Fright nights – Fionnuala Ward on scary films

There are scary films and there are horror films. Horror films fall into the scary category but not all scary films fall into the horror category. It’s an interesting cinematic dynamic. Well, maybe. But either way they both involve squinting through fingers at some point during the viewing process.

Sadly and with no small level of embarrassment I’m entirely useless at both. Take horror for a start. For me, horror isn’t about someone running around with a chainsaw, slashing and burning as they go. That’s if slashers are into burning as well. Not sure on that one.

Nor is it about someone luring someone else to a cabin or cave or caravan to perform barbaric acts and mutilations.

I came of age when there were two types of horror films. There were Dracula films and there were Frankenstein films. And that was pretty much it. These films were black and white and had the calibre of production values, no doubt cutting edge at the time, whereby the set pretty much rattled when someone moved around too enthusiastically or slammed the door for dramatic effect.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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Mind you, who cared about vibrating walls when you were dealing with a character who could change into a blood-sucking creature late in the evening or a strange, awkward entity who has come into existence as a result of the harnessing and manipulation of the very essence of life, itself.

But I couldn’t watch either. At some point, BBC2 ran a season of both at about 10pm on a Friday. Friday night was when my Mam and Dad went out to bridge and heady with freedom, my siblings would bounce onto the sofa and fairly lap them up. Meanwhile, I went to bed.

And then there was that famous severed head in Jaws. I was nine at the time and the word on the street was that it popped out of nowhere on an abandoned boat.

That was enough for me. We went to see it in Dundalk, where we were staying with relations at the time. I sat in the cinema covering my eyes, dreading this scene to unfold. I must have said something to someone because early on I was pointed in the direction of the lobby and told to wait out the film there.

Which I duly did, hanging around on my own for an hour or so. Simpler times.

During lockdown, I sat down to watch the film from beginning to end. I hadn’t had my head in the sand during those intervening years. I’d caught up on most of the key scenes. I knew Robert Shaw bit the dust in the end and that Richard Dreyfuss survived. And I was more than familiar with that part where the shark makes its first appearance. That’s when Roy Scheider turns to his companions and says they’ll need a bigger boat.

Anyway, I sat on the sofa and waited for the dismembered head to do its thing. And even though I had convinced myself that I was now so much older and worldy-wise, it still made me jump, bobbing up out of the void as it did. But I’m over it now.

Looking back, it seems strange that the severed head in the boat had resonated so much in my imagination. Strange in that, even at nine, I’d already come face to face with the genuine article. Most probably more than once.

A school friend insists that we visited the head on a school tour, and maybe we did, although my own memory has both parents and siblings somewhere in tow.

Drogheda was en route to a regular summer ritual. If the day was anyway good, my Da would leave work early and drive us all to Bettystown, togs and towels in tow. And on one or more of these trips, either coming or going, we called into the church in Drogheda to see the head of Oliver Plunkett.

I went back to have another look a couple of years ago. The head turned out to be bigger, much bigger than I’d remembered. And oddly blacker. It had to have been scarier to me as a child than any cinematic device, what with it being an actual shrivelled skull with holes for eyes. But I guess that’s where the power of the big screen takes over with its ability to ambush you in the dark.

I like to think that what with the visit to the church and that pandemic-induced viewing from the sofa, I’ve now exorcised the dread of an artificial head materialising on a screen in my general vicinity.

My next project should really be to go online and see if those old Frankenstein and Dracula films are out there somewhere. I should definitely get onto that.

Absolutely.

But one step at a time.