The Chamber of Horrors

Growing up in London, there were certain places we went to regularly - London Zoo, the National Gallery, the Science Museum, etc. One of my favourites was Madame Tussauds. From an adult perspective, it's a cheesy, overpriced, overcrowded tourist trap, and when I was 16 and obnoxious I used to take great pleasure in strolling down Baker Street past the queues of American and Japanese tourists and blowing cigarette smoke in their faces. But as a little kid, I loved it purely because of the Chamber of Horrors.

I remember the almost unbearable excitement of approaching and entering the dark, ghoulishly lit underground room, which rang with distant screams and the rattle of chains. And within were a series of figures that left me breathless and thrilled. I can't find many pictures online (and probably the waxworks from the eighties are long gone) but I can still recollect them in detail. Some of the highlights were:

The man being garrotted. This one is the most vivid in my mind. I can visualise all the details: his hands helplessly clawing at the solid metal band; the expression of agony on his face, gritted teeth, eyes squeezed shut, tendons standing out; the impassive face of the man standing behind him, studiously tightening it around his neck.

Death masks. Possibly of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, etc. But the historical aspect wasn't important to me at the age of 6 (funnily enough). It was their green, dead faces, the bloodied mouths, and their streaming hair.



Bride in the bath. I think she was a victim of George Joseph Smith. It was her agonised face and naked body that enthralled me.

Although, in fact, none of that is quite as creepy as this picture of Tussaud's storeroom which I just found online:


Other similarly gruesome attractions that I loved as a child included the Torture Museum in Carcassonne. Among its fascinating exhibits was a chair which had hundreds of sharp metal spikes sticking inwards:



I also have strong memories of a Chinese torture instrument made up of interconnecting metal bars that locked your wrists and ankles together and kept you in an agonising, hunched position. And medieval engravings of a woman being pulled to pieces by four horses (quartered, I suppose), and of a man hung upside down naked, legs apart, being sawn in half.

Another favourite haunt was Mountfitchet Castle, a reconstructed Norman castle/village which we often visited in the school holidays. Gory highlights here included a man on a surgeon's table, his mouth wide open in agony, his torso split open with blood pouring out, and decapitated heads stuck on spikes over the entrance, complete with bloodied neck stumps.

I have photographs of all of these somewhere, and will come back and add them when I have time to dig them out. In the meantime I just wanted to post some happy reminiscences of my bloodthirsty, torturephilic childhood.

Blood, Biting and Badness

It's a cliche that sex is better when it's wrong. But I understand it. Because, if you shouldn't do something, but you still end up doing it, you must really really want to.

It's come into play a lot recently with B. For him, every aspect of his desire for me is wrong. It makes him feel bad and guilty. And that turns me on. A lot. Not so much the real-life badness when it starts to fuck up our friendship, but the "oh god I shouldn't but I want to so much" badness.

Way way back in 1996 when I first met R, I was really into blood. I used to cut myself, badly enough that I ended up in hospital, but I wasn't angsty about it. I had quite a detached relationship to my own body and could cut or burn it (or have someone else do it) without feeling any particular emotion. I liked the aesthetic.

Sometimes I wrote him letters in blood. I used a ceramic cup which I'd smashed up. I kept the pieces in a plastic carrier bag in my bedside table, and used their sharp edges for both cutting and writing. The variation in the shape of the pieces, and in the viscosity and colour of the blood, created nice calligraphic effects. From his perspective, the strangest thing was that the content of the letters was mundane: just scraps of institutional news and thoughts about what had been on telly. But - incongruously - scrawled in blood.

At times, with R, this cutting spilled over (sorry) into something like sex. The first time I ever went to his house was around my 16th birthday. We stayed up all night talking. Eventually, around dawn, the inevitable sofa snogging session began. There was fumbling and groping and heavy breathing, but it only got properly heated when I persuaded him to bite me. The harder he did it the more turned on we both got. There was something in his savagery which made me lose my mind a little bit. Something about being meat. The smell of blood and sweat. His absorption in his own violence.

Then the fateful moment: he looked up momentarily and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror above the sofa. The sun had risen and he saw his own face, pale, his skin and teeth stained with my blood. I saw the horror in his eyes and felt him growing cold. I took him by the arms, tried to pull him back to me, to relight the fire. But it was too late. He was scared, disgusted, by himself and by me. He stood up and went to make tea instead, refusing to go any further down that road.

Writing this eleven years on, what sticks in my mind is the look on his face when he saw himself. Not because I liked the horror, not because I wanted him to stop, but because... If he looked like that, if he was so horrified by himself, then it meant he hadn't quite known what he was doing. That he had, somehow, lost control. Lost his presence of mind. Was carried away by desire and by the physical. He'd betrayed himself, betrayed his better judgement and his reason, to blindly follow the urges of his body.

I'm not really into blood anymore, but that doesn't matter. Some people have a thing about specific acts, specific objects, but I don't especially. Whether it's biting or choking or groping in an alleyway, it's making someone do something they know they shouldn't. Divided between their own desires. Driving them to the point of savagery and violence. I want to make them break themselves.