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The Horror Show!, review: An intriguing trawl through the nightmares of youth culture

Return of the Repressed3 by Jake and Dinos Chapman - Arts Scan/Arts Scan
Return of the Repressed3 by Jake and Dinos Chapman - Arts Scan/Arts Scan

The premise of this new show is both intriguing and nuanced: when the real world is frightening, young Britons turn to horror to express their fears. Those fears have manifested themselves in our counterculture time and time again.

Take Jordan, aka Pamela Rooke, and the queen of 1970s punk with her blonde bouffant, pearl necklaces and demonic eye make-up. Here, her portrait hangs close to Margaret Thatcher’s latex puppet from Spitting Image, all bulging eyes and wolfish teeth (and on public display for the first time, on loan from Cambridge University). Suddenly Jordan, an alter ego whom Rooke, a shop assistant turned stylist and model, first dreamt up at the age of 14, reveals herself as a grotesque parody of the most prominent woman of the age.

Or Siouxsie Sioux, a monstrous interpretation of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra by a teenager from Chislehurst, as the music journalist John Doran interprets her in his essay to accompany the exhibition. Whether Sioux would have articulated her look that way is perhaps beside the point. What are punks and goths if not young people subconsciously reinterpreting cultural icons and bogeymen (and women) through the lens of their own anxieties.

But this is more than a show about the echoes of angry youth cults. It is presented in three acts, which broadly chart countercultural horror through the previous half century. Monster deals with the 1970s and 1980s; Ghost with the 1990s and early millennium, and Witch with the post-2008 era.

Artwork by big names such as the Chapman brothers and Cornelia Parker is given equal billing with folk art, music, video and audio scraps, even ephemera found in drawers. The work collides in groupings, or what co-curator Claire Catterall calls “haunted constellations”.

The Horror Show! deals partly in well-trodden subculture ground. Here is Bowie in his Diamond Dogs guise, as examined in the V&A’s David Bowie Is exhibition in 2013. Here is Leigh Bowery’s gimp costume, similar to those that featured in the Barbican’s celebration of the iconoclastic dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, Cosmic Dancer, in 2020.

Yet the curators have also unearthed different kinds of horror from more obscure histories. One grainy 2002 film by Dick Jewell shows a procession of young Londoners descending the stairs to the nightclub Kinky Gerlinky in the early 1990s. Each clubber arrives in sexually transgressive costume, greeting the camera as the preening star of their own performance. It is an extraordinary social document, a show of gleeful subversion and deeply buried unease.

Jewell’s film is the show’s early inkling of horror beneath the mainstream. As Catterall points out, that club scene would form much of the British media establishment for the next 40 years. In the Ghost section, a grinning, almost demented, portrait of Tony Blair by Paul Heartfield lurks near the sinister public information spoofs of Richard Littler’s fictional English town of Scarfolk - one of which features a similarly grimacing face.

Self Portrait (after Kali & Gene) by Harminder Judge - Arts Scan/Arts Scan
Self Portrait (after Kali & Gene) by Harminder Judge - Arts Scan/Arts Scan

Meanwhile, mainstream music and media is just as frightening. Examples here include unsettling pop videos by Tricky and the Prodigy, creepy PlayStation adverts directed by Chris Cunningham and clips from Ghostwatch, the BBC’s 1990s horror-drama poltergeist chase presented as live reality television.

Displays can also be baffling, such as the tatty souvenirs bought by Iain Sinclair on lonely urban rambles or a collage by Drew Mulholland using detritus from Syd Barrett’s garden. But eventually, inconsequential items build into an anthropological body of evidence. It dawns on us that horror is everywhere.

Witch, the final act, is presented as an optimistic coda to this version of Britain as an inverted Arcadia. It is a celebration of the modern youth cult of eco-magic, a contemporary response to environmental fears. It all ends in We Wax, We Shall Not Wane, an “ambisonic” installation by electronic composer Gazelle Twin, a mix of audio pulsations and texts narrated by Maxine Peake, and billed as “an elemental conjuring of spiritual resilience” and “a rageful lament for women lost to violence”.

It would be easy to knock The Horror Show! It is sprawling, cacophonous, a little earnest. And why start in the early 1970s, when the mid-20th century held horrors of its own? But - like every youth cult - this exhibition’s intent is deadly serious. And it is riotous, anarchic fun.


Until Feb 19. Tickets: https://www.somersethouse.org.uk