Ever since The Woman in Black became the most successful British horror film of all time, it's become apparent what the next few years of British horror will have in store. There'll be period costumes. There'll be stately atmospherics. There'll be long periods of hardly anything happening that are suddenly punctuated by a noise or a chair or a bird or whatever. But that's not what British horror is all about.
British horror isn't about Daniel Radcliffe looking glum. It's cheap. It's trashy. You can see the seams. And it barely cares. In fact, there's an argument to say that the bizarre low-budget Keith Chegwin vehicle Kill Keith (out on DVD next week) is far more representative of the British horror scene than The Woman in Black will ever be.
Which isn't to say it's good, of course. How could Kill Keith possibly be any good? It's a limp, dirt-cheap mish-mash of slapstick, soggy romcom, drab workplace drama, confusing Ally McBeal-style fantasy sequences and grisly Saw-style gore. It begins with a man licking yoghurt off the crotch of a cardboard cutout and goes downhill from there. Joe Pasquale briefly appears to swear in a monkey costume. Tony Blackburn plays a Tony Blackburn lookalike while the real Tony Blackburn is played by a twentysomething from Hollyoaks. You can see it straining to sell itself as torture porn, but the most tortuous aspect of Kill Keith is the fact that it even exists at all.
And, in its own way, that's sort of impressive. For all Kill Keith's flaws – of which there are billions – there's something heroically individual about it. The plot, which essentially revolves around the brutal murder of several minor light-entertainment figures, is so ramshackle and erratic that it obviously hasn't been developed or focus-grouped or subject to too many studio notes. If it had, the end result would have been approximately 30 seconds of Joe Pasquale eating a banana and cursing a lot. Kill Keith is clearly the fruit of one man's vision. Admittedly it was an awful vision and it should have never been seen through to completion, but you have to applaud the determination involved.
Plus, it's the sort of confused sprawl that can only come to exist when expectations are so low that the writers and directors can get away with whatever they want. And while that meant I had to spend an interminable Sunday afternoon waiting for it to end, it's not hard to imagine Kill Keith picking up a cult audience like other dreadful British horror films of the past. Films like 1988's Dream Demon, a kind of elongated perfume advert notable for starring both Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail. Or 1990's I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle, where Neil Morrissey buys a vampire motorcycle and then pulls some funny faces.
These films might not be well made or particularly well known, but they're not easily forgotten either. Save the polish and maturity and – God forbid – success for films like The Woman in Black. Real fans know that, if you want to experience British horror at its purest, sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and prepare to get mucky. And if that means watching Keith Chegwin dance around in a dungeon in little leather briefs, then so be it.
I should have mentioned, there's a scene in Kill Keith where Keith Chegwin dances around a dungeon in little leather briefs. It's really not a very good film.
• Kill Keith is released on DVD on 26 March
