When I was a child, my family lived for a while in a flat above a video shop. This struck everyone at school as very odd (though to be honest, most things about me probably struck them that way). However to me it seemed perfectly normal and meant that I got to see a lot of films.

This being the 1980’s, the age of the so-called ‘Video Nasty’, there were a lot of tapes with melodramatic covers to convey just how terrifying they were and that you would probably die if you so much as watched them. Although I was too young to see most of these, I could still imagine stories that went with those images. I had a whole evil melting people in a village idea for Scanners that I still think would have been better than any of the sequels (low bar but still)

So this piece is my homage some of those weird, seemed-scary-at-the-time images that surrounded my childhood

Damian Mark Whittle