The rekindling of a (Twisted) love affair by James Burns

I blame Bette Davis.

As an idiotic 10-year-old, I was allowed to stay up late to watch her terrifyingly demented performance in The Nanny and couldn’t sleep all night, convinced that she was hiding in the cupboard, ready to stuff a pillow over my face if I drifted off to sleep.

Even though it was an old film, and in black and white, I’d never witnessed anything so spine-chillingly horrific in all my 10 short years.

Apart from having several nightmares about Bette for weeks afterwards, the only other drawback was that my mum banned me from watching horror films for several years (I had to sneak out to see Jaws with my grandma when it got a re-run at the local cinema; we told my mum we were going to see Bambi).

Otherwise, a decades-long love affair with horror began. Stephen King, James Herbert, The Evil Dead, The Exorcist and An American Werewolf in London, among many others, all played a huge role in my early years.

However, when I started writing fiction, I stayed away from the genre. I’m still not sure whether it was simply because I was an arrogant little shit and considered myself to be a literary fiction writer, or if it was just that my best ideas fell into that category; either way, my early novels had little to do with horror.

Then, when I moved over to screenwriting (given that it’s way quicker to write a 90-page screenplay than a 100,000-word novel), horror was still off the menu. Drama, comedy and sci-fi seemed to be the genres I was drawn to. It wasn’t until very recently that I decided to take the plunge and write a full-blown horror film.

Carrion Screaming is a 1970s-style slasher-in-the-wilderness type film which I jokingly describe as “The Hills Have Rambo’s Eyes”. As its title suggests, it’s a tongue-in-cheek horror comedy, in the vein of Shaun of the Dead, Ready or Not and Happy Death Day. It really gave me a taste for focusing on horror.

Which is where Twisted Volume III comes in… I’d recently finished Carrion Screaming and had started on a new horror film script when I read Chris Jones’ email announcing a call for entries. I hadn’t written anything but screenplays in over a decade, so this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to rekindle my passion for both prose and horror. Talk about kismet.

And so, during a week away on holiday at a remote cottage, I sat down to write “Let the Game Begin”. I’ve always been intrigued by truly evil bastards, so I wrote the story from the perspective of a revolting, sociopathic misogynist who was planning on taking his twisted “games” to a whole new level.

I enjoyed myself so much that I wrote and submitted another short horror story, “What Your Heart Desires”, about a demented genie-type lunatic (yeah, there is a bit of a theme going on here…).

And that was it; I was well and truly bitten (or should I say gnawed) by the horror story bug. I’ve started developing another dozen horror stories and finished the first of them.

What I love about writing short horror stories is that you get a sense of accomplishment so quickly. With novels it can take years, and with screenplays it takes months. I can write a fun and twisty short story in just a few weeks. Then move onto the next one.

I don’t know where I’m going with these yet, but I’m hoping to have enough to publish my own anthology of horror to rival the quality of the stories in Twisted Volume III.

Because, apart from rekindling my twisted love affair with horror stories, taking part in Twisted50 was also hugely inspiring. The stories I read by other writers (while providing feedback) were all of a remarkable quality. So much so that I doubted whether either of my stories would be chosen for the book.

And so, it’s extremely motivating to have my story appear alongside so many brilliant and terrifying tales. I can’t wait to get my grubby hands on the paperback edition of the book and read it from cover to cover. And then spend the next few weeks having nightmares.