THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story

by Carlton Kenneth Holder

  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 card over black screen reads: RIM FOREST- 19
77. 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!”