What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?

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Way back in my university days, the gap between the summer term and the start of the next year was a long one. Three or four months.

Traditionally, students went home. Home, for me, was Liverpool, a dirty, industrial, parochial city in the north-west of England. Not exactly a mouthwatering prospect.

So, I tried to get away as much as possible.

In contrast, my best friend at uni had a relative who was high-up in one of the London universities. The universities had halls of residence, and as soon as the students were out for the summer, they sold the rooms to parties of foreign schoolchildren, making them a going concern twelve months of the year. So, to cut a long story short, my bestie had a summer job as a kitchen porter in a hall right on the edge of Clapham Common, in London, just a fifteen minute ride from the West End.

As the guy’s best friend, I got invited to stay. I couldn’t wait. 

He had his job during the day, but there was plenty for me to do. I was nineteen going on twenty, and I’d never really experienced the bright lights of the capital before. I spent my days just roaming, soaking up the city.

In the evenings, however, we did have time to socialise, and one evening we decided to go up into town. As a treat, we visited one of the Leicester Square cinemas.

Now, Leicester Square was/is known for film premieres. Red carpets, etc. But when not used for these, they let oiks like me watch movies. It was state of the art. Massive screen in front of us, the very latest Dolby Whatever sound system, the whole room vibrated with the noise.

Around that time, there was this cluster of “war” movies. For many years, there had been a relative vacuum, since the cringeworthy “heroics” of John Wayne and his ilk. This new generation attempted to capture the “real” atmosphere of war. Not the cheesy, all-American heroes, but the horror those battlegrounds must have been. We’d already had Platoon (which I hadn’t seen at the time), and there was a lot in the press about how our attitude to war itself had changed. This was what I think of as the second movie of that cluster.

The movie was Hamburger Hill.

Bear in mind I was roughly the same age as the boys who had been sent over there for real. I knew how little I comprehended the world, how little they must have understood… And in that particular cinema, with its boom-box sound system, every explosion was real.

I mean, the movie probably has less of an impact now, because we’ve all seen it a dozen times on TV, where the sound quality just isn’t there, but after we left the cinema, both of us needed to just sit quietly outside for ten minutes, while London bustled around us.