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.

Car Crashes and Comas

When I was little, around the ages of 7-10, I was slightly obsessed with car crashes, injury, comas, and paralysis. As far as I can remember, this fascination started when I watched a crap TV movie in which a young girl was hit by a car and left paralysed. It must be twenty years since I saw it (blimey) but I can still remember the scene in which she was hit. She's crossing the road, carelessly, looking back at her friend, and then WHAM. I remember seeing her body flung up in the air and bouncing hard off the car bonnet.

It wasn't just the climactic impact that enthralled me. It was also the fact that afterwards she was so badly damaged, physically and mentally. She spent the rest of the film learning to walk and talk and eat again. It's hard to be sure, but I think part of the fascination was that a single moment of carelessness could have such immense consequences. What could be destroyed in an instant.

There were lots of other examples:

We were shown a public information film at school about a boy who was skateboarding and was knocked over by a car. I still remember the final image with the blood trickling out of his nose, and the solemn pronouncement that he had 'a fractured skull'. I think it was the first time I ever heard the phrase.

In real life, around the same time, I knew a girl who was in a serious car accident and was paralysed. We weren't close friends - I think our mothers vaguely knew each other. I have a vivid memory of an article about her in the local newspaper which included a photo of her with her legs in some sort of metal contraption. I was painfully interested by this picture.

The enforced passivity of the coma also intrigued me: for example, the film Reversal of Fortune, about Klaus and Sunny von Bulow, and the Sweet Valley High book Dangerous Love, in which there was a motorbike crash which left Elizabeth comatose. I had a thing about unconscious people being physically moved around. I used to play a game with my sisters where we would take it in turns to 'play dead' and be moved around by the others.

I even remember telling a babysitter, who was probably only about 16 herself, that I was really interested in people being paralysed, and her having no idea what to say back to me. Which isn't that surprising really.

Does this belong in a blog about sexuality and BDSM? Instinctively I think it does. My fascination, which coincided with the very beginnings of puberty, had an edge which I would describe as sexual. (I told some of this to a friend in the pub last night, and she suggested that it might have something to do with your body changing, beyond your control.)

The vividness of the images, how clearly I can still recall these verbal and visual scenes twenty years later, means it must have been very very intense at the time. Perhaps it could even be described as a fetish. But I had more or less completely forgotten about it until something sparked my memory recently, and it all came flooding back.

I have no idea what conclusions I can draw from any of this, except: it's amazing what you can forget; I was evidently quite strange, even at the age of 7; and it's not very surprising that I found Crash ridiculously erotic.