‘…tonight, on Yorkshire TV, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee star in Dracula AD1972‘ Colour and blood! Followed by Twins of Evil and Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde! Colour, blood, and naughty bits! How fast the rot set in. Frankenstein meets the Wolfman, my first tentative toe dipped into terror. The ELO and The Stranglers (still my favourite bands) providing the soundtrack and finding old copies of Club International in a local wood. Oh, the joys of youth endless summers, dad playing monsters at birthday parties to the terrified delight of all the kids, bike rides, building dens, comics, trainspotting proper trains on the Woodhead line, grandma’s house for tea on Saturdays, John Pertwee as Dr Who (I was born 3 days before the Timelord began his adventures in ’63). I am 42, and yet I have no idea what the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything (Oxford comma) is. This list is constantly changing, however. Favourite horror movies include The Bride of Frankenstein, Night of the Demon, Les Yeux Sans Visage, Dracula (1958), The House That Dripped Blood, Death Line, The Satanic Rites of Dracula (oh yes!), The Wicker Man, Suspiria, and Midsommar. I have also had stories published in The Fourth and Fifth BHF Books of Horror Stories, which gave me the opportunity to provide prequels for both Lord Courtley and Johnny Alucard, as well as exposing just how psycho-sexual my mind was able to wonder into.Īlthough Hammer films will always be my first love, I have a keen interest in all things horror. The Vicar thinks its hilarious I often go to work dressed in a Christopher Lee t-shirt, and read Stephen King, James Herbert and Guy N. I am a huge geek at heart with a love of the genre, and I hope that is reflected in my writing.Īs to what that job is, I am Custodian of the Saxon Tower in Oxford, which is a pretentious way of saying I allow visitors to climb the Tower which is situated next to the City Church. I am lucky in that the job I have allows for quiet periods wherein I am able to make copious notes from my Mind Palace – although Jumbled Loft-Space would be more accurate – before assembling them into a form that is hopefully coherent and enjoyable. Since then, I have contributed just over sixty pieces for the magazine and various book releases both published and yet to come. I’d had a short ‘Fan Memory’ published in the Peter Cushing Special back in 2017, but ‘Spotlight on Horror’ proved to be my debut proper with pieces on The Brides of Dracula and Twins of Evil. That was pretty much all the formal training I had other than a love of short story writing before joining the WBD team proper in 2020. I was pleasantly surprised to read the scribbles of my 14-year-old self and think, “Hmm, not bad, I’ll use that!” As a natural hoarder, I kept hold of my notes, which proved handy twenty-eight years later when writing about the Psycho films for the magazine. In 1991, aged 12, I saw Taste the Blood of Dracula and thirty years later here I am writing for We Belong Dead on various forms of horror including a piece on that very film amongst fifteen others in ‘A Pictorial History of Hammer Horror’!Įven at school I couldn’t get away from the genre when, during an English class, we got to watch Psycho before writing an essay on its various themes. From early childhood memories scared at the sight of Worzel Gummidge changing his heads to being terrified of the Wheelers in Return to Oz.
I seem to have spent most of my life surrounded by horror, of the fictional kind I am glad to say.
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