by Derek Milman
Yeah, you too, I want to say, but don’t. She fixes her smile on me, sipping champagne. Her pearl-colored blouse neatly tucked into that black skirt makes me think of bad porn about offices after hours and misbehaving secretaries. It feels wrong to be having these thoughts. This is Hayley, Hugo and Aida’s daughter. I want to punch myself in the head.
“You should see this.” She leads me down the lawn. Past a row of sycamores there’s a roped-off area, a hole in the ground with a mound of neon-green Astroturf, and a man with a shovel.
I rub the back of my neck. “He’s really being buried on the grounds?”
She nods. “It’s what he wanted. Isn’t it . . . sort of beautiful?”
“It’s creepy as fuck, Hayley.”
I’m not processing any of this the way I should. I feel removed, like this is happening to someone else, and I’m just a witness. But no matter what happens today, I’m going to see my dad, that’s for sure. I can’t even remember when I saw him last.
My dad was great at keeping me at a distance—and he’d make a point of it. That’s when I hated him the most. But I hated myself when I’d realize how desperate I was for any kind of connection with him. It was tough accepting that I simply didn’t matter to him. That I was nothing more than a footnote to his famous, busy, bloated life, his persona always larger, more immediate than me. As a kid, I found that trying to get something more from him was always a losing game that I’d keep playing.
“Are you okay?” Hayley asks me.
“Yeah.” My skin feels kind of hot, though.
She points to an old oak, which once had a tire swing attached to it. “We used to play in the pachysandra under that tree. Remember?”
Hayley and I would throw a jar of swirled marbles into the air and then hunt in the pachysandra, like truffle-sniffing pigs, for every single one. I was six; Hayley was eight.
The castle and grounds have been passed down through generations of my mother’s family—a family of business magnates and industrialists. Mental illness ran in their DNA as fervently as fair skin and blue eyes runs in others.
My great-grandfather was an insane gardener. Literally. Both those things. I’ll never forget coming outside one day when I was little, just as spring had sprung, to find exotic flowers blooming everywhere—the grounds exploding with crazy combinations of color, like I had just entered an acid-coated Oz.
Of course a week later it rained jumping spiders, their webbing coating the tops of trees and shrubs like shredded silken parachutes. The crew ran around tearing off their shirts, flitting them out of their hair. A production assistant was reduced to tears.
Hugo told me that some of the blossoming trees, imported from exotic locales, also held exotic spider eggs. Soon after the flowers bloomed, the eggs hatched too. That’s when I first learned that with beauty comes a little bit of terror. That pretty much sums up my childhood here: something cool would happen immediately followed by something traumatic. I could never deal with that.
I give Hayley a half grin, half grimace.
“What?” she says.
“I just don’t get how you’ve been able to deal with this place for so long.”
She shrugs. “I grew up here.”
“Me too,” I say, feeling weirdly defensive all of a sudden, because we both know it was only to a point. I left. She stayed.
“I have my own apartment, in the Hitchcock Wing, overlooking the Shakespeare garden,” she says. “I’m head of accounts now.”
“Really? Oren made you head of accounts?”
“Well, your dad did.”
“Wow. Congrats!”
I’m happy for her, but I also suddenly feel a little jealous. A question I used to ask myself a lot bubbles up to the surface: What if I hadn’t left? Part of me never stopped wondering what my life would have been like had I stayed here.
“Thank you,” says Hayley. “The studio’s failing, though.”
“But hasn’t it always been? Wasn’t that, like, always the point?”
“Well. It wasn’t explicitly the point. Criterion reissued Black Blood Picnic and The Vomit of Sergei Ramona.”
I press my sneaker into the grass. “I heard.”
“That was huge for your dad. He felt validated, he was so proud.”
I nod. “Good for him.”
“Hey, we still make four features a year, and we have solid VOD sales. People still buy DVDs, if you can believe it. Parts of Central Europe love us—we’re huge in Slovakia, for some reason, and our films still get a theatrical release there. But it isn’t enough. The landscape is changing.”
“You mean people don’t want to watch grainy creature features anymore? Because it’s not, like, 1952?”
Hayley, noting my sarcasm, folds her arms. Any talk of the studio or my dad instantly creates this rush of bitterness in me. I offset that by making fun of this place—since it’s super easy. But it’s my family legacy, so it’s interesting to see Hayley be the one all defensive and proud about Moldavia.
Keeping her eyes on me, she takes another sip and taps her fingers on the rim of her flute. “Well,” she says, “your dad was considering an offer from Rusty Blade Films to buy the studio.”
“Really?” This surprises me. Rusty Blade makes soulless torture porn—everything my dad hates, and everything Moldavia stands apart from. They made like a billion dollars from this insanely gory series called Backpacker about spoiled rich kids in Europe who get kidnapped and put in snuff films.
In the last one, the bratty daughter of a Silicon Valley titan dies by getting wormed. That’s right: wormed. Little green inchworms are dropped down her throat, one at a time (it’s a long scene), while she slowly chokes to death, to the delight of pervy mobsters with unplaceable accents wearing Karl Lagerfeld sunglasses who bid millions for the only existing tape.
If my dad was going to align himself in any way with Rusty Blade, he might have actually been considering his estate and our inheritance, given his condition. But that really doesn’t sound like him, so maybe it was the dementia.
The grave digger walks by, dirt-coated shovel slung over his shoulder. “Alas, poor Yorick!” I shout after him, but he doesn’t turn around. I’m about to ask Hayley what time this whole thing is going to start, when Oren breaks free of the gaggle of clucking squeezers and starts making this hooting noise, hands cupped over his mouth.
I frown at him. “What the hell is he doing?”
“I think we’re starting,” says Hayley.
The crowd, more of them than I thought—who the hell are all these people?—start to converge on the center of the lawn, by the open grave. They creep from all corners of the vast estate in tight clusters, like a half-finished watercolor painting that got tipped upside down.
Suddenly, I see all these familiar faces popping out of the crowd—faces I haven’t seen for years, faces I had forgotten about, some with a little more age on them now—carpenters and grips and electricians, the dudes in the props department, the people in the kitchen, the makeup crew. Hunter Yates, the studio’s marketing director; the kids from the scenic design and special effects teams, teenagers when I knew them—now in their mid-twenties. A few of them hold babies.
There’s Elena Scaler, otherwise known as Mistress Moonshadow, a principal Moldavia actress, who films her famous web series, Live from Moldavia, somewhere deep in the bowels of the castle. I see Lorenzo Mayberry, the aging Italian lead actor of several Moldavia classics, standing in a clump with his costars, a small repertory company of Moldavia regulars known as the Spine Tinglers. Many of them have acted in Moldavia films for decades. Lorenzo, an icon in the horror underground, suffers from vertigo and narcolepsy. As my dad once famously snapped on the set of The Grinning Gargoyle: “Why the hell couldn’t he just be a drunk like everybody else?”
“My God, Dario, is that you?” Franklin Fletcher, the chief legal officer of Moldavia, and one of my dad’s closest confidants, cuts a clean path toward me, moving one or two squeezers aside with a
gentle push of shoulders. He’s dressed in a well-tailored dark suit, which matches his personality: organized, humorless, and efficient. I shake Franklin’s hand. He has a firm grip. “You’re all grown up,” he says, removing his tinted glasses. “I’m so sorry about your father. He lived a long life, and no one can say there’s a single minute of it he regrets.”
There has probably never been a truer statement made. I doubt my dad regrets a single thing he ever did, said, or made.
“How is the orphanage treating you?”
“We call it a group home,” I reply. “And I’m pretty happy there.”
Franklin flicks out his wrist to check the time on his gleaming Rolex—the same color as his slicked-back hair. “I’m glad to hear that. How old are you now?”
“He’s seventeen,” says Hayley, who’s moved in close by my side, her fingers lightly grazing my arm.
“My goodness,” says Franklin. “Soon you’ll be off to college.”
“We’ll see.” Pretty much nothing else could heighten my stress right now than hearing the word college. It’s just another decision to make, more uncertainty. And I’m already lost in the disorienting maze of whatever today is going to be.
“Plenty of time to decide, I’m sure,” says Franklin.
“Not really.”
Franklin doesn’t hear me. He’s scanning the crowd and then turns toward the castle, where a long white carpet is being laid out, leading all the way from the glass doors of the rear atrium to the gravesite.
As it gets more crowded, other people start coming over to me, hands grasping, in a Dickensian sort of way, like only I can anchor them in this storm of madness. Barbara Pandova, who helped design the iconic mummy monster in The Entombment of Freddie Fell, gives me a kiss on each cheek.
Samantha Childress, the icy but brilliant head costume designer, wearing this lavender scarf-and-gown ensemble, gives me a hug. Joaquin Joseph, a carpenter when I knew him, and now an internationally recognized production designer, starts sobbing into my shoulder. With each new person, there’s another punch of emotion flooding through me, threatening me with a total loss of control.
People are paying their respects. This is an actual funeral. Even though—Jesus Christ, does anyone realize this?—my dad isn’t even dead yet! He’s really going to be buried alive. This is literally his last hour on earth. I wonder what that must feel like: to know everything is about to end. Every dream, thought, or fear he’s ever had—thrust into oblivion. Everyone he’s ever known he’ll never see again after today.
Surprisingly, I’ve never thought that much about death; it was always an abstract concept, rendered even more unreal growing up around fake ghosts and monsters. But all of a sudden, I feel this prickling coldness. And now, the appropriate emotions, as if governed by a system of ingrained etiquette, seem to decide what’s going to take the lead. As the floodgates open, I get a terrific lump in my throat and my chest starts to feel leaden. “Shit,” I say, softly, to myself, digging my nails into my palm.
I feel grief. I was not expecting that at all.
The crowd of mourners seems to be multiplying. I’m losing the familiar faces in the throng of squeezers, some of them decked out in garish costumes and clownish makeup, many of them dressed, I now realize, as characters from classic Moldavia films.
Some of them hold calla lilies, my dad’s favorite flower, which makes an appearance, however briefly, in almost every one of his films. Ginger Borenville in Wolf Wife dies with one in her teeth after getting shot by a silver bullet from her philandering hairdresser husband (played by Lorenzo, of course).
Hayley explains to me that the funeral is semi-public—open to fans who purchased “tickets” through the painfully outdated Moldavia website.
I turn to her. “Are you serious?”
She nods, slowly.
I guess that explains all this insanity. Why am I even surprised? Of course this is what my dad would want; he always maintained an obsessive relationship with his hard-core fan base—drawing them in while simultaneously keeping them at arm’s length.
I’m older now, my hair is long, tied up into a droopy man-bun, and I haven’t shaved, but (and I was afraid this was going to happen) I get recognized anyway.
Once word begins to spread that I’m here, at least a dozen squeezers come up to me asking for an autograph. Thing is, like it or not, I am firmly enmeshed in Moldavia lore since Zombie Children of the Harvest Sun. When I was twelve years old, my dad made me the star of one of his films. I played the main zombie kid, Alastair, who unites an undead army of hungry children against their very much still living parents and teachers. Hayley was in the movie too, and so was her mom, Aida. They were both great, in smaller roles.
Like me, they never appeared in another Moldavia movie again.
Zombie Children was critically panned. It has such a low score on Rotten Tomatoes they had to come up with a new level of bad, like I think it’s literally certified shit. But for squeezers the movie remains a late Moldavia favorite and has become this big cult thing. I’m probably the only kid in a group home to ever receive fan mail.
Just seeing the grounds again, and remembering growing up here, is giving me a reaction. Hives creep up on the inside of my wrist. My throat constricts.
My dad does his own thing, so there were no union rules, no child labor laws being enforced. Zombie Children was filmed entirely on the grounds, behind closed gates, as all Moldavia films are, with cast and crew living in the castle for the duration of the shoot. Although I had various tutors homeschooling me, or whatever, that stuff was always an afterthought.
Hugo usually did the normal dad stuff with me: playing catch, taking me on walks during my bits of downtime. My dad worked me hard, day and night, pretty much bullying me into giving what’s considered one of the great modern-day horror child performances, despite the overall movie being considered crap.
My dad was notorious for overworking his actors. He’d film screams until voices were completely shot. He felt there was a real terror that would creep into a scream after a certain point. He was always after that moment, that elusive truth. The scene in Hiss for a Kiss when disgraced fortune-teller Charlotte Lockwood sees a cobra slithering across her dining-room table is supposedly the longest scream ever put on film—at two whole minutes. “Scream all night!” my dad would say, gleefully. It became a catchphrase. He started saying it whenever he was about to film a new scene.
He was even harsher with me. He knew he could push me further—and be brutal in an unchecked way—than he could with any other actor he ever directed.
More squeezers run over to me, like I just escaped my booth at a horror convention. They’re getting more aggressive—wanting selfies and hugs, oblivious to the fact that I’m at my own dad’s funeral. I make a beeline away from them, my pulse racing.
Everywhere I look, I see a scene from a Moldavia movie. I spot the shrub where the half-devoured remains of Lionel Gimpin were found in Shapeshifter. I see the yellow rosebush where Parma Quiota was summarily dispatched by a gang of serial-killer ghosts in The Stranglers of Strangelove Cove. I see the tree where Puritans hanged teenage witch Betsy Norris in Dial W for Witchcraft. Over by the lattice gazebo demonologist Uriel Orloff was struck by lightning in Coal Black Soul. And by the big old fountain, where stone angels perpetually piss water, the vengeful countess Antonia Rigg started feeding her possessed pet Rottweiler junk food in Devil Dog.
I’m also very much aware of who I don’t see: namely, Hugo and Aida.
“You doing okay?” Hayley’s managed to find me in the scrum. As I turn to her, I start a little, because I didn’t notice the gold locket around her throat before. Now the light is hitting it just right, so it gleams. That’s my mom’s locket. I recognize the engraved profile of the little boy with the sapphire eye. His face snaps open; my mom had a little photo of me at two years old trimmed and glued inside.
I don’t get a chance to ask Hayley about it. The glass doors of the atrium suddenly
open, and four men in kilts, playing bagpipes, come marching down the long, white carpet.
I’m a little confused, since there’s not a drop of Scottish blood in my family.
Seven pallbearers, all in white tuxedos, appear behind the bagpipes, carrying out my dad, who also wears a white tux. He’s sitting up, leaning against the back of the velvet-lined dark-wood casket as if he’s taking a dip in a Jacuzzi. The pallbearers follow the procession of the bagpipes, all of them solemnly marching down the carpet from the castle to the gravesite. “Who the hell are we burying, Braveheart?”
“Bagpipes feature prominently in The Psychic Sisters of Edinburgh,” says Hayley. “He must be paying tribute. It’s one of your dad’s late favorites.”
“I didn’t know.” I haven’t seen any of the recent Moldavia films.
Hayley looks at me. “You stopped watching them, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” I watch the procession. “Hayley, what is all this? This is madness.”
My dad, clearly out of his mind, is blowing kisses and throwing calla lilies at everyone while holding a lit cigar in his other hand. People throw lilies back at him, so it all looks like one bizarre calla lily fight. Another pallbearer drags my dad’s oxygen tank behind the casket, head down, looking pretty grim, like he never got the memo that this is actually a giant yard party.
“This is what your dad wanted,” she says. “You know he gets what he wants.”
“How could he want this? Everyone’s acting like he’s already dead. We’re actually going to bury him alive?” I can’t fully comprehend what I’m seeing.
“This is how he felt he could take on death. He wanted to go on his own terms. Make his death a celebration of his life, leave with dignity.”
“Dignity? Hayley, he’s not in his right mind!”
“Thank you for coming!” my dad is saying. “Thank you!” He looks frail and shrunken, more so than I remember, which makes a weird match to his bright, maniacal energy. He got so old. He spots me, and his face changes: the lower half sort of falls, goes slack. He looks as if he’s desperately trying to see something through a wall of cotton.