'There's a wolf and a monkey upstairs'...

... the beginnings of horror. Part One.

I know the exact date of my first exposure to the horror movie genre: ominously enough, it was Friday 13^th (the date, not the actual film, which would not be made for another nine years). It was 1971, and the month was August, right in the middle of the school summer holiday, which meant that staying up late to watch something on TV was, for once, an option. The film in question was ten years old and making what was probably its first appearance on British television: The Curse of the Werewolf, starring Oliver Reed.

When it appeared in cinemas, The Curse of the Werewolf was the latest in a run of pictures from the now legendary Hammer studio, which effectively updated most of the iconic horrors of the 1930s, in colour, for modern audiences. Colour meant blood, of course, although I was watching in black and white. Exactly why I was watching is what this blog aims to find out. How, where and when had I discovered the horror film genre and what had piqued my interest to such an extent?

I knew next to nothing about horror films at this time, and unlike today when information is freely available online, the process by which one discovered such artefacts could be long, tenuous, and spun out over many years. I’d heard the names Frankenstein and Dracula bandied about in the playground for quite some time, without knowing exactly what or whom they were referring to. The first depictions of horror movie characters I saw on TV were probably those featured in Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? which had debuted on BBC1 in September 1970. Episode 24 featured a werewolf story, and assuming the BBC showed the episodes in their original order, I would have seen this instalment on 25 February 1971. Although it’s not mentioned in my diary, I was almost certainly watching on that date, as the alternative on ITV was Magpie, a series we always ignored in our house. Either way, I doubt it was Scooby-Doo that piqued my interest in horror films, and I’m fairly sure I know when I first came across a depiction of a werewolf.

As a child, I found the mere idea of a wolf a scary proposition. My brother and I would dare one another to go upstairs in the dark, attesting to the presence up there of a ‘wolf and a monkey’. I’d learned to fear wolves as the bad guys in countless fairy tales, and I’d seen some particularly creepy illustrations in a storybook from the iconic ‘Little Golden Books’ series. Three Bedtime Stories was illustrated by Garth Williams, whose stylised but detailed drawings, with every piece of fur painted in, could make even the Three Little Kittens into the stuff of nightmares. His depiction of the Big, Bad Wolf in the story of the Three Little Pigs looked next to nothing like a real wolf, but it was certainly scary: especially when reduced to a single, menacing eyeball peering through the wooden door of the home built by the second little pig...

The scariest illustration ever: Garth Williams' painting for The Three Little Pigs (Golden Press, 1958)

So why should the mythical wolf upstairs have been accompanied by a monkey? Simple. Or, perhaps not quite. I have a memory of seeing one of what might be termed the ‘big monkey movies’ on a Sunday afternoon on television in 1965 or 66. It was almost certainly not King Kong, whose iconic status ensured it would not be released to television until the 1970s. Which leaves us with Mighty Joe Young, the Kong-lite fantasy released by RKO pictures in 1949, and produced by the same creative team responsible for the genre-defining original. Mighty Joe Young is, of course, a more sympathetic and less destructive creation than Kong, but the sight of an oversized gorilla attacking a bunch of cowboys must have impressed itself on my consciousness. Allied to this, somewhat ludicrously, was a cuddly monkey which was kept in a box at the local hairdressing salon, as part of a batch of toys intended to keep children quiet while their mothers had a shampoo and set. The cuddly toy had a fur body and a plastic face and hands. It was without a doubt, one of the scariest things I’d seen at that age. So, a cuddly toy and a vintage movie equated to a fear of monkeys. I have to admit, I still don’t go a bundle on our simian relatives...

I don’t class Mighty Joe Young as a horror film, though. Its Sunday afternoon slot (and a subsequent Saturday evening showing in 1967) was indicative of its suitabilty for family viewing. Which leaves Oliver Reed’s werewolf unchallenged as the first bona fide horror movie I sat down to watch. But why did I do so?

I’m fairly sure the answer to this question lies in the range of horror movie monster kits produced by the now legendary Aurora company during the 1960s and 70s. Later revised into the well-remembered ‘Glows in the Dark’ editions, which incorporated luminous plastic parts, these kits were originally offered in normal (one might say boring), non-glowing plastic, and it was a display of these original versions that I encountered during a trip to one of Birmingham’s department stores in the winter of 1970. The painting on the box (illustrated at the top of this post) was an extremely atmospheric depiction of the Oliver Reed wolf man (identifiable as such by his red cummerbund, although the kit itself was clearly based on Lon Chaney Jnr’s portrayal in the Universal original), and it was that image, allied to the entirely new (and extremely scary) idea of a hybrid creature, part human and part wolf, that set my imagination running. That's a scary picture, no doubt about it. See the house in the background, with the lit windows? That's your house, kid, and that tree he's hiding behind is just at the bottom of your garden... the Wolf Man is out there in the darkness, and he's coming to get you... tonight!

We didn’t buy the kit, but I couldn’t get that painting out of my mind. After the Garth Williams illustration, it was the single most disturbing image I'd seen up to that time. Wolves again... race memory or fear learned in childhood? Who can tell. Without realising that I was employing basic psychology, I decided that the best way to deal with this new-found fear was to confront it head-on. Or maybe my dad did, I don’t remember. Either way, seeing that box and its artwork – and a few months later encountering the ‘Glows in the Dark’ series of monster kits – would lead directly to my watching the ITV broadcast of The Curse of the Werewolf on Friday 13^th August, 1971.

I don’t have the Midland edition of TVTimes for the week in question, so I can’t say whether the broadcast went out as part of a specific, branded horror film season. A few weeks later, The Terror of the Tongs was shown under the banner of ‘The Late Movie’, a strand which was still running in early 1972, when, on Friday 14^th January, I caught the classic Universal horror Werewolf of London. Despite its 1930s origins, I found Werewolf of London decidedly superior to The Curse of the Werewolf, and had been tipped off by the TVTimes film reviewer to watch out for the innovative ‘tranformation scene’ wherein the stricken Dr. Glendon passes behind a series of pillars, emerging a little more hairy each time. This was, for me, the key scene in the whole film, but there was plenty to enjoy elsewhere, with a memorable musical score and creepy, ‘fake London’ atmosphere, all stagey studio sets and noirish lighting. My diary notes this screening, and even mentions the fact that it was ‘a Universal picture’, the rotating globe logo somehow adding to the overall atmosphere of this black and white classic. I actually missed the first ten minutes of the film, which explained how Dr. Glendon became afflicted with Lycanthropy. The reason for this? It clashed with a re-run of The Goodies, over on BBC2. Never mind silver bullets, Cricklewood’s finest could see off any werewolf...

The next horror mentioned in my diary was Hammer’s production of The Mummy on Friday 17^th March 1972. The Friday late night slot at this time included numerous other titles, such as City of the Dead, but I only tuned in to see the iconic monsters, the next of which was Hammer’s Dracula on Friday 9^th June, 1972. Anything that had figured as a plastic kit from Aurora was fair game, and by Christmas of 1971, a fair few of these had found their way into our house. From being scared by the box artwork, I'd gone as far as inviting it into the family home... some therapy!

Summer of 1971 had seen our family holidaying in Brixham where my dad, recently laid off from his day job, had accepted a summer season playing drums as part of a trio at the nearby Pontins holiday camp. The band members shared a flat above a shop in the high street, and two doors down was a model shop whose window was fairly crammed with Aurora kits. The first of these I remember acquiring was the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but I also saw the ‘Glows in the Dark’ monsters which were to become an obsession over the coming months. During that holiday, my brother and I were bought two kits from this range: King Kong and Godzilla. King Kong I knew well enough, despite not having seen it (ironically, ITV had showed it on a Sunday night on one of the weekends when we were away), but Godzilla was an entirely new discovery. Frankly, I didn’t really care what Godzilla was or where he’d come from at that stage: it was enough to know that he was a huge monster, glowing with radioactivity (literally, in the case of those luminous plastic parts) and depicted in the act of trashing a city.

Aurora's kits of Godzilla and King Kong: what 1970s kid could not want to own these?

Normally, when confronted with an unfamiliar item of pop culture, I’d turned to my parents to ask if they knew anything about it, but neither my dad nor any of his fellow musicians was able to supply much if anything by way of background on Godzilla, which is hardly surprising, given that the original film was sixteen years old, and its sequels had tended to be relegated to Saturday morning kids’ programmes on the rare occasions when they even made it into British cinemas. Indeed, it was at just such a matinee performance (complete with cartoons and a live comedy compere) that I saw my first Godzilla picture, the serio-comic Son of Godzilla, on Saturday 18^th May, 1974.

Returning to 1971, the experience of seeing all those horror movie monsters depicted in artwork form on the many Aurora boxes in that Brixham model shop was clearly a major influence in my taking the plunge into the murky depths of horror movies... where lurked such bizarre creations as the Creature from the Black Lagoon (another Aurora model: I would have to wait another four years to see the somewhat disapppointing film). The kits acted as a de facto trainspotter’s guide to horror films: clearly, the featured monsters were the most important examples of the genre, and thus, ignoring pretty well anything else, I set out to see them all in their movie incarnations. One or two were, it transpired, the manufacturer’s own creations: ‘The Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Mare’ was just a chained skeleton in rags, but the title suggested a movie, for which I searched the TV schedules in vain. I had more luck with the likes of Frankenstein, Dracula et al, and was immediately impressed by Christopher Lee’s depiction of the latter. Brides of Dracula was shown by ATV on the week immediately following The Curse of the Werewolf, but I don’t know if I caught this screening. I do know that, of all the classic bogeymen of horror films, Dracula stood head, shoulders, cape and fangs above the lot...

Aurora's plastic kits had provided me with a useful introduction to some of the iconic movies of the horror genre, but as yet, I still didn’t know much about the wider world of horror movies. That situation was soon to change with the acquisition of a certain publication...