Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25570682-20141023032905

Hi guys. I just wrote a story but I can't post it. I don't think the topic hits any of the banned items but I could be wrong. Would someone like to read it and tell me where I am going wrong.

FOR THE LOVE OF HORROR

Let's go back to when I was a kid. I was around six, seven or eight years old, I'm not 100% sure. I loved horror movies and for some strange reason my parents didn't mind me watching them. Over the years I have remembered snippets of movies, some I watched on a Sunday afternoon with my mother, but I could never remember what they were called.

The invention of the internet has done wonders for my memories. With the help of Google and YouTube I have been able to find and rewatch almost all of the movies, good and bad.

There was all the Hammer Horror movies, Hitchcock's classics, even the Twilight Zone and Tales of the Unexpected ( I also discovered they were penned by Roald Dahl and I though he just wrote children's books).

There was most of Christopher Lee's work which included, among others, Horror Hotel and his Sherlock Holmes stuff. There was an obscure few that took me years to find like Crowhaven Farm and The Spiral Staircase. There was even a made for TV movie directed by Spielberg that was bugging me for years, turns out it was called Something Evil.

There are so many more I could name and I enjoyed everyone of them, as good or bad as they were. Now I know a lot of you may dissect what I am saying. Hitchcock's movies are thrillers, Sherlock Holmes isn't a horror and so on and so forth. To a six, seven or eight year old child they are all horrors.

And this brings me to the scariest movie I have ever seen. I have watched this movie several times since and as a stand alone movie a lot of you, including myself, may scoff at what I am saying.

Before you tell me that I am contradicting myself, I must explain. It is not so much the movie itself but the feelings, emotions and most of all memory that it stirs in me every time me I watch it. The move is the Amityville II : The Possesion.

It was released in 1982 when I was just one year old so I was probably closer to eight or nine than I was to six or seven when I watched it.

I lived in a three bedroom house on a typical housing estate. My sister, being the only girl, got the smallest room to herself, my parents got the biggest which left the middle room to me and my older brother. I was the youngest. He got the bed by the window and I got the bed by the door. It was almost in the door, you had to open the door, take a step to the foot of my bed, turn and close the door before you could really enter the room.

The night, or evening, I watched this movie was like any other. I don't know if it was on TV or if it was a rented VHS but we all sat down to watch it together. My siblings didn't enjoy horrors as much as I did so as the movie progressed the crowd dwindled. My brother headed out of the room soon to be followed by my sister. This was before Playstations and Xbox so God knows where they went. My brother probably went out to play on the avenue and my sister probably went to her room to listen to the radio or sort out her Fancy Paper ( Do you remember that??)

My father also left. He had a second job at weekends. It was night time work and he was usually out of the house until 3 or 4am. The fact he left early in the evening leads me to believe it was a summer weekend. Either that or it was way past my bed time.

That left me and my mother. She had her gin & tonic and knitting needles and was happy. The click clack of the needles dissolved out of my hearing as I got more and more engrossed in the movie.

As this movie is now 32+ years old I don't think I will upset anyone with the plot lines. Even so SPOILER ALERT: The kid gets possessed, takes his fathers rifle and murders his whole family while they sleep in their bed.

And with that I was off to bed.

With this being the early 80's and my father working two jobs to make ends meet, bed meant sleep. There was no TV's in the room to fall asleep with, there were no bedside lockers with lamps or radios, I don't think a night light had been invented by then. You closed the door, turned off the light and felt your way back to your bed while trying not to stub your toe.

Bearing this in mind, along with the fact that I was, and still am a very heavy sleeper imagine my surprise when I woke up in the middle of the night.

Standing in front of me, at the edge of my bed, was a tall man. He was silhouetted by the light behind him and he was holding something long that glimmered in the light. I lay there in silence, unsure if I was dreaming, as he stood, unmoving, staring back.

I was sure I had closed the door. At first I thought it was my father, home from work, checking in on me but the figure never moved. I was paralysed with fear. I couldn't even turn my head to check if my brother was in the room. The only thing I could do was close my eyes.

I woke up the next morning, the image burned into my mind. I went downstairs for breakfast. My father was cooking a fry-up breakfast for us all. Sheepishly I asked him if he came into my room last night. He looked at me like I had two heads and asked me why he would do that.

I never told him why I asked, I never told him what I saw but every time I watch that movie I still see him. The man, standing at the edge of my bed, silent, still, with a rifle in his hand. 