Thanks Wes Craven for one of the most haunt­ing images of my youth

Wes Craven pro­duced one of the scari­est images of my youth. I would see this image pret­ty much on a rigid week­ly basis, when my father and I would amble up to our local VHS rental store. The shop boast­ed a fair­ly stan­dard lay­out, with kids/​family titles clos­est to the door (most rent­ed: 1989 Fred Sav­age vehi­cle, Lit­tle Mon­sters), and as the box­es fanned out towards the counter, things got a lit­tle dark­er, with hor­ror and ​“adult” tucked away at the far end.

Tir­ing of all the ani­mat­ed fluff which me and my younger broth­er had seen enu­mer­able times (the selec­tion was lim­it­ed), I’d often like to cheek­i­ly browse that lim­i­nal zone where action merged into hor­ror. Films like Cobra, Preda­tor and Total Recall were deemed fair game as pos­si­ble fam­i­ly rentals by my lib­er­al father, and so I could pre­tend to be glanc­ing over those titles, when in real­i­ty I was peek­ing across at the ter­ri­fy­ing late ​’80s, ear­ly ​’90s hor­ror box art.

They had, what I now recall, as being a lot of ter­ri­ble VHS hor­ror (the entire Vestron Video cor­pus) which nev­er made it to cin­e­mas and doubt­ful made the jour­ney beyond that beloved, anti­quat­ed medi­um. Which is fine, as they’d done their ser­vice to cin­e­ma in that for­mat. There was one box cov­er which I found utter­ly ter­ri­fy­ing to the point that I could bare­ly look at it. The image on the cov­er was a con­vict dressed in reg­u­la­tion orange over­alls and sat in an elec­tric chair with a met­al clasp around his head. Across his chest he had a bizarre black-and-white che­quered stripe, infer­ring that elec­tro­cu­tion may have been some kind of extreme sport.

The most haunt­ing aspect of this image is that this man – who I lat­er dis­cov­ered to be the actor Mitch Pileg­gi (oh no, not Skin­ner from the X‑Files!) – seemed to be get­ting some kind of excite­ment from being elec­tro­cut­ed to death. His facial expres­sion was a clean mix of sheer agony and high sex­u­al ecsta­sy. The film was called Shock­er from 1989, and its pres­ence on that video rack meant that I was unable/​unwilling to dip my toe into the fetid waters of the hor­ror movie for a good many years, lest I had to spend too long look­ing at that cover.

I still find this cov­er pret­ty, ahem, shock­ing, due in part to it being offen­sive­ly in-your-face in a way which few equiv­a­lents – mod­ern and vin­tage – are. It’s rare for a home enter­tain­ment box cov­er or mar­ket­ing poster to con­tain an actu­al pho­to­graph­ic image of a char­ac­ter being killed – when there is an image of death, it’s usu­al­ly soft­ened by use of illus­tra­tion or pho­to manip­u­la­tion. But here was an actu­al man who was actu­al­ly being mur­dered (by the state, I’d hope!), and the peo­ple behind this movie had just decid­ed that the best route to suc­cess would be point-blank hon­esty with regards to the con­tent of this film.

I nev­er rent­ed Shock­er, nor have I ever seen it, that resid­ual fear per­haps build­ing up in the inter­im years to make it a per­son­al film mau­dit. Although I have seen and enjoyed many of Wes Craven’s oth­er direc­to­r­i­al works, includ­ing genre clas­sics such as 1984’s A Night­mare on Elm Street (a great film about dreams) and 1996’s Scream (a great film about high school), this one remains there as a sin­gle image sit­ting in the dark­est recess­es of my sub-con­scious, like one of those impulse actions which pre­vents you from putting your hand into a food mix­er. Yes, he prob­a­bly didn’t per­son­al­ly design that image, but the film was his idea – he cre­at­ed the sick inspiration.

It was extreme­ly sad to learn that on the morn­ing of August 31, 2015, Craven had died of a recent­ly diag­nosed brain can­cer, as announced by the Hol­ly­wood Reporter. For Lon­don­ers cur­rent­ly gath­ered for a long week­end of hor­ror-based indul­gence at the annu­al Film4 Fright­Fest, a time of col­lec­tive mourn­ing may be the order of the day. For hor­ror fans – nay, movie fans – world­wide, one of the wicked high priests of mod­ern genre cin­e­ma has passed, and each will find their own way to cel­e­brate his rev­o­lu­tion­ary oeu­vre. Me? I’m going to final­ly watch Shocker.