No doubt most people on the planet are aware of the significance of the next few days, for this weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York. ‘You’re not, are you?’ I can hear you ask as we I run the risk of being accused of being tasteless in running a column in a horror zine on what has been widely suggested to be the worst terror attack of all time. Dear reader, if at all worried I suggest you look away now, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Of course, being horror aficionados I’d argue that surely this is the sort of thing that we should be able to discuss, and slightly impassionately?

I guess I should get my ‘where were you’ moment out of the way. I was visiting my girlfriend Claire in a little Northern Irish town called Newtownards, when the towers were struck. We’d had an early breakfast and were looking forward to celebrating her birthday later that day. The news channels were on, and we watched as the story was quickly picked up. And I remained transfixed as the second plane hit, and the towers crumbled on live television, across the Atlantic ocean. I was shocked, truly shocked, and captivated. Watching the towers crumble was like watching an episode of Gerry Anderson’s 1960s supermarionation series Thunderbirds. We set off for a walk after a while, and I fully expected to witness the start of World War III in the hours that followed – after all I thought George W was a bit of an impulsive fella. Thankfully it didn't happen. All my favourite message boards became dominated by the talk, but I was a little taken aback by the fuss. Living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, we were used to terrorist attacks, bombs that destroy entire communities, and in a way, that was simply part of our life. New Yorkers who were caught up in the day seemed to come to that way of thinking in time too.

Horror cinema took its time to deal with it. The Trade Towers were taboo, it was felt that to reference them would be cheap, exploitational, desensitive. Of course, to ignore it was to deny reality – the attack dominated thoughts for a long time after, and to reference planes, security, explosions in New York all struck as ill-thought. I’m still waiting for a revisionist film that takes the attack as a theme, results in the release of some sort of toxic infection and has everyone walking round the streets, as zombies.

My comments about Thunderbirds were quickly confirmed as being too close to the bone. The Friday following the attack, Gerry Anderson’s excellent series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons was due to begin a repeat season on BBC2 that I was very much looking forward to. Come Friday night, the show was missing off the schedules. I wrote to the BBC, asking if it was something to do with the attack that prompted the BBC had pulled it, and how I understood but was disappointed. The BBC confirmed that yes, the subject matter was felt inappropriate. A show, aimed at kids really, which debuts with an episode in which the world president is killed in a plane crash and replaced with a replica… Yes. I can see why they felt they needed to pull it.

The first Spiderman film was due for release in May 2002, and the teaser trailer was quickly pulled following the attack. A thrilling piece where a New York bank is robbed at gunpoint, and the villains make their escape in a helicopter, only to be caught in Spiderman’s giant web. The camera pulls back and reveals the web is strung between the two towers of the World Trade Centre. It is an awesome piece, and available on Youtube for viewing. I guess it wasn’t relevant any more as the towers were gone, but the sensitivities were such that they didn’t even put the trailer on as a DVD extra. A revisionist approach if you ask me.

It is perhaps in the denial of reality, and an overly-sensitive approach that results in terrorism’s real victory. A country too afraid to talk about the elephant in the room.

And then it became a short-hand, stereotype for referencing Muslims, terrorists (not necessarily the same thing), and a quick tick in some sort of bizarre check list for ratings approvals. I’m still not sure why footage of the attack turned up in Battle Royale 2, though it obviously served as inspiration for the Supermarionation-like Team America. United 93 was probably the first film to try and grapple with the day properly, and it’s a great message film. Shows like CSI: NY have handled it very well, addressing it head on, and allowing the cultural shift in New York to filter through into the dramatic tellings.

Horror cinema has been happy to serve us fiendish villains and warped portrayals of real-life criminals, often within a very short space of time of the actual events, and I suspect 9/11 is ready for a reworking in the name of horror fiction. The NAZIs have been a regular feature for decades. Roberto Rossellini was twisting the NAZI reputation as early as 1948 with Germany Year Zero, but think about the likes of 'He’s Alive' (from the fourth series of The Twilight Zone), They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1968), Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974), 'The Eagle’s Nest' debut story from The New Avengers in 1976 – which features Peter Cushing as another German scientist, reviving the dead! In fact, its impossible not to read much of 1940s and 1950s horror as a cultural revenge attack, with their rather negative depiction of the Germanic peoples.

Of course, if you take the time to watch any of the documentaries on WWII, especially contemporaneous ones, or governmental films, the picture painted is truly horrific.

Optimum Releasing recently reissued a couple of Alan Resnais films on DVD here in the UK, which deal with real-life horror. Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) is perhaps one of the finest documentaries of its time. Asked to make a documentary on the holocaust, Resnais combines haunting colour footage of the abandoned concentration camps alongside black and white newsreel footage of the liberation and the NAZI atrocities. The abandoned camps are extensive ghost towns, being gradually reclaimed by nature – even then, a short decade after the war ended. Buildings crumble, railway lines sit bereft of life, and evidence of the lives that were taken is everywhere in the mad assemblage of glasses, hair and so on that the NAZIs left.

The footage of the frail men and women being experimented on, investigated, the glossy designer conditions of the camps – these scenes are in stark relief, and emphasise the loss of life at those camps. Since I first saw the film I’ve been struck most by the sequence in which the bodies of the dead are literally bulldozed into a mass grave, like flexible, lifeless dolls.

Some of the documentaries that have come out about 9/11 in recent years have also had that same sort of captivation; trying to reassemble the day in real-time, combining before and after footage. Depicting the jumpers – those people who in fear of their lives chose jumping from a skyscraper over burning to death. Footage that was felt too horrifying for a long time to be shown. A taboo that is nearly broken. Tasteless though it may seem, I still wonder when the taboo will be lifted and the footage of actual bodies and their impact will filter through into the books and screens. Why is it that our culture allows us to look at the bodies of middle-eastern civilians, see Sadam Hussein (or his double) hung until dead; why is it okay to watch footage of cruel testing during the 1939-1945 war, people killed, and bodies left to rot or mutilated? Why is Vietnam okay but 9/11 not? Why is the culture of respect so skewed?

I’m reminded of the sequence in Rossellini’s Viaggo In Italia (Voyage To Italy) where Ingrid Bergman and George Saunders are in Pompeii looking at the remnants of the bodies found under the ash, and Bergman is suddenly overwhelmed and runs off through the ghost-town site. As human beings we are entranced by horror, by disaster, and the scars it leaves serve to educate us, to remind us of how to move forward productively and pro-actively with our lives.

The other Resnais film to be released by Optimum is Hiroshima Mon Amour, a fiction film about a chance encounter between and French actress, in Hiroshima to make a film about the impact of nuclear war, and a local resident. A painful love story, Resnais didn’t want to repeat himself after Nuit et Brouillard, and so combines a dramatic tale with depictions of the city itself, the way it has dealt with the memory of the event – displays, models, and also some footage of the aftermath itself. It’s a muse on memory and pain more than anything else, and perhaps is a more fitting way of dealing with the likes of 9/11 than endless repetition of the facts of the event.

I’ve watched a fair amount of documentary footage on Hiroshima and Nagasaki over the years too. For a while I collected downloads of American and foreign nuclear test films, including their appraisals of the event after. The bombs are awesome, in the truest sense of the word, their impact irrefutable, and deceptively beautiful. That man can live on after such events says much about him. They say after a nuclear war only the cockroaches will live, but that’s not true.

The impact of nuclear war has been felt in cinema for decades now, something we fear, and have a very real idea of the potential it has. You should check out the 1982 documentary compilation The Atomic Café – referenced in Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008) and Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy (1996).

One last piece of meandering thoughts on the horrors of 9/11 – the scary prescience of the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, a show which spun-off from televisions great sci-fi/horror The X Files. The pilot aired in March 2001, some six months before the 9/11 attack. I’ve screened it a couple of times for friends who loved the Files but didn’t know about the spin-off show (and who probably don’t realise Millenium was an X Files spin-off too!). I knew the reputation before I first saw it, but to watch it is to be struck by the uncanny nature of the plotline. In a nutshell, the Lone Gunmen find themselves embroiled in a government conspiracy, one which is to see a commercial aircraft flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, with the planned outcome being an increase in arms sales for the US government. I shit you not. This isn’t too far removed from some of the conspiracy theories that emerged post attack, and we do get treated to a scene from onboard the airliner as it travels head-first for the towers (see clip below). So if 9/11 was okay to treat six months before it happened, we really owe it to ourselves to start playing with the events…

I’m off to finish my scripts for ‘Zombie 9/11’ and ‘They Saved Osama’s Brain’. I’ll be back next time to talk about more real life horror.

Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night And Fog are available now on DVD from Optimum Home Entertainment.

Robert JE Simpson is a film historian, broadcaster and writer based in Belfast. He has a fridge in the garage which he hopes will protect him when the nuclear bomb hits. Yes, it is white.
He is the editor of Diabolique magazine, and can be visited online at www.avalard.co.uk.