The Horror Show! at Somerset House is bizarre and brilliant
The Horror Show! at Somerset House is hands down the weirdest major exhibition of the year. What sounds like a common-or-garden spooky Halloween show is in fact a kind of potted history of British counterculture from the 1980s until 2010.
At least I think that’s what it is – after spending well over an hour there, I’m still not entirely sure.
It consists of a series of seemingly unrelated objects: a gimp mask from Steve McLaren’s sex shop; an old mix tape owned by record producer Richard Russell; a David Shrigley taxidermied kitten holding a sign saying “I am dead”.
It’s divided into three sections loosely covering the 70s and 80s, 90s and 00s, and the period from the financial crash until the present day, each one filled with artefacts from that time that are in some way macabre or unsettling.
The first section is the most straightforward: there *is* something chilling about the counterculture movement of the time, from the violence of punk to the otherworldliness of the new romantics; that was kind of the point.
There are cabinets filled with record sleeves and paperback novels (JG Ballad’s “brutal, erotic” novel Crash, for instance) and torn leather jackets, and a room decked out like a nightclub, rimmed by photographs of men and women in bondage gear and glowering teens in fierce make-up.
The next area feels less focused, consisting of a bunch of stuff that feels creepy in a way you can’t put your finger on, in the way things half-remembered from your childhood can be. There’s one of those collection boxes for a polio charity in the shape of a disabled boy peering through a window.
There’s a room plastered in wallpaper depicting the scrubby underpass of a motorway flyover – plastic bags clinging to branches, discarded shopping trolleys – which reminded me of misspent teenage afternoons.
There’s a screen showing seminal 90s “documentary” – in fact a spoof – Ghostwatch, complete with adverts for VHS cassettes. These are all great – while none of it is what you would usually describe as “horror”, there’s a sense of unease that runs throughout, the feeling of time having passed and once familiar objects taking on an uncomfortable otherness.
The final room loses me altogether, pertaining to witchcraft in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. There are modernised tarot cards, strange costumes, things built out of twigs, and I’m not sure what any of it really means.
Still, Horror Show! is unlike anything you’re likely to see at a major gallery, a bizarre collection of things that aren’t overtly frightening, but rather crawl under your skin and fester. And after all, isn’t that the best kind of horror?