The Whicker, Man: Halloween Challenge Night 13

The UK horror experience fascinates me. For something as homegrown and ready-loaded with a ready arsenal of classic, gothic literature and a hefty output of the Hammer and Amicus Studios in the 60s and 70s, it feels as though British horror often gets overlooked in favour of its glitzier, more camera-ready US cousin, with its Universal Monsters, serial killers, Munsters and Addamses. There’s a charisma to American horror that’s sometimes lacking in the older, colder, damper, camper British version. And yet, consumers of the form overlook Britshock at their peril, because beyond the celebrated works of Stoker, Shelley, Cushing and Lee there’s an intriguing domestic oeuvre in UK horror that has a taste all of its own. A rare vintage, redolent of wet post War Victorian townhouses, urban cemeteries, canals, shadows, Scream comics, House of Hammer series, and guilty tattered paperback dreadfuls passed under school desks by day, to be consumed in secret after sunset.

I go on – and could easily continue to, but suffice it to say, British horror – even in the early decades of my long life, is a broad church, as evidenced by Alan Whicker’s exploration of the British Horror psyche here, on the cusp of a new era of visual nasties...

 Whicker’s World: A Handful of Horrors: I Don’t Like My Monsters to have Oedipus Complexes (1968)

This is once over lightly stuff, but intriguing for its scattershot skimming of what makes for British horror in the day – horror magazines, low budget schlockers, a distracted interview with scream queen Barbara Shelley, an earnest but wired Screaming Lord Sutch, Christopher Lee, Terry Nation and his Dalek creations, and our oh-so-lampoonable host drifting through Highgate Cemetery, pursued by a Yeti. It’s all good, it’s all valid, it’s all there – bumping its ugly bits together in a mash-mash stitched-together way. Reminiscent of… I don’t know what.

Horror essentially defies codification, which is part of its character and an essential element of its perennial appeal, so a single episode doco is never going to do it justice – even if geographically contained. Heck, subsequent documentary series have covered literature and film and still not scratched the surface, but that just means that there’s more to discover, to experience, to appreciate and argue over.

YouTube option:



Halloweenometer: Your mileage may vary, as it should. Trust me, it’s better that way.

Companion Piece: I nearly did Lord Sutch's 'Jack the Ripper', but opted for something a little more catchy and... comic. Here's the Damned!