Film: Horror stories

As all PostFeature viewers know, I am, and have always been, a very big fan of old films. Each week on the show I write and present a segment called ‘The Classical Review’, which stems from the YouTube blog I started many moons ago – search for ‘Miss Jessica Kellgren-Hayes’ and marvel at how many hairstyles it is possible to achieve with just a few pins!

I was very close to my late grandmother as a child, plus my father is beyond a film buff (truly, he can recognise a film playing on the television within a minute of walking into the room AND can probably produce an amazing piece of trivia) so it isn’t greatly surprising that I should have a keenness for all things old fashioned when it comes to the cinema. What does surprise me is how little other people know about the history of film and the huge role Britain played in the worldwide propagation of the moving image. Cinema practically started in Brighton!

Why isn’t the history of moving image included in school syllabuses?

It isn’t just the history of film in Brighton that is oft overlooked: a few days ago I was discussing horror films with a friend, who then asked if I knew which part of America Alfred Hitchcock was from. Yes, that Alfred Hitchcock. Now, my friend is a huge horror movie fan and has seen a lot of Hitchcock’s work, but was completely unaware that the director was born in Essex and that a number of his works were filmed here.

Why isn’t the history of moving image included in school syllabuses? Films are an important cultural medium because they tell us so much about a society’s hopes, fears and desires. Take horror film for instance; the genre seeks to elicit negative emotional reactions from viewers by playing on their primal fears. Plots within the horror genre often involve the forced intrusion of an evil, supernatural force, event or personage into the everyday world. Scary films permit the audience to feel the fears they keep bottled up inside, afraid to even look at, and then allow them to walk back out of the cinema, safe from harm.

Horror films have been expressing fears and scaring people for well over a century. Did you know the first horror film was a series of silent shorts created by film pioneer George Melies in the late 1890s? Now, I’m not suggesting for a second that we start showing horror films rather than teaching children about the Romans … but surely there is a little wiggle room?

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