Eden Lake: the film that frightened me most

I’ve seen a fair few horror movies in my time. I’ve sat through Hellraiser, haunted houses and Hannibal Lecter – but it was hoodies that scared me the most.

I had no idea what was coming. The first – and only – time I watched Eden Lake was on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer. I was back home during my university holidays and working hard at perfecting the student’s art of lounging about with nowt to do. The football season had just ended and thrown me into my annual existential crisis, the weekends suddenly robbed of all meaning and purpose.

A mate had lent me a stack of DVDs. Eden Lake happened to be on top of the pile. Knowing almost nothing about the film, I stuck it on, although it was hardly the most atmospheric setting for high-octane horror: family members pottering about at will, sunlight streaming through the windows. Not the conditions you’d think a film needs in order to frighten. And yet, it remains one of the most brutally terrifying experiences in my life.

Eden Lake is a straightforward, stripped-down slasher that owes a lot to its brilliantly simple central conceit: in the place of the vengeful ex-boyfriend or the escaped mental patient, its menace comes in the form of mouthy, hoodie-clad teenagers. It might be fag-packet stuff, but few films have inflicted upon me anything close to that level of gut-wrenching, high-intensity trauma.

Certain images have remained imprinted in my mind since (if you’re ever in the mood for some prolonged scenes of facial mutilation-by-Stanley-knife, Eden Lake’s your film) and when the credits eventually rolled, I felt like I’d been through 12 rounds with Mike Tyson rather than 90 minutes with Michael Fassbender.

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It’s well-documented that the best horror is borne of real-life societal fears, and the genre has a rich history of innovation in this department. Mary Shelley’s monster showed the sinister side of scientific progress, Don Siegel’s pod people doubled for spawning communists and so on. Those sorts of hidden meanings are all well and good, but for some of us, such clever-clogs metaphors can sail over our heads. Sometimes literal trumps latent.

Eden Lake does not require a doctorate to decode. Arriving in 2008, shortly after the happy-slap phenomenon, David Cameron’s ill-judged hug-a-hoodie speech and that gun-fingers photo, the film played on the tabloids’ foremost fear: poor kids. Its reprobates – replete with BMXs, flick-knives and cameraphones – check all the necessary boxes. Rather than dealing in allegorical ghosts and ghouls, Eden Lake plants itself firmly in grim, gritty reality.

This hard-edged realism had all the more effect on me. I was a child of a different, more friendly generation of horror. I was accustomed to slasher films winking at the audience in between brutalising their cast. The Scream trilogy, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty – pretty much everything the genre threw up over the 90s-00s era – specialised not so much in scares as smugness and smart-arsery. Wes Craven may have revived the slasher film with Scream, but he also demanded that self-reflexive in-jokes took precedence over proper, pant-wetting terror.

Eden Lake is very much in the business of pant-wetting terror. The discomfort begins early on, wastes no time in spiralling hellishly out of control, and, with its conclusion, treats the viewer with steadfast sadism. It was, I realised, a far more effective formula than the wise-cracking fluff I was used to. These psychopathic kids knocked Craven’s pasty-faced prank-caller out of the ballpark.

Given the form Eden Lake’s threat takes, the obvious way to frame the film is as a Daily Mail reader’s nightmare incarnate – the onslaught of murderous, feral kids being the logical conclusion of the underclass’s dereliction of duty. Broken Britain wielding a shard of broken glass. But maybe its real brilliance lies in its effect on Guardian-reading liberals like me and you: the instinctive fear provoked by its tracksuited executioners showing how the sort of reactionary conservatism that you define yourself against is actually within us all. Perhaps, among all the distress and dismemberment, the really disturbing thing about the film was how it ripped me from the comfort of my latte-swilling high horse.

Either that, or having to watch Fassbender being trapped, hunted, tortured, tied up and burned alive is simply the most profoundly harrowing cinematic experience I’ve ever had to endure. Probably a bit of both.