Until the age of about 13, the scariest thing I’d watched was Rentaghost.

Then came ‘video nasties’ – and the stuff of nightmares.

Back in the Eighties, my friend’s family were the first people I knew to have a video recorder. Sitting in their living-room around this clunking great machine, whirring so loudly it made the floor shake, felt like being in a space-age future world.

My friend’s older brother acquired some horror videos, and one night we watched them in the dark. I still have the mental scars.

Linda Blair’s head spinning round in The Exorcist was small fry compared to the effect Leatherface had on me.

I remember every horrible moment of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the gibbering hitch-hiker, the eerie house, the freezer, the old grandpa, and the sound of the chainsaw in the woods. This was the original movie, shot with a shaky camera so you felt like you’re there.

That film haunted me for months; I used to lie awake at night thinking about it. A few years later, I watched it again, to see if it would have the same effect. It did.

It put me off horror films for life. I’ve dabbled – Nightmare On Elm Street, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project – but I can’t cope with full-scale horror-fests.

All this seems at odds with the fact that I was once in a horror film. It’s something I’d completely forgotten about until recently when my niece, Ellie, was telling me about Chucky. Having just turned 12, she’s too young for horror movies (although I wasn’t much older when I encountered Leatherface), but she’s become aware of the Chucky movies and has seen online images of the hideous doll.

It occurred to me that I might be trapped in horror somewhere in YouTube, eternally screaming my head off.

We made the film at university one summer. A crazy friend with a David Cronenberg obsession was shooting it and recruited a few of us to be in it. It was filmed around a beach in North Wales and our props consisted of a bin liner full of foul-smelling animal organs acquired from an abattoir.

I did lots of screaming with the camera pointed at me, while rotting cows’ entrails spilled across my boyfriend’s ‘lifeless’ body. He ran into the sea afterwards to get the wretched stuff off.

I’ve no idea what happened to the film, or even what it was called. I did it for a laugh when I was young and daft. I just hope it doesn’t end up doing to an unsuspecting adolescent viewer what Leatherface did to me all those years ago.