I'm Clyde Macfarlane, an NCTJ qualified journalist and illustrator.

There is a great comfort blanket when seeing a horror movie- it’s always only a film. You are safe in the audience. That terrifying scene at the end of The Ring when the girl crawls out of the TV screen was a one-off freak occurrence, right?

Although hardly a horror, most will agree that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey– which was shown at Old Portsmouth’s No. 6 Cinema on Saturday- is as deeply unsettling as films get. Take the eerie, relentless music, or the universe-trotting monolith, or the unexplained ageing of the lead character as he hurtles through time and space.

Then of course there’s the guy who kicks it all off: HAL 9000, the malfunctioning robot. Visible only by an unblinking red light and a calm voice that echoes around the spacecraft, this too-smart-for-its-own-good creation is one of cinema’s most unconventional villains. Last week Stephen Hawking warned mankind of the dangers of artificial intelligence, and BBC News used HAL to exemplify his point.

So as HAL was just beginning to act weird, the last thing No. 6 Cinema needed was a technical fault. The screen went black yet the sound continued, the lights on the ceiling became too bright; it was as if someone/thing didn’t want us to watch the end of the film. Kier Dullea’s lock-jawed, sweat-beaded face was suddenly pressed up to No. 6’s massive screen- a scene from much later on- and was met with some equally eerie music from a different film all together. Then everything went black for good.

Much to the dismay of my fellow angry nerds in the audience, a No. 6 employee stood up and announced that the screening had permanently malfunctioned. A few got up and left. But then, success; our space odyssey sprung back into life, from the correct scene and with a perfectly in tune soundtrack.

I wasn’t sitting comfortably though. My horror movie comfort blanket had been removed; HAL had seized the controls at No. 6 Cinema. A boy in the front row spent the last half an hour of the film with his head pressed into his mother’s lap as she stroked his hair. I’d almost forgotten that 2001: A Space Odyssey has a ‘U’ film rating, which should put it in the same league of scariness as The Little Mermaid.