WAIT'LL HE MEETS ABBOTT AND COSTELLO:

[I] find myself drawn to the only genre, apart from comedy, that feels appropriate for this time of year. That is horror -- specifically, British folk horror (the gory American stuff trotted out at Halloween does nothing for me).

These films and television programmes operate in a world of sleeted citadels and misty moorland, candlelit crypts and lurching cadavers, desolate graveyards and village inns, where weary travellers rest for a moment before continuing on their lonely journey into nightmare and torment. The atmosphere is usually dark and thundery, but not always: A Warning to the Curious (arguably the best instalment of the BBC's 1970s "ghost story for Christmas" strand) is made all the better by the parched, sun-drenched landscape of Suffolk in July. The Two Faces of Evil, a sultry tale of possession from the Hammer House of Horror television series, pulls off the same trick.

It's impossible to talk about British horror without mentioning Hammer, much as it is impossible to talk about British humour without mentioning the Carry Ons. They are two sides of the same coin: the fun factory and the fright factory. Low budget and quickly produced, they feature an informal repertory company of performers, and scripts knocked off by pipe-smoking hacks in six weeks or less. We delight when we see booming, baroque Christopher Lee or birdy, emaciated Peter Cushing (an incredibly sweet man in real life, but blessed with a face like a vampire bat's tombstone) in the same way we delight at Sid James' "yak yak yak" laugh or Kenneth Williams sashaying on. It is fitting, I think, that the best send up of the Hammer franchise is Carry On Screaming -- and Screaming is quite possibly the best Carry On.

Perhaps it's because humour and horror rely on the same techniques: shock and surprise, suspense, the pull-back, the reveal -- even deliciously camp costumes. There is a reason why The League of Gentlemen -- Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson -- was so fascinated with both genres and able to blend the punch of each tradition to achieve laughs and scares simultaneously. [...]

Horror, like comedy, is about the human soul and human reaction: laughter and screams, in the context of creativity and imagination, are more for me than a simple chemical process.

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