THROWBACK THURSDAY: Whatever Happened to Spontaneous Human Combustion?

There is a meme (see above) about the disproportionate prevalence of "quicksand" as a threat in the media of our youth.

While I remember this trope - and have employed it in adventures I've written for games of Dungeons & Dragons - that's not the 'great danger' I remember most clearly from my youth that now doesn't seem to get a look-in.

That would be: spontaneous human combustion.

I have vivid recollections of reading about this phenomena in multiple Fortean Times-like publications (such as The Unexplained, from the early '80s) and books that I pored over as a youngling, every one seemingly running the same picture of the charred leg of a supposed victim of spontaneous human combustion.

It turns out this case dates back to 1951 and involved the discovery of Mary Reeser's limb (pictured left) in her Florida home, with signs of a very localised fire that had left the majority of the room untouched.

Although the case remains a mystery, the pseudoscience of spontaneous human combustion has been ruled out as a cause.

But when I was a wee bairn (already blighted with an easily-triggered fear of fire because of an early exposure to The Amazing Mr Blunden at the cinema), this image seared itself into my brain.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't directly afraid of spontaneous human combustion, but for the longest time I was really convinced it was both a real thing and happening all the time around the world.

And yet since, probably, the 1990s I haven't heard mention of it.

However, in this age of idiotic conspiracy theories and science-denial, I'm expecting spontaneous human combustion to explode into our psyche once more.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Horror! The Horror! The Horror!

These days I'm a sucker for horror movies, with a particular weakness for monster movies.

While my passion for the genre began with a teenage viewing of the original 1978 Dawn Of The Dead, one of my favourite franchises remains the Nightmare On Elm Street movies.

I can still clearly remember the buzz the first one generated around school when it came out in 1984.

I was 17 at the time and not as into horror movies as I am now, but the "word on the street" was - in those pre-internet, pre-DVD dark ages - that it was the "most terrifying movie anyone had ever seen ever!"

Of course, when I eventually got to see it on VHS it was quite tame; still brilliant, thrilling and gory, but nowhere near as horrific as my teenage mind had imagined, fuelled by the hyperbole of fellow teenagers who'd claimed to have seen it... and just made it through to the credits by the skin of their tough guy teeth.

Even at the time some of the mood-setting special effects seemed quite primitive, these days they look positively archaic.

I seem to recall that the first horror film my parents let me stay up to watch on television was The Omen II. That scared the crap out of me and gave me nightmares for days - but now that also seems quite tame to my cynical forty-something brain.

I guess at the time it was some 'reverse psychology' parenting to stop me pestering them to be allowed to stay up and watch 'grown-up' movies.

It must have worked because I don't recall any horror movie encounters until the height of the heady days of the tabloid-led 'video nasties' scare (in the early '80s), when it was de rigueur to go round each others' houses and dare each other to watch the latest piece of nasty that someone had acquired on video tape.

I didn't make it through either The Evil Dead or Texas Chain Saw Massacre - which is ironic as the latter would, decades later, form the backbone of my university dissertation, and both movies rate among my top horror flicks these days.

It wasn't until one of these illicit gatherings when a gang of us were watching George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead that I had my 'Road To Damascus' moment and realised I was actually rather enjoying this movie and would like to see more of the same.

But that's not to say I've become so hardened and blasé to horror that nothing has a lasting impact on me.

Here's a quick rundown of the top three horror movies that still give me the heebeejeebies:

• The Exorcist

• The Blair Witch Project

• The Amazing Mr Blunden

No real shocks with the first two. I know The Blair Witch Project doesn't do it for everyone, but it digs at me on a psychological level for some reason - I guess it's something about being lost in the woods with an unseen antagonist, and the cinema-vérité style, with the handheld camera, just makes it all the more real.

It's that level of 'truth' that also makes The Exorcist so unnerving to me. Later horror films have generally taken a lighter touch, and even been more action orientated, but The Exorcist unfolds like docudrama and, to this day, as with Blair Witch, I can't watch it without the lights on!

The final entry in this trio of terror is an unlikely one that is obviously very personal.

My gran took me to see The Amazing Mr Blunden at the town centre cinema in Tunbridge Wells when I was six - and it scarred me for life.

To be honest I can't remember much of the specifics of the film, just that it involved a ghost and a large house fire. It wasn't the ghost that got to me, it was the house fire.

To this day, I haven't watched the film again because something about it just flicked a switch in my little, six-year-old brain.

And I have no plans to... even though it appears to actually be a U-certificate kids' film and not the hideous torture porn my addled brain recalls being 'forced' to sit through Clockwork Orange style with my eyelids pinned back.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Sic Itur Ad Astra

The Star Trek: Voyager episode One Small Step features a discussion of childhood dreams and ambitions.

Whenever I watch this, it strikes a particular chord with me as, at about the age that Chakotay decided he wanted to be a palaeontologist and Seven Of Nine was dreaming of becoming a ballerina, the only thing I wanted to be was an astronaut.

It wasn't even Star Trek (The Original Series) or other sci-fi shows of that era (early '70s) that drove this dream but simply the fact that I was growing up in age when men were still walking on the Moon and the "space race" was a vibrant and exciting part of everyday life.

Sadly, I also remember when how that dream got mothballed.

I was reading an article in an annual (either Star Trek or Doctor Who, and I'm leaning towards the latter) about the reality of space travel and I came across a paragraph that pointed out that if your craft re-entered the atmosphere at the wrong angle you'd burn up (I already had a childhood phobia about fire from being freaked out by The Amazing Mr Blunden as a six-year-old) and so that was it. Dream shattered. Astronaut ambitions shelved.

I wonder how different my life would be if, at that impressionable age, I hadn't read that article in an old annual and had instead pursued my space-travelling dreams through later life, studied the sciences at school (heck, any studying would have been an improvement), gone off to university at 18, taken a job in the aerospace industry or become a scientist or a pilot...

Talking of old annuals, as we were, another "freaky" story revolved around a pair that I picked up at a summer fête at the old Pembury Hospital (I think one might have been a Victor annual, but I can't remember the other, it might even have been a Doctor Who one).

One of favourite annuals as a kid
- but nothing to do with these anecdotes

What I do recall is that the two annuals were from different years and I didn't look inside them until I got home - only to discover that these two, otherwise unconnected books, both contained exactly the same illustrated article about UFOs! My little kid mind was officially blown!

The Pembury Hospital fêtes were fixture of the Knight's social calendar as, in their day, the events were always able to attract "big name stars" to open them.

One year we had Rod Hull & Emu (I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I stroked Emu) and another time there were a couple of genuine Daleks for people to inspect (before my time, even William Hartnell, dressed as The First Doctor, opened the fête one year).

In later years, once I was a local journalist, the hospital fête gave me my first opportunity to interview Louise Jameson (The Fourth Doctor's companion, Leela).

She was thinking of moving to the area and so ended up grilling me on what I thought about Tunbridge Wells.

Either later that year or the next she moved to Rusthall, on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells.  I like to think I played some small part in that decision.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Monster Mag #1

I've finally got round to scanning in the first of my treasured self-made Monster Mag comics, written and drawn by yours truly when I was only nine.

Self-published, with a print run of one, I thought I had lost these treasures from 1976, so when I found them last year after we had moved I couldn't believe my good fortune.

Fragile homemade artefacts, held together with sellotape older than Rachel (honestly, she wasn't even born when I drew these comics), I carefully scanned issue one this week and cast a critical eye over my work.

I was clearly influenced by the oddly-shaped, art-distorting, black-and-white British reprint titles, such as The Titans, which explains the horizontal page orientation of Monster Mag, and quite possibly the prevalence of Marvel characters within its pages (Thor, Hulk, Doctor Strange, Nick Fury to name but a few).

These big hitters were mixed in with characters of my own creation, such as the delightfully cheesy Ray-Kid, who, without his protective helmet, found his entire head transformed into ball of energy.

The presence of several Universal monsters (the Wolf-man, Frankenstein's Monster, The Mummy, and the Invisible Man) also seems quite random, as I have no idea how I glommed on to them.

Perhaps I was watching those movies far earlier than I remember.

Given that I believe it was my gran who took me to see The Amazing Mr Blunden at the cinema around this time, and scarred me for life with a hypersenstive fear of dying in a house fire, it's quite possible that she was letting me watch Universal horror movies on her black-and-white TV as well (along with the Saturday afternoon wrestling that preceded Doctor Who).

I think it was also my gran who wrote the date (February 26, 1976) on a couple of the pages, because that's clearly not my handwriting, and I have a vague recollection that I drew these comics during a couple of my regular Saturday sleepovers at her house.

Please enjoy the dreadful drawing and appalling spelling of Monster Mag #1:

I, now, just have to scan in issue two...