Horror films are generally more horrifying when you haven't seen them.

I was never allowed to watch horror films when I was a little lad, and so, I think, they grew in my mind into truly terrifying things. And as they grew more terrifying, and more taboo, they started to seem more and more intriguing. I can clearly remember a girl at primary school describing how she watched Psycho on the telly through the banisters on the stairs, when her parents thought she'd gone to bed. And I remember someone describing Nightmare on Elm Street 3 to me in the playground and conjuring up horrendous images of it in my mind. When I eventually saw the film, of course, it was a crushing disappointment­ one scene I'd been told about that had stayed with me for some time, with the boy being used as a puppet with his veins as the strings, seemed particularly small-scale compared to the scene in my imagination - but by then I'd already seen a few horrors and was strangely compelled to see some more.

The first Horror film I ever saw was Halloween 3, which, in hindsight, is an awful film. It's also quite a strange film in that it doesn't feature the killer from the first two Halloweens but instead concentrates on a bizarre plot to create Halloween masks that send out lasers, triggered when some music plays from an advert for the masks, that burn children's heads off, or something. This didn't matter at the time, because I'd never seen or heard of the first two films. And I did find it pretty horrific: I think Iremember a spider coming out of a skull, and this, mixed with the fact that I was actually watching a horror film, something my parents wouldn't have allowed, was enough to be a bit thrilling at the time. I tried to watch the film again actually, when it was on telly last year, but I couldn't get through the opening sequence without being aware that it was going to destroy any remaining traces of dignity that it still has in my memory.

The first horror film I saw that lived up to the film that I imagined it to be was Dawn of the Dead ­ I saw a trailer for this when I was quite young, before something like Arnold swarchenegger's Commando, or Nine Deaths of the Ninja, or something (I had a friend at primary school that was really into Ninjas that had parents that didn't mind what he watched. As a result we watched loads of ninja films). The trailer looked horrible and, again, lodged itself into the back of my mind. When I eventually saw the film it was, in fact, bigger and better than the film my mind had concocted. But, I don't know if I can class Dawn of the Dead as a horror film really­ at heart it's more of a strange kind of disaster film really isn't it?