The filmmaker half expected a pirate hook up the ass. Still, he marveled at this expression of nature. You couldn't buy production value like this. Being the only one on the road without fog lights, Loveless had to pull over more than once to let a line of locals drive past who tossed him scornful looks. The filmmaker’s evil black stare back said, Give me a break, fucknuts! First time up the mountain, okay? Loveless had found out from his friend Griffin that the locals called people who didn't live in the mountains “flatlanders.” He thought, They probably just call us that so we would reciprocate by calling them highlanders. They must love that. This brought to mind one of the filmmaker's favorite eighties cult films “Highlander,” a fantasy about immortals who do battle with one another throughout the ages. The classic song “Who Wants to Live Forever” from the movie soundtrack by the iconic rock group Queen popped in Loveless’ head. He hummed it the rest of the way up the mountain.
Loveless reached the top and followed the sign that said Arrowhead. As he got closer to town, the fog peeled back. The town was small, smaller than Loveless expected. There was only one movie theater on the mountain. It played all of four movies and didn't have the latest releases. That was the filmmaker's idea of roughing it. There were only two supermarkets in Lake Arrowhead. Loveless grabbed a burger in a greasy spoon restaurant frequented by locals, half of whom looked like lumberjacks, women included. It seemed the mountains township was made up of two factions. One faction was well-to-do older retired couples, the types who had resided in places like the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. They were living out their twilight years in scenic and rustic Lake Arrowhead - the Beverly Hills of the mountains. The other faction was the people who had lived there all of their lives. They populated the poorer surrounding areas - Twin Peaks, Crestline, and Running Springs. Places where the average public school education stopped at fifth grade. They definitely had that small town vibe. In Loveless’ head he heard the fiddle music from the movie "Deliverance."
‘You've got a purdee mouth there, boy.’
Loveless was told by one chatty-katty young waitress with a mouthful of braces that there were a number of shops and restaurants by the lake mainly for the tourists. But any exploration would have to take place tomorrow. Loveless wanted to find his buddy's cabin home before nightfall. The fog had buoyed that decision.
As soon as Loveless left town, headed in the direction of his soon-to-be dwelling, the fog picked up again. There were strange sights in the rapidly darkening night. He saw a teen boy and girl hitchhiking. It had been a very long time since Loveless could remember seeing anyone hitchhiking, at least not anyone who wasn't an aged hippie relic from a long dead peace movement or a crack whore looking for a totally different type of ride. The two teens, not more than thirteen or fourteen, definitely weren't hippies. They were heavy metal rocker types with a smidgen of Goth, replete in their regalia of ripped jeans, black concert tee-shirts, dyed jet black hair, stud belts and bad attitudes. The boy wore an army surplus jacket. The girl had a beat-up denim jacket covered with band patches. Loveless didn't pick them up, but looked back in his rearview mirror with mild adult concern. They were walking along a blind curve with no shoulder or sidewalk, just hills and cars zooming by. The filmmaker soon found out that hitchhiking was the cool and accepted mode of transportation for the underage youth of the mountains.
Something was trotting along on the shoulder beside Loveless’ car. There was a break in the fog and he saw what it was. A coyote. It looked at him without an ounce of concern, then trotted nonchalantly down the hill, into the woods.
Loveless found the cabin home, which like many of the homes on the mountain, was built on the side of a steep hill. The filmmaker had to park at the top of the hill and take a long series of rickety old wooden steps down to the house. He made a note to himself to replace a number of these steps before he tripped and broke his neck. Loveless could see from the top of the staircase that there was a carport on the other side of the house. Use of the carport was discouraged by the condition of the pavement, which was badly cracked by the steady growth of a large tree whose massive roots had, over time, created an upheaval in the cement. The utility road that led to the carport was also twisted, unpaved and full of rocks of varying and intimidating sizes. Loveless saw the tiny sprinkling of homes, none closer than a quarter of a mile, then dense woods. It was already dark from the fog. Now the sun was setting. Which meant in a few minutes it would be pitch black.
It took several tries before the key Griffin had given Loveless opened the door. The filmmaker prayed the electricity was still working. The prospect of walking into a dark house that he didn’t know his way around at night didn’t sound like fun. He should have thought about this before and set out from LA earlier in the day. Loveless had the flashlight from the car in hand. Expect the best, prepare for the worst. What if some mountain lion had made the uninhabited cabin home its den for the winter? The filmmaker’s imagination picked a bad time to suddenly start working on him. He squelched these thoughts and opened the door. Loveless stuck his hand in and tried the light switch by the door. Click! Illumination failed him. Griffin had told Loveless where the power box was. The good news was that it was located on the outside of the house. Now the real question was, would it work? He flipped all the circuits. Loveless saw a light shine instantly through the half open front door. On the way in, he walked through a thick web, eating a mouth full of cobwebs and possibly a small spider.
Inside, the filmmaker was greeted by a quaint living room with a vaulted ceiling. To the right was the kitchen and a hall that led to a bedroom and the master bedroom, which was smallish, and a bathroom at the end of the hallway. A staircase led down to what he guessed was the basement. Loveless would investigate that last. The filmmaker flipped lights on as he moved through the house. Back in the living room, he saw there was a fireplace, complete with wood and starter logs. Next to it was a glass door that led out onto the balcony. The large balcony, which was above a lower deck directly outside the basement, looked down onto the carport in the back and out into the woods. Loveless went out onto the balcony. Boards creaked under his feet. Some of these would need replacing as well. To the left of him was a much larger home, three stories. It was the nearest house to his cabin home, but was still at least a quarter of a mile away.
It was now dark. Night fell quickly here in the mountains. Loveless would have to remember that. As his eyes became accustomed to the night, he noticed there was someone on the balcony of the house nearest him. Small cigarette clouds rose from the balcony like smoke signals. The person, merely a shadow figure, waved and went inside. Loveless got the distinct impression that it was a woman, but this was only a guess.
Inside, the filmmaker decided to mark his first night in this new temporary residence by starting a fire. It was cold enough already here in the mountains, despite only being October, and J.D. had always liked fires. He made sure the flue was open, lit the starter log, placed small branches and then a real log on top of them. In no time, a fire was blazing. The filmmaker looked around. The fire warmed the decor. With wood furnishings, carvings of bears and wolves and a reddish wood floor, the fire gave the place the finishing touch needed to complete the classic rustic mountain look. There was a staircase to the side that led up to a small loft that looked like it had once been a child’s play room. Loveless remembered that Griffin had lived up here when he was married and had a small son. He moved back to LA during the divorce. His wife moved to Fresno with the kid.
Although Loveless really didn’t want to, he knew he had to check the basement before he went to bed. The filmmaker had already decided to sleep on the big, soft couch in front of the fireplace for his first night. It was becoming nice and toasty there. He would bring his things down from the SUV in the morning. But Loveless knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he didn’t check the basement.
The light switch at the top of the staircase didn’t work. The light bulb was probably burnt out. Probably. For a sec
ond, the filmmaker was tempted to turn back. After all, movies were his business. In how many thrillers, horror movies, and gritty dramas was a midnight stroll through a dark basement the undoing of many a cinematic day-player? The basement was always the place where hideous, grisly acts - affronts to God and man - were carried out in secret, outside the light of day and goodness. It’s where evil dwelt. Where demons crept up out of. But that was the movies. This was the real world. The really real world. Loveless got out his flashlight and proceeded down into a dank darkness, where the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees. At the bottom of the stairs there were two rooms, one to the right, one to the left. Damn, why couldn’t it have just been one wide open area I could surveil with a single sweep of my flashlight? the filmmaker thought. He felt inside each room for the light switch, but couldn’t find them. They weren’t near the entrance. Great. A few feet in front of him was the back door. He saw a light switch there and flipped it on. A light bulb outside the door stuttered then lit up. Light immediately shone in through the small window on the door. The window was broken, the glass had fallen inward. There was also a small trickle of blood. Someone had cut themselves while reaching in to unlock the door. Loveless tensed. His breathing quickened. Options were running through his head. One was to get the hell out of there. The other was to find the light.
The filmmaker swung the flashlight around towards the room on the left. What if they were still here? Loveless stood completely still for a full minute, barely breathing. Finally, lacking any further patience, he pushed forward. Entering the room, he finally saw the light switch and turned it on. It was a few feet deeper in the room than he had expected, not as close to the entrance. Now Loveless remembered something else his friend Griffin had said. Something about converting part of the basement into a guest bedroom, which is what the filmmaker stood in. The bedroom was small and functional. Oddly, nothing in it looked like it had been disturbed by the vandals. Loveless turned his investigation to the other room. Loveless looked in exactly the same place for the light switch and found it. What the hell was it Griffin had converted this part of the basement into? Then a thought bubbled to the surface. He remembered that his friend Griffin had a dark side. Loveless hadn’t seen Griffin’s wife Helen since the divorce, which was odd since they had all frequented the same haunts at one time. Months later, he was told she had moved out of town. Convenient. Maybe his friend’s dark side was darker than he had imagined. Divorce was a twisted bitch. Maybe a bitter Griffin had converted the basement into a torture chamber. Maybe parts of Helen were hanging on meat hooks right in front of him. In the moment before he flicked the switch, the filmmaker got the impression that this room was large. Click! The light bulb dangling naked from the ceiling, gave off dim light. It was a large family room. A Foosball table sat in the corner. A big old projection TV, couch, ping-pong table, and a cabinet full of board games filled out the rest of the place. The walls were painted a bright cheerful yellow. Framed photos of the family and crayon drawings by the kid hung on the walls. There was a closet in the corner where Loveless later discovered cardboard boxes full of old baby clothes, worn suitcases, an antique record player, and a large metal lock box.
The filmmaker stepped a little further into the room and felt a crunch under the heel of his boot. He saw a lamp on an end table and turned it on. It lit the area directly in front of him. On the floor was a shrine of some sort, candles on little trays set out in the shape of a circle. Inside the circle, smaller candles made what was unmistakably a Pentagram, the Satanic star. The candles alternated between black, red, and white. They were all burnt down to leaning gobs of dried wax, which Loveless had stepped on. While freaky, the filmmaker dismissed it as the work of bored mountain kids looking for kicks. This probably happened months ago. It had been awhile since Griffin had been up here. Loveless didn’t blame him: divorce tended to taint places with an overabundance of memories, both good and bad. For a second, the filmmaker could see his friend in his mind’s eye, laughing with his wife and son in the room as they played foosball, cheated at board games, and watched movies on video. A wave of empathy washed over Loveless with the stolen moment. If it had been a flashback scene in a movie the filmmaker was directing, he would have lit it hot, with stirring shadows, shot it shaky handheld with a grainy stock of film to give it a home movie look. But this wasn’t a movie. Griffin didn’t have the heart to return to his former family home by himself and just wanted Loveless up there to make sure the place was still in one piece.
The filmmaker smiled at the candles, an overused stereotype. What was it about rural area teenagers and Satanic worship that went hand in hand so wonderfully? How many news reports had he read about teenagers cavorting in the woods with drugs, heavy metal death rock, a Satanic Black Mass ritual or two, and sex-capades. Loveless supposed there wasn’t too much to do in the small communities and the surrounding woods aside from that. Rite of passage stuff, that’s all. Just something to grow out of, a fleeting rebellion against daddy, mommy, God, and country. The cities had street gangs, extended families. The woods had Satan, the ultimate father figure, who would never disappoint because he so blatantly embraced evil, chaos, and perversion.
Loveless locked the back door. He found a plank of wood, a hammer and a box of nails and nailed the board over the broken window on the door. Eerily enough, this reminded the filmmaker of a scene out of the most terrifying movie he had watched as a kid, “Night of the Living Dead.” It was all the more terrifying because it was shot in black and white which made it seem shockingly real. It was the scene where the hero - oddly enough an African American man in 1960s Pennsylvania - boarded up a house, fortifying it so that the freshly resurrected zombies could not burst in and eat his flesh. What was the saying? “When there was no room left in Hell, the dead will roam the Earth.”
Loveless felt silly when he noticed the goose bumps on his arms. It was a cool night he told himself.
Chapter Two
Mathaluh Lives
After two weeks in Lake Arrowhead, Twin Peaks, Rim Forest, and the surrounding mountain townships, the filmmaker was acclimating nicely, although he hadn’t yet visited the town of Crestline. Each day was slightly cooler than the one before it and a little more Halloweenie. Despite this, Loveless still hadn’t come up with a story for his movie or even an idea for a story. He hadn’t written a lick since he had quite literally climbed to the mountain top. The filmmaker had decided on a genre: horror, probably due to the time of year and the fact that Halloween was unequivocally his favorite holiday. Having grown up on a steady diet of comic books, horror films, and sci-fi novellas, Loveless loved Halloween. Halloween had a way of waking people up to the possibility of the fantastic in life, if only for a month. The likelihood of the existence of UFOs, psychic spies, and angry spirits not only became more real, but fun as well. J.D. Loveless carried this Halloween spirit with him all year round. Although highly skeptical about the actuality of these incredulous forces, he loved the possibility of them anyway. For the filmmaker, it somehow made life a little less mundane.
So Loveless decided to do a horror film. However, he planned on approaching it with an art-house sensibility. He didn’t want to do some ‘B’ straight to video slasher film with a big jiggly boobed actress, rapidly descending towards an unsavory career in porn, bouncing across screen before the opening credits had even faded. He wanted whatever film he made to have an independent spirit and a fresh perspective on the classic horror movie. Something that was entertaining, took a realistic approach to the horror, and spoke to its audience metaphorically with a spattering of psychological horror. Since he was currently in the mountains, Loveless decided he wanted to do a claustrophobic small town horror movie with few locations and a big theme. Like “Night of the Living Dead” or “Halloween.” These movies not only scared the bejesus out of you, but also explored such weighty themes as racism and how and why human monsters are created. The filmmaker felt secure in his decision to commit to the horror genre by virtu
e of the fact that it was one of the few genres that did not demand name actors. After compiling a list, the filmmaker confirmed his suspicions. Out of the top twenty best horror films of all time, only two or three of them were studio fare with known stars.
Loveless had decided to write a horror film exactly five days after arriving in the Arrowhead Mountains. He had entertained a number of ideas. None held his attention for more than an hour. The hard thing about writing a horror script is that just about every conceivable subject matter has already been turned into a film. Loveless wanted something original, a subject that had never been made into a movie before. That’s what eluded him. That’s what stone-walled him. Just when the filmmaker would think he had something good and ideas started to bounce around his brain, he would remember a film that had already been made about that concept. This went on for nine days.
On the tenth day something happened. Loveless ventured into Crestline. Whereas Lake Arrowhead was the upscale community of the mountains, Crestline leaned heavily towards poverty and White trash. It was a world of broken down homes, junk-filled backyards fiercely defended by dirty dogs, and adult residents with elementary school level educations and more than a few teeth missing from years of Meth abuse. The kids were all restless and disenfranchised, echoing the same whiny lament, ‘When I turn eighteen, I’m gonna get off this damn mountain.’ In that regard, Loveless could relate to them. Growing up in a ghetto in Brooklyn, he often heard the same sentiment. The odd thing of it was, J.D. Loveless was one of the few people he had ever known to leave his neighborhood. He told everyone he was moving to Hollywood and then actually moved. The filmmaker knew most of these kids would never leave the mountain. It was a world unto itself. It wasn’t practical to commute. It was too far down the mountain to San Bernardino and once it got cold, between the ice, fog, snow and mudslides, it became a perilous proposition. Ironically, many families actually moved to the mountains with that bright notion of having the best of both worlds. Their kids would grow up in a small, friendly, safe, and affordable community, while they would commute and make big city money. Most of these families held up for about six months max before begrudgingly placing ‘for sale’ signs on their front lawns. Those who stayed became mountain people. This was their life now and the world below became a distant memory.
THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story Page 3