In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Sleepless, I wandered Hollywood Boulevard amongst the hookers of both sexes. They looked in better shape than I did. Scored near Grauman’s Chinese. Did hopscotch on the handprints in the cement. Watched the stretches sail by to fame and fortune. Watched pimps at their toil. Sometimes someone wanted to shake my black hand, other times wanted to shake my white.

  In McDonald’s I picked up a discarded Enquirer and saw what I didn’t want to see: photographs of Doctor Bob leaving The Ivy with the winner of Bride on his arm. Lissom. Tanned. Augmented. A conglomerate of cheerleader from Wichita, swimmer from Oregon and pole-dancer from Yale. There she was, grinning for the cameras with her California dentition, just like I used to do.

  Yes, I sent him texts. The texts that they showed in court: I admit that. Yes, I said I was going to destroy him. Yes, I said I was more powerful than him now and he knew it. In many ways I wanted him to suffer. I hated him, pure and simple.

  But I didn’t kill her. I swear on my mother’s life.

  Yes, she came to my house. Obviously, because that’s where they found the body. But she came there, drunk and high, saying she wanted to reason with me and persuade me to mend broken bridges with Doctor Bob. When the prosecution claimed I abducted her, that I drugged her, that was all made up. She came to me doped up and in no fit state to drive home. I told her to use the bedroom, drive home with a clear head in the morning. It was raining, too, and I wasn’t sure this girl—any of her—would know where to find the switch for the windshield wipers. Her pole-dancer arms were flailing all flaky and I saw the scars on her wrists and on the taut, fat-free swimmer muscles of her shoulders.

  I put two calls in to Doctor Bob but they went to “message” so I hung up. She had two blocked numbers on her phone and my guess is she called someone to come pick her up while I was out.

  I had an appointment with a supplier because my anti-rejection drugs were low. Maybe I shouldn’t have left her but I did. Fact is, when the police found my fingerprints all over the carving knife—of course they did, it was in my house. From my kitchen. Anyway, their fingerprints were all over the damn thing too.

  I didn’t break the law. Not even in that slow-mo car chase along the interstate where I kept under the speed limit and so did they.

  I know I was found not guilty, but a good portion of the American people still believed I killed her. Thirty-two wounds in her body. Had to be some kind of … not human being. And I am. I know I am.

  But the public didn’t like it that way. They blamed American justice. Blamed money. Yes, I came out free, but was I free? Really free? No way. I was acquitted, but everyone watching the whole thing on TV thought it was justice bought by expensive lawyers and I was guilty as sin. They near as hell wanted to strap me to the chair right there and then, but there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it.

  God bless America.

  I had to sell my place on Mulholland Drive. Live out of hotel rooms. Pretty soon I was a cartoon on South Park. A cheap joke on Jon Stewart. Couldn’t get into The Ivy any more. Looked in at Doctor Bob, eating alone.

  Now, where am I?

  Plenty of new pitches to sell. Trouble is, I can’t even get in the room. Maybe it’s true that the saddest thing in Hollywood is not knowing your time is over.

  Now the personal appearances are in bars and strip joints smelling of semen and liquor. Not too unlike the anaesthetic, back in the day. I ask in Alfry’s voice if this signed photo, book, album is for them. They say, no, it’s for their mother. And that’s the killer. Nobody wants to say the autograph of the person who used to be something is for them.

  Night, I flip channels endlessly on the TV set in some motel, the cocktail in my veins making me heavy-lidded but nothing less than alert. If I see a clip of me I write it in my notebook. Radio stations, the same. Any of my songs, I chase them for royalties. I’m human. Everybody wants a piece of me, but I’m not giving myself away any more. Not for free, anyway.

  I look in the bathroom mirror and I see flab. Scrawn. Bone. Disease. Wrinkles. Puckers. Flaps. I’m wasting away. I’m a grey blob. What they didn’t say when they build you is that you die like everybody else. Only quicker. Six times quicker. The techniques weren’t registered and peer-reviewed, turns out. Nobody looked into the long-term effects of the anti-rejection regime. That’s why I’ve been eating like a horse and my body keeps nothing in but the toxins. When I was passing through Mississippi and collapsed at the wheel, the intern at the hospital said the protein was killing me, the fat, cholesterol, all of it. My body was like a chemical plant making poison. I said, “What? Cut the munchies?” He said, “No more munchies. No more midnight snacks. One more hamburger will kill you.”

  I’m a nineteen-year-old concoction, hurting like hell. Each part of me wants the other part of it back. It’s not a spiritual or mental longing, it’s a physical longing and it’s pain and it’s with me every sleepless second of the goddamned day.

  My only crime was, I wanted to be somebody.

  Trouble is, I was six people.

  At least six, in fact.

  To be honest, I lost count after the second penis.

  Maybe you can hear the music in the background, in the next room. They’re playing “Teenage Lobotomy” by the Ramones on the tinny radio beside my king-size bed.

  While I’m here, sitting on toilet pan, coughing up blood.

  Truthful? I’d be writing this the old-fashioned way, paper and pen, except Murph’s fingers are feeling like sausages and I’m getting those flashes again in the corner of Salvator’s left eye right now. They’re like fireworks. Hell, they’re like the fourth of July. That’s why I’m talking into this recorder. The one Doctor Bob gave me, way back. The one I needed for interviews, he explained. “They record you, but you record them. You have a record of what you say. They get it wrong, sue their ass.” Doctor Bob was full of good advice, till it all went wrong, which is why I guess I’m sitting here, wanting to set it all down, from the beginning. Like it was. Not like folks say it was. Not like the lies they’re saying about me out there.

  Half-an-hour ago I rang for a take-out and a mixed-race kid in a hoodie rang the doorbell, gave me a box with a triple bacon cheeseburger and large fries in it. Gave him a fifty. Figured, what the heck?

  I’ve got it in my hand now, the hamburger, Anthony’s fingers and Vince’s fingers sinking into the bun, the grease dripping onto the bathroom floor between my feet, feet I don’t recognize and never did. The smell of the processed cheese and beef thick and stagnant and lovely in its appalling richness—a big fat murderer. The intern was right. One more bite will kill me. I know it. The drugs were too much. The side-effects, I mean. Like steroids shrink your manhood, this shrinks me. The dairy, the fat. And nobody gave me a twelve-step. Nobody took me in.

  I texted Doctor Bob just before I started talking into this thing. He’ll be the first to know. He’ll come here and he’ll find me. Which is how it should be. There’s a completeness to that I think he’ll understand. For all that came between us, and boy, a lot did, I think we understood each other, deep down.

  That’s why I know, absolutely, this is what I have to do.

  Whether he listens to this story—whether anybody presses “Play” and listens, is up to them. Whether they care. Whether anybody cares, any more.

  All I know is, I’m taking a big mouthful. God, that tastes good … A great big mouthful, and I taste that meaty flavor on my tongue, and that juice sliding down my throat … And the crunch of the iceberg lettuce and the tang of the pickle and the sweetness of the tomato … God, oh God … And, you know what?

  I’m loving it.

  KIM NEWMAN

  Completist Heaven

  Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man from the Diogenes Club, all under his own name, and The Vampire Ge
nevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as “Jack Yeovil.”

  His nonfiction books include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit.

  He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (supplying the latter’s popular “Video Dungeon” column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television documentaries.

  Newman’s stories “Week Woman” and “Ubermensch” were adapted into episodes of the TV series The Hunger, and the latter tale was also turned into an Australian short film in 2009. Following his Radio 4 play Cry Babies, he wrote an episode (“Phish Phood”) for BBC Radio 7’s series The Man in Black, and he was a main contributor to the stage plays The Hallowe’en Sessions and The Ghost Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. He has also directed and written a tiny film, Missing Girl.

  The author’s most recent books include expanded reissues of his acclaimed Anno Dracula series, including the long-awaited fourth volume Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard; the Professor Moriarty novel The Hound of the d’Urbervilles, and the stand-alone novel An English Ghost Story (all from Titan Books), along with a much-enlarged edition of Nightmare Movies (from Bloomsbury).

  With Maura McHugh he scripted the comic book miniseries Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland for Dark Horse Comics. Illustrated by Tyler Crook, it is a spin-off from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series. His most recent novel is The Secrets of Drearecliff Grange (2015). Forthcoming fiction includes the novel Angels of Music.

  As Newman explains: “I was inspired to write ‘Completist Heaven’ by the sad case of a friend who ruined his mind and health noting movie trivia for a series of reference books.

  “Personally, I kicked the biscuit habit years ago. But it really annoys me when American magazines refer to a film which doesn’t exist called The Cat People, and I have twice looked at my DVD of Cat People to make sure they’re wrong …”

  I’m plumbing additional channels, homing on signals from as far away as Hilversum and Macao. With each twiddle, the dish outside revolves like Jodrell Bank stock footage from the Quatermass serials. Lightning crackles above the garden, approximating a Karloff-Lugosi mad lab insert shot from the 1930s.

  Unimaginable images and sounds are pulled down from the skies. With the new reflectors, this satellite system can not only haul in everything being broadcast but anything that has ever been broadcast. Shows listed as lost or wiped are beaming out to Alpha Centauri; now, those signals can be brought unscrambled back to Earth.

  This is my creation. Fueled by coffee bags and custard creams, I have substantially made the system myself, like Rex Reason assembling the Interocitor in This Island Earth. It was an interesting technical exercise, jacking in all the signal boosters and calibrating the dish to the minutest fraction. My redundancy money was well spent, despite what Ciaran said when she left for the last time.

  I admit it’s true: I could spend the rest of my life eating biscuits and watching repeats on television. There is so much to see, so much to discover …

  Just tuning the first channels, I come across a Patrick Troughton Doctor Who which does not officially survive, and a stumbling, live Sherlock Holmes from the late 1940s. If anyone on Mars or Skaro makes television programs, this dish will pick them up. To be honest, there is no need ever to leave the house except for groceries. Everything ever hurled out over the airwaves, on film or videotape, will turn up eventually. The full listings edition of What’s On TV looks like a telephone directory.

  This is Completist Heaven.

  Whoever assigns frequencies has a sense of humor, though it often takes minutes to get the joke. Channel 5 is a perfume infomercial. Chanel No. 5. Channels 18 to 30 are vérité footage of drunken Brits being obnoxious on holiday in Greece, with “The Birdy Song” on a tape-loop soundtrack. Channel 69 is Danish porno. Channel 86 is Get Smart reruns. Maxwell Smart was Agent 86. I clock a Martin Kosleck cameo in a vampire episode and make a mental note to list it on Kosleck’s file card. Channel 101 is disgusting true-life mondo horror, rats and bugs and atrocity and burial alive; in a minute, I remember that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Room 101 is where you face the most frightening thing in the world.

  What does that leave for Channel 1984?

  Channel 666 is either a director’s cut of The Omen or a Satanic televangelist. In the thousands, most of the channels are date-tied: Channel 1066 is a historical drama in unsubtitled Norman French; Channel 1492 is a collage of Columbus movies with Jim Dale being tortured by Marlon Brando; Channel 1776 is that Bilko episode set during the Revolutionary War. Channel 1789 is a miniseries about the French Revolution: Jane Seymour goes nobly to the guillotine while Morgan Fairchild knits furiously in the first row. It’s not in Maltin, Scheuer or Halliwell, so it must be new. I don’t count miniseries as movies, so I don’t have to watch further, though I’m sure that’s Reggie Nalder dropping the blade.

  I hit Channel 1818. Dyanne Thorne, a couple of melons down the front of her SS major’s uniform, tortures someone in black and white. A girl in a torn peasant blouse squeals unconvincingly as a rat eats cold lasagna off her exposed tummy. I figure this is a print of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS that I’ve never seen. I get out the file card for the film and my notes make no mention of a rat torture quite like this. This is the sort of revelation I pay the monthly fee for: it is quite possible no one has ever seen this version of the movie before. I take up my red ball pentel, and prepare to jot down any information. The store of human knowledge must always be added to.

  The crowning moment of my life was when my letter in Video Watchdog finally corrected all previous misinformation and established, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the correct German running time of Lycanthropus, aka Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory or I Married a Werewolf. Ciaran was especially cutting about that. Many people don’t understand, but without accuracy all scholarship is meaningless and the least we can do is lay down the parameters of what we are talking about. Now my mission in life is to force all periodicals and reference books to list Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General (the title as it appears on the screen) under M for Matthew rather than W for Witchfinder. Ignorant souls, starting with the film’s distributors, have been committing this error since 1968. Heathens who list the Michael Reeves movie under C for The Conqueror Worm are, of course, beneath contempt and not worth considering.

  The Ilsa movies are in color, so I fine-fiddle the knobs. Snow crackles across the image as the victim screams. No color appears. Ilsa gets out her nipple clamps, sneering in a bad accent, “Vellcome to SS Experiment Kemp Sex!” The camera pulls back, and on the next slab over from the abused girl lies the unmistakable bulk of a flat-headed, clumpy-booted, electrodes-on-the-neck, Universal-copyright Pierce-Karloff-Strange Frankenstein Monster.

  Puzzled and intrigued, I gnaw on a chocolate-coated ginger snap.

  An ident crawl along the bottom of the picture identifies the film: Channel 1818 Feature Presentation Frankenstein Meets the She-Wolf of the SS.

  Obviously, this must be some new retitling of a familiar movie. If the color came on, I could identify it. More twiddling is to no avail.

  I dig out Weldon’s Psychotronic Enclyclopedia, Glut’s The Frankenstein Catalog and Jones’ The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide. Frankenstein Meets the She-Wolf of the SS does not make these standard reference tools. I venture further: consulting Lee’s sadly-outdated Reference Guide to the Fantastic Film, Willis’s three-volume Horror and Science Fiction Films, my bound collection of Joe Bob’s We Are the Weird newsletter, some back issues of Shock Xpress, and such variably reliable sources as the Phantom’s Ultimate Video Guide and the mysterious Hoffmann’s Guide to SF, Horror and Fantasy Movies. No one lists a Frankenstein-Ilsa crossover. This is exciting, a discovery. I feel a thrill in my water, pull out a fresh file card, and wri
te down the title. I curse myself for having missed the credits.

  To celebrate, I hold a cheddar thin in my mouth and suck gently, until saliva seeps through the biscuit and dissolves it entirely. With my tongue, I work the paste bit by bit into my gullet. The sensation is exquisite.

  Officially, there are only three Ilsa movies (Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia) but Jesus Franco’s Greta, Hause Ohne Männer aka Wanda the Wicked Warden or Greta the Torturer, with Thorne in the title role of Greta-Wanda, is sometimes spuriously roped into the series. Could this be a hitherto-undiscovered entry in the Ilsa series, or some apocryphal adventure of a lookalike Greta, Gerta, Irma, Helga, Erika or Monika? The sync is just off, but I’m sure this is shot in English, not dubbed. A heel-clicking subordinate salutes and snaps “Heil Hitler, Major Ilsa” establishing this as indeed part of the Isla canon. The black and white bothers me still. Is this a flashback within a color film? That would be a bit artsy for Ilsa.

  The Nazi Bitch Queen is in an office, ranting. It’s definitely Dyanne Thorne (once seen, those melons are unmistakable) and from the relative lack of lines on her face, the movie has to be from the mid-1970s. Oddly, it looks good in black and white: less like a bad dupe which has lost color than a film lit for monochrome. The shadows gathering in the office as night falls make the scene look better than the cheesy images I remember from other Ilsa movies. Not James Wong Howe good, but at least George Robinson good.

  I look through Glut and Jones, trying to find a Thorne credit in a ’70s Frankenstein movie. Of course, just because a film is called Frankenstein Meets the She-Wolf of the SS doesn’t mean it’s a Frankenstein movie. Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror is a werewolf movie and several Japanese giant monster films have Frankenstein forced into their titles for German release, since Frankenstein is a generic term for monster in Germany. This must have been retitled since Glut came out, since he lists non-Frankenstein Frankenstein titles. With the proliferation of fly-by-night cable and video, some movies have multiple titles into double figures. I need three file cards just to list the alternate titles of Horror of the Blood Monsters or No profanar el sueño de los muertos. However, that Monster, noted in occasional cutaways, leads me to identify this tentatively as a genuine Frankenstein movie as well as an unknown Ilsa.