THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story (6 page)

“What crap is this?”

This wasn’t the work of evil
druids
, the
filmmaker thought as he shook off the other feelings. Probably just Brent and
some of the other local kids having fun at his expense.
Ha Ha!
Loveless
kicked the stones away and entered the house. Suddenly, he didn’t feel very
good.

With a stiff drink in hand and
beer as a chaser, the filmmaker sat on the couch in front of the roaring blaze
in the fireplace and opened a new document on his laptop in the screenwriting
program. What would this movie be called? And then it came to him in a flash of
inspiration that always seemed to operate independent of conscious thought.
The
Black Album.
Seemingly in response, coyotes began to howl outside his
window. Loveless got up, went out onto the balcony and looked out into the
forest that was his backyard. A full moon sat high and clear in a night sky
full of stars. He couldn’t see the predatory dogs, but he could hear them, hear
the direction they were baying from. This howling began to amplify as more
coyotes showed up. There had to be at least thirty of them up on the hill now.
An animalistic choir. Intimidated, the filmmaker went back inside quietly,
hoping they didn’t hear him. On a whim, Loveless went down into the playroom
below and searched through the closet. Something had caught his attention the
other day when he was down there. Something that he now had reason to find. In
the very back of the closet was an old record player.
Why not?
Loveless
thought as he hauled it upstairs.

In the spirit of the project he
was embarking on, the filmmaker took the record out of the black sleeve. He
marveled at the glossy texture of the vinyl record. It’s day had come and gone,
but there was something about holding a record in your hands that was so much
more tactile, more real than a CD or iPod. And the quality of the sound that
such creations produced, well it was like the difference between film and
video. Video was clearer, sharper. But film evoked emotion with its soft focus
and rich saturated colors. Progress demanded CDs and digital video. But purists
and artists still yearned for vinyl and celluloid. Maybe technological
advancements in the arts were just different, not better.

The filmmaker put the Mathaluh
single on the record player. Both still worked. The music that came drifting
out surprised Loveless. It was good. Haunting and good. Spellbinding. The song
had a unique and unsettling sound all its own. If the band had lived, they
would have inevitably became famous as the people on the mountain had claimed
they would. That is, if they weren’t arrested for murder. The second thought
that came to the filmmaker’s mind was that he had to use this song in the
movie. It was too good not to. After all, there’s no one alive to contest the
rights. Hell, no one would even know where he got it from.

Loveless poured himself another
drink and looked at the clock. 8:27 p.m. The music seemed to seep into his
mind, his very being. The filmmaker didn’t remember much more after that.

Loveless awoke curled up in a
ball on the floor in front of the fireplace. The fire was still blazing. Harsh
sunlight blasted in through the glass balcony doors. He was wearing his jeans
and nothing else. Beads of sweat glistened on his skin from the heat of fire
and sunlight. The filmmaker was foggy to say the least.

Crap, I got drunk, passed out and
didn’t write a God damn thing,
was all Loveless could think.
What a fucken loser!

He looked at the clock. It was
11:52 a.m. Snatches of memories or a dream began to come back to him.
The
filmmaker was partying with Lizzy, Brent, Carla, Toby, and some of the other
kids from the Rock, drinking beer, doing shots, blazing. They began dancing
around Loveless as he danced feverishly in the center of the circle, eyes half
closed. Nordic black metal - called by some Satanic rock - erupted out of
stereo speakers. The young girls were being physically seductive, laughing.
The
image of this in his head was distorted, stretched, liquefied.

“No way. No God damn way. I would
never have partied with underage kids,” the filmmaker told himself. “This has
to be a dream. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t have happened.” But the living
room around him bore signs of a party, beer bottles, shot glasses, food. The
song pages and Satanic tomes were all about. They looked like they had been
pored over intensely. The Ouija board sat by the fireplace. There were pillows
on the floor around it, as if it had been played by three or four people.
Loveless, with a massive hangover, staggered to the refrigerator and found an
ice-cold bottled water. He held it to his head for nearly a minute, then gulped
it down all at once. Rushing into the bathroom at the end of the hall, the
filmmaker prayed to the porcelain god. Once there was nothing left in his
stomach, he dry heaved heavily for several painful seconds. Loveless went back
to the living room and plopped down on the couch next to his laptop.

He talked to himself out loud,
“The worst thing is, I didn’t write a friggin’ thing.” Loveless’ mouth froze on
the last syllable as he opened the laptop and under “The Black Album” saw a
full page of writing. Scrolling through, he found page after page of not a
script, but a story. It stopped abruptly on page forty-nine. There was no
ending. Loveless had no recollection of anything, let alone writing this. “How
the hell-” His astonishment was compounded when he saw the day next to the time
on the computer toolbar:
Sunday
.

“Sunday?” The last complete
memory Loveless had was of pouring himself a stiff one and sitting in front of
the laptop. On Friday night. All the rest were vapor snippets, real, dreamt or
imagined. This couldn’t be right, the filmmaker thought. He opened the front door
and looked outside. A stiff wind hit his shirtless frame. Loveless pulled a
hoodie over his head, slipped on his sneakers without benefit of socks, and
climbed the stairs outside the house to the main street. He walked all the way
to the nearest house, which wasn’t near at all. In front of the house he found
a local newspaper sitting on the front lawn. It was the fat Sunday edition of
the mountain newspaper.

“What the fuck, man?” Loveless
looked around and indeed the surrounding neighborhood had that sleepy Sunday
feel. There was no weekday traffic and he spotted families on their way home
from church, dressed in their Sunday best. It was surreal to say the least.

In a daze, the filmmaker went
back to his cabin home. He walked around for several minutes shaking his head,
muttering to himself, “This just isn’t possible. I can’t just have nearly two
days unaccounted for.” More flashes of partying with the mountain’s youth
washed over him in waves.
In these flashes he was laughing insanely. Brent
was egging him on. Lizzy and Carla were jumping up and down on the sofa. Toby
was standing in the middle of the room trancelike, his hands raised in the air.
All the while that chilling unintelligible music played on.

The filmmaker stifled all his
confusion as he sat back down on the couch. He began to read the story on his
laptop. In moments, he was engulfed in it, absorbed, captivated. An hour later,
Loveless sat back and put the computer aside. The story, if you could call it
that - in spots it was pure stream of consciousness from the main character’s
point of view - was eerily good. It was different. That was for sure. It wasn’t
at all the traditional horror movie. It incorporated much of the Mathaluh
legend in it, but at the same time smartly fictionalized it, made it a bigger
storyline, more commercially-viable. The story had a strange vibe. It all took
place in one day, a night and the following morning. It was also full of
spelling and grammatical errors, words and dialogue run together as if it had
been typed in a mad fury, without heed for stopping or going back. It was truly
a diamond in the rough and would take the filmmaker at least two weeks to
really hone both story and characters, format into a screenplay, and fashion
into a movie that could be produced. Since it took place mainly in one house
and there were not many main characters, it would be a simple shoot from a
production point of view.

Loveless had total belief in this
work.
His work.
He may not remember having written it, but it was
definitely his work. The dialogue and set-ups were pure Loveless, whether he
remembered them or not. What he was concerned about was what was fact and what
was fiction regarding the lost weekend. The filmmaker practically prayed that
he had dreamt partying with the teen populace.

I’m not that kind of guy. I
wouldn’t have partied with kids.

Would I?

Chapter
Three

Revision

FADE IN:

These were the first words a
screenwriter or filmmaker put on the first page of every screenplay. This was
the starting point. Loveless’ hands practically shook with anticipation as he
began writing the script that had slowly been seeping into his soul and nearly
every waking thought ever since
that weekend.
That weekend which was
only last weekend. The filmmaker was obsessed with this film. His film.
Loveless was even dreaming scenes from the story, vividly. They jarred him from
his sleep - heartbeat elevated - drove him to his keyboard. The filmmaker had
wanted inspiration. Well this was it, at its most extreme. Plus, if he ever
wanted to entertain the prospect of a good night's sleep again, he would have
to get this screenplay out of him; he had to give birth to the gestating
cerebral fetal creation that was kicking and screaming inside the womb that was
his mind. However, sleep was the last thing Loveless was thinking of.

He was on the path now.

Most stories, especially spooky
stories, started with a grim, scary prologue to set-up the parable, capture our
attention and imagination and draw us into this world. A world of blood
splatter and grisly death. In this instance, the prologue takes place decades
earlier in the Arrowhead Mountains.

Excerpt from screenplay:
A
c
ard over black screen reads: RIM FOREST- 1977. As the card dissolves, the
black screen becomes a night time sky full of stars. Below this, we see the
rooftops of homes sprinkled throughout forest and trees, many with billowing
smoke rising out of scorched brick chimneys. We close on a very large, very old
house in the woods, off by itself. Oddly, it has a colorful stained-glass window
on the front door. Something you'd see in a church, not  a home. 

Loveless stopped typing when he
heard the doorbell. He looked outside a nearby window. It was already early
evening. Not expecting anybody - the filmmaker didn’t really know anyone on the
mountain - he frowned and answered the front door. Two witches, a mummy and a
zombie stood on his front porch.

“Trick or treat,” the monsters
chimed altogether.

The filmmaker was stupefied for a
second. Then he realized it was Halloween. Loveless smiled. It was a good thing
he had thought about it earlier in the week and had stocked up.

“Treat! Be right back.” The
filmmaker went to his kitchen and filled several bowls with an assortment of
candy. He returned to the front door and distributed the treats liberally. As
the monsters thanked him and ran off gleefully to their next house, Loveless
had a realization and called after one of the dashing witches, “See ya later,
Lizzy.”

The girl looked back once and
giggled before disappearing into the dark.

“Guess I’m not going to get much
work done tonight.”

This did give the filmmaker an
idea as he returned to his writing. Since the movie takes place pretty much all
in one night, why not make it a special night indeed. His hands typed away on
the laptop with this new thought.

We close on the jack-o’-lantern
sitting on the porch of the house with the stained-glass window. In slow
motion, in the foreground, bodies flit and dance past screen to surreal effect:
witches, zombies, mummies. On any other night this would have been strange. But
not on this night. Halloween night.

Music drifts up from the
basement. Things always tended to drift up from basements. Camera moves in on
the basement window. Inside, fifteen year old HENRY KRASSNER - longish blond
hair, thin chin - sits rocking out to a fast-paced song playing on the record
player turntable. From the unmade twin bed and disheveled youthful belongings
in view behind him, it is clear that Henry has made the basement his own
private teenage sanctum. Angle on spinning record. The name of the band on the
label is Mathaluh. The setting is given an eerie pall by the green light
emanating from the moon colored lava lamp in the corner, its twisted creations
casting unearthly shadows on the wall as they rise and fall. On this wall,
amidst these shadows, we see a string of newspaper articles, cut out, taped up.
From them, we learn the following: legendary rock band Mathaluh is two months
dead. Their private plane crashed into the Arrowhead Mountains with all band
members aboard, including the enigmatic lead singer Jeremy Jared. A night after
the plane crash, the warehouse containing all the copies of Mathaluh’s
unreleased new album burnt to the ground. On the same night, the recording
studio containing the masters of all the songs on the album, was also destroyed
by a blaze the fire department deemed suspicious. Authorities believed the
fires to be the work of a Christian fundamentalist group who had accused the
rock band of allegedly murdering a missing underage groupie during a satanic
ritual. The girl was last seen backstage with the band after a concert, six
months prior. Police investigated, but found no evidence of the band's
involvement in the girl's disappearance. Without a body or witnesses, there
wasn't much to go on. Rumors of their apparent involvement in the occult merely
served to sky-rocket the band's legend and popularity even more. Only three
promotional copies of Mathaluh’s album still existed somewhere out there in the
world, given away to three fans as part of a radio show contest days before the
plane crash.

Those fans and the albums they
won would never be heard from again after tonight. Henry is one of those
contest winners.

But the teenager is thinking
about none of this now. He’s too busy painting a homemade Ouija board. The
sharp folding knife the boy pulls out of his pocket glints moon green light as
he flips it open and runs the sharp edge of the steel blade slowly across his
left palm, making a thin incision. Henry closes his hand tightly and lets the blood
run down through his clenched fist into a little paint jar, commingling with
the bright red paint already in it. Taking a paint brush, the boy stirs both
blood and paint together, then uses it to write Mathaluh across the top of the
Ouija board. The finishing touch. Henry smiles, tilting his head as if
listening to someone or something. He can hear things now we can't. This is his
Hell board. It calls to him. The boy places both hands on the planchette,
fashioned cartoon-ishly after a bloodshot eyeball. The planchette immediately
drags his hands across the board to the letter P, then another letter. Then
another. The teen should be scared. Instead, he's fascinated.

“Play - it - backwards,” Henry
says, putting the letters altogether. Momentary confusion. Then his eyes drift
to the record on the turntable. A smile peels slowly across the teenager's
face.

Two thirteen year old trick-or-treaters,
a CLOWN and a VAMPIRE, have no idea of any of this when they arrive at the
house nearly an hour later. The hand-written sign stuck to the outside of the
stained-glass window reads: HAUNTED HOUSE. Below that: COME ON IN. The dwelling
is dark, moonlight bleeding through the curtains of the many windows in the
home. The trick-or-treaters enter. Wandering around the immense house, the
clown quickly loses sight of his friend. Clown's POV: There are no decorations.
There are no hanging ghosts made out of white bed sheets, no atmospheric
lighting, no scary howling sound effects. There is just darkness. From the
expression on the boy's face, he doesn't think much of the haunted house.
"This blows." Muffled sounds come from the living room. Looking for
the vampire, the clown follows the sounds back. "Hey, man. Where ya at?
Let's get out of here. Place is lame."

No answer.

The clown makes out a bowl of
cookies on an end table and helps himself. He stops, makes a face, spits the
cookies out. The cookies are damp, salty. "What the-?" The clown
turns on a nearby lamp. He gags vehemently. The cookies have been doused with
fresh blood.

The lamp light illuminates
something else, on the couch.

The clown approaches slowly,
scared, but still hoping this is some kind of elaborate Halloween prank being
played on him by the older Henry and his vampire friend. However, the boy
vampire sits motionless on the couch covered in a clear plastic tarp. Through
the plastic, the clown can already see that the vampire’s throat has been cut
from ear to ear, his eyes blankly staring outward, a frozen expression of
horror permanently etched on his face. Under the tarp, blood still continues to
gush out of the fresh wound. On the floor table between the couch and an easy
chair that sits across from it in a dark corner, a hunting knife sticks up out
of a jack-o’-lantern, blood congealing on the blade.

Mathaluh’s slow haunting “Dark
Ballad” begins to play, starting low. It’s at that moment that the clown,
frozen in place, senses someone sitting in the easy chair in the pitch black
corner. Henry leans forward, out of that darkness and hisses, “Trick or treat, smell
my feet, give me something good to eat.” The silver revolver in his hand gleams
as he lifts the gun out of his lap, eyes full of murderous intent, and glee.

The music grows louder now as the
clown begins to run. The front door swings shut in his face. It won’t open. The
house won't let the clown leave. It wants him. The boy hears the chair creak as
Henry rises from it in the living room. The music fills the house now as it
distorts into something ugly. Something perverted. It begins to play backwards.
In between the unholy gibberish, the clown can make out, “Kill In the name of
Mathaluh. Kill in the name of Lord Satan. Kill to live. Live to kill.” It isn’t
just one voice. It seems to be different voices, many voices, all at once,
disjointed, echoing, rising and falling in pitch. These voices are male,
female, old, young. The words seem to follow the scared clown like a wraith.

Desperate, the clown scrambles up
the nearby staircase. In the upper hallway, he tries a number of doors. All
locked. The bathroom door isn’t. The clown rushes inside. He pushes aside the
window curtain to let moonlight in. That’s when he sees HENRY'S MOTHER, hanging
from the shower curtain rod like a grotesque marionette, covered in blood from
multiple stab wounds. The clown can hear Henry’s creaky footsteps coming up the
stairs. The boy backs out of the bathroom, tries more doors. They're all
locked. The clown tries a door that leads to the master bedroom. It opens. The
boy runs inside. Pitch black, then a lamp with a flickering light bulb comes to
life all on its own, stuttering strobe-like before finally revealing HENRY'S
FATHER. He lays serenely in bed, his hands folded across his upper-chest. An
assortment of kitchen knives stick up out of his bloated gut. The man never
woke up. He never saw it coming. Bare teeth and a gum-line stick out through a
mouth that has been meticulously cut into a jack-o'-lantern's smile. The sheets
are soaked red. The wood floor is covered in a reflective crimson puddle. The
clown scrambles, slipping on the dead man’s blood as he runs back out into the
hallway. On hands and knees, he looks up and sees Henry. The older boy smiles.

"Henry, please don't,"
is all the little clown can manage.                                                            

From outside the house, we hear a
blood-curdling scream. We see the muzzle flash through an upstairs window. We
hear the gunshot.

Henry staggers back down the
staircase. Passing a hall mirror hanging on the wall by a coatrack, he lifts
his blood-splattered face to look in. Instead of his reflection, Henry sees the
smiling wicked face of the demon Jeremy, then a flash of images of the dead and
departed. At first, we see a hideous demon lurking in the bathroom. This is
what Henry saw. Henry attacks. The demon becomes merely his terrified mother,
being murdered by her only son. The deformed sideshow freak with three eyes
sleeping in his parent's bed, becomes merely the corpse of his father. The
deadly vampire in the living room turns into just a kid in a costume with fake
plastic glow-in-the-dark fangs. The killer clown melts into just a little boy
in a costume and face paint with a gunshot wound to the head, whimpering as he
dies alone and scared in the upstairs hallway. Fantasy has given way to
reality. The truth. The monsters Henry thought he was slaying were his family,
friends. This Halloween night he has been tricked. The teenager tenses as he
fights his possession with every ounce of resolve he has left. “No.” For a
moment, his face replaces the demon's in the mirror. Henry repeats his solemn
vow again, “No!”

The house becomes even darker,
all at once, and cold. When the teenager breathes out, he can see his own
breath swirling out, drifting throughout, coming to life. It's as cold as a
tomb. Henry's not alone. He turns and sees the little girl in the white dress
who stands in the living room. She's not a day older than thirteen. She'll
never be a day older than thirteen. The little girl looks lost. Her face is
sad, sad for Henry. The LOST GIRL is pale, like a corpse. Or a ghost.

"Are you lost?" Henry
asks.

"Aren't we all?" the
lost girl answers. No breath leaves her mouth when she talks. In a whisper, the
girl recites grim lore, "The demon Jeremy has one eve to compel or trick
you into killing in his name. All Hallow's Eve. Then your soul goes to the hot
place while he’s freed from the inferno- and, he wears your body. He gets to be
you.”