The Eight Year Old who Saw Halloween 2

When I was very young, I always enjoyed going to stay with my father because he had, GASP, a VHS video recorder. We didn’t have one of those at home…

This large beast, a top loader of sturdy build, possibly made by Sanyo, sat next to the television, and spent much of its time being used to record episodes of Dallas – as boring to me then as it is now – and far more excitingly play rented films from the wonderful “Gogglebox” – a pair of shops based in Altrincham and Sale that had tabletop Space Invaders, the latest movies to rent, and also an under the counter stock of pirated films just out at the cinema.

I saw ET in that manner.

And also, I saw a number of fairly grim horror movies. “The Exterminator” sticks in the memory for the mincing machine scene, made ludicrous in retrospect by the fact that the meat packing mobster survived despite having gone through the machine in its entirety.

And then there was Halloween 2. I hadn’t seen the first movie, so had no idea what was going on at all, other than the fact that a scary man was wandering around very slowly killing people in horrifying ways. I remember the “duh….duh-duh…” music that accompanied his relentless footsteps. I remember a throat being cut in all its crimsonly graphic glory. But that was nothing compared to two other death scenes.

The first was a case of mistaken identity. On the part of the victim, rather than Mr Myers himself, who having slain the boyfriend in silhouette, took his place behind his busty naked nurse ladyfriend. Who had no idea that Myers had turned up the temperature of the hot-tub to boiling point.

She got the idea pretty quickly though, as Myers dunked her face in the water a few times, and we heard her deafening screams as the camera showed the flesh being scalded off her face in loving close-up. Over and over again he boiled her; over and over again we saw her increasingly ravaged face.

One big whole world of shudders.

In the other memorable scene, another nurse – the hospital setting being well stocked with pretty nurses for slaughter purposes – goes into the doctor’s office. Can he help explain all the mutilations that seem to be occurring? But no, she turns his swivel chair around when he fails to respond, and sees the hypodermic needle embedded in his right eye, the eye socket pooled with blood.

She screams and retreats. But as she does so, we see Myers in his iconic mask emerge from the shadows and grab her around the throat. Again in highly detailed close-up, we see Myers deploy another hypo, moving it in slowly towards the side of her eye with that sort of pleasure-less relentlessness that typifies his character.

And as I screwed up my child eyes in sympathy, the needle went in through the side of her occipital cavity, through the bone and into the eyeball itself.

I never figured whether the poor woman died of this violation in itself, or whether she was injected with something to kill her. It didn’t and doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is why was an 8 year old watching this in the first place? Although thrilled to be watching films like this, it still left some images scarrred onto my childish brain. All I can say, I was always attracted to the dark, macabre and diseased as a child. Didin't harm me. But others wondered if it would.

Cue the video nasties debate a few months later.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 31/10/2013