Editor Ellen Datlow puts together some really good books and this might be one of my favorite to date. Dark fantasy/horror stories strung along a theme of films and filmmaking. What a brilliant concept.
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I personally feel that short fiction is the ideal format for horror and dark fantasy literature and the theme of film/film-making is absolutely brilliant and Datlow collects a very nice assortment. This collection is highly recommended.
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Looking for a good book? The Cutting Room is an excellent collection of dark stories around a film theme.
As befits this meticulously modulated cover, the twenty-three pieces inThe Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screenrarely deal directly with film. Instead, they reflect it, they cast it back and mirror it, often from unique perspectives, more than occasionally using lenses that distort and twist in order to assert deeper realities.
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The stories range from relatively straight-forward narrative; to narrative transmuting seamlessly into script, bringing characters—and readers—into the texture of a film; to narrative as verbal representation of filmic hyper-realism, existentialism, absurdism, surrealism, and several other –isms. The first, Edward Bryant’s “The Cutter,” reads literally as a man’s descent into madness from unrequited love; on other levels, it seems concerned with society’s unrequitable love for realities that can exist only in movies. The last, Kim Newman’s devastatingly funny “Illimitable Dominion,” conjures a world overtaken by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe and the spate of Poe-based films that were produced in the mid-1960s. Every story in between modulates carefully between direction and indirection, between implication and inference.
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A film exists as images projected onto a screen. The processof film, this anthology proclaims, is never-ending, stepping down from the screen and into the imaginations of the audience, where it continues to grow, to permute, to change…itself and the beholder.
When Datlow’s name is on the cover, however, you know the collection will contain the highest quality writing and arranging, kind of like listening to a Rob Gordon mix tape (or Rob Fleming, for those who prefer the novel version ofHigh Fidelity).
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Like any anthology, it’s unlikely that every story will resonate with all readers, but as far as quality is concerned, The Cutting Room is a major success. Even if you only read “The Cutter,” this monster matinee is worth the ticket price.
Anticipate many nightmares within these pages.
Read the rest of Darcangelo’s review, which includes discussions on many of the individual stories, at Ensuing Chapters.
For information on The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the SilverScreen, visit the Tachyon page.
Over the next two weeks, in celebration of Halloween and the new anthology The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, Tachyon and editor Ellen Datlow present excerpts from a selection of the volume’s horrifying tales.
The final selection comes from “Illimitable Dominion” by Kim Newman.
Okay, you could say it was my fault.
I’m the one. Me, Walter Paisley, agent to stars without stars on Hollywood Boulevard. I said “spare a thought for Eddy” and the Poe Plague got started …
It’s 1959 and you know the montage. Cars have shark-fins. Jukeboxes blare the Platters and Frankie Lyman. Ike’s a back number, but JFK hasn’t yet broken big. The Commies have put Sputnik in orbit, starting a war of the satellites. Coffeehouses are full of beards and bad poetry. Boomba the Chimp, my biggest client, has a kiddie series cancelled out from under him. Every TV channel is showing some Western, but my pitches for The Cherokee Chimp, The Monkey Marshal of Mesa City, and Boomba Goes West fall on stony ground. The only network I have an “in” with is DuMont, which shows how low the Paisley Agency has sunk since the heyday of Jungle Jillian and Her Gorilla Guerrillas (with Boomba as the platoon’s comedy-relief mascot) and The Champ, the Chimp, and the Imp (a washed-up boxer is friends with a cigar-smoking chimpanzee and a leprechaun).
American International Pictures is a fancy name for James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff sharing an office. They call themselves a studio, but you can’t find an AIP backlot. They rent abandoned aircraft hangars for soundstages and shoot as much as possible out of doors and without permits. At the end of the fifties, AIP are cranking out thirty to forty pictures a year, double features shoved into ozoners and grindhouses catering to the Clearasil crowd. They peddle twofers on low-budget juvenile delinquency (Reform School Girl with Runaway Daughters!), affordable science fiction (Terror from the Year 5,000 with The Brain Eaters!), inexpensive chart music (Rock All Night with The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow!), cheapskate creatures (I Was a Teenage Werewolf with The Undead!), frugal combat (Suicide Battalion with Paratroop Command!) or cut-price exotica (She-Gods of Shark Reef with Teenage Cave Man!). When Jim and Sam try for epic, they hope a marquee-filling title—The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent—distracts the hot-rodders from sub-minimal production values and a ninety-cent sea serpent filmed in choppy bathwater.
The AIP racket is that Jim thinks up a title—say, The Beast with a Million Eyes or The Cool and the Crazy—and commissions lurid ad art, which he buries in hard-sell slogans. He shows ads to exhibitors, who chip in modest production coin. Then, a producer is put on the project. Said producer gets a writer in over the weekend and forces out a script by shoving peanuts through the bars. Someone has to direct the picture and be in it, but so long as a teenage doll in a tight sweater screams on the poster—at a monster, a switchblade, or a guitar player—no one thinks too much about them. Sam puts fine print into contracts that makes sure no one sees profit participation and puffs cigars at trade gatherings.
Roger Corman is only one of a corral of producers—Bert I. Gordon and Alex Gordon are others—on AIP’s string, but he’s youngest, busiest, and cheapest. After, to his mind, wasting half his budget hiring a director named Wyott Ordung on a 1954 masterpiece called The Monster from the Ocean Floor, Roger trims the budgets by directing most of his films himself. He seldom does a worse job than Wyott Ordung. Five critics in France and two in England say Roger is more interesting than Cukor or Zinnemann—though unaccountably It Conquered the World misses out on a Best Picture nomination. Then again, Mike Todd wins for Around the World in 80 Days. I’d rather watch Lee Van Cleef blowtorch a snarling turnip from Venus at sixty-eight minutes than David Niven smarm over two hundred smug cameo players in far-flung locations for three or four hours. You don’t have to be a contributor to Cayenne du Cinéma or Sight & Sound to agree.
After sixty to seventy films inside four years, it gets so Roger can knock ’em off over a weekend. No kidding. Little Shop of Horrors is made in three days because it’s raining and Roger can’t play tennis. He tackles every subject, within certain Jim-and-Sam-imposed limits. He shoots movies about juvenile-delinquent girls, gunslinger girls, reincarnated-witch girls, beatnik girls, escaped-convict girls, cave girls, Viking girls, monster girls, Apache girls, rock-and-roll girls, girls eaten by plants, carnival girls, sorority girls, last girls on earth, pearl-diver girls, and gangster girls. Somehow, he skips jungle girls, else maybe Boomba would land an AIP contract.
The thing is everybody—except Sam, who chortles over the ledgers without ever seeing the pictures—gets bored with the production line. Another week, and it’s Blood of Dracula plus High School Hellcats, ho hum. I don’t know when Roger gets time to dream, but dream he does—of bigger things. Jim thinks of bigger posters, or at least different-shaped posters. In the fifties, the enemy is television, but AIP product looks like television—small and square and black and white and blurry, with no one you’ve ever heard of wandering around Bronson Cavern. Drive-in screens are the shape of windshields. The typical AIP just lights up a middle slice. Even with Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Amazing Colossal Man, and The She-Creature triple-billed, kids are restless. Where’s the breathtaking CinemaScope, glorious Technicolor, and stereoscopic sound? 3-D has come and gone, and neither Odorama nor William Castle’s butt-buzzers are goosing the box office.
Jim or Roger get a notion to lump together the budgets and shooting schedules of two regular AIP pictures and throw their all into one eighty-five minute superproduction. Together, they browbeat Sam into opening the cobwebbed checkbook. This time, Mike Todd—well, not Mike Todd, since he’s dead, but some imaginary composite big-shot producer—will have to watch out come Oscar season. So, what to make?
For information on The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, visit the Tachyon page.
Over the next two weeks, in celebration of Halloween and the new anthology The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, Tachyon and editor Ellen Datlow present excerpts from a selection of the volume’s horrifying tales.
Today’s selection comes from “Ardor” by Laird Barron.
—Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, February 9, 1975
What is it Pilot John says right before we drop from the sky?
Where is Molly’s body? No, that’s my own voice haunting me on account of someone else’s ghost, someone else’s guilt.
The pilot’s head inclines to the left, slick as any disco floor pro. He gasps and takes the good Lord’s name in vain. There’s a quality of terror in the sharp inhalation that precedes this utterance. There’s rapture in the utterance itself. His words are distorted by electronic interference through the headset. The snarl of a lynx wanting its fill of guts.
Obligingly, the world rolls over and shows its belly—
—I come to after the crash and call Conway’s name the way I sometimes do upon surfacing from a nightmare. In this nightmare he is kissing me, but his left eye is gone and I can see daylight shining all the way through his skull. He says hot into my mouth, This wound won’t close.
Now, I’m awake and alive. Hell of a surprise, the being alive part.
Snow trickles down through a hole in the fuselage and crystallizes in my lashes and beard. The last of the daylight trickles through the hole too and the world around me resolves into soft focus. Buckets of white light saturate everything until it’s all ghostly and delicate. I’m strapped into the far back seat of the Beaver. I close my eyes again and recall low mountains rising on our left and the shadow of the plane descending toward an ice sheet that seems to stretch unto the end of creation.
Our particular jag of beach lies south of Quinhagak, not that that helps. In the summer, this is a vast circulatory system of bogs and streams on the edge of the Bering Sea. Ptarmigan and wolves, bears and fish dwell here, feast upon one another here. In the winter, it’s one of God’s abandoned drawing slates. The temperature is around negative thirty Fahrenheit. That’s cold, my babies. The mercury will only keep dropping.
“Conway’s in Seattle,” Parker says. “He’s safe. You’re safe. Who’s your favorite football team?” His breath is minty. He thinks I’m slipping away when I’m actually slipping back into the world. Sweet kid. Handsome, too. Life is gonna wreck him. That’s funny and I chuckle. He grips my shoulder. His mittens are blue and white to match the stripes on the plane. “C’mon Sam, stay with me. Who’d you root for in the Super Bowl? The Vikings? I bet you’re a Vikings man. My cousin met Fran Tarkenton, says he’s a gem. Can’t throw a spiral, but a hell of a quarterback anyhow.”
“Cowboys fan.” I’m remarkably calm, despite this instinctive urge to smack the condescension from him. He means well. His eyes are so blue. Conway’s are green and green is my favorite color, so I’m safe as Parker keeps saying.
“The Cowboys! No kidding? Seattle doesn’t have a club. One more year, right?”
“Dad is from Galveston.” I haven’t thought about my father in an age, much less acknowledged him aloud. Could be a concussion.
“Where’s your accent? You don’t have an accent.”
“Dad does. Classic drawl.” I hesitate. My tongue is dry. Goddamned climate. “How are the other guys?” The other guys being Pilot John, regional historian Maddox, and our wilderness guide extraordinaire Moses.
“Don’t worry about them. Everybody’s A-OK. Let’s see if we can get you outta here. Gonna be dark any minute now. Moses thinks we need to be somewhere else before then.”
His voice is too cheerful. I’m convinced he’s lying about everyone being all right. Then I catch a glimpse of Pilot John slumped at the controls, his anorak splashed red. His posture is awkward, inanimate—he’s a goner for certain. The engine has to be sitting on his legs. Snapped matchsticks, most definitely. The windshield blasted inward to cover him in rhinestones. I lack the strength to utter recriminations. Abrupt stabs of pain in my lower back suggest my body is coming out of shock. It isn’t happy.
For information on The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, visit the Tachyon page.
Over the next two weeks, in celebration of Halloween and the new anthology The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, Tachyon and editor Ellen Datlow present excerpts from a selection of the volume’s horrifying tales.
Remember The Blair Witch Project’s marketing campaign? It was an update of sorts on 1971’s The Last House on the Left, except where Wes Craven would have us keep reminding ourselves that it’s just a movie, it’s just a movie, Blair Witch kept whispering that this was actual found footage. It’s the same dynamic, though; it was tapping the same sensationalistic vein.
Writer/director Sean Mickles (Abasement, Thirty-Nine) knows this vein very well. And, for Tenderizer, he let it bleed.
As you probably recall, the first trailer was released as a “rough cut,” with the media outlets quoting Mickles’s grumbled objection that Tenderizer wasn’t ready, that production difficulties were built into a project like this, weren’t they?
Speculation was that he just wasn’t ready to let it go, of course.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Whether actually released with his approval or not, that first trailer definitely had nerve. Just the title at lowest possible right in a “rough-cut” font, then ninety seconds of black screen, punctuated by shallow breathing, the kind that makes you hold your eyes a certain way, in sympathetic response. At the end of it there wasn’t even any large-sized title branded on or swooping in—there were no closing frames. It was all closing frames. It was as if a minute and a half of our pre-movie attractions had been hijacked. Watching it, you had the feeling you could look up at the theater’s tall back wall, see a prankster’s face smiling down at you from the projection booth.
Except that breathing, it was supposed to be actual recorded breathing. From one of the twenty-four victims of the Woodrow High School Massacre.
Neither Mickles nor Aklai Studio ever suggested it, but in the press surrounding the trailer’s release, Aklai did deny it, and not just in an oblique way, but in a way that felt coached. By a lawyer.
Mickles had no comment.
It was obvious he was part of this junket very much against his will.
Soon enough, another rumor found its way into circulation, from no source anybody could ever cite. But it was so terrible it had to be true. It was that that black screen, that nervous breathing, it was the last voicemail Mickles had received from his six-year-old daughter nearly ten years ago, when she was playing hide and seek with her nanny—when Mickles, according to the reports, assumed she was just carrying the cordless phone with her and had accidentally speed-dialed him.
Whether an intentional call or not, she still suffered the same fate: carbon monoxide in the garage, her new best hiding place.
The rumor about Tenderizer, then, was that Mickles was dealing with his own grief (or guilt) by exploring visuals that breathing could have been associated with, for a girl playing hide and seek on another ordinary day.
If either theory were true—the breathing was from a victim of the massacre, the breathing was from his own daughter’s accidental death—then the studio should have stopped the project right there. Aklai would have lost a few dollars, sure, but it would have gained some public opinion points, which are finally worth more.
Film is intensely personal, yes, and it can be violently pornographic, but playing either the labored breathing of someone now dead or the last missive from a daughter to a father, that’s combining the two in a way that shouldn’t be flirted with, right? Shouldn’t there be a line?
Apparently not.
Six months after that initial trailer, there was the soon-to-be-famous thirty-second spot—perhaps originally intended for network, for primetime—that featured footage culled from on-the-scene news reports, complete with station identifications, license plates, and sports logos blurred over. No, not blurred: smeared over. Instead of scrubbing the pixels or smudging the print, Mickles was showcasing his art-house pedigree. The news footage was playing on a small television, and the legally necessary “blurring” was actually Vaseline dabbed onto the screen. Which is to say those thirty seconds were shot, cut, and piped into a television monitor, then paused and rewound continually to wipe and reapply the Vaseline, a process that would have taxed even a Claymation artist’s patience. And for what effect, finally?
As with the rest of Sean Mickles’s body of work since his daughter’s accident, that’s always the question, yes.
Of course, save for one telltale glare of the screen right at the end of those thirty seconds, it takes a trained eye to even clock that it’s a television screen being filmed in the first place. Simply because of what that television is playing: thirty seconds of respondents and interviewees and witnesses to the Woodrow Massacre. Which of course we’ve all seen nearly to the point of memorization. Those easy, iconic moments weren’t the one Mickles chose for this trailer, though.
For information on The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, visit the Tachyon page.
Over the next two weeks, in celebration of Halloween and the new anthology The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, Tachyon and editor Ellen Datlow present excerpts from a selection of the volume’s horrifying tales.
Today’s selection comes from “Even the Pawn” by Joel Lane.
Early on a February morning in the city centre, two refuse collectors found a human body wrapped in double-strength bin liners. It had been dumped in one of the tall bins at the back of a Chinese restaurant, with no serious attempt at concealment. As if whoever put it there had wanted it to be found. The refuse collectors had chased a few crows away from the bin, and immediately seen what they had attacked. Before the rush hour, the body was in the city morgue next to the law courts.
Fortunately, the crows hadn’t reached her face. Though what identification we managed was of limited value. She was aged eighteen or so, white, possibly Slavic. Her hair was cut short, spiked and bleached. She had complex injuries, external and internal, that pointed to sustained beating and sexual abuse. What made headlines was that she’d died after being left in the bin, though probably without regaining consciousness.
The photo that appeared in the papers showed her face after the mortician had toned down the bruising. It was a strong face with dark-blue eyes and good teeth, a few loose. She was somewhat overweight. When dumped, the body had been wearing a T-shirt and shorts that were too small for her, probably not hers. We failed to match her face, teeth, and DNA with anyone on record.
In the week following local press coverage of the death, we received three anonymous phone calls from men who claimed to know the dead girl. All of them said her name was Tania, and she’d worked in a massage parlour in the city. Two of them named a place in Small Heath, one a place in Yardley. Both parlours were owned by the Forrester brothers, two local businessmen whose affairs we weren’t likely to be investigating soon. They had important friends in the force and the local council—by “friends” I mean people they owned. There are other kinds of friends, though it seemed that Tania hadn’t had any kind.
The hostesses at both parlours told us the same thing: Tania had been sacked because she was unreliable. A colleague some distance up the food chain from myself had a word with the Forrester brothers, who claimed no knowledge of what had happened to her. We’d already established by default that Tania—which almost certainly was not her real name—had been trafficked from Eastern Europe, but since the Forresters were above reproach we had little to go on.
My involvement in the case started with something the hostess at the Kittens parlour in Yardley had said. There was a “regular” at Kittens who always phoned to ask if Tania was there. If she was busy when he arrived, he waited for her. Since most of the punters chose other girls, this fanboy had made quite a difference to Tania’s confidence. Since her departure—the hostess claimed to be unsure whether the dead girl was really Tania—he hadn’t been back.
Yardley being part of my regular patch, I was asked to monitor Kittens and try to track down this possible stalker of the dead girl. It was one of several parlours near the Swan Centre, a convenient stopping-point for sales reps and long-distance drivers. The hostess—“receptionist” was her official job title—was a tired-looking woman in her forties called Martina. She promised to call me on my mobile if Tania’s former admirer turned up.
Before I left, Martina showed me the waiting area, where two girls were watching TV and drinking coffee. They were both wearing blue cat masks. I didn’t stay, but the image bothered me for days afterwards. At least the sins you commit in your heart don’t expose you to blackmail.
The call came a few weeks later, but not from Martina. The man on the phone said he sometimes visited Kittens, and had been friendly with Tania. He hadn’t been there in a while. Today, when he’d turned up, Martina had warned him the police were after him. “I thought I’d better contact you myself.”
We interviewed the punter, whose name was Derek, for two three-hour sessions. He was aged nearly forty and lived alone. It soon emerged that he was an alcoholic. The interviews were very dull. He wanted to talk to us about Tania and his distress at her death. But he seemed to know nothing that could help us. The weekend of her death he’d been in Stafford, helping his parents move house. We checked the alibi and it held. He was harmless, ignorant, and about as interesting to listen to as woodlice in the loft.
“We were close,” he said more than once. “Tania liked me, I could tell. The way she reacted when I touched her. Sometimes I’d make her cum. Sometimes we’d make love fast, then just sit together and talk until the time ran out. We didn’t meet up outside the parlour, but we would have eventually. I could tell she didn’t have a lover. Sometimes I know things without being told them.”
For information on The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, visit the Tachyon page.
Over the next two weeks, in celebration of Halloween and the new anthology The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, Tachyon and editor Ellen Datlow present excerpts from a selection of the volume’s horrifying tales.
Today’s selection comes from “She Drives the Men to Crimes of Passion!” by Genevieve Valentine.
The scene was this: Cocoanut Grove, Saturday night, packed so tight you had to hold your drink practically in your armpit, and the band loud enough that you gave up on conversation and nodded whenever you heard a voice just in case someone was talking to you.
You never went to the Grove on the weekends if you had any kind of self-respect at all—by 1934 all the stars had turned their backs on the Grove and fled to the Sidewalk Café, where they could drink themselves onto the floor without any prying eyes. The reporters had given up trying, and now they came to the Grove to dig up dirt on the third-rate bit players.
It was fine for the bit players, but I had some prospects.
Well, one picture. It hadn’t done well. I knew they were talking about putting me on pity duty with the melodramas that shot in four days on the same set. No extras, no stars; nothing to do but come to the Cocoanut Grove and look around at the bit players you were going to be stuck with for the rest of your life.
“You need a friend in the studio, fast,” said Lewis. “Come down to the Grove with me. There’s bound to be someone.”
I nursed my Scotch and grimaced at the crowd for an hour, looking for a studio man I could talk to.
None. Damn Sidewalk Café.
I was on my way across the floor to leave when the music ended, and the dance floor opened, and I saw Eva.
She’d been dancing—strands of her dark hair stuck to her shining brown skin, a spiderweb across her forehead. If she’d been wearing lipstick it was gone, but her lids were still dusted with sparkly shadow in bright green and white that shone in the dark like a second pair of eyes.
I saw her coming and held my breath. I could already see her at the end of the lens—turning to look over her shoulder at the hero, giving him a smile, tempting him to do terrible things.
“You should be in pictures,” I said, and it sounded like a totally different line when you meant it.
Her audition alone got me into Capital Films for a feature with her. I knew it would.
There was no point in making her into an ingénue (exotic and ingénue did not mix), so we went right to the vamp. I made her a fortune-teller in On the Wild Heath. She captivated the lord of the manor, put a curse on him when he scorned her, and got shot just before she could lay hands on the lady of the house.
The Hollywood Reporter called her “Exotic Eva” in the blurb—couldn’t have planned it better—and went on for a paragraph about the passion in her Spanish eyes. They wrapped with, “We suspect we haven’t seen the last of this sultry siren.”
Capital signed me for another flick, and started making us reservations at the Sidewalk Café.
Eva wore green satin that matched her eyes, and as we danced under the dim lights there were shimmers of color across her skin.
“I think I love you,” I said.
She said, “You would.”
It sounded ungrateful, but I let it go. There was time for all that; right now, our stars were rising.
Capital didn’t want her being a heroine yet. (“Keep her mysterious,” they said. “The fan magazines can’t even tell if she’s really Mexican or if it’s just makeup. It’s perfect.”)
I made her a flamenco dancer next, in Stage Loves.
The lead, Jack Stone, was nothing much—I was doing the studio a favor just having him—but at least he looked properly stunned whenever she was in the frame.
Originally Stone’s theatre patron was going to seduce her and leave the virginal heiress for a life with the variety show, but word came down that Capital was going to start getting strict about the Production Code, so the hero sinning was right out.
So instead Eva seduced the patron, and got strangled by the jealous stage manager in the last reel.
(The poster featured her bottom left, with a banner: “Eva Loba is Elisa the Spanish Temptress—She drives the men to crimes of passion!”)
The new script must have worked just as well; the studio asked for two more movies as soon as the film was in.
For information on The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, visit the Tachyon page.
Over the next two weeks, in celebration of Halloween and the new anthology The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, Tachyon and editor Ellen Datlow present excerpts from a selection of the volume’s horrifying tales.
Today’s selection comes from “Bright Lights, Big Zombie” by Douglas E. Winter.
“When I started using dynamite, I believed in many things… . Finally, I believe only in dynamite.” —Sergio Leone, Giu la testa
IT’S 6 A.M. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR BRAINS ARE?
You are not the kind of zombie who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. You are not a zombie at all: not yet. But here you are, and you cannot say that the videotape is entirely unfamiliar, although it is a copy of a copy and the details are fuzzy. You are at an after-hours club near SoHo, watching a frantic young gentleman named Bob as the grooved and swiftly spinning point of a power drill chews its way through the left side of his skull. The film is known alternatively as City of the Living Dead and The Gates of Hell, and you’re not certain whether this version is missing anything or not. All might come clear if you could actually hear the soundtrack. Then again, it might not. The one the other night was in Swedish or Danish or Dutch, and a small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of this stuff already. The night has turned on that imperceptible pivot where 2 a.m. changes to 6 a.m. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of bullet-blown heads and gobbled intestines, and now you are trying to hang onto the rush. Your brain at this moment is somewhere else, spread in grey-smeared stains on the pavement or coughed up in bright patterns against a concrete wall. There is a hole at the top of your skull wider than the path that could be corkscrewed by a power drill, and it hungers to be filled. It needs to be fed. It needs more blood.
THE DEPARTMENT OF VICTUAL FALSIFICATION
Morning arrives on schedule. You sleepwalk through the subway stations from Canal Street to Union Square, then switch to the Number 6 Local on the Lexington Avenue Line. You come up from the Thirty-third Street Exit, blinking. Waiting for a light at Thirty-second, you scope the headline of the Daily News: still dead. There is a blurred photograph of something that looks vaguely like a hospital room. You think about those four unmoving bodies, locked somewhere inside the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. You think about your mother. You think about Miranda. But the light has changed. You’re late for work again, and you’ve worn out the line about the delays at the checkpoints. There is no time for new lies.
Your boss, Tony Kettle, runs the Department of Victual Falsification like a pocket calculator, and lately your twos and twos have not added up to fours. If Kettledrum had his way, you would have been subtracted from the staff long ago, but the magazine has been shorthanded since Black Wednesday, and sooner or later you manage to get your work done. And let’s face it, you know splatter films better than almost anyone left alive.
The offices of the magazine cover a single floor. Once there were several journals published here, from sci-fi to soft porn to professional wrestling. Now there is only the magazine, a subtenant called Engel Enterprises, and quiet desperation. You navigate the water-stained carpet to the Department of Victual Falsification. Directly across the hall is Tony’s office, and you stagger past with the hope that he’s not there. “Good morning, gorehounds,” you say as you enter the department. There are six desks, but only three of them are occupied. Brooks is reading the back of his cigarette package: Camel Lights. Elaine shakes her head and puts her blue pencil through line after line of typescript. Stan, who has been bowdlerizing an old Jess Franco retrospective for weeks, shuffles a stack of stills and whistles an Oingo Boingo tune. J. Peter and Olivia are dead.
What once was your desk is now a prop stand for a mad maze of paper. An autographed photo of David Warbeck is pinned to the wall and looks out over old issues of Film Comment, Video Watchdog, Ecco, Eyeball, the Daily News. Here are the curled and coffee-stained manuscripts, and there the rows of reference volumes, from Grey’s Anatomy to Hardy’s Encyclopedia of Horror Film. Somewhere in the shuffle are two lonely pages of printout, the copy you managed to eke out yesterday from the press kit for John Woo’s latest bullet ballet, smuggled through Customs between the pages of a Bible.
Atop it all is a pink message slip with today’s date: Ruggero Deodato called. Don’t forget about tonight. “And hey,” Brooks says, finally lighting up a cigarette. “We had another visit from the Brain Police.” You are given a look that is meant to be serious and significant.
You have spent the last five years of your life presenting images of horror, full color and in close-up, to a readership—perhaps you should say viewership—of what you suspected were mostly lonely, adolescent, and alienated males who loved these kinds of films. The bloodier the better. Special effects—the tearing of latex flesh, the splash of stage crimson, the eating of rubber entrails—were the magazine’s focus, and in better days, after a particularly vivid drunk that followed a screening of the latest Night of the Living Dead rip-off, you and J. Peter and Tony came to call yourself the Department of Victual Falsification.
That was then, and this is now. The dead came back, not for a night but for forever. Your mother. Black Wednesday. Miranda. Cannibals in the streets. The bonfires in Union Square. Law and order. Congressional hearings. Peace, complete with special ID cards and checkpoints and military censors.
You remember, just before the Gulf War, reading newspaper articles about high school students who paged through magazines that were to be sent to the troops in Saudi Arabia, coloring over bras and bare chests, skirts that were too short, cigarettes caught up in dangling hands. You thought that this was supremely funny. Now each month you do something much the same. The magazine publishes the latest additions to the lists, recounts the seizures from the shelves of the warehouses and rental stores. At first the banished titles were the inevitable ones, the old Xs and the newer NC-17s and, of course, anything to do with the living dead. In recent months, the lists have expanded into the Rs and a few of the PG-13s.
You are detectives of the dying commodity called horror, and there are fewer places where the magazine is sold, and fewer things that you can say, and fewer photos for you to run and, of course, there are fewer people left alive, fewer still who care.
For information on The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, visit the Tachyon page.
Over the next two weeks, in celebration of Halloween and the new anthology The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, Tachyon and editor Ellen Datlow present excerpts from a selection of the volume’s horrifying tales.
“… all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world have not any subsistence without a mind—that their being is to be perceived or known.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“It is a simple equation: take me, subtract film, and the solution is zero.”
—Akira Kurosawa
They are filming something on the street, in front of our house, very close to the front door.
Even though he can’t see them when he pulls up his blinds or pushes aside one of the curtains, my six-year-old son Brian senses that someone is watching. After dismissing his claims as “… an overactive imagination,” Dianne, my wife, finally admitted to feeling the same way, though with the nervous, slightly embarrassed, “Maybe-I’m-Just-Full-Of-Shit-Today” laugh she always uses whenever she can’t put her finger on what’s bothering her. So far neither of them have directly asked me what I think, how I feel, do I believe them or not.
I think this is exactly what the Onlookers want, for you to convince yourself that it’s just your imagination playing tricks on you; it’ll make the work easier for them, and perhaps less terrifying and painful for the rest of us, if and when we cumulatively figure out what’s happening; after all, isn’t perception both perceiving and being perceived? If the Onlookers are edging us toward a state of non-being without our knowing it, then what can we do to stop it, to re-balance the equation, to perceive while being perceived?
My wife and son are fading before my eyes, you see; and more than once in the last few days, both have asked me if I’ve been losing weight, which means I am lessening in their perception, as well.
All around, the colors of our life are become paler. There is a dogwood tree in our back yard, and the red spots on all the leaves have turned to the same foggy gray as an old black-and-white film; as have many of the leaves on the other trees; as has much of the grass.
Dianne and Brian say I’m too pale lately. (Dianne called it “looking a bit gray around the gills.”)
I can’t bring myself to tell them they look the same to me.
They are filming something on the street, in front of our house, very close to the front door.
Something tells me they’re going to want their interior shots soon, before they lose the light.
I don’t think there’s any way I can stop them.
I first saw the Onlookers when I was a child, but had no idea what they were, what they wanted, or of what they were capable.
In the summer of 1964, when I was five, my father—who sold medical supplies—took my mother and me along on a business trip to New York. Spending nearly a third of every year on the road, Dad always felt bad because we’d never had a “proper” family vacation; rightly thinking that Mom and I got sick of spending every summer stuck in Cedar Hill, he hoped this “… madcap excursion in the wilds” (as he called it, like it was going to be some Great Adventure worthy of Jules Verne) would suffice.
We had a wonderful time, as I recall (being only five, my memories are divided into two categories: the bus, taxi, or subway ride to someplace in the city, and the cool stuff I got to do once we arrived).
Dad was meeting with some doctors whose offices were on the Upper West Side in the 140s, near the Hudson River, and for a few hours Mom and I were left to our own devices—which meant sightseeing and shopping.
We’d just left a restaurant where I’d had the best ice-cream sundae in the history of ice-cream sundaes (that I ate way too quickly; it would later come back to haunt me with a stomachache) and were heading for some boring old antique store when we rounded the corner and walked right into a movie—or, rather, the movie walked into us, in the form of a hunched, roundish man in a dark coat that was far too heavy for the summer weather. His head was down so that his face was buried behind the high upturned collar of the coat; all I could see of him was that coat and the gray, flattened hat he wore (which Dad later told me was called a “Porkpie” hat).
The man bumped into Mom, almost knocking her over (he was walking very fast and seemed to be trying to get away from something), then veered left and plowed straight into me.
I spun around, arms pinwheeling, trying to catch my balance, tripped over my own feet, fell backward against one of the sawhorses, went over, tried to twist around so I didn’t crack my skull on the pavement, and landed on the other side on my butt. I immediately began crying; everything hurts more when you’re five years old, and it especially hurts more when it happens in a big, strange, scary city that seems like it could eat visitors from Ohio for breakfast and still want a second helping.
I looked up, hoping to see Mom’s face lowering toward me; instead she stood frozen, having just seen the face of the man in the coat and Porkpie hat.
And that’s when I saw my first Onlooker.
For information on The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, visit the Tachyon page.