Do You Want To See Something Really Scary?: Halloween comes to Greenock

Most people have their favourite scary movie, whether they enjoy being scared or experience it as a white-knuckle endurance test. Even those that profess to gain no real pleasure from the genre will generally have an opinion as to which movies are the best examples of what the darker side of cinema has to offer.

As far as I'm concerned, something that is absolutely key to this kind of enjoyment is the environment in which the film is seen. If the atmosphere is right and you don't have the misfortune of being distracted by wisecracking idiots, phones ringing or any number of frustrations, then you might get a moment to remember. Provided, of course, the film you're watching is of a suitable standard.

I've been watching horror films since I was seven. At this time my family regularly holidayed in Millport and the crumbling cinema there was my first public auditorium of trauma.

Sat in the back row beside a hole in the rear wall (big enough, I thought, for an arm to reach through), the rattling projector exposed me to a bizarre treat called Let's Kill Uncle.

Let's Kill Uncle

Quite a few nightmares followed but my holiday had been enlivened in a thrilling way. I soon became addicted to this style of film thanks to the late night double bills on BBC2 that have been deservedly getting retrospective mentions in the media of late.

In my teens I was accused of not liking a film "unless someone gets their head chopped off in it" which, though untrue, was a reasonable assessment of the kind of thing that usually grabbed my attention.

While my enthusiasm for horror waned in the late eighties as I became frustrated at the continually low standard of feature arriving on the screen, some of my favourite films to this day are of the spine tingling variety.

If I'm ever asked to describe my number one horror film viewing experience, thoughts drift back to a cinema in Greenock. The location in question was the Gaumont on Brougham Place.

By this point the Gaumont was one of only two remaining cinemas in the area, the other being The ABC in the centre of town. Hard times had hit the cinema industry and audiences were en route to their all time low. One advantage of this was that the staff were, shall we say, less strict about honouring the certification of films.

By 1979 the Gaumont was a few months away from closure and the admissions policy barely existed. It was a far cry from the day when a doorman, nicknamed Lurch due to his incredible likeness to the Addams Family character, used to lunge up and down the aisles to hush the rowdy youngsters. It was there that I saw my first X certificate film. It was One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and I was barely in secondary school.

A week later, I tasted the dubious pleasure of teen sex comedies when I was permitted entry to the dubbed Israeli/West German faux American 50's high school romp, Going Steady.

A fortnight later I was finally to be laughed out of the foyer for trying to buy a ticket to see a film for which I was five years underage. But not before I was granted admission one more time. As chance would have it, this last venture was a double bill of Assault On Precinct 13 and Halloween.

The audiences had dropped to such a desperate level by this date that the Gaumont no longer bothered to open the stalls, so it was to the balcony that I, accompanied by two school friends, walked that night. After a head count of the other ten people in the gloomy auditorium, I realised that this night had a thirteen theme to it: Assault On Precinct 13, thirteen in the audience and I was thirteen.

The opening feature was great and my friends and I could have left quite happily after that. But we were there to see Halloween and had been preparing for this film for days. It's fair to say I was not prepared enough. Despite having already been given a detailed breakdown of the plot by an enthusiastic fan of the film, I was pulled so far into John Carpenter's story that I swear I could smell Donald Pleasence's aftershave. I lived every single moment of the film and felt as though I spent the last half hour of it being chased myself.

Barely a word was said coming down the steps afterwards. Brilliant, just brilliant is what I think I managed to say. Then it was off home alone through the dark streets of Greenock that now resembled the streets of Haddonfield, and Michael Myers could easily be on the prowl here as well. The house in which I grew up was a mere few minutes across open ground from the cemetery and I had always believed I could deal with the dead should they decide to walk. But Michael Myers was tough, with the darkest eyes, the Devil's eyes.

A few years later, while out driving in Greenock, my path was crossed by speeding fire engines. Following them out of curiosity led me to Brougham Place to discover the Gaumont, which had stood empty since 1980, being consumed by fire. A crowd had gathered and among the collected people stood my two accomplices from the John Carpenter double bill. With the ABC shutting, Greenock was about to endure seven years without a single cinema in the town and it was a truly sad night.

It would be poetic if I could say the flames surged from the building in a Halloween orange. But they didn't. A huge white plume billowed over the cinema as seventy odd years of magic went up in smoke. It was an ending more suited to The Fog, The Fall of the House of Usher or even Poltergeist.

But they never crossed my mind.

All I was thinking about was kids' parties I had attended there, a young girl singing Paper Roses before a feature, Lurch bossing the aisles and Halloween.