“When I was eleven or twelve, my parents went to a parents-teachers evening, and they were so appalled by the fact that all the compositions I wrote were horror stories, every single week – in fact I remember there was one called A Day At The Beach which involved a decapitation – that when they came home I was banned from watching horror films.

It was their own version of the Hays Code.

I was banned from getting this magazine, House of Hammer, with which I was completely obsessed. And it was particularly bad because, that Friday night was a screening of a very, very rare Hammer movie, Revenge of Frankenstein, which was never on. And I was beside myself. I went to bed crying, laid there in the darkness ‘til I heard my parents go to bed, and then I realized my sister and her boyfriend were staying up late to watch it. So I just went downstairs and watched it anyway.

And that was the end of my horror exile.” — Mark Gatiss