With this installment, Scarred draws to a close, and who better to show us out than one of the most respected horror and thriller writers of the past forty years. Ramsey Campbell is the critically acclaimed author of The Face That Must Die, The One Safe Place and numerous other novels and short stories. His latest novels include The Grin of the Dark and Thieving Fear, and a new short story collection, Just Behind You, which is forthcoming from PS Publishing. He’s currently working on a novel, Creatures of the Pool, as well as contributing a regular column in Video Watchdog.

What scares you, Mr. Campbell?

Very few films terrify me these days. I’d be happy if they did, and I always watch in hope. The Blair Witch Project, with its combination of documentary realism and Lovecraftian allusiveness, works rather well, and some of the Asian spectres that have haunted our screens recently are closer to M. R. James’ inhuman revenants than almost any of those in films of his stories. However, the one director whose work has conveyed unutterable dread to me several times is David Lynch. I’m not exaggerating: Eraserhead feels to me like being trapped in someone else’s bad dream. The old couple in Mulholland Dr. dismay me as soon as they start grinning, long before they shrink, and they’re by no means the only alarming element in the film. There are several passages of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me that I would find insupportably disturbing if they lasted any longer (the breakfast-table scene, for instance). However, Lost Highway outdoes them all for me. I’ve seen no other film that communicates such a sense of nightmare horror. The entire first section in particular does, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, and I was interested to learn that Lynch chose as his favourite scene from the film the one that terrifies me most - surely the most terrifying consensual sex scene in all fiction - where Fred’s impotence causes him to imagine that Renée’s comforting hand on his back belongs to someone else.

I discuss the film at length in Mark Morris’s anthology Cinema Macabre.

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