Like a psychic's production of automatic writing, the work we create when we are young can be a powerful clue to what obsesses us. In a trance of innocence, without the demands of commerce or self-consciousness, we speak with a purity that is difficult to achieve in later work. Not that purity is necessarily a great artistic virtue—some of the most boring art I know values that quality far too highly—but in the scrawl of an unwitting mind there may be interesting codes to be broken.

I offer this observation in relation to the release on video of two short films I made some 20 years ago, Salomé and The Forbidden. The former was made on eight millimetre, the latter on 16 millimetre; both were shot in black and white (The Forbidden is in negative throughout). Neither have dialogue, but ‘mood music’ has been added for the video release, which effectively supports the hallucinatory atmosphere of the pieces.

In short, they are technically extremely crude and their story-lines obscure: Salomé vaguely follows the biblical tale of lust, dance, martyrdom and murder, but only vaguely; The Forbidden, though derived from the Faust story, is steeped in a delirium all of its own. Notwithstanding, the images still carry a measure of raw power some two decades on, in part perhaps because the context is otherwise so unsophisticated.

One of the inspirations for these pieces was the work of Kenneth Anger, which I first saw in the late 60s. At the time, my hometown of Liverpool boasted a burgeoning art scene, and there were small but overfilled screenings of American underground films every few weeks. Many of these offerings lost me (Chelsea Girls was a fine soporific, for instance), but Anger's films, with their mingling of homosexual signals, impenetrable occult symbolism and sheer cinematic brio mesmerised me. They formed in my mind a bridge between work I might attempt myself (they weren't technically very polished), and the more mainstream films that I had an appetite for: horror, science-fiction, biblical epics and musicals. Here was a cinema of hallucination, lushly stylised and perversely metaphysical. What more could I want by way of a model?

I was surrounded by friends who shared my enthusiasms, among them Doug Bradley, who went on to become Pinhead in the Hellraiser films, and Pete Atkins, who penned the second, third and fourth installments in that series. They were tireless and brave collaborators. Encouraged by the sexual freedom of many of the underground films we saw, we put propriety aside and followed our instincts. Flesh, which is so much a part of the stories I have told in the years since, is given a fine showing in these pieces, particularly in The Forbidden. As are images of anxiety and death. The head of John the Baptist, lopped off and presented to Salomé for kissing; the body of Faust, laid out on a table by angelic presences and elegantly skinned, a man dressed as a demon moving through a negated landscape; another demon, naked and blank-faced whirling in a dervish frenzy.

Some of the images—a board of geometrically arranged nails, a figure out of Vesalius, skinless but perfectly calm—find new forms in later films. In this sense these brief works are sketches for far more elaborate renderings, and both films might be mined for such prefigurings. But they would not, I think, do them great service. Yes, they are certainly scrawls—unkempt and unproficient—but there is a hermetic quality in them both that I almost envy. Although the genre in which I now work cinematically offers more opportunities for a kind of narrative dislocation than, for instance, the domestic drama (horror movies remain a refuge for the surreal) they are more and more confined by the literalism of an audience that no longer cares to be challenged or disturbed. I could not make a commercial film that does what The Forbidden does: folding explicit sexual images and unexplained symbols into a journey towards death. There is no significant market for such dream films, unless they pretend to be something else, something simpler, with a beginning, middle and end.

In the world of painting, the ambition to make a work of art as a child might make it—innocent of aesthetics—is perfectly commendable. In literature, to write from the unedited unconsciousness is a valid goal. In film, however, the raw no longer has a significant place. Filmmakers who want to deal in visions rather than some stale notion of cinematic reality have to bury their intentions under a heap of generic demands. We are the poorer for the absence of this experimentation.

Until some genius creates a film stock on which we simply imprint our dreams, we will remain prisoners of the commercial imperative. I only hope that the horror film-makers who are coming up do not have their eyes so fixed on producing the next Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street that they miss the pleasures of letting their obsessions run wild. The psychics' scrawl may seem incomprehensible to the rational mind, but the images and ideas which fuel the great fantastiques are, thank God, strangers to sweet reason.