Trust Exercise

The Horror Movie

Trust Exercise: The Horror Movie

In 1977, The Spy Who Loved Me was the first ‘grown-up’ film my twin brother and I were exposed to on the big screen. But before our epiphany at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly (now defunct), there were two other cinema visits; one with our father, and the other, with our stepfather, the dastardly Keith.

Perhaps emboldened by taking us to see Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday on an Easter visit to Paris, our dad drove us to the chilly barn that was the Letchworth Broadway to see the biggest blockbuster of the day, Jaws. How he managed to smuggle two eight-year-olds into an A-rated film (a certificate that caused controversy at the time) is still a mystery. But take us he did, maybe after explaining to our mother that it would be educational given our (by then waning) interest in sharks and creatures of the deep. Jaws was an unforgettable experience, but for mainly the wrong reasons. The sheer terror of the opening sequence scarred me for life. When the discordant cello theme began and the Nordic beach beauty is dragged under by an unseen terror, I resolved never to go swimming again. Not even in a swimming pool. The subsequent shark attacks on Amity’s stricken bay were harrowing; although, given our love of gore and violence learnt from Battle comic, there was something queasily thrilling about seeing so much blood fountaining everywhere. The moment that gave me nightmares for a whole year was when Police Chief Brody and the Oceanographer Hooper go out to investigate Ben Gardiner’s abandoned boat at night. When Hooper points a flashlight at the mysteriously damaged hull of the vessel and Gardiner’s chewed-up head pops out I think I jumped out of my skin. An out-of-body experience, but not the pleasurable variety provided by The Spy Who Loved Me. It was a grisly, wholly unexpected shock, one I still shiver to remember decades later.

Like the Bond films, Jaws was full of reversals, but they were harsh, adult surprises. What wasn’t apparent at the time was how much the secure family set-up of the Brody family affected me. Spielberg would go on to become the celluloid poet of broken homes, with his depiction of young lives affected by separation and divorce in both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. Here he presents a family that stays together with a strong father who deeply loves his wife and children. When Ellen Brody asks her husband, ‘Want to get drunk and fool around?’ it’s clear their sexual relationship is still alive. They are flirtatious and affectionate with each other in a way our parents never were. Keith’s imposture at home, his sloppy wooing of our mother, was wholly transgressive. It should have been our father doing the dancing around the living room with our mum, not Keith.

There was something deeply moving in the scene of Brody at home, late at night, flipping through books depicting shark attacks with a rising sense of horror. He understood without question that his duty was to protect the citizens of Amity from danger, but even more so, his own wife and children. Furthermore, his children were our age, as was the poor boy on the Lilo who gets shredded alive when the mayor fails to close the beach. Brody was a father who stayed, who didn’t leave to work in another country, as our father had done a few years before. The final scene of Brody and Hooper, kicking back to shore on a piece driftwood, seemed congruent with a father fulfilling his duty to protect the family unit. Of course he survives. He has to. As with every mythic tale of defeating an outside threat – from Beowulf to Alien – Jaws was all about protecting the sanctity of the family, as well as the wider community.

At the time, I didn’t realise how much the third-act scenes on board the Orca were shaping my notions of masculinity. Here were three men together, facing danger with varying degrees of stoicism, humour and resourcefulness. The scene where the three share their scars is a beautiful piece of screenwriting. While Robert Shaw’s Quint can boast about surviving the wreck of the USS Indianapolis in WWII, Brody and Hooper need to save face and present their own pitiful war wounds. It’s insightful and funny and sad all at once. There was a pecking order, I could see, among males, and it was usually the one with the loudest voice at the top. Keith, with his overbearing masculinity, his Alpha-male force, was clearly an apex-predator. Quint is also an apex predator until he’s eaten by one; the Great White shark snaffling up his legs and half the boat in the film’s terrifying final scenes. In my happiest moments, I daydreamed about Keith meeting the same fate.

Suitably chastened by Jaws, we began a brief flirtation with the horror genre. Along with buying second-hand Bond paperbacks at our local indie bookstore, we sought out Peter Benchley’s novel on which Spielberg’s masterpiece was based. I still have my battered copy with its gothic font and the impossibly huge shark heading for the naked ‘Summer Girl’ (as Amity’s mayor dismisses her) on the surface. There were also film tie-ins of The Exorcist, The Omen, and Orca the Killer Whale, as well as schlock by James Herbert and Steven King. This fascination with the macabre must have led to me seeing the B-movie horror flick Grizzly at Hitchin’s Regal cinema in May 1977. On the night I went, my brother was ill, so my mother stayed at home to look after him while Keith drove me to the big, chilly auditorium (why were all 70s cinemas so cold?) of the town’s fleapit. The Regal was opened in 1939 at the height of Hollywood’s golden era. An Art-Deco wonder inside, its exterior was curiously drab. You could walk past it and not be enticed in, unlike most of the classic 1930s cinemas. I didn’t know it then, but the place would close in a few months, laying dormant from September 1977 to its reinvention as a music venue in the early eighties, attracting everyone from the Smiths to the Style Council.

Grizzly was a much flimsier, stupider film than Jaws, but I convinced myself I was enjoying seeing the limbs of intrepid woodsmen torn from their bodies. I resolved there and then never to go into the woods at the bottom of the lane we lived on without serious weaponry. It was a strange, unnerving experience. As with Jaws, it’s a wonder I got in to see the film in the first place. Part of the uneasiness of the experience was being alone with Keith. He sat a little too close to me the whole time, his arm occasionally snaking round my shoulder, giggling at the goriest scenes as if he was watching an episode of Are You Being Served? There was so much cognitive dissonance (as no one called it then), I left the cinema confused and disappointed. At home, his mixture of sadism and sentimentality, his unpredictability, made me very scared of him. Paradoxically, he was at his scariest when he was doing anything nice, like taking you to the cinema, though this was to prove a one-off.

The fact was, although I hated Keith to my very bones, there was a countervailing, and counterintuitive, urge to love him too. Of course I wanted to trust him, to love him, and for him to love me. A child of eight believes people are fundamentally good and have your best interests at heart. My mother had welcomed this man into our family so I should at least try to like him, if not treat him like a surrogate father. However, Keith was fundamentally unlovable. Any show of affection from me would be rebuffed or, I can see now, ridiculed. In truth, he just wanted me and my brother to disappear so he could get on with living with our mother, unimpeded. He wanted her to himself. And though this was never overtly stated, it seeped into everything, like seawater into the sinking Orca.

While my brother was jealous that I’d been to see Grizzly, in retrospect I wished I’d never gone. The reason being that the experience would be forever tainted by Keith, and his ‘nice’ gesture of taking me. It’s incredible to think he never took us to kick a football about, something our father wouldn’t dream of doing. In fact, he only ever performed two selfless acts for his partner’s children in the time he was with us. The first was buying a family cat, a gesture ruined by naming it ‘Pussy’. The second was taking us to a playground in Stevenage’s quaint Old Town on a sunny afternoon at the start of the summer holidays. We were there for three glorious hours. Though he didn’t bring a football, he took many pictures. I still have them. In these, we’re flying on swings or scaling a climbing frame in our matching Six Million Dollar Man T-shirts, our hair golden in the light of July; the light that is young once only, as Dylan Thomas wrote in ‘Fernhill’, his great poem of childhood. We look like mini-Bee Gees. The playground seems curiously deserted, as if he’s hired it for the occasion. But the unforced smiles on our faces attest to the fact that we had fun. Which is not how I remember the day, strangely enough, when I come to think of it now.