Initial Thoughts After Watching Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story
I don’t like true crime as a genre. No judgement, I just don’t resonate with it. This might seem odd considering how often I’ve written about horror cinema. True crime is about death; horror movies are about life. No one gets killed in horror movies. They cast the same spell as myths found in ancient cultures: this part of nature and that part of nature are brother and sister, and they fuck and she gives birth to this other part of nature, and then a fourth character turns up and cuts off the brother’s genitals and throws them into a lake and that’s where geese come from… I’m being facetious, but the point is cultures with strict taboos hold horror in the dreaming world because it’s a part of life and, therefore, something needs to be done with it.
The West murders are somewhat personal to me. I grew up in Gloucester City. If you walked up Cromwell Street, got onto the Main Road and then went to the end of it, you’d be at my grandmother’s house. I have some vague memory of my mother saying she had met Rose West in passing, once, or she knew someone who had. Many had this story. All this aside, anyone who lived in the city at that time were marked by the crimes. The steady socio-economic collapse of Gloucester in the decades that followed often felt like a result of the murders. The land itself had been cursed.
The only scenes that repeat in my dreams are places from Gloucester. This was the case even when I lived in Bristol then Birmingham and now Glasgow. Gloucester is a strange place moulded by history (the Romans, the Cathedral), culture (Beatrice Potter, Ivor Guerney), myth (so, so many more ghost stories then you realise), eccentricity (there used to be a boat in the docks that held new age events before the owners moved to China to study Esoteric Buddhism), politics (the rows of boarded up shops in the centre. I remember when graffiti started to appear: Gloucester Renaissance My Arse)…
I’m not going to say much substantial about Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story. It’s a reasonably well put together three part documentary that omits the most sadistic details (there’s nothing about the masks Fred made for the kids, for example). The most startling thing was hearing people that sound like me in a place I recognise, bearing in mind I know the case pretty intimately as a Gloucester boy.
The night before I watched Fred and Rose West I had a dream. When writing dreams down, I tend to put in line breaks to make the information digestible. This is exclusively for practical reasons: writing dreams as narrative prose takes too long - bearing in mind you’ve just woken up and have shit to do - and prose isn’t suited to them anyway. This in no way should be read as a poem. Poetry is not its intention. The “Mike” is one of my longest running friends, from Gloucester:
Traveling to Neptune
In a spaceship but
I look out the window
And there are no stars
Just infinite blackness
And some workers are
Working on the ceiling
Of the ship and I walk
Up to Mike and say
Why would we spend
All this time flying up
To Neptune when we
Could just dig down
and get to it that way
And he smiles and then
I’m travelling to an airport
To Tokyo but I’m late
And the trains that take
Me there seem to be
Going the long way round.
As is usually the case with dreams, the obvious isn’t immediately obvious while sleeping: that both of these scenes are about taking the long way around to get somewhere. There’s also a moment in which I talk to someone from Gloucester about trying to dig down to something archetypal: Neptune. But, upon waking, the first thing I thought of was Event Horizon, a film in which a spaceship vanishes at some point around Neptune and comes back haunted by unspeakable horrors.
6. I always felt Gloucester City Council bulldozed over 25 Cromwell Street the same way a child brushes mess under their bed to make their room look clean. Like the council had been taking the long way around to face unspeakable horrors. There have been a handful of books on the West Murders over the years, but seeing a documentary on a major streaming platform did feel like good grieving, like something substantial was being expressed. I hope surviving family members and loved ones in the documentary feel one step further towards closure, and that any curses on Gloucester are cleared once and for all.