Day 16: Cameron's Closet

So, yesterday we talked about Howling sequels, a few of which, it turns out, use elements of Gary Brandner’s source novel more faithfully than the original Joe Dante film. Well, it also turns out that, while Brandner wasn’t involved in the screenplay of The Howling, he did write the script for another 80s horror movie – and that movie was 1988’s Cameron’s Closet.

As with a lot of horror films I’ve long harboured an urge to see, my fascination with this one stems back to staring up in awe at the poster in the video store window when I was a kid. (It looked something like the sleeve art to the left, although what language that’s in, I’m not quite sure). Around then, I watched plenty of videos but they were the ones my mum brought home, and tended not to be horror. Or, if they were, they’d be of the tamer variety, like Poltergeist III. Somehow, although I was obsessed with horror films, it never really occurred to me to pester her to bring home a nasty one once in a while. To me, horror was the stuff I stayed up late for on Friday nights (Hammer films if it was BBC1; cheesy monster movies if it was Channel 4). The contemporary stuff looked even better – lurid-looking movies with colourfully gruesome posters and titles like Kindred, The Bite and Pin – but I’d sort of resigned myself to waiting until I was old enough to rent them myself.

Anyway, that’s all I can really base my desire to see Cameron’s Closet on. It’s only today that I actually looked it up on the IMDb and found out what it’s about, and it sounds a bit ropey to be honest. Damn, that poster was cool, though.