Comfort

Baby, I know you’re a little freaked out after the movie, and that’s natural, it was kind of a freaky movie. With hindsight, a midnight showing of a horror film might not have been the best idea. But, and I can’t stress this enough, you don’t need to be nervous.

Don’t worry; everything will be terrifying from now on.

We’ll get home, fix a snack, make a pot of tea, convince ourselves that the irregular thumping on the walls is just the sound of pipes settling, and head to bed. You’ll wake up in a cold sweat after something pulls sharply on your left leg, turn over and see me, fast asleep, muttering in something that sounds suspiciously like Latin being spoken backward, head to the bathroom, squeeze your eyes shut when the walls start dripping blood and, when you finally suppress your unvoiced scream and open them again, you’ll convince yourself it was your own sleep-addled brain playing tricks on you.

And by the time you get back to bed, the whispering at the back of your mind telling you that you’re all alone and that nobody will save you will be something you’re so used to that you can almost ignore it.

Almost.

By morning, of course, the baby-headed spiders will be nearly done their hive in the closet. But you’ll wear a t-shirt, so you won’t realize it’s there until three or four days from now. Which will be two or three days after you’ve killed me with an axe, believing that I’ve been replaced with a perfect replicant that hungers for human blood.

Which, by the way, will not be the case. It will actually be me that you kill. Still, the bloodthirsty replicant will continue going to work in my place, so you’ll never be questioned about my absence. Not that the police would have much time to question you even if they did realize that the real me was dead, chopped up and hidden in the hallway linen closet.

Because, like I said, three or four days from now, you’ll open the closet to find a button-up blouse, and realize that the baby-headed spiders have long since occupied it, and moreover that they’ve been breeding freely. And, finally freed from their confinement, the first thing they’ll do will be to…

…well, I don’t want to give away EVERYTHING that will happen. After all, what is life without surprises, right? Sufficed to say, it won’t be pretty, and you aren’t likely to make it out of the room. But, if you do manage to make it to the door, get past the ghost twins and find your way down the endless echoing hallway and out of the suddenly abandoned building, don’t take any pleasure from it. The only thing your unlikely survival would mean is that you get to see what happens to the world around you once the plague of baby-headed spiders is released upon the unsuspecting city.

And that might be the worst part of it all.

No, wait, the coming of the Hungry Ones. Had I mentioned they were coming? No? That’s my bad, they are, I’ve invited them and they assure me they’re coming. And that’ll definitely be the worst part of it all, that part will be really bad.

So, you see, your life going forward will be an endless nightmare. You will know no peace, no moment of respite, for the rest of your potentially very short existence.

From here on in, everything will be terrifying.

I’ve already arranged it all.

And that’s why, you see, there’s no need to worry…

I Want to Make A Movie

In my movie, I want Tim Allen to participate in a hit and run, only to return home to find that the person he’s run over and abandoned to die on the side of the road is none other than Santa, and that, due to an obscure clause in his contract, whoever kills Santa is forced to take his place. Over the course of the rest of the film we’ll focus on Mr. Allan’s transformation, both physical as he takes on the traditional form of Santa and mental as he becomes more generous and jolly, as his inner Santa comes to the fore.

The tone I intend to create, over the course of this film, is one of existential dread mixed with a healthy dose body horror, as an ordinary man is forced, as penance for one lapse of judgment, to watch helplessly as he is transformed beyond his recognition, as one by one the signifiers of identity he’s put so much stock in, both physically and mentally, are stripped from him, as he is consumed from the inside out by the Christmas Spirit, an angry ghost which must be appeased at all costs, and which has no care for the life it is consuming.

Partway through act two, Allen-Clause will discover that he’s no longer capable of taking his own life, that every time he tries the Spirit prevents him, seeking as it does to protect its host body until such time as the transformation is complete and it has total control, and due to this revelation he will spend act three seeking out someone, anyone, willing to put an end to his life while there’s still enough “self” left in him for his death, and by extension his life, to hold some measure of meaning.

Eventually, he’ll remember how he got into this mess in the first place, and run into a busy street, where he’ll be hit by a car and, in his dying moments, bloated body broken, from behind his white beard, he’ll let out a laugh, not the “Ho Ho Ho” his laugh had become, but rather the laugh of Tim Allen, weaker and more hoarse as he dies, but still inarguably his own. In this way the audience will know that, in death if not in life, he’s triumphed, both over the Spirit and its horrible clause.

I believe the film will be a fascinating look at the nature of identity, as well as a gripping horror story, and as such will release it midway through October, just in time for “holiday season” for this type of film. I also suspect I could bring it in with a relatively minimal budget, as I can’t imagine Tim Allen’s terribly busy nowadays, also a plus as the possibility of a sequel is obvious.

After all, somebody was driving the car that ran Allen-Clause over at the end of the film.

And, no matter what lengths the host bodies might go through to die, Santa does come every year, like clockwork. So however many hosts might succeed in ending their lives, eventually there will be one who isn’t strong enough to do what it takes, or lucky enough to do it in time. And that unlucky soul will be consumed so completely that it will be as though they’d never existed at all.

Because the Christmas Spirit will not be denied…

The Most Unfair Part Is...

…how well the film had been going. My directorial debut was three weeks ahead of schedule, the dailies looked fantastic, and it seemed we’d be wrapped in another two weeks.

The day the dead rose I was extraing to help contain costs, and was in full makeup when real corpses started shambled into the set. Nobody could tell extras from undead.

So I ran. And, when the first group of survivors I ran into shot at me, I kept running. I’ve been running ever since.

It’s lonely, being trapped between worlds. But I try to make the best of it…

Third Reel

The farmhouse exploded, spraying debris through night skies. And, from the wreckage, he came.

Machete hanging from one hand, mask unsinged, he shambled toward the two of us.

The bomb was my last idea. If that hadn’t killed him, what would?

So we bolted. We’d never outrun him, but when he stopped to kill one of us, the other might escape. Our only hope.

You were a young woman, blonde and topless, who hadn’t had a single line of dialogue in the first two thirds of the film.

I ran, keeping two steps ahead of you. I liked my odds.

Zombies

In zombie movies, one guy always gets bitten, and tries to hide it from the group, and he winds up screwing things up for anyone.

And I laugh.

At his stupidity, and short sightedness.

Ignoring facts at the expense of his friends lives.

If it were me, I think to myself, I’d man up, eat a gun and save everyone a world of pain and danger.

But now, looking at the bite on my arm…

It’s barely a scratch.

And I’m so fucking scared.

I’m not ready to go.

Not like this.

I’ll tell them, I will. Just… not yet.

I Don't Like Horror Films

I can’t help it, I don’t enjoy horror films. They seem stupid to me.

The thing of it is; Ghosts aren’t particularly scary. Or Werewolves, or Zombies. Vampires, in my opinion, are particularly stupid. But none of them are scary.

When he hit me, once, across the side of my head, and my ears rang so loudly I couldn’t hear for three days, and again, sending me spiralling to the floor, and I lay there, spitting up blood and praying he wouldn’t hit me a third time, that was scary.

Horror films are nothing. I just can’t get into them.