World Autism Acceptance Week: Trim that Fringe.

 

 

I reckon that World Autism Acceptance Week is as good an excuse as any to reshare the transcript of my Spectrum Sinema performance from The Edinburgh Fringe last year - the actual gig was edited for timing reasons/my rambling ways so it was fairly short 'n' snappy which was unusual for me but it seemed to go down OK.

I mean there were no walk-outs but I did make a man visibly uncomfortable with the sheer Autistic intensity of my love for the films of 1982.

This has been a dream of mine for years if I'm honest.

Which I always am obviously seeing as Autistics are incapable of lying.

Probably.

Anyway, rather than share the short 'live' presentation I've decided instead to post the current work in progress long version of it.

You see I'm planning writing (or maybe even performing) the whole thing - and more - at some point so see this as a taster.

Regular readers may recognize some bits from previous posts but you've got to start somewhere and if recycling jokes is good enough for Mel Brooks it's good enough for me.

Enjoy.

Hi all, my name is Ash and I reckon it'd be nice and polite to introduce myself to you all in a kinda 'getting to know you'/hellish team building way.

I'm a full-time  illustrator, part-time balloon twister and some-time UFO faker with a somewhat unhealthy and all consuming obsession with good - and bad - cinema.

Mainly in the horror genre.

Basically I've been told I'm what happens when you buy Mark Kermode off Wish.

Which is nice.

Tho' not for him obviously.

But where does this obsession come from and why horror in particular? I hear you cry.

Not literally mind as all I can hear is creaking seats and a probable asthmatic at the back.

Anyway to explain this we have to go back in time to me as a small 2 year old boy.

You see my first memory isn't of my parents but of sneaking out of my cot, crawling into the living room at my grandparents house and watching the 1931 Frankenstein from behind a chair. 

Seriously.

I remember it like it was yesterday and from that moment my Autistic brain just clicked and before I knew it I was hooked on cinema. especially the stark black and white spooky kind.

As I grew older this obsession continued to grow too, helped along by my frequent Saturday night stays at my grandparents house and the BBC horror double bills that ran from 1976 to 1983 my love of horror - and especially the Universal classics of the 30s and 40s - was cemented. 

A tiny me obviously upset that George Romero hadn't released a sequel to Night of The Living Dead yet. Because it was 1972 obviously.

 

After exhausting the run of Universal movies I began to soak up other companies output from the time as well as immersing myself in whatever literature about the genre I could find, because you can never have too much information about your favourite thing, so whilst other kids had The Beano or Warlord or football sticker albums to occupy their school break times, I had Famous Monsters of Filmland and House of Hammer or one of those chunky hardbacks (usually by Alan Frank or Denis Gifford who it seemed had the monopoly of horror works in the 70s) so loved by WH Smiths and the like round about Christmas time.

 

A book about horror films yesterday.

 

It was in such a tome that I came across a little RKO chiller called Cat People directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Simone Simon that told the story of Irena Dubrovna, a newly-married Serbian fashion illustrator who becomes obsessed with the idea that she'll metamorphose into panther if she sits on the sofa and holds hands with her husband or something.
 

This bit of the plot was unimportant because I'd read it was a classic that had to be seen so that was enough for me.

I mean I could tell you the story line, the running time and the cast list but as far as I was concerned it was actually just about a woman turning into a big cat and it was a classic because I'd been told it was.

And being a big horror fan - and Autistic - meant learning and repeating these things with absolutely sod all understanding of any of it.

Many - many - years later during one of our drunken chats my wife Rho pointed out to me that the whole point of the first film is that it's an exploration of sexuality, sexual awakening and identity and I had to admit that I didn't actually realise that at the time but who can blame me?

It was called 'Cat People' not 'Nervous Lady Becomes a Cat At The Thought of Kissing a Man'.

I'll come back to this later. 

No, nothing at all vaguely sexual here.

 

 

 Jump forward to 1982 where, as a very serious 12 year old film fan I was getting rather excited about the amount of top quality movies getting released that year.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, John Carpenter's The Thing, Blade Runner,
Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Conan The Barbarian, The Sword and The Sorcerer and The Dark Crystal were just some of the delights I had to not only look forward to (hopefully) seeing but also to read up and learn more about.                 

Blade Runner and The Thing were a given as I already knew EVERYTHING about these being the directors biggest fan (be kind) but the one I was most excited about was Cat People.

I mean come on - it's director, Paul Schrader had written Taxi Driver (which I hadn't seen but had read how important a film it was), it was written by Alan Ormsby (whose film Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things was a cult classic, obviously I hadn't seen it but I had seen some photos from it and read how it was a low budget gem whatever that meant) plus David Bowie was singing the theme tune (obviously I knew who he was because as a child I was constantly singing Space Oddity at every given opportunity but I'd recently become obsessed with him due to his hair during The Serious Moonlight Tour rather than because of his music), Malcolm McDowell was in it (and who didn't love him as Alex Delarge in A Clockwork Orange? I did, or I would of if I'd seen it) as was Nastassja Kinski who I knew from the final Hammer film To The Devil A Daughter which I admit I'd not really been that interested in as everyone in the photos seemed a bit too grumpy and all wearing plaid sports jackets which was enough to put anyone off.

Oh yes and I read that it featured nudity so I thought better of it.

I mean come on, what 12 year old boy watches horror movies for naked ladies?

Not me I can tell you.

Sigh.

So anyway, in no way being able to pass for 18 I had to find another way to see the movie, which is where our local video shop and it's ability to source screeners from across the pond came in, so it was on one fateful Saturday evening when my parents had gone out for the night - and left my sister at my grandparents - that I settled down to watch what would possibly be THE greatest and scariest horror remake ever.

An hour and 58 minutes later I was left shocked and shaking.

They'd taken a film about a lady that turned into a cat and made it about sex!

How very dare they.

I was expecting long lingering looks, stilted dialogue, scary shadows and a cat transformation not Malcolm McDowell trying to kiss his sister, full frontal nudity, a lady getting eaten by a leopard whilst just wearing her pants and talk of jumping thru' hoops.


But scarily I wasn't expecting that the boy-haired, librarian like, needy and nervous Nastassja Kinski would cause a huge hormonal explosion that by the films climax would mean that for the first time ever I was aware of thoughts that weren't altogether PG rated or in any way related to movies.

Horror or otherwise.

Yes, I'm (very) embarrassed to admit it but I discovered girls via this film.

If you look up perfection in the dictionary you get this photo. Fact.

And as much as the feeling it gave me in my tummy was nice the thought that if I ever met a (real) girl I liked and tried to kiss her the very fact that there was a good chance she'd turn into a huge black cat and rip my throat out absolutely bloody terrified me.

So I did what any 12 year old boy in that situation would do.

I ordered a Cat People poster and hung it above my bed so I could stare at it every night before I slept.

Partly in the hope that it would make the fear of girls go away but mainly because I reckoned if I wished hard enough Nastassja Kinski would step out of the poster and be my girlfriend.

Don't even think about taking the mickey.
 

You see I always think that when your autistic brain realizes a thing that memory/definition of it becomes the default setting.

So I equated girls I found attractive with slightly accented librarian types with dark secrets that may at some point attempt to eat me if upset.

And this isn't a metaphor, it's genuinely what I thought.

As you can probably guess, the rest of my teens were interesting to say the least and it took a good 4 years till I even looked at another girl - OK a real girl - again.

And that girl was a 20 year old French exchange student named Cécile Fournier and she was – to my mind at least - incredibly exotic.

She drank wine not snakebite, swore like a trooper, smoked like a chimney, didn't shave under her arms and smelled of Mint Aero.

But more importantly she was the spitting image of Rena Mandel from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film Vampyr. 

Only with an added leather biker jacket.

Come on, what’s not to love?

Rena Mandel - that is all.

I mean yes she was one of those terrifying girls I was so scared of but as a plus point she did know her horror movies (she even wore a Coffin Joe pin-badge!) and seemed to not mind me following her around like a lost puppy.

Look I was only 16, I'd just left school and it was that last long summer holiday before I started art college so I was allowed to be a wee bit awkward/odd around girls.

Though to be honest I was fairly awkward around everyone.

It's a gift.

So it came to pass - after a fair few weeks of sneaky hand holding, furtive snogs and the like (she said she felt guilty as I was but a boy or "tu n'es qu'un garçon" as she'd whisper) - that she invited me back to her flat to watch a movie.

Finally I would get to see what a mysterious, international and very sophisticated ladies VHS horror collection looked like.

I mean she even had a big box copy of A Clockwork Orange she'd brought with her when she moved to sunny Birmingham (see? it all ties together) so suffice to say I was giddy with cinematic excitement.
 

Scarily it was that night that I learned a really valuable lesson in life when I discovered - much to my annoyance/confusion that "Do you want to come back to mine and watch a movie" doesn't actually mean that at all.

You may not know this but sometimes it means have 'the sex'.

Not before, after or even during the film but actually instead of.

Madness.

And really bloody terrifying.

I mean who would want to do such a thing when you could be watching a bloody good horror movie I thought to myself, totally unaware that this very situation would come back to haunt me years later.

But I digress.

Which as you may have gathered is something I do a lot.

Which is why I always have notes. 

 

16 year old me - how could anyone resist? (please don't answer that).

And before you ask the answer is yes.

Of course I did.

Persuade her to watch a movie that is.

Anyway, the hand-holding, film watching and the like continued for what seemed like forever (in reality about 3 months) and I soon realised I was pretty good at this dating lark - true I only really saw Cécile for a couple hours on Wednesday and Saturday - and most of that time she was drunk - but what else did I have to compare it too?

Well Han and Leia in The Empire Strikes Back obviously, but let's be honest I was always way more the whiny farm boy than cynical anti-hero.

So summer turned to autumn which turned to winter (imagine a cool montage with a soft rock ballad playing) and before I knew it, it Christmas was approaching and with it a confession from Ms Fournier.

It seemed she was heading home to France.

But not just for Christmas it seemed but for good.

I reacted in the way I always react in situations like that and shuffled from foot to foot whilst focusing on something in the middle distance whilst tilting my head to the left lightly.

I've found out since that if Neuro-typical folk tell you anything serious it's best to give a them a slight head-tilt whilst listening, it seems that they fucking love that.

Makes them feel validated or something.

Then suddenly she said "Would you like to come too?"

"What?"

"Would you like to come too?"

"Where?"

"To France....at least for a while."

So there I was, a geeky, socially awkward (that word again) nearly 17 year old wannabe artist being invited to go to France.

And by an actual real-life girl too.

A girl that knew who Paul Naschy was.

And who at no point had tried to eat me.

But that wasn't the best bit, you see it turns out that Cécile was actually from Domfront in the south of Normandy.

Now you may know Domfront as a very pretty hill town, full of ancient ramparts with a quaint old town centre full of half timbered houses with an historic church, a breathtaking castle and a popular - and cheap - market on Friday mornings.

But to me is was somewhere way more important.

It was were Jean Rollin made THE greatest water-based zombie movie of all time.

Of course I'm talking about Zombie(s) Lake.

And yes, I know I talk about it a lot.

And that's because it's so damn wonderful.

No, really.

If it wasn't then why did Jess Franco remake it a few years later as Oasis of The Zombies?

Seriously, same plot, villains and structure.

Oh yes, and the same script.

And I was going to go stay there.

"Yes please!" I excitedly shouted "That's where Jean Rollin filmed Zombie Lake!"

"Zombie Lake?" she answered quizzically "Ah yes I think I saw that, I'm pretty sure it was shit".

Suffice to say she headed back to France alone a few weeks later and I never heard from her again.

Zombie Lake on the other hand is still with me, I mean only recently I bought another copy - the re-released DVD (with an even thinner sleeve than last time if that's at all possible) that now features the version with the big grey granny pants not seen since the heady days of the big-boxed Betamax 'Modern Films' release.

Which, yes, I also own.

I know I should really get out more.

Maybe go to the cinema or something? 

Like that day in 1988 when I took a girl to see The Blob remake maybe?

So you really want to hear what happened?

OK then but please, don't you dare take the piss.

At least not too much.

 

This film is genius. Fact.

 

You see, being an intensely geeky/Autistic film nerd (I may have mentioned this) you can only imagine how important/exciting this was for me at the time, I'd even persuaded her to watch the original on VHS the night before so she could take notes, compare and contrast the two films etc.

Because that's how cinema dates work obviously.

I assume she was happy with this because she sat intently watching from the edge of my bed, arms folded and with a serious expression that said - to me - I am concentrating and enjoy being tested on films.

Anyway the next day we arrived at the cinema (early obviously so we could see the trailers and immerse ourselves in the full cinema experience etc) and settled into our seats.

As the film started I (vaguely) noticed she was a wee bit antsy, maybe she was scared? I thought then carried on watching.

About halfway thru' the film she stood up, mumbled something about 'forgetting something' and needing the toilet promptly leaving, only to return just before the end very flustered and out of breath.

I assumed she'd been running or something (I was always really good at reading folk), only to discover (much later) that she'd not forgotten her bag or needed a wee at all but was in fact out of breath as she'd left the cinema to have sex in the car park with another guy.

Another guy with absolutely no film taste.

Which frankly was way more upsetting. 

 

"Hang on....are they having sex in that car?"

That's not all tho' - skip forward (many) years and one night when Rho and I are discussing awful cinema stories (I wont tell you hers) and I let loose the sorry tale.

When I get to the bit where she'd randomly bumped into this guy she fancied and had sex with him, Rho looked at me in disbelief and ask if I actually thought it was a random encounter.

"Well that's what she said later" I replied.

Rho laughed heartily before giving me that look and pointing out that it sounded very much like the whole thing was planned.

This revelation blew my mind.

"But why would you arrange to have sex with someone in a car when you could be watching The Blob remake on the big screen?"

I really don't know what lesson to take from this other than some people really don't like remakes?

That Autistic folk take their films way too seriously?

Or something.

 

 

 

 

You don't have to decide just yet though as there are plenty more Spectrum Sinema stories where they came from - and luckily none of the others are dating related but do, at some point feature a few dubious fashion choices, so if you've enjoyed this and want to hear more drop me an email or leave a comment.

... If not then goodbye and in the words of Simon Bates...