Hell comes to Devon
Revisiting Christopher Pike's YA horror + Gremlins x Killstar
Last week Hell Tor film festival, which started in 2019, returned to Exeter in the UK. Celebrating the county of Devon’s history of horror, the theme of the festival was vampires, with guests including Caroline Munro (Dracula AD 1972, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) and Madeline Smith (Taste the Blood of Dracula, Live and Let Die), and screenings of films like Razor Blade Smile and Fright Night.
Although I have a lot of respect for Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, I wouldn’t describe myself as a massive Hammer fan. The films that had the most impact on me as I developed my love of horror came from America, films like the Poltergeist series, Dawn of the Dead, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Earlier than that I spent a lot of my young childhood watching and rewatching Mad Monster Party, Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein and, ironically, Carry On Screaming, which parodied the popularity of Hammer horror. Somehow Hammer passed me by as a child and when I tried to catch up as an adult, the pacing was never as appealing as watching video nasties or more visceral modern horrors.
I might not be a Hammer aficionado, but I do love horror and want to do everything I can to promote dark arts within the South West of England. The event I chose to attend at Hell Tor was titled Grim and Grisly Ranks of the Undead: The Shearsmith-Rigby-Swanton Vampire Classics, a talk that consisted of actor Reece Shearsmith (Inside No. 9, The League of Gentlemen), Jonathan Rigby (Borley Rectory, Lot No. 249) and James Swanton (Host, Curse of the Ninth, The First Omen), three British actors, writers and horror-lovers meeting to discuss their favourite vampire films. Or at least, their favourite vampire films that don’t include Count Dracula, the figure that dominated so many of the other talks and screenings at Hell Tor.
At the beginning of the talk, Jonathan Rigby asked the other hosts to remember the “seminal moment when you realised you’re for the dark”, his way of asking when their love of horror began. Shearsmith’s answer involved his childhood love for Smiths Horror Bags crisps in the 1970s, one of which featured an illustration of Dracula wearing a top hat. This fed into a conversation about the hosts’ respective dislike of the recurring image of Dracula in a top hat.
The event was a blast and made me wish I’d had time to see more of the festival. The highlight was getting to hear how effortlessly funny Reece Shearsmith is in the flesh. I’ve followed his career since being introduced to the BBC comedy horror series The League of Gentlemen by my wife, who grew up in one of the villages where it was filmed. Originally running on British television from 1999 to 2002, The League of Gentlemen is one of the darkest and most macabre comedies to every grace British airwaves, with the cannibal nose bleeds in series two continuing to haunt me to this day.
I’ve seen the League of Gentlemen live a couple of times, doing what I assume were scripted performances, but it was a joy to discover that Shearsmith is as funny in person as the characters who he creates.
Speaking of classic horror films, one of my favourite fashion labels, Killstar, recently released a new line of licensed Gremlins collaborations that I would recommend checking out if you’re in the UK.
There always seems to be an abundance of choice if you’re looking for horror t-shirts and the like in the US, with Terror Threads regularly offering up cool products tying in with films like Terrifier or The Devil’s Rejects, but in the UK the choices often seem limited to badly-printed unlicensed designs that don’t last more than a couple of washes.
Since around 2010 Killstar have created high quality Goth and “alternative” clothing in a range of sizes, by which I mean that they sell t-shirts in extra small that actually fit me. I’ve been buying clothes from them for most of that time and there was only one t-shirt that didn’t last well, using an ill-advised gold leaf design that washed off within a cycle or two, but which went off sale soon after. More recently they’ve released limited collaborations with brands like Gloomy Bear, Beetlejuice and Chucky. This is cynical stuff and you pay a premium for these designs, but the Gremlins range is loads of fun and I had an email recently announcing an upcoming Lost Boys line that also looks very cool.
On a related note, if you love Gremlins and haven’t heard of it already, check out the Gremlins Museum account on Instagram, documenting the largest collection of Gremlins movie props in North America. They frequently post about preserving puppets, concept art and more from the original films, demonstrating a love and respect for the work of everyone who brought the Gremlins to life that is inspiring to see.
Readjusting to the pace of reading prose again after years of reading a million comics and graphic novels to review each month has been a gradual process, but I feel like I’m getting back up to speed again. Or at least I’m not taking a hundred years to finish each novel anymore. Over the summer I decided to revisit some old favourites.
From around the age of ten, I became obsessed with Christopher Pike, an author writing predominantly teen horror books at the time. I discovered Pike in the public library, where I spent most of my free time. There were a number of stories in the scholastic young adult Point Horror line that I read and it felt like they all lacked teeth, apart from Pike, who I became religiously devoted to. I loved Pike’s novels so much that I would take as many as I could carry to school each day and lend them to my classmates, collecting them for several years before moving on to more adult horror.
I hadn’t reread anything by Christopher Pike since the age of 13 or 14, when it felt like I’d outgrown them, but my collection is still intact. October 2022 saw the release on Netflix of showrunner Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Pike’s The Midnight Club, which might have been the first screen adaptation of his work since 1996. I’m afraid to watch it in case I hate it, but it reminded me of the joy the books once brought me and made me want to revisit them. I recently reread the Final Friends trilogy, career highlights for Pike that were released in 1988 and 1989. I passionately loved these books in the 1990s, despite them proving to be more realistic and grounded than most of his novels.
The Final Friends trilogy covers the story of a group of friends in their final year of school, before moving on to university or their lives elsewhere. Characters lust after people who aren’t interested in them, their actions are misinterpreted leading to bullying and exclusion, everybody has a secret and by the end of the first in the series, one of the most popular characters is dead and the remaining two books unravels the mystery of how and why she died. There are memorable characters (Bubba particularly), embarrassing trips to buy contraception, rich kids misunderstanding poor kids, and vice versa. 10-year-old me found it to be an enlightening insight into what to expect from my teenage years.
After finishing the trilogy again, I’m conflicted about how well they’ve lasted. There’s an extent to which the story still stands up. The window-dressing changes from generation to generation, but the impulses driving teenagers haven’t changed much for hundreds of years (or at least, they hadn’t until we plugged everybody into the internet and broke our brains). This means that plotlines about thwarted teen romances and journeys to lose virginity feel as relevant and relatable now as they did thirty years ago.
In other ways, however, these novels have not aged well. I’ve read anecdotes that Pike was considered a pretty progressive writer for the 1980s and 1990s, which fits with the way his overall body of work dips into folklore and myth from a wide range of different cultural influences. All I have to base this on are recollections from Pike fan groups and message boards, but I’ve read suggestions that his publishers and editors weren’t wildly excited by the diversity he wanted to introduce in his novels, going as far as to police their hair colour of characters when it could be inferred that they weren’t supposed to be imagined as anything other than middle-class white teenagers.
Based on anecdotes of editorial intervention into what Pike was and wasn’t allowed to publish, I’m choosing to charitably hold that knowledge in my mind when I say that there’s one notable black character in Final Friends, and he’s one of the heroes of the story, but equally he’s an escapee from the ghetto whose best friend died in his arms after a switchblade fight with the crack dealer next door, and it takes his new white best friend to help him learn that he’s a natural basketball player.
I can’t say whether it’s Pike’s drive to offer a progressive voice in a series of books marketed predominantly to affluent white American teenagers that age it badly, or the editorial interventions that stopped Pike from genuinely diversifying his cast of characters. As it stands, Final Friends feels less like it reflects the reality of the period during which the novels were written, and more like a reflection of restrictive publishing trends at the time.
Maybe Final Friends was the wrong place for me to start. Horror and darkness was what I loved most in Pike’s work, and Final Friends is more of a mystery, or at least horror-adjacent only. I followed it up with Fall Into Darkness, which alternates between the story of a group of teens hiking in the woods before a tragedy, and one teen being prosecuted for a possible murder that takes place during the trip. It doesn’t feel dated in the same way that Final Friends does, but the courtroom scenes play out like a simplified soap opera, which perhaps reflects the level of leniency that authors were allowed in the days before facts could be more easily checked using the internet .
After rereading Final Friends 1: The Party, Final Friends 2: The Dance, Final Friends 3: The Graduation, I started writing about the experience of delving back into Christopher Pike’s work when I was a few chapters away from the end of Fall Into Darkness. I initially wrote that my journey would end there, that I shouldn’t sully my fond teen memories with my jaded adult eyes. And then I reached the end, and remembered that there’s a nihilism to Pike’s best writing that charmed me as a kid and still charms me now. People lose in his stories, teens kill teens and sometimes the bodies are never recovered. Where other authors for young adults at the time wrapped their stories up neatly and ensured that justice was served, Pike showed me a universe that could be indifferent to my suffering. Not because Pike was scaremongering, but because the world is a scary place.
I’m hoping that my world specifically will be a scarier place this weekend. I’ve booked tickets to visit Scare City, in immersive horror experience in the North West, based in the ruins of the abandoned Camelot Theme Park. This is one of the UK’s earliest opening Halloween scare maze events this year and it looks pretty brutal based on the website, so I can’t wait to check it out. When my children were young and we lived in Stockport, I almost took them to Camelot, and then it closed and lay dormant before we could visit together. My teenage son couldn’t be convinced to accompany me this time, but I can’t wait to see what it’s like being chased through the ruins!