The Night My Parents Came To Kill Me

Here’s something I wrote for a creative course a few years ago. The assignment’s brief was something that deeply affected me. Do read on.

* * *

I did try to think of some nice incidents in my life to talk about, honest I did. It’s not that there haven’t been any beautiful moments; there have. But I think I’m a bit embarrassed when it comes to the mushy stuff. Now, funny, embarrassing and/or terrifying moments from my personal history, those I can do. So this is about the night my parents came to kill me.

It must have been sometime around 1982, which would have made me twelve or thirteen years old. I was at the age where my parents had begun to let me stay up quite late to watch television. My brother, two years younger, would have been packed off to bed an hour or two before me, so I was able to enjoy one of those great privileges of being the older child. I could watch things he couldn’t, and then tell him about them in the morning, mainly to show off. I loved it.

Sometimes I saw some real gems of the early 80’s, like Soap, which spoofed American daytime dramas I had never seen. It was this funny programme about two feuding families, but here’s the weird thing, and just goes to show how the age of the viewer totally affects how they experience something. For about four episodes, Soap terrified me. It was a subplot about a baby being possessed by the Devil. It boiled down to this one scene: a lavish child’s bedroom, with a cot in the centre. The child itself is unseen, the crib facing away from the audience. The lights in the bedroom flash on and off spastically, the windows at the back blow in from a sudden gale, and all the toys start to fly about. The worst bit by far was the baby’s voice. This deep man’s voice laughing like the Devil. Now, more than two decades on, I can laugh at the silly voice and talk about how it’s just a spoof of Rosemary’s Baby. But at my tender pre-teen age, it scared the life out of me.

I must have hidden my fear well though, because my parents continued to let me stay up late and watch all sorts of things that, in retrospect, were quite unsuitable. I think I saw more horror films before the age of thirteen than anyone else at my school. My dad was a bit of a horror film fan, and had often regaled us all with his renditions of masterpieces like Les Diaboliques, Onibaba and Das Totenschiff. Looking back on that list now, I think it’s just as likely that he was into foreign films, some of which inevitably happened to be horror. But it was the spooky stuff he told us about, and infected us with. He certainly never let me stay up late to watch Jules et Jim.

So horror films were a fixture in my young life. I loved those nights when I was getting ready for bed just as something good was starting on the TV. In my mind, I see myself looking intently at the screen over my shoulder as I take my sweet time getting up off the sofa and inching towards the stairs, hoping that Mum or Dad would get the message and let me stay.

On this one particular night, there was a new film on BBC1. It was Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I’d heard of it already, because there was had been an advert for the film on the back of the American comics I collected. The picture hadn’t given much away, but the fact that it had been advertised on the back of an issue of the Fantastic Four and was now here on British telly was good enough for me. I had to see it. This was the 1979 version of the film, by the way, not the black and white original with, crucially, the slightly upbeat ending tagged on. This was the bleak remake with Donald Sutherland. If you’ve not seen it, look away now, because I’m about to spoil the end scene.

Previously, a handful of men and women have discovered that people are being replaced by alien pod-creatures as soon as they fall asleep, and so are forced to spend a terrifying night on the run from the increasing numbers of body snatchers as they are gradually whittled down one by one. In the last scene it is finally dawn and one of the survivors, a woman, stumbles down a city street trying not to betray herself to the emotionless clone-people walking by her. She sees a fellow survivor, played by Donald Sutherland, and staggers over to him, gratefully blurting out her story. He stares back at her impassively, then raising an accusing finger, lets out the trademark howl of the body snatchers, alerting his fellow pod people to her presence. And that’s the end of the movie. The pod creatures take over the world and everybody dies.

Hell of an ending.

I was shaking in my pyjamas. This was much worse than Forbidden Planet or any of the Hammerish horror films I’d seen, even the one about the zombies on the trans-Siberian express. As the man from the BBC announced closedown and the national anthem started to roll, Mum sent me upstairs to brush my teeth and go to bed. And this is where it gets really scary.

We lived in a big detached house in the woods. A great place in daytime, with a massive garden to play in and a tree house down the bottom. But at night, it felt different. There were no street lights outside. The other houses were hidden from view by screens of trees and thick sprawling rhododendrons. Inside was little better. My parents, ever conscious of the electric bill, insisted on lighting being kept to a minimum at night. So there would be one 40-watt bulb for the upstairs hallway, just enough to get you from your bedroom at one end to the bathroom at the other. And there was another problem; there was another floor above ours. The stairs leading up there were curtained off by a thick blanket, mainly to keep the heat in, but it also meant that there was this concealing but all-too flimsy screen that I would have to navigate past if I was to make it to the bathroom and back.

So that was the situation: gone midnight, post-Body Snatchers, I was stood at the top of the stairs, the reassuring lights of the living room below terminating at my feet. Ahead was the dimly lit hallway, with the spooky blanket hanging down halfway along. At the end was the bathroom, and beyond, my parents’ bedroom. They were still downstairs, doing all the ritual locking-up tasks my dad insisted on every night. My brother was already safely asleep in his bedroom at my back. If the body snatchers got him now, he’d never know about it.

I trotted quickly to the bathroom, the left side of my body tingling in anticipation of something jumping out from behind the blanket. It hadn’t happened so far, but every night the danger was there. Having reached the bathroom, all I had to do was brush my teeth and I’d be halfway done. I stood at the sink, one eye on the mirror so I could see the open doorway behind me. The fact that this precaution would be no good against a vampire was ever present in my mind. And still is, if I’m honest, every time I look in the rear-view mirror of my car at night. I hadn’t closed the door; the reasoning being that I preferred to see monsters coming, rather than opening the door and having them right there in my face. I suppose I feared surprises just a little bit more than any actual creature.

Unmolested by vampires, I finished my teeth and stood at the bathroom doorway, one hand on the light switch, as it was forbidden to leave extra lights on. All that was left now was to get back down the hallway and jump into bed, where I had my own bedside light and a massive torch from Tandy’s that doubled as a deadly club. It was at this point that my parents came up the stairs to kill me.

Just like in a classic horror film, I first saw the elongated shadows coming up the stairs, accompanied by a dreadful creaking beneath their feet. I was frozen at the bathroom door as my mum and dad marched slowly upstairs and turned woodenly toward me. And then I saw what they were carrying. It was a pod. One of the long green marrow type things that the body snatchers used to shrivel you up and grow an alien replacement that would howl. They stepped toward me.

Almost exactly like this. But in colour.

I think I slammed and locked the bathroom door on them. Thank God that this was the only room upstairs with a lock, ever since my second cousin Marcus had come to visit and been funny about using a toilet you couldn’t lock. I backed away from the door as far as I could. Not like in those films where they put their face right up against the door so the monster could just stick its clawed fist straight through and rip their face off. My body had gone all hot and cold at the same time, and the skin on my shoulders, neck and head felt funny. This was it. In the time it had taken for me to brush my teeth, my parents had been taken over by the body snatchers and now they’d come for me. I would eventually fall asleep in the bath and be shrivelled up.

It probably took my mum about ten minutes to convince me it was all a joke. I think I looked through the keyhole to make sure, which is when I saw that the ‘pod’ was in fact my brother’s toy marrow, a big plastic vegetable with a friendly smiley face and antennae. They didn’t sound all that emotionless, so I eventually relented and unlocked the bathroom door, wiping snot and tears with my sleeve, and trying to make out that of course I wasn’t scared. I thought they were burglars; that’s what it was. Not body snatchers, that was stupid.

They did then start to feel a bit bad. Possibly they saw through my façade of coolness and suspected that perhaps I was still a bit too young for that sort of film, or at least too young for a practical joke about them being taken over by alien pod people and then coming for me. I think that was the last horror film they let me watch for a while.

* * *

First Among Equels

Easy there, my fellow spellcheckers. Or indeed spell-checkers; I'm never sure. I stand by the oddly-formed third word of the title and here's why. I have before me a shiny new issue of Total Film magazine, the 'no telly allowed' sister publication to geek periodical SFX. You may have seen SFX in the newsagent perhaps, nestled on the shelf somewhere between White Dwarf and Kerrang!, below FHM and above Total Carp.

Did you know that there are over eight different carp magazines in my local newsagent? Not eight copies of Total Carp, not eight fishing magazines. Eight different carp magazines. If I was a lazy writer I'd have written that last sentence thus: Eight. Different Carp. Magazines. But I'm not so I didn't, and neither should you.

Total Carp, Carp Fishing, Carp Angler, You And Your Carp, What Carp? Carpistry, Carpy Diem and The World According To Carp. I may have made some of these up, but I assure you that there are indeed many, many magazines devoted purely to pictures of what looks like the same man in a flat cap (there's another one: Carp & Caps) holding the same ugly green fish out to the camera like the mighty hunter he is.

But I diverse. Total Film. It's about film. Totally. There's an article on pages 84 to 90 about the forthcoming 300: Rise Of An Empire starring Eva Green, which I want to say a couple of things about. OK, three things, but one is really just to say: Eva Green's eyebrows - what's up with them? I mean, really? I honestly believe she's down in casting directors' special little notebooks as #1 on the 'really low, really straight eyebrowed actress' list. But hey, everybody's got ta have a USP, and I'm guessing that's hers. Fair play to her. Too long have we been pigeon-holed, labouring under the yoke of the plucked and arched brow. Cast down your tweezers and burn your wax strips. Say it long and loud, we're proud to be browed.

Ahem. Sorry. Sorry Eva. What I actually want to say is this. Movie titles that go Something: Rise Of Something Else are rubbish. The film might be great, but the formula X:RiseOfY is lazy, lazy lazy. See also G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans ("Ooo look! It's Michael Sheen as Tony Blerewolf!"), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Rubbish I say.

And just where is the Silver Surfer rising from, exactly? He's from outer space. Rise of the Mole Man, yes, I'll give you that. Even Rise of the Sub-Mariner. But I would have thought that Scorching Hot High Orbital Entry of the Silver Surfer would have been more spatially accurate. Shame on you, Fantastic Four sequel. For your rubbish title yes, but more importantly for the embarrassing and somewhat creepy scene of Mr Fantastic dancing with his long stretchy arms snaking around the ladies, second only to Spider-Man 3's similarly cringey shots of naughty, greasy haired enVenomed Peter Parker skanking around a night club floor in his evil black symbiotic togs. Superheroes should not dance, not even the Batusi.

Secondly, lastly, whateverly, and this is the point I intended to make briefly and succinctly some paragraphs ago, the article on 300: Rise Of An Empire: contains the following quote from director Noam Murro, "Its not really a prequel, it's not really a sequel, it's a side-quel". By which he means that this film depicts events that take place at the same time as the original Zack Snyder (insert Mark Kermode impression here) movie 300, and indeed the Frank Miller comic of the same name. Not to mention the actual bloody historic events themselves.

So surely that makes it an equel?

That's what I'm calling it. Films that take place contemporaneously as other films in the series. Equels. Obviously.

That's mine now. I thought of it first and thus own it. I don't even need to Google the word 'equel' to be sure I was first.

Oh OK, I will, but I'm sure I'm OK.
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It appears I'm in the clear.

The Mighty World Of Me #3

Another comic effort. A bit longer than usual.

The Mighty World Of Me #2

Another comic effort.

Dead Man Talking

Heard an incredibly depressing interview on my drive to work this morning, in the grim wet gloom two days before Christmas.
Totally bummed me out, so I've squeezed it all out of me and onto paper. Keyboard. Screen. Whatever.


I listened to death today.

Not Death with a capital D.

No dour Discworld reaper,

nor gamine Gaiman goth girl, no;

I listened to a dying man,

who exuded his oncoming death

with each emphysemic, leukemic breath.                          

For half an hour in my car

I listened to him breathe his death

on Start The Week with Andrew Marr.

A man so near the end

you could feel the mortality

seeping out of the radio.

Blanketing me in the bleakness

the blackness

the sadness

of his poetry.

You're not dead yet Clive,

but I'm mourning you now

and thinking back

to the funny fat-faced man on the telly

saying 'Meanwhile, on Endurance…'

and showing us clips

of silly people from around the World,

and writing what is was like

falling towards England

with only a cardboard suitcase,

a Singapore suit

and mushy slushy Chelsea boots.


Normal light-hearted hijinks will resume in due course.

The Mighty World Of Me #1

Thought I'd try doing a webcomic. This is my first effort.

Dan Brown's The Mysterious Thing

Now, I quite like a Dan Brown book, I do. Oi, come back. I haven't finished yet. Put your snarky snobbery over there on the side for a moment and read on. There will be amusement and mockery, do not fear.

As I was saying, I do quite like a Dan Brown book. I like the mysteries and the riddles and the stuff about the weirder bits of history. I even don't mind the bits about art and architecture, providing they're heavily laced with references to hidden clues and secret passages of course.

And sometimes the books have cool visual puzzles like the ambigrams in Angels & Demons and the map thing in The Lost Symbol. I actually sat down and decoded the map thing before reading any further, yes I did. I am that sort of a person. I also used to translate alien languages in comics, and for those of you who do likewise, what about that issue of Smalsh Yegger, eh?

But I diverse. I do like a Dan Brown book. I will freely admit that the writing, whilst perfectly competent, ain't great literature. But that's fine. I'm not after great literature, just an engaging mystery/adventure. And yes, the characterisation's non-existent, but who cares? I just wanna figure out the puzzles along with (and hopefully ahead of) tweedy protagonist Robert Langdon.

BUT. I am halfway through the audio version of the latest effort Inferno and I've figured out which aspect of Mr Brown's writing bugs me. It's the padding. My god, the padding. The endless pages of nothing much happening and nobody getting anywhere. I swear he uses a template much like the following to bump his page count up every other chapter...

* * *

The Mysterious Thing

Chapter nn

Robert Langdon glanced down at the Mickey Mouse watch that served as his personality. His age-nonspecific brow wrinkled in concern. Too fast.  They were moving through the plot too quickly. He had to slow things down somehow.

But how? Perhaps some internal monologue, debating his choices. Or should he? The threat of the Unusual Killer finding them was ever present. Could he afford to spend time reviewing the story so far and considering all the clues and puzzles for the convenience of the reader? Could he afford not to?

His mind wandered back to a lecture he had given about the Famous Dead Guy some time ago. Rehashing the deceased genius' life and achievements would not only serve to remind everyone that this story Could Actually Be True, but would also pad out a few pages with some judicious keystrokes from the Famous Dead Guy's Wikipedia page. And it would make an ideal flashback scene for the movie adaptation.

He paused in his reverie, suddenly aware once more of his surroundings. They were in the Fascinating Real Place, with its unusual architecture and collection of weird stuff. Tourists will come to visit this place after they've read this; I should get a royalty, Langdon mused. Though he did not muse wryly, as that would have suggested some sort of personality.  And in any case, he did not need the money, as his flashback lectures on Art History For Dummies seemed to provide him with a healthy income. Enough to keep him in tweed jackets and comfortable loafers, at any rate.

Running a hand through his brown hair, his only notable feature apart from the watch, he glanced over at his companion on this strange journey. The Helpful Young Woman was looking at the Intriguing Object she held in fascination.

'Robert', she began 'You were telling me a little about the Helpful Thing before we had to run away again. While we're hiding here from the Unusual Killer, could you continue for the benefit of myself and the reader?'

Langdon smiled. But not patronisingly, as that would have shown some sort of personality.

'More than a simple MacGuffin, the Intriguing Object is a device to guide the protagonist on his journey, revealing clues one by one. And by extension, the reader too is fed background on the Famous Dead Guy and the Mysterious Thing which we seek in maddening, bite-sized morsels. Just enough to keep them interested through the padded bits.'

'Like this one?' the helpful Young Woman said, peering out from their hiding place, bravely.

'Precisely.' Langdon was pleased. Under his paternal tutorship, she had rapidly adapted from the role of wrong person in the wrong place into a useful expository foil and capable companion, much like a Bond Girl or Dr Who assistant, though with neither the sex appeal of the first or the personality of the second. No matter, he reassured himself, she would disappear in between books anyway.

They went over the next clue again. Discussing it over and over, to give the readers a chance to work it out themselves and feel clever. Was it an anagram? Or an acronym? Perhaps a homophone or a translation? Fortunately, as the world's premier symbologist and explainer of things, Langdon was well qualified to unravel the secrets of the Mysterious Object, one tedious layer at a time.

He repeated the next part of the puzzle. If they could stretch this out for another paragraph, he would be able to use his jammy eidetic memory to solve the riddle. Perhaps if he went over the story so far just one more time, with the Helpful Young Woman asking lots of simple questions. But already he could feel the onset of another narrative shift, and with it another frustratingly oblique chapter from the perspective of the Unusual Killer and the Friend Who Is Actually The Main Baddie. Langdon checked his watch again and ran his fingers through his brown hair. But not nervously, because, well, you know.

* * *