Tom Parker Bowles is an award-winning food writer, restaurant critic of The Mail On Sunday and the author of nine cookery books, the most recent of which is Cooking and the Crown, featuring royal recipes from Queen Victoria to King Charles III.

I lost it at the video shop. Well, that’s not technically true. I first really lost it watching The Amityville Horror on late night telly with my friend Jake, way past our bedtime. Or was it Children of The Corn, where the kids in a small Nebraska Corn belt town slaughter the grownups, to appease “He Who Walks Behind The Rows”.

It could have been the bit in Raiders of The Lost Ark when the bespectacled Gestapo agent melts before our very eyes, or Bette Davis in The Watcher in The Woods, or the skeletons in the pool in Poltergeist, or most 1970s episodes of Dr Who. Or the whole of bloody Jaws. But to misquote Goodfellas, “as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to hide behind the sofa.” I love horror films like Norman Bates loves his mother. With an all-encompassing obsession.

I grew up in the splatter glory days, those heady, pre video censorship days, before the prim, pious and altogether pants Video Recordings Act (VRA) of 1984 gave the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) the right to rate, cut and ban any film on video that offended tabloids, sanctimonious Tory MPs (I’m looking at you, Graham Bright), or ghastly old puritans (RIP, Mary Whitehouse). Back then, just a wander around Forward Video in Corsham, Wiltshire (or any other VHS emporium) could fuel a young boy’s fascination (and nightmares) for years to come.

While films shown in cinemas were rated from U (Suitable for all) to X (adults only), films released on new-fangled VHS or Betamax had no such restrictions, meaning that an entire world of blood-soaked, brain-splattered, breast-enhanced exploitation excess was available to all.

Well, if you could sneak it past your parents, that was. No film was too sick, sleazy or deranged, and with so much filth to choose from, the poster art needed to be lurid, exploitative and a whole lot of fun to stand out. It mattered little that the cover bore little relevance to the film within.

No, one glance at The Toolbox Murders (“Bit by bit … by bit he carved a nightmare!”), The Beast in Heat (“Horrifying Experiences in the Last Days of the SS!”) or Zombie Flesh Eaters (“When the earth spits out the Dead … they will return to tear the flesh of the Living …”) and I was hooked. I’d pore over Radio Rental video catalogues like rare vellum manuscripts, dreaming of Mardi Gras Massacre, Twitch of the Death Nerve (aka Bay of Blood, and actually very good), 2000 Maniacs and Bloodsucking Freaks. And collect Video Today magazines with a reverence verging on awe.

But then the VRA became law, and 39 films, from Absurd to Zombie Flesh Eaters, were deemed “obscene” by the Director of Public Prosecutions, and illegal either to sell or own. A further 34 (including classics like The Evil Dead and Shogun Assassins) were put on “parole”, while the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Exorcist were simply refused a certificate until the end of the 1990s. I wanted to see them all.

To a gore-hungry teenager – who had already worked his way through everything from Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead to Hellraiser, Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street – these “video nasties” became horror’s Holy Grails, only available from dodgy men in dodgy pubs on dodgy pirated VHS. God, those were the days.

Many were pure crap. Some, like I Spit on your Grave and Anthropophagous the Beast, simply too misogynist and hateful to ever watch again. I first saw The Evil Dead at The Scala in King’s Cross, The Exorcist (along with Salo) at the ICA, which – as an “arts club” – was exempt from the usual certification law.

But it wasn’t all hungry cannibals, psychotic handymen and merrily-slashed jugulars. I also rented, recorded and bought any horror I could find, inhaling every work by every great director:  James Whale, Tod Browning, H. G Lewis, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven.

From them, it was a short hop to the Italian maestros: Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, Joe D’Amato and Ruggero Deodato, and on to the sexy Euro sleaze of Jean Rollins, via some crazy, balls-out bonkers Mexican, Japanese, Filipino and South Korean flicks. Now, of course, everything is available at the touch of a button. Even the most rare and extreme stuff, from Thundercrack (don’t ask) to A Serbian Tale (really, don’t ask).

But I do miss the days where to get hold of an uncut copy of Zombie 2 was akin to stumbling across a lost Caravaggio. The illicit thrill! The crap quality! The Horror! A few taps on a keyboard just aren’t quite the same.

Eight Favourites

Yes, I know, there’s no Nosferatu, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Innocents, Dracula (Lugosi and Lee), Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, Carrie, The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween, The Shining, Alien, The Thing, Evil Dead 1 and 2, Audition, The Ring, The Descent, Hereditary and Midsommer. But I assume you’ve seen them all anyway. If you haven’t, why not? Go away, and get watching.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

For a film with such a brilliant (and brilliantly lurid) title, the gore is actually pretty restrained. Set in the searing heat of a Texas summer, and mostly in the daytime (no gloomy gothic castles here), Tobe Hooper’s dusty, grimy masterpiece starts off with a gibbering nutter (one of the murderous family, obvs) slicing his hand open, and builds to a near-unbearable crescendo of tension and terror.  All set to the most jarring and discordant of soundtracks. Yet there’s dark humour here (the supper scene is jet black), alongside a couple of great jump shots.

The Wicker Man 

Possibly the greatest British film of all time. Robin Hardy’s folk horror classic may not be splattered with blood and guts. But it’s strange, subtle and endlessly unsettling, a film that lingers in the darkest recesses of the imagination. And from the moment Neil Howie (Edward Woodward’s God-fearing copper) flies into Summerisle from the Scottish mainland – in search of Rowan, a young girl who has gone missing – you know it’s not going to end well.

There are folk songs and priapic pagans, lusty couplings and sumptuous wigs. Christopher Lee is wickedly camp as Lord Summerisle, while Britt Ekland writhes and pouts as only she can. It all builds to an incendiary climax. Altogether now – “Christ! No, no dear God! No, Christ!”

Suspiria 

Don’t come to Dario Argento’s greatest work expecting linear plots, coherent dialogue or anything that really makes any real sense. Just immerse yourselves in his mesmerically brilliant, colour drenched visuals, his splenetic editing, and terror-soaked vision of hell.

The plot involves a young ballerina coming to a famous German ballet school, which is also the home of some ancient witches. Thow in a harsh, prickly Goblins score, a neck hungry dog, bloody pits of razor wire, and a batshit-crazy final act. Argento at his finest.

Dawn of The Dead 

George A. Romero’s first film of the Trilogy, Night of the Living Dead, may be the more celebrated. But its sequel, set in a shopping mall surrounded by hungry zombies, is not just a gripping, gloriously gory zombie action thriller but a not-so-subtle satire of consumerism in modern America. Albeit with lots of splattered heads, gobbled guts and really good 1980s synth.

Witchfinder General

Not horror, exactly, although Vincent Price’s Matthew Hopkins (the eponymous Witchfinder General) is evil incarnate. Michael Reeves’ deeply grim tale is set during the English Civil War, and East Anglia has never looked so forbidding. Beautifully shot, it is unrelentingly bleak. In the worst possible way.

An American Werewolf in London

A comedy horror that is actually both funny and scary. Rob Bottin’s make-up effects are still incredible, the werewolf attacks brutal, and Griffin Dunne, as his slowly decaying best friend, is superb. It also features cinema’s greatest pub, The Slaughtered Lamb. “Stay on the road, and keep clear of the moors.” Oh, and “Beware the moon.” Obvs.

Zombi 2

Lucio Fulci’s Caribbean zombi epic is supposed to be deadly serious (and has its nasty, gut-munching moments too), as well as nodding to classics like I Walked with a Zombie and The Island of Dr Moreau. But any film that contains an underwater fight between shark and zombie is perhaps not competing with Kurosawa, less tongue-in-cheek, more tongue-through-cheek. Still, there’s the classic scene where an eyeball is popped by a sharp wooden shard. Ands lots of shuffling, brain-hungry zombies too, and a decent final twist.

Cannibal Holocaust