Friday night frights on The Dark Side

I recently bought a small pile of issues of The Dark Side magazine, a British magazine focusing on horror movies. It has been running since the early nineties and is still going strong, shuffling on with all the vigour and unrelenting inevitability of the decaying living dead. And I think it's pushing me back down a path of horror nastiness, and I'm more than willing to head down such dark roads.

The Dark Side is shamelessly gross, with more of an international slant than other horror mags, and loads of naked women. Unsurprisingly, it was one of the first magazines that I bought regularly with my own money, finding out about Umberto Lenzi films and seeing actual pictures from his impossible-to-find videos like Cannibal Ferox in the Northtown Mall carpark. 

I only got it for a year or so back in the day, as I branched out from horror films to all sorts of genres and moods, and became a proper film geek who was still a little bit embarrassed about all that lust for trash movies. I did get over that shame, but it took a while.

So I stopped getting it in 1995, but would occasionally see a copy in an airport bookstore or something, and use it to read on a long flight (after ensuring no sensitive or young souls will see the fake carnage splattered across its pages). 

And then a local second hand bookstore got in a good collection of issues a few months ago, and I've have been reading a lot of issues form the late 90s and 2000s I missed, and it's reignited that fire I always had for these awful, awful movies. 

If we can find one moment of light in this hellish year, we can find it in the accessibility of all sorts of horror films I only dreamed of seeing, so many years ago. Half of the video nasties can be found on Youttube or Vimeo, with minimal effort.  

So I've already got stuck into it again, although I have to watch them when the rest of the house has gone to bed. Starting with old favourites like House by the Cemetery and The Beyond, and wondering what Jesús Franco I should indulge in next. 

This won't end well. I know I'll overindulge in this kind of film, and get jaded about it all over again. But for now, I'm happily going over to The Dark Side every Friday night, once the kids have gone to bed.