Dark Matter Presents Haunted Reels, page 1
STORIES FROM THE MINDS OF PROFESSIONAL FILMMAKERS
Copyright © 2023 Dark Matter INK, LLC
Introduction copyright © 2023 C. Robert Cargill
Pages 373–375 constitute an extension of this copyright page.
This book is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s or artist’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Dark Matter INK paperback edition July 2023.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Curated by David Lawson Jr.
Copy Edited by Rob Carroll, Jonothan Pickering
Book Design and Layout by Rob Carroll
Cover Art by Olly Jeavons
Cover Design by Rob Carroll
ISBN 978-1-958598-13-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-958598-33-7 (eBook)
ISBN 978-1-958598-34-4 (audiobook)
darkmatter-ink.com
STORIES FROM THE MINDS OF PROFESSIONAL FILMMAKERS
CURATED BY
DAVID LAWSON JR.
This book is dedicated to all the filmmakers, storytellers, and artists pushing the boulder up that hill.
It is also dedicated to my wife, Cathy, and daughter, Clara, without whom I wouldn’t be half the man that I am.
—David Lawson Jr.
Contents
Introduction
C. Robert Cargill
“Natalie Fears Recurrence” And Other Letters the Psychiatrist Recommended She Write
B. J. Colangelo
The Gloom
Jay Baruchel
Desire Path
Malachi Moore
It Stood Above Me
C. Robert Cargill
A Story with A Beginning and No End
Aaron Moorhead
Ilimu
Wanjiru Njendu
THE BEGINNING
Izzy Lee
Grim
Graham Skipper
Spells
Gary Sherman
Vox Canis
Carl Lucas
Hologram Store
Brea Grant
The World Often Ends
Justin Benson
FuGaZi
Janina Gavankar & Russo Schelling
Breathe
Nick Peterson
The Man Who Saved the World
Jared Moshe
Sprout
Jordan Goldstein
The Deception of Youth
Sarah Bolger
Dead No Longer
Owen Egerton
This Is Not My Face
Gigi Saul Guerrero
Roll The Bones
Ariel Vida
Weavers
Gille Klabin
Yeast
Lola Blanc
Detroit
Michael Dunker
Muzzle
Brett Pierce & Drew Pierce
Midnight: a series of letters
A. T. White
The Fiancée Comes to Town
Cezil Reed
It Comes Back
Elise Finnerty & Estellle Girard-Parks
Strange to Me
Kyra Gardner
Towards the Light
David Lawson Jr.
About the Authors
Content Warning
This anthology contains content that may be unsuitable for certain audiences. Stories include foul language, disturbing imagery, and graphic depictions of sex and violence. Reader discretion is advised.
Introduction
C. Robert Cargill
Many years ago, my good friend Joe Lynch had his film Mayhem accepted into the SXSW Film Festival—a prestigious Austin-based multimedia festival, covering interactive (software), music, and movies. The film track is a huge launching point for independent genre and documentary films, but the popularity of the fest means hotel rooms across the city sell out months—sometimes a year—in advance. Joe was left with a film in a big festival, but no place to stay for its three showings. He reached out, and I let him crash at my place for a week in our guest room.
While there, between screenings, he and I spent most nights out on my porch, drinking beers and telling industry war stories. Our ups, our downs, our inspirations, and sometimes we got deeply personal. Joe called it “porch beers.” When he went back to LA. and people asked him about the experience, in addition to discussing the screenings, he told many of them, “If you get down to Austin, make sure to have porch beers with Cargill.”
A few months later, someone did just that. A friend reached out and said he was flying into Austin in a matter of hours and was told he needed to have “porch beers.” I had nothing pressing, so I picked him and a few of his crew members up from the airport, and we drank on the porch until dawn, once again swapping our war stories, commiserating, and just having a great time talking about work in a purely cathartic way.
He went back to LA and began telling friends: “If you get down to Austin, make sure to have porch beers with Cargill.”
And from then on, whenever they were in town, calls and texts came in from filmmakers wanting to have “porch beers.”
Within a few years, people began requesting to come over during the three major Austin film events of the year: SXSW, the screenwriter-centric Austin Film Festival, and the genre bacchanalia that is Fantastic Fest. By 2019, I was hosting over a dozen porch beers a year, with upwards of a dozen filmmakers a night sitting on the porch, swapping the stories they couldn’t tell at the festival—both terrible and triumphant—all under the auspice of one rule: what was said at porch beers stayed at porch beers. And that held. The stories told there always stayed there. First-time genre filmmakers mingled with A-listers—writers, directors, actors, producers, editors, composers. We were all filmmakers at porch beers, and we learned firsthand that we were not alone. Making movies is fucking hard. Sometimes really fucking hard. It can drain you, grind you down into dust, even sometimes traumatize you. But we’ve all been there, and the catharsis of talking with your peers about your trials and tribulations can be amazing. Fantastic Fest 2019 saw eight porch beers in a row, one for each night of the fest.
Then 2020 hit. SXSW was the very first major event to cancel. Then Chattanooga Film Festival, a favorite regional festival of many on the circuit, had to cancel their in-person portion. We were all stuck inside, our industry and careers left entirely uncertain, as we all found ourselves inside of a horror movie.
Three filmmakers who had attended several porch beers in the past—Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, and David Lawson Jr.—reached out and asked if they could use the name “porch beers” for something they were planning. They’d grown stir crazy during lockdown, and one of the things they lamented missing the most was sitting around and drinking with other filmmakers. So they wondered: What if we did it digitally? I told them I didn’t have a trademark or anything on the name, but loved that they wanted to rekindle the experience, if even in a limited capacity.
And thus the Zoom-room version of porch beers was born. Every Thursday night, starting at 8:30 p.m. PST, the room opened, and filmmakers from all walks of life would filter in. Our youngest filmmaker was a twenty-one-year-old fresh out of film school; our oldest was in his mid-seventies and had directed films many of us had grown up on and been inspired by. Over the course of the pandemic, nearly a hundred filmmakers would join the room—some only once, others week in and week out, come rain or shine. Some nights would only host half a dozen for an intimate chat; other nights would see twenty different filmmakers hanging out at once, for hours at a time.
Some jokingly referred to it as “Thursday Night Therapy.” Others used it to navigate their current development nightmares, knowing full well someone in the room might have the answer to their woes, all still under that cone of silence. And over the course of three years, numerous deep, close friendships formed in that room. I have over two dozen truly amazing close friends that I hadn’t even met in person until years into our friendship.
In 2022, many of us got together for the first time at the Fantasia Film Festival, and then shortly thereafter had a thirty-filmmaker in-person porch beers, reviving the tradition at Fantastic Fest. Somewhere along the line, a discussion was had that we all wanted to do something together. This book is that something. What you hold in your hands is the physical manifestation of numerous filmmakers’ emotional survival of the global pandemic. There’s a lot we all lost during those years, but for the authors of this book, something wonderful was gained.
These are our nightmares. These are the echoes of the things we’ve all been through. Horror is catharsis; it is pure, unbridled empathy. This is the distillation of three years of discussing filmmaking, our lives, and what it means to make genre, particularly horror. And we hope you enjoy it.
“Natalie Fears Recurrence” And Other Letters the Psychiatrist Recommended She Write
B. J. Colangelo
&
I think Dr. Paslawski exclusively bathes in peppermint and tea tree oil. I’m going to dread our sessions because every time I enter her office, the smell of menthol slaps me across the face as if I’ve committed some blasphemous crime in the eyes of the invasive plant community. Tea tree oil is an antifungal, so she’s only telling on herself.
Why am I starting this way? Probably because I don’t want to do this. No, not probably. I really, really don’t want to fucking do this.
Okay. So. I’m Natalie. I’m twenty-six. Hi. Nice to meet you—whoever ends up reading this.
My girlfriend brought me here hoping they’d help me or whatever, and now I’m sitting at a desk covered in a layer of film from what feels like hastily applied disinfectant, and my nose is STILL recovering from the sting of cheap peppermint while I play “Dear Diary.”
“Natalie fears recurrence,” she said to me.
At least she doesn’t call it hallucinations.
Someone scratched a pointy looking heart at the top of this desk near the little dip where crayons sit. The linework looks too thick to have been a safety pin. It was probably a paper clip. But…who would need a paper clip? And who would have a casual paperclip at the ready in the middle of a therapy session?
Someone who needs therapy, clearly.
I shouldn’t talk shit about the mysterious paperclip carver. They could be very nice for all I know. Or they could be someone who skins cats alive with paper clips and squashes their flesh between their toes. But how did they get it in here? My tits are hanging past my belly button because underwire bras are on the ban list, next to shoelaces and spiral notebooks. A girl who thought aliens were sending her messages through her refrigerator magnets pulled hers out and slit her throat with it a few years back in the middle of the common area, and now my lower back has to suffer.
It’s a real crock, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Maybe I’m just “projecting my own insecurities onto a perfect stranger.” Okay, but in all seriousness, I hate when people say that. Sometimes it just feels good to aimlessly judge someone without it having to be deeply interwoven with my own TrAuMa or whatever. Then again, I’m the asshole on my third 5150 hold in two years, so who the fuck am I to complain?
Okay. So.
Recurrence.
Everyone keeps saying that I’m here for my own safety, but there is no safety. I feel his presence humming through my veins like laying on the floor in front of an amplifier overwhelmed by interference. It just keeps getting louder. He’s out there. Waiting for just one millisecond of weakness, and then he’ll take me.
If it happens again, it will kill me.
And he’s coming.
I want to go home.
• • •
Things I Promise Not to Take for Granted When I’m Home Again
Underwire Bras
The Hitachi Magic Wand
Crunchwrap Supremes
When I Forget to Close the Curtains and the Sun Wakes Me Up
Bad Playlists for Long Drives
The Way Aria’s Hair Dye Stains Everything We Own Red
Showering Without Shoes
The Weird Smell of Aria’s Ears When She Doesn’t Clean Them
Glitter that Refuses to be Vacuumed
The Instant Warmth When Aria Nestles Into Me While She Sleeps and For a Moment, Time Stops and I Forget How to Breathe but I Know I’m Alive Because She’s Pressed Against Me…
Lint Rollers
• • •
She was still able to see me during intake. I stood there, nude, and she just stared at me through the wire mesh glass. She didn’t blink. Not even once. It was her only defense against the tears welling in her eyes. I don’t blame her for calling me in.
He was starting to inch inside of me again.
We keep the fan on at night to drown out the constant bickering of our neighbors and their screaming kids. I hadn’t shaved in a while so I thought I was just feeling the air current moving around my leg hair or something. Aria was fast asleep and she was wearing these fuzzy cashmere socks my mom gave for her birthday last winter, so I would have known if it was her playing a game of midnight footsie with me.
It wasn’t.
It was him.
I looked down toward my feet, just past the rolling hill of my body enveloped in our dingy comforter, to see his jagged smile curling through the cracks around his mouth. The same smile he’s been giving me for seven years. I felt him steal the words from my throat when I tried to scream, “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!” so all I could muster was a squeak and a bemused “Help.”
He ran through every single hair on my calf and stopped when he reached the scar on the back of my thigh. His touch felt like covering your skin with salt and pressing an ice cube against it—a touch so cold that it burns. I pressed my eyes closed so tightly that the remnants of mascara my cold cream couldn’t wash away seared into my tear ducts. My head began to shake something violent.
I heard Aria choke and I panicked. The burning was gone. Somehow, he’d changed targets and he was after her. I knew it. He’d had his way with me and now he wanted the only thing in my life I’ve ever loved. I couldn’t let him. I turned over, the comforter flew off of my body and knocked over the half-empty glass of water on my nightstand. I jolted upright and braced myself for absolute carnage and saw that she was…
Fine.
She had choked a little on the spit pooling in her mouth. I looked back to my feet and he was gone. My heart was beating so loudly I was sure she could hear it, but between the fan and her snoring (she only snores when she sleeps on her back), she didn’t budge. She didn’t wake up. I sat there and listened to her breath slip through her teeth, to the sound of the fan and the way it jostled the leaves of the Lady Palm in the corner, to the spilled water dripping from the nightstand to floorboards.
Thank fuck we don’t have carpeting.
I don’t think Aria likes it when I talk about him. Then again, does anyone really like hearing about the people who have been inside your girlfriend before they met you? This would be so much easier if he was someone I let fuck me before I figured out I was gay, but how do you tell someone, “Hey, six years before we met, I was possessed by a demon who called himself Carcirath, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life in agonizing terror, waiting for him to take over my body once and for all?”
Fuck.
They are never letting me out of here.
MARCH 13th
It’s 3 a.m. I usually don’t sleep the first night I’m admitted. Maybe an hour or so, but it’s not the best place for, you know, relaxation or whatever. The woman in the next room is coming down off something. My money’s on meth because it’s the easiest thing to get in this city. If you can’t buy it, there’s sure as shit enough tutorials online that teach how to make it. I didn’t think it was possible to hear someone sweat, but reality has a fun way of proving me wrong. She’s a mom. Her kids must miss her terribly.
I like the night guard. His name’s Antwan, and he snuck me a blue Gatorade. He was here the last time I had to be admitted, so he knows I’m good for it. I told Aria on the drive up here that I like this place best because it’s connected to the hospital, which means we get food from the hospital kitchen. In the hierarchy of shitty food, I think it looks something like:
Regular Hospital
Public School Cafeteria
In-Flight Airline Meal
Prison
Psychiatric Hospital
Tonight was an embarrassing attempt at mac & cheese. The noodles were mushy, the cheese was powder-based, and it 100% tasted like it was made by a white dude making minimum wage. Maybe this is the kind of opportunity offered to whomever comes in last place on Iron Chef. Or like, you know how there are Juilliard graduates who don’t turn out to be Viola Davis or Oscar Isaac and wind up as actors in mystery dinner theatre? Being the head chef at a psychiatric hospital seems like the culinary school equivalent.
Aria took me to my favorite restaurant the night before I got here. It’s a small Vietnamese place connected to a Vietnamese grocery store, a hair salon, and a nail salon. A family immigrated to the area and bought an entire city block’s worth of storefronts. Walking between Wadsworth and 55th feels like stepping into another world. It’s as if someone plucked out a neighborhood from their hometown and dropped it next to the bus station.
