It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive by Mark Kermode Read Free Book Online

down, but even without words the silent shapes and shadows of those old chillers made perfect sense to me. It was, indeed, my first real experience of discovering something that was uniquely mine , something that existed outside the domain of my parents’ control and authority. And, of course, it was forbidden, secretive, taboo – and therefore irresistible.
    When I think back to those furtive nights in front of the cathode ray, the titles that stand out are old Hammer flicks like The Quatermass Xperiment (aka The Creeping Unknown ) and The Curse of Frankenstein , alongside the Vincent Price frightener The Fly which became my ‘favourite movie of all time’ for about a week. I clearly remember walking to school one windy morning and reciting the entire plot of The Fly to a goggle-eyed friend who got so creeped out by my animated description of insect heads transplanted onto human bodies (and vice versa) that he literally started to cry. And I vividly recall returning home one afternoon to find that my father had left specific instructions with my mother ‘not to let the kids watch Village of the Damned ’ which was playing on BBC1 that evening. The next day was hell on earth for me because it seemed that every other kid at school had stayed up to watch this tale of alien children taking over a small English village,and no one could talk of anything else. There were even kids who had brought in the book (John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos ) just to relive some of the more terrifying moments in the playground. I was mortified – it was (to quote the underrated farting kids’ fantasy flic Thunderpants ) ‘the worst day of my life – ever!’
    It is surely no coincidence that I spent many subsequent years obsessing about Village of the Damned , tracking down articles about the film in old movie magazines, reading everything John Wyndham had ever written, from The Kraken Wakes to Chocky to Jizzle and more, and even surreptitiously attempting to persuade my parents to ‘take us for a nice day out at Letchmore Heath’ where I knew that many of the key scenes of Village had been filmed. When I came to write my PhD thesis about modern English and American horror fiction fifteen years later, I would devote a lengthy section to The Midwich Cuckoos and its place within the canon of ‘paedophobic’ literature. To this day, the very thought of Village of the Damned gives me an illicit tickle. Significantly I can’t remember where I finally first saw it – only where I first didn’t see it.
    If there is a moral behind all this it is surely that attempting to repress something will only cause it to resurface elsewhere, bigger, stronger, and nastier . I am living proof of the inherent failure of censorship – if you tell me that I can’t watch something, then my desire to see it immediately will be equal and opposite to the force of your refusal. You know, like that law you learned about in physics lessons; let’s call it ‘Newton’s Law of Motion (Pictures)’. I’mhonestly certain that if my father had never told my mother to tell me that I couldn’t watch Village of the Damned I would have forgotten about it long ago. As it is, at the age of forty-six I still feel an irresistible urge to slam my old VHS copy of the movie into the machine right now – just because I can .
    This electrifying awareness of the forbidden was clearly hard-wired into my psyche at an early age and frankly it has never gone away. Nor would I want it to. I have had fantastic times watching things I was told not to watch, and I pity those who have never known the delicious pleasure of good honest visual guilt . Look at Lars von Trier, whose recent movie Antichrist has been (wrongly) dubbed ‘the most shocking movie ever’. Von Trier reportedly grew up in a fantastically liberal Danish household in which rules were frowned upon and look what it did for him – he is now a self-confessed neurotic depressive who is ‘afraid of everything in