Midnight Movie: A Novel (33 page)

Ah, yes, the legendary “Day of the Living Dead” video. Like everybody else in the world, I thought it was a hoax. I thought that somebody, like Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth, slapped it together for shits and giggles. But then when the hot chick from MSNBC and the gay dude from CNN interviewed the poor guy whose leg got yanked off, everybody knew it was the real deal.

It was shot with an iPhone, and the quality was clear but not exceptional, which made it look even creepier, even more realistic. Like, you couldn’t see the zombie’s whole face, but you could make out the shit oozing
from
her face, which practically glowed in the dark. She was moving faster than you’d expect—virtually human speed, for that matter—so she looked, I don’t know,
formidable
. Unbeatable, even.

It happened fast, man, really fast. She shuffled into the picture, then bit this young woman in the neck, then the arm, then
the leg, then the breast. And when I say “bit,” I don’t mean nibbles. No, the zombie girl was pulling chunks off the human girl. When the zombie bit the woman’s stomach, she went extra deep, so when she came up for air, the girl’s intestines fell on the sidewalk. As the girl stumbled away, her guts unraveled like an old garden hose.

A muscular black dude in his teens tried to take down the zombie girl, and she ripped off his leg like it was nothing. His fucking leg ripped off right at the quadriceps. I have no idea how he lived.

The clip was only one minute long, and it would’ve been longer—possibly
way
longer—had the cop not shot her in the back.

I told Erick, “That was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life. I’m appalled that somebody would post something that awful, considering everything that’s happened. What kind of person would take the time to make that, just to get a rise? Especially
now.
”

Erick said, “Claire, no disrespect, but you are in such denial, it’s … it’s … it’s
insane
. Just fucking insane. You have a research department. Use it. Get the real story. Read up.” And then he said something that struck me: “If there’s even the slightest chance this is for real, and your participation is key in making our, I don’t know,
reversal
work, wouldn’t you want to be a part of it?”

I said, “Erick, I suppose your heart is in the right place, but—”

He didn’t let me finish. He said, “Jesus Christ, Claire, it’s three days of your life. Get your ass out of the office, go to your jillion-dollar condo, pack a bag, get to the airport, and get the fuck down to Texas. Don’t be a cunty stuck-up bitch.”

I told Erick that if she was being difficult and he needed to go DEFCON five, he should call her a cunty stuck-up bitch. Just a hunch.

And then she hung up on me. I thought,
Nice job, Tobe. Good piece of advice with the name-calling
.

Gregson went out-of-pocket, so we owed it to him to get moving, with or without Claire Craft. Since she was out, the question was, who the hell do we cast as our cue-card girl? Me, I was rooting for Jennifer Aniston. Yeah, she wasn’t age appropriate, but I’d always had a boner for her, and it’s part of the producer’s job to sleep with actresses, so I figured I’d float it past Tobe.

Kidding. My heart—and my dick—belonged to Janine. Sorry, Ms. Aniston. Your loss.

We flew back to Austin, and I checked into the Four Seasons; my thinking was,
Fuck it, if I’m going out, I’m going out in style
. I still have no idea how Claire found out I was staying there.

She showed up at, I don’t know, four in the morning or something, and despite her obvious tiredness, she looked all put together just so, exactly like you’d expect a high-powered magazine chick to look.

I stared at her for a second, then said, “You came.”

She said, “I did.”

I had to go. What convinced me? Well, Tobe Hooper was just mystical enough to have created this whole mess. Which I’m sure is why everybody else showed up.

I refused Tobe’s plane ticket. I didn’t give a damn if Jack Warner himself offered to pay for my flight. I wanted to make my own way there. It was the least I could do.

I came. I went. I saw. I conquered.

Erick banged on my door at, what, like five in the morning or something and said, “Dude, you wanna be a zombie in Tobe’s new movie? Before you answer, bear in mind that you’ll have to wrestle a fake alligator stuffed with dead animals, and you’ll have to suck the neck of a sixty-something-year-old woman, and you’ll be covered in ooze made from some of the most unbelievably rancid shit in the world, and there’s a decent chance that when this movie gets edited and shown for an actual audience, you’ll die a horrible death.”

I was like, “Bro, nothing would make me happier. Where do I sign?”

It didn’t make sense for me to be in the flick. Spiritually speaking, Theo was about as close to Gary Church as we could find: Gary
had been Tobe’s best friend, and Theo was mine. Gary was an aspiring actor and Theo was an aspiring musician. Gary was short, and Theo was short. And, most important, Gary was dead, and Theo was available.

When Erick Laughlin invited me to Austin, I told him I’d come on one condition: that I could bring my family along. And he went ballistic: “No goddamn way, Helen! No goddamn way! I don’t even want
you
to come, for chrissakes! Hell, I don’t want
anybody
to come! This could turn out to be a clusterfuck of the highest order! People could get hurt! Seriously goddamn hurt!”

I said, “I understand that. And they understand that. But they believe in Tobe, and they want to be with me.”

He was quiet for a second, then he said, “Listen, Helen. You seem like a nice lady. And I’m not a violent person by nature. But I swear to God, if you bring your husband or any of your children with you to Texas, I’m going to drag their asses back to the airport and physically throw them onto the plane myself. And if you don’t believe it, well, just try me.”

I didn’t want to try him. That tone in his voice was deadly. So I kissed my family good-bye and went by myself.

I brought the original camera. The
original
. It wasn’t in Tobe’s locker at the society. It was in my basement at my house. It hadn’t been touched in decades. And I had it. In my basement. In my house.

It was mine.

We didn’t fuck around. We
couldn’t
fuck around. The clock was ticking … or at least that’s how Tobe and I had begun to look at it. We
had
to believe in what we were doing, and
believing
it meant
doing
it, and
doing
it meant doing it
fast
. What were we going to do, sit around and wait for another city to go up in flames? Or until we were 100 percent certain this movie would have
any
effect on
anything
? We had to roll cameras, and we couldn’t let anything stop us.

A shot-by-shot remake is a colossal pain in the ass, and it almost never works. You want proof? Check out Gus Van Sant’s version of
Psycho
that he shot in, what, ’98 or something. Gus is a master, but that thing, it wasn’t one of his finer moments, probably because, well, because a shot-by-shot remake is a colossal pain in the ass.

But Gus had one thing on his side that I didn’t: a clear template to work from.
Destiny Express
was a snafu from top to bottom, and even though I’d watched it ten-ish times—which is ten-ish times too many—I couldn’t get a handle on it. Probably because the movie had no point.

See,
Chainsaw
was a story. It wasn’t
The Iliad
or anything, but it had an arc, a beginning, middle, and end. Yes, it was about shocking the audience, but they wouldn’t have been shocked if it was a random series of attacks and murders, because they wouldn’t have been absorbed into the picture. There would’ve been distance. If there wasn’t anything for the viewer to grab on to, they wouldn’t have given a good goddamn what happened to good ol’ Sally Hardesty.

This isn’t to say that I was planning to infuse
Destiny Express Redux
with meaning; we were staying loyal to the original, so that
would’ve been impossible, because the original was meaningless. But I was a different person come remake time. I had almost two dozen films under my belt, and some of them weren’t too bad. It was ingrained in me to bring a point of view to the table, so divorcing myself from the true creative process and shooting a series of random zombie attacks felt tepid and unnatural. I wanted to give it some semblance of, I don’t know, nonsuckitude. That was my default mode. But a dude’s got to do what a dude’s got to do, and I had to make it as sucky as the original, so I was going to make 100 percent certain it would suck
exactly
as bad as the original, no more, no less. So before we shot a single frame of film, I sat down with Darren Allen to figure out the perfect schedule for perfect suckage.

And that was more fun than a barrel of bat guano.

I had the original schedule. I kept it. Deep down, I knew I’d need it. Deep down. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I just did. I did. I did.

I have no clue what happened to Darren Allen. Back when we were kids, he was always somewhat of a misfit, but man, present-day, the fellow was a mess. He breathed heavy, and he stared at you a little too tightly, and he was dressed like a homeless man with a good clothing connection.

You know how sometimes a guy is so difficult to talk to that you have trouble making eye contact with him, because it’s so goddamn uncomfortable? That was the deal with the 2009 version of Darren. But I had to do it.

Tobe liked the original schedule. He thought it was cool.

I hated the original schedule. I thought it was fucking creepy.

First, there was my handwriting. I always thought I had pretty neat handwriting, even when I was a kid, but that yellowing piece of paper that Darren was holding on to for dear life was covered with the scrawl of a madman.

It was unreadable. But that’s why it was cool.

Darren couldn’t read it, so I asked him why he even bothered to bring the damn thing with him. He kept saying, “Redux, redux, redux.” Man, he was one weird dude.

So I threw him out of my room, called Erick, and told him to act like a goddamn producer and produce me a goddamn schedule.

I ignored the goddamn schedule. I didn’t think the cosmos would mind.

Since I was dealing with a bunch of nonacting actors, a cameraman who had problems communicating with anybody who didn’t operate in his bizarre-o orbit—which was everybody—a makeup and effects guy who hadn’t made up or effected anything
but computers for the last three-some-odd decades, and an overtired director who, just one week ago, had gunned down and killed his zombified friend, I thought it best to keep things simple.

So. Day one, we’d shoot Tobe’s intro, then we’d have Claire do her cue card thing, then Theo would kill her off, then we’d send her on her merry way. And we had a very good reason for doing that first. I don’t like using the “C” word, but Tobe was right: That girl was a grade-A cunt.

Then that night, William, Theo, and I would gather up the roadkill, and Tobe and Helen would steal some leather jackets, then we’d converge at Tobe’s room at the Four Seasons and make ourselves a gator. That was the only thing I was looking forward to: bringing a pile of dead animals in and out of a four-star hotel.

Day two, the alligator scene. That was going to be a logistical nightmare, no two ways about it. I expected it to be an eighteen-hour day. Good thing nobody on the crew was union.

Day three I planned to keep somewhat flexible, because there was a chance we’d have to finish off the alligator scene. After that, it would be all Theo and Helen. Attack, after attack, after attack.

Day four, the car wreck. I hoped Darren could handle all the moving around with the camera. I hoped.

Day five, establishing shots and actual human interaction. I saved that for last, because by that point, I was sure we’d need an easy day, and since there were only about five minutes of real dialogue in the entire movie, we could knock that out on the quick.

Day six through who-knows-when, edit this damn thing as fast as possible. Why the need for speed? Because thanks to a sympathetic movie theater manager named Marcus Frost,
Destiny Express Redux
was premiering at the Regal Arbor Cinema on September 1.

I took care of all that—the schedule, booking the theater, and some other logistical crap that I don’t remember—in about four
hours. Turns out that doing the producing thing wasn’t all that difficult. I don’t know what Scott Rudin’s always complaining about.

My primary concern about the end product was the gore factor. Even though it was a piece of rat dung,
Destiny Express
was solidly disgusting. I know I have the ability and intestinal fortitude to be as repulsive as Tarantino or Roth, but we were on a budget, and it wasn’t like we had the luxury of watching dailies or anything. So I put on my blinders, shot it, and hoped it’d look properly gross on the big screen.

Listen, I love Tobe, and I think he’s a true artist, but
Destiny Express
stunk, and
Destiny Express Redux
wasn’t going to be any better.

The first thing we shot was Claire’s cue card intro, and even though she was a beautiful woman, and even though I did the best I could with what I had to work with, she looked ridiculous in that Catholic schoolgirl outfit. Sixtysomething women, no matter how well preserved they might be, should never wear plaid skirts with thigh-high stockings.