The Cameo's All Night Horror Madness

For a generation of twenty-somethings, slack parenting and older brothers and sisters led to us watching horror films at a far younger age than we should have. Childhood nightmares of Freddy stalking school corridors and dead grans rising from the earth to force feed us Tunnock’s Tea Cakes have settled now into vague neuroses in adult years.

This November, however, The Cameo is offering closure. They’re playing classic horror films back-to-back for an all-nighter open surgery. It’s time to face those demons and put the nightmares to bed.

First up on the therapist’s list is The Return of the Living Dead (1985). A group of kids that “just wanna party” choose the wrong night to gatecrash a cemetery. When an army engineered toxin is accidentally released by a biotech firm (that old chestnut), the dead reanimate and prove as hungry for “braaains” as the kids are for 80s beats. A classic zombie film as noteworthy for its Rodney Dangerfield school of acting as it is for its gore.

Pre-Halloween and Friday the 13th, Black Christmas (1976) proves you don’t need a mask and chainsaw to scare the shit out of someone. This film’s nut job prefers obscene phone calls to torment his sorority girl victims. Clever camera work and a less-is-more approach to the killing combine to create a genuinely creepy slasher.

The other seventies offering of the evening goes for a more-is-more approach. With Suspiria (1976), director Dario Argento serves up a psychedelic murder mystery scored to the soundtrack of Italian rock band Goblin. The film follows new student Suzy as she creeps around Madame Blanc’s ballet academy, investigating the disappearance of her fellow dancers. She stumbles Alice-like through sets that’d make Tony Montana blush. Camp and disturbing in Gok Wan proportions.

Speaking of prosthetic faces, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982) is a tender story of brotherly love between Duane and his mutant Siamese twin Belial (who he carries about in a wicker basket). Forced apart at birth, the two find each other through love and telepathy, before travelling to New York for vengeance on the surgeons who separated them. If this all sounds familiar it's because Danny Devito and Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in the popular remake.

And while Saw 3D assaults our intelligence with all the craft of a Hollyoaks episode, Stuart Gordon shows how it’s done with From Beyond (1986). Scientists experimenting on the brain’s pineal gland manage to open up another dimension. It’s essentially Trap Door for adults, with more workmanship put in to the plasticine monsters. Carefully crafted stop-motion heads breaking apart and spewing goo, and painstakingly prepared prosthetic worm monsters that digest bodies to the bone hark back to a time when horror directors really cared. And there’s even more brain munching to round off the night’s cognitive therapy.

Surgery opens from 11.15pm 27 November.