Halloween was never much of a thing for me during my childhood, but it seems to have become a major highlight of the year for the Hong Kong children that I teach now. Since today was our last English class before the half-term break - and hence before All Hallow's Eve - I just shared with my students this creepy favourite of mine from the 1970s: La Cabina (The Telephone Box), a Spanish made-for-TV short directed by Antonio Mercedo.
It was made in 1972 and won quite a few awards. And it has a special place in my heart - a love/hate kind of a place - because when I first saw it on British TV in the late 1970s (when I was about the same age as my students are now) I recognised it as a story that I had written myself a couple of years earlier. I was naturally pretty miffed that they'd stolen my idea without giving me a credit or any royalties. But then I discovered that it had been made some years before I wrote my story, and so I didn't have much of a case for an infringement of my intellectual property. I learned the hard lesson that there is no truly original idea in the world - or very, very rarely so, at any rate. (And I must acknowledge that my story was much more limited; it didn't really have the conspiracy/paranoia dimension that emerges in the second half of Snr Mercedo's macabre little masterpiece.)
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