Childhood Trauma no 1

Up until about a year ago, I thought Moomins were just a figment of my early imagination. But then that book arrived in our store, and I nearly dropped it, screeching "OH GOD THEY ARE REAL!!!"

I have a very very dim memory - which I even thought was no more than a dream - of some mousy-elephantish looking creatures hiding in a house, while outside a sinister, dark creature approached, nothing more than a black lump with red fires for eyes and a mad grin and a pointy nose.
I must have been about two, and I remember I was terrified of that image, but neither my parents nor I could remember whether that was real or just a nightmare.

In subsequent years, I had serial nightmares of a similar creature I called the Worm, which regularly invaded our home, living in dark nooks and crannies, and in the land beyond the mirror. Sometimes you could see it in the mirror, a reverse landscape I was always fascinated by and wondered what it was like to be there. Mind you, this was long before I ever heard of "Through the Looking Glass".

In some of my dreams there was a cupboard near a mirror with a curtain instead of a door, and when you crawled behind that curtain, there would be a hole in the wall that would let you through into the mirror world. One time I foolishly followed that path, ending up in a mirror version of my flat, which was eerily silent and deserted... until a rustle made me jump, and when I peered into the dark corridor, I could see that this was where the Worm lived, that nameless lumpy creature. And I raced back to the hole and crept back into my own world, hoping it wouldn't follow me.

The Worm would appear in all kinds of unexpected places. On my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I would spot its long pointy nose sticking out from behind a dresser where it was trying to hide, and then it would lunge out and charge for us while I screamed "The Worm! The Worm!", running back into the lounge, where I tried to hide my family in cupboards before floating up to the ceiling myself, hoping to God it wouldn't look up.

At other times I would sit in the bathtub with my baby brother, and suddenly the floor of the tub would tilt and open up a gaping hole into which we slid, and the Worm would be down there, groping for us.

And its babies would be under my bed, screeching and poking their needle-sharp noses through the mattress (good Lord, what would Freud make of that??), into my back, giving me something that felt like seizures of terror, and I would wake and scream for my Mum and Dad.

The Worm was the single most terrifying creature of my early childhood. And I think it had its origins in the Groke... except that the Worm was infinitely more scary.

About 12 years ago, when I first met my friend Peter in Berlin at a Christmas party, he recited me this tale in his marvellous Queen's English, an excerpt from "The Moon of Gomrath", in which a dark, evil creature called the Brollachan possessed first a horse, then a little girl.

"Now the Brollachan", Peter said in his spookiest voice, with goosebumps creeping over my flesh, "had eyes and a mouth... but he has no speech, and alas... no shape!" He told me how it was blacker than black, a shadow in the night too dark to comprehend. "Somewhere near the middle... if there was a middle", he whispered, "were two red points of light."
And I realised he was talking about the Worm... it was the first time in years I had actually thought about it, and I had an invisible cold hand crawling down my spine, because Peter's story hit me square in my subconscious' nuts: "The pony turned its head and looked at Susan. Its foaming lips curled back into a grin, and the velvet was gone from the eye: in the heart of the black pupil was a red flame..."

Things like this make me wonder if there are archetypes of evil planted in our subconscious, ideas that cross cultural boundaries, because if there is a Collective Unconscious to mankind, as Jung describes it, then surely similar images representing similar ideas would pop up all over the world. The Groke (it's original name is Marran; I remembered it as Morrah) is Swedish, the Brollachan is a Scottish legend... and what about the god Kaonashi in "Spirited Away" (god, that creature always hit a nerve with me)?
That's ultimately more scary than just a single child's nightmare, no?

Childhood trauma no 4

On films and the reality of childhood

Bloglag: 5 months

I have been sick for the past few days and spent most of my time wrapped in a blanket, drinking lemsip or hot chocolate, snotting my brains out and watching films.

One of them was E.T.

Since I first saw it in 1987 (that’s when it first made it to East Germany), I have watched it more often than I can count. I saw it a gazillion times in the cinema, back in the day when you didn’t have to sell your last shirt to afford a ticket (50 East German pfennig for kids, the most expensive ticket I ever bought was 2 East German marks, which still was only about between 20 and 50p, if at all, by today’s standards).

You’d think a film would get old and stale, and most films these days do for me, but I swear, watching E.T. made me cry every. single. time.
I am gripped and wrapped up and swept away by it every single time. And when I think about it, I am pretty sure that E.T. was one of the most intense, profound experiences of my childhood.

That might sound lame and geeky to some, or like I haven’t had a childhood to speak of.
But the thing is, my childhood happened mostly in my head, in my own little world. I don’t know how universal that is, but I strictly filtered what I would allow in that world... reflecting on that, that’s a skill I should readopt. It might well be that this would “reduce” my life to the imaginary, but I have never seen it that way. It’s more like, expand my life to the imaginary.

This is the, admittedly cheesy, truth: E.T. was one of the few stories that acted as a surrogate for a lot of things missing in my life back then: affection, the tolerance and embrace of the soft, emotional, beautiful, sentimental. I have always been an emotional, soft person and I do believe that people are born to be a certain way, but I didn’t necessarily grow up in an environment that fostered and nurtured that. So whatever I couldn’t express and live around my family and friends, I would channel into something else: my dolls and stuffed animals, the stories I played and made up and finally wrote down, the books I read and the films I watched that could grow roots in me and fill an emotional hole – fiction or not, they served a purpose. That’s why stories exist. That’s why films and stories and that secluded little world that my dad believed would be my downfall are actually the things that made me what I am today, or more so, kept alive what I was born to be, constantly battling against the cynic, the bitter hag, the deranged, twisted creature that is the dark half of mine.

In the past months I have worked my way through many of the deranged films of the Tartan collection, read a lot of twisted books and bizarre magazines (make that a capital B), and it is as the saying goes, the wolf in you that you feed is the one that gets stronger.

And when I watched E.T. today, I suddenly remembered what I miss so much... and I was relieved to feel that I still am capable of being that person.
It’s not that I want to give up one side for the other, I embrace both of them, and both of them are just coping strategies. But I have had that vague feeling for a long time, that somehow things have gone wrong, that I am not the person I wanted to be, that life has turned out to be not what I wanted or expected, and that turning around and groping my way back is not going to be easy if I have forgotten what I’m looking for, what I used to want, what I used to be like. It’s like my core got buried in a mental mindshaft that collapsed under the weight of real life and bad choices.
E.T. is that reminder, some sort of guide post, a scratch in the bark of a tree that I recognise as a marker of being on the right way.

80s kids movies - they just can't make them anymore!

bloglag: 2 years

E.T. was on the other night, and it ran on every single TV in our house. It was funny. I came up the stairs and heard some strange gargling sounds and immediately recognised it. I have seen it THAT OFTEN!
Abi, Charlie and I giggled our way through all the silly things we never noticed in the film: e.g. why the scientists are wearing space suits, why they sound like Darth Vader ("I am your father!", we cried in unison) why one of them, when they come over the hill, carries a glow stick ("his pager called him and he had to come straight from a club", Abi suggested), why they come through the window, why the toy train goes off when the scientists break into the house, how they managed to turn the house into a lab in the space of about 30 mins ("flat pack labs from IKEA", Abi suggested) and why Elliott's brother, when he finds ET in a creek, tries to camouflage him with a white sheet.
"It was the 80s", I said defensively. "Back then, we didn't question things."

Anyways, ET will always be one of my favourite films. Along with The Neverending Story. The tears I have shed!

There is a charm about 80s movies that could never be reproduced in the following decades. Today everything is CGI shit, there seems to be a lot less love put into the work. They had less to work with back then, and had to put in a lot more effort to get results, but somehow it made it worthwhile. Did you know that the tortoise in The Neverending Story cost about 1 million dollars to make, and most of the characters were created from some latex material that would actually disintegrate in daylight (which is why the displays in the Bavaria Film Studios are literally kept in the dark). Today it would be a pure CGI creature that would probably bear a striking similarity to the mummy (which seems to have become the template bad guy for a lot of films – The Fog remake, The Boogeyman, I am Legend, don’t get me going on that shit).

What happened to models?

There was an imperfection to it that actually gave it the special something that seems to be lacking in today’s blockbusters, because they are too bloody perfect.
Remember the old Sinbad films and the way the creatures moved? Ray Harryhausen is a genius! Man, it creeped the hell out of me, but it was amazing.

Anyways, here is a list of 80s films that you need to buy for your kids, and watch yourself, if you haven’t already done so.

E.T.
The Quest/ Frog Dreaming
Flight of the Navigator
Space Camp (a bunch of kids go to a space training camp and accidentally get shot into space where they have to make their own way back... not likely, but who cares!)
Camp Cucamonga (oh the 80s fashion, and 80s hip hop, and all the old child stars in there that raise the question of what ever happened to them? Well, Chad Allen is a gay icon *sad sigh* and Candace Cameron is the sister of Growing Pains heartthrob-cum-born again fundie Kirk Cameron)
Explorers
The Goonies
The Journey of Nattie Gann
Lost Boys
Project X
Wargames
Breakfast Club (or any brat pack movie – you haven’t lived the 80s without those!)
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (teenage legend and messiah, he is what everyone wanted to be as a teenager, and he had a band named after him – Save Ferris. Plus, amazing for enlarging your quotes repertoire. Anyone? ... Bueller? Bueller?)
Joey/Making Contact (A bit like Poltergeist meets ET: Hitler-lookalike ventroquist’s doll going apeshit in a little boy’s world)
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (I rest my case.)
Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey
Weird Science (we were all disappointed to find out that the internet doesn’t actually work like that, but it’s still a great film!)
A Christmas Story
Tron
Poltergeist (if anything, it will teach your kids not to sit too close to the telly)
The Gate
Labyrinth
Jim Henson’s Storyteller (a series, but amazing nonetheless)

Only a small selection but a good place to start.
Just trust me on this one.

Guilty pleasures

Once again, Wil Wheaton, my favourite celebrity of all times, has done it: something I should have done ages ago, which is to write about guilty pleasure films. I was actually wetting myself when I read this (I know - attractive!), not just because he manages to turn The Omega Man and the likes into drinking games which will land you on a drip in hospital, but also because he points out so marvellously what exactly is so cheesy but at the same time sooooooo good about these films. And he actually names almost exactly all my favourite Guilt Trips (which I do own on DVD because they are too good to miss.

Come on, there is nothing like Charlton Heston in 70s movies. I know he can't act for shit, and he is a gun-waving idiot, but nothing makes me giggle/watch in 'passing a car crash'-fascination more than his catchphrases, overacting and having helpless damsels cling to his barrel chest in a desperation that makes feminist tear their hair out.

So yes, have a read of this fantastic review.

ze klick.

The Others

I have just watched "The Others" for the first time, whilst shamefully neglecting an assignment that wants to be finished. That film hella spooked me... I actually screamed at one point. I like its mood and weirdness, makes me feel creeped out all over. It was good to see Christopher Eccleston (sp?) in it as well... he was well weird, but it's just nice to see a Brit playing a Brit for a change... and not an American with a dreadfully fake accent (Tho Kidman did quite well, I thought. But what do I know, being German and all?). Was I the only one who was totally creeped out by the housekeeper? And the book of the dead?
OK, I shan't spoil it for anyone. But do go and watch it. The ending is hella weird.
Just my kinda film, morbid as heck, and romantic and moody and scaring me outta my wits. No wonder I have nightmares all the time.
It is pretty funny. Have lived in that all-Christian community where they told you watching creepy movies is wrong and whatnot, and I tried giving them up, driven by peer pressure.

But the truth is, I have always loved them. Ghost stories were always my favorite. My writing lecturer noticed my morbidity right away, and it was always the thing by which I was recognized. It's almost my trademark.
Heh, you preachers out there... can I be morbid and be a good Christian at the same time? Discussion open now.
I just wonder, cos does it make me a bad person to like that kinda stuff? I mean, I have never killed anyone (except mosquitos, but that's only cos I'm allergic to them). In fact, I saved a slug today. Occasionally, we keep finding slugs in our house... I have no idea how they get in, cos I can't see a hole anywhere... but they manage... and I found slug trails on the kitchen floor today, in front of the garden door. If you didn't know what they are, they'd look pretty... silky and glittery. But then, someone points out to you they are just slime, and it's like a gush of cold water. Anyway, I found this little curled up slug on the step that leads to our garden, looking all lonely and neglected, and I picked it up with a paper towel. At first I couldn't tell where the front and back were. But being suddenly lifted to wuthering heights, a shy snail eye slowly emerged from one side (which I had previously believed to be its ass).
"Hello," I said. "Come on out and be not afraid. I am not French. You and I, we hate the French. Let's be friends!"
Apparently trusting my gentle words of peace, eye number two, which had been in reserve until then, extended and pointed in my direction.
"I shall name you Kevin", I said.
Kevin looked pleased, oozing slug slime onto the paper towel.
"Well, Kevin," I said. "I don't think you'd be particularly happy in this house. I shall release you into the garden."
We went outside. Kevin was thrilled to see his habitat from a bird's perspective. He hung on with all his might. I put him down on the grass. Saying goodbye was hard. But it was best this way. Kevin's telescope eyes pointed up, filled with the pain of separation.
"Don't make this harder than it is!", I said, welling up. "Run along now. Run like the wind!"
I stood and looked till he faded in the distance. Then I returned to the house, my heart heavy. But I can say I have lived. Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.