in the studio became more rattled as the studio lights flickered. Then the ghost leapt from the house into the studio electrics and into the mind of the presenter who then started talking in tongues. Ruddy hell. It was STILL frightening to me even though I knew it was drama. But there were still hundreds of thousands of viewers who thought they were watching reality TV. After the program the BBC was flooded with telephone calls. Some complaints. Some trying to warn the staff that their studio was haunted by a vicious spirit. The BBC have vowed never to show anything like that again!
You know something? I now own GHOSTWATCH on DVD. And it is still frightening.