FILM

Author Kim Newman tells Robin Askew why he’s still in love with horror films.

Kim Newman and Venue go back a long way. His first review for the mag was of 'The Evil Dead'  in 1983. Around the same time, he was working on what was to become the definitive account of screen horror since the 1960s: 'Nightmare Movies'. On publication in 1985, the first edition was banned by W.H. Smith for including a still from 'Cannibal Ferox'. Today, Kim's a successful novelist, critic and broadcaster. In fact, under a little-known broadcasting regulation it is now illegal to make a TV documentary about horror or science fiction without calling upon his informed punditry. There's also a new, third edition of 'Nightmare Movies' in bookshops this week. It's not something he ever anticipated writing after the 1988 overhaul.

"I thought when I left off that I was never going back," he explains. "I even said in the introduction that I foresaw that somebody else would champion the new generation of films that crusty old gits like me would hate. Because I saw myself as coming along after all those people who'd written books about Hammer Films and Boris Karloff, and had been very sniffy about films made after 'the great days'. I wanted to say, 'No, no, look at these films! I like them too: ‘Night of the Living Dead’, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’, ‘Halloween’…' Now these things are accepted classics and everybody's remaking them, it's strange to remember that at the time there were people saying, 'Oh, they're not proper horror films.' I assumed that I would become that person, going round saying, 'These modern films are all terrible, aren't they? It's just meaningless violence and horrible music played for young people wearing stupid clothes.' But although there are some films that exactly fit that description, it does strike me that there have probably been as many good movies in the last 20 years as in the 20 years previously."

Of course, much has changed since 1988, when Kim was still hacking out copy on an Amstrad computer, watching films on VHS cassettes and had only vaguely heard of something called the internet. Access to material is so much easier today and there's no shortage of detailed critiques of what he describes as "the most obscure rubbish that plays on the Horror Channel at two in the morning when even I'm not bothering to use the V+ box". But while there are plenty of good writers out there, the wealth of primary sources has produced  "a tendency to concentrate on the minutiae and not look at the big picture or shape the material in any way."

Kim protests that, contrary to the claims of others, he hasn't seen everything ("I really haven't. Has even Takeshi Miike seen all his films?"). But he does average a little more than two films a day. Most of these are rubbish, which he ploughs through for his popular 'Video Dungeon' column in Empire magazine. "If they stopped making films about people being tied up and tortured in basements, I'd be reasonably happy," he sighs. "But because I'm a completist, I feel a strange compulsion to watch them."

Now that torture porn has been run into the ground and the Japanese spook boom has played itself out, Kim's hoping for a revival of the monster movie ("There is a part of me that will always watch anything with a giant monster in it") and predicts current events will give rise to more eco-horror. "…and there's got to be the American Tea Party horror film: the lunatic fringe, right-wing, founding father, idiot-type slasher: 'First he wants to cut the budget. Now he wants to cut your throat!'"

Is there ever an occasion, though, when he watches his long-suffering postman struggling to the door with yet another vast pile of no-budget zombie movies and wishes he was working down t'pit instead? "No, because I am well aware that the life I have is rather enviable. Not having to get up early in the morning if I don't want to, being able to class lying around all afternoon watching films as part of my job, getting the expenses money back from buying blu-rays…"

'NIGHTMARE MOVIES' IS OUT NOW (BLOOMSBURY, £30)

Copyright Robin Askew 2011