by Greg Kihn
“It’s me, sir, Clint Stockbern.”
“What do you want?”
“I’ve got the money.”
“Let me see it.”
Clint held up the packet of cash to the view plate. “Six hundred dollars.”
The view plate slammed shut, the locks began to turn, and a half minute later the big door groaned open. Clint got the feeling that the old arch-topped entry hated to be used. It shrieked and moaned with an almost-human quality.
Landis stood in the doorway, a smaller man than Clint had expected, but every bit as feisty and unpleasant.
“Give it.” Clint passed him the packet. Woodley shoved it in a pocket without comment. Clint watched and waited, his reporter’s senses taking in everything.
Woodley clutched a spit-soaked cigar and a cheap ballpoint pen, giving each equal physical attention. What is he writing, Clint wondered. A new screenplay? The afternoon came alive with possibilities.
The old man wore a maroon fifties-style, racetrack flash sport shirt and a pair of wrinkled gray pants. Everything he wore was shiny and threadbare, just like most of the upholstered furniture in the house.
The frown never left his aged, television face. Lines, almost too many for one lifetime, crisscrossed that landscape in angry vectors. He’d combed what little hair he had left from the sides of his head across the top, giving it a thin, greasy blanket of yellowish-white thatch. It seemed an ill-advised hairstyle for Landis, one that only made him appear even more cheap and depraved. His eyes were deep-set in his pale face, ruthlessly scanning for carrion, two red wet spots in a gaunt mask.
He stepped aside and drew his arm across his chest, “Come in, kid,” he mumbled.
Clint followed him into another world. As Woodley shuffled a few paces ahead of Clint, the young man could see that Woodley was wearing battered bedroom slippers instead of shoes.
Once inside, the first thing Clint noticed was the smell.
An oppressive atmosphere of mustiness and decay permeated the high-ceilinged rooms. Air had been denied circulation here for a long time. Clint had been in old people’s houses before, and they all had that peculiar, closed-in odor. His grandmother’s house smelled like that, except that hers had the subtle bouquet of mothballs in addition to the dusty stillness. Here, in Woodley’s horror hotel, the mothballs had been replaced by the sour scent of cheap cigars and rotgut whiskey. And something else, too, something unclean and animal, a fetid, corporeal stench. Clint guessed the place hadn’t been cleaned in years.
The interior of Woodley’s house resembled a Gothic rummage sale furnished primarily from film sets: oversize wooden chairs, a standing suit of armor, a Styrofoam coat of arms, some faded plastic plants. Like the movies he’d made, the mansion was a low-budget, fright night turkey, the second feature at a drive-in in some dismal town where there was nothing better to do on Saturday night.
It reminded Clint of the old man’s cinematic visions, and his own earliest memories.
He had learned something about himself watching that twisted crap, something that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He discovered that he loved to be scared.
“Isn’t that the Iron Lady from I Married a Vampire?” Clint asked. Fake blood, now the color of dried chocolate, flowed down the side of it in gaudy patterns.
“Yeah, I used it in Attack of the Haunted Saucer, too,” Landis said through phlegm-clogged vocal cords. Clint could hear the old man wheeze. He sounded like he had emphysema. “Buzzy Haller built it. We loved it so much we tried to use it in every damn picture. The thing photographed great. It’s made of plywood and polyurethane foam.”
“Attack of the Haunted Saucer is one of my all-time favorites,” Clint said.
“Yeah,” Landis coughed. “A real piece of work. Did you read what The New Yorker said? They called it the worst movie of all time, can you imagine that?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard it called that, but I don’t see it that way. I recently saw it at a festival of fifties horror films, and the audience loved it.”
Landis rummaged through some papers and ignored him. He picked up a clipping and read, “Woodley’s trashy production is a depressing, hopelessly conducted farce. The acting, sets, plot, camera work, and laughable special effects all bear his indelible stamp of ugly cheapness. He makes Ed Wood look like Kurosawa. A big fat piece of crap!” He looked up at Clint and scowled. “Worst movie of all time? Fuck them. What do they know?”
Clint was about to answer when Woodley continued.
“What these guys don’t realize is that Attack of the Haunted Saucer was a quickie. I don’t argue that, but I defy anybody to make a feature-length movie for five thousand dollars in three days and have it show a profit. Even in 1956, which was a great year for low budgets, that was a record.”
Landis’s rage kept like bottled steam. Clint knew it was a ponderous cross for the retired filmmaker to bear, and he decided to keep the interview light … until the end.
They sat facing each other on an ancient sofa that belched and farted when Clint eased his slim frame into it. The old man collapsed into a battered, vinyl Universal-Lounger. A half-full bottle of generic whiskey dominated the tiny end table next to him. Woodley made no attempt to hide the fact that he enjoyed drinking the world’s cheapest booze in the middle of the afternoon.
“Want some?” he wheezed.
Clint shook his head.
“I guess you want to hear about Saucer, the so-called worst movie of all time,” Landis blurted out to Clint’s surprise.
“Yeah, among other things. How do you feel about that?” Clint asked, getting his notebook out and depressing the “RECORD” button on his cassette machine.
“Well, you gotta understand, making movies was different in those days.”
A flutter of wings and a high-pitched shriek interrupted Woodley and drove Clint from his chair in a burst of panic.
Something sailed over his head.
Woodley laughed, his throaty guffaw thick and mean.
“If you’re a red-blooded horror fan, you won’t mind my bats. There’s only a couple of them left, and they aren’t rabid.”
Clint noticed his hand shaking. He sat back down, his eyes scanning the rafters overhead.
“Scared the shit out of you, didn’t it?” Woodley said.
“Yes, sir, it did.”
“Good. Scaring people has been my main gig for over fifty years … and I still get a kick out of it.”
“You were saying that making movies was different in those days,” Clint prompted.
“Right. Well, all I can tell you is that we had to improvise all the time. We had to think on our feet. I’d like to see Spielberg or Lucas try to pull off some of the stuff we did. Forget it! Anybody can make a movie for fifty million dollars. Hell, it’s as simple as making a few phone calls. In those days, we were forced to really get creative. We put our balls on the line every time. These guys today don’t have a clue.”
Clint nodded. Good start, now let’s get the old fart to open up.
“What was your favorite film to work on?”
Woodley took a sip of the whiskey. It had been fermenting in the glass, looking like a curious mixture of motor oil and urine. Clint noticed a slick on top. The old man’s frown straightened slightly, then cracked. What passed for a smile on Landis Woodley’s face appeared as joyless as a dog baring its teeth.
“Favorite film? Let’s see … probably Blood Ghouls of Malibu. We got to work on the beach all day on that one, plus the late Jonathon Luboff was such a joy to work with. He was the consummate pro, always knew what to do. We never had to waste any time with him. Not like that idiot Tad Kingston.”
“Kingston gave you problems?”
Landis snorted unhealthily. “He was a royal pain in the ass. Of course, the kids loved him, so we had to use him. He did most of his acting with his hair.”
Clint laughed. The old man had made a joke. It was the last thing he’d expected.
“Did Buzzy Hal
ler have anything to do with that hair?”
“No. That’s about the only thing he didn’t have a hand in. The man was a real genius. He worked on every one of my productions, and believe me, if he couldn’t do it, it couldn’t be done. We were pretty close … used to play poker every week. He lived over at the Roosevelt Arms, a basement apartment. The Roosevelt’s a shit-hole, you know.”
Clint nodded. Buzzy Haller became a true legend around Hollywood and his special effects work ranked right up there with the best of them in the early days. It was Buzzy’s misfortune to fall in with the B-movie people, and he never had a decent budget to work with.
Also, Haller had a drinking problem. Judging from the look of Landis Woodley, it must have been the one true bond that held their friendship together. It seemed the height of irony that, in this town of successful drunks and dreamers, alcohol and imagination kept Buzzy Haller from working—until he killed himself.
Clint decided not to broach the subject of Buzzy’s suicide.
“Tell me about Luboff.”
“Jonathon was a master. He knew what to do when the cameras were rolling, I’ll tell you that. Unfortunately, the man had a major drug problem. He was addicted to heroin for twenty years. It was starting to affect his work toward the end.” Landis paused to relight his cigar.
“You helped Luboff, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I dragged him to the hospital a couple of times so he could kick. The guy was a real mess. You’d think that being a veteran actor with hundreds of films to his credit, the damn Screen Actors Guild would have covered his medical expenses, but they couldn’t have cared less.
“It was a real battle, but eventually we got them to cave in and foot a small part of the bill. You know, I was probably the only guy in Hollywood who gave two shits for Jonathon Luboff in the later years of his life.”
Clint nodded. “Some of his early work, like Curse of Nosferatu and Doctor Death, is Hall of Fame stuff.”
“They loved his accent. That Eastern European double-talk was the most imitated shit in town for a while. He was big box office, too, at one time. The man was an institution. Of course, at the end he was broke and strung out. Kinda sad, you know what I mean?
“When Luboff was in the hospital we put together a benefit at some theater downtown. We showed a few of his films … and nobody came. Not one fuckin’ person! Can you believe it? We didn’t sell a single ticket. That’s the way this town takes care of its own. But I will say this, the man was a class act, a sweetheart. Everybody in the crew loved him.”
The old man seemed to be softening; his voice became less hostile. Talking about Luboff had opened a door.
“Those scum-suckin’ pigs who ran the major studios forced us all out of business.” The old man’s voice cracked. “They drove that poor bastard Luboff to drugs, and Buzzy to drink. In Haller’s case, they said it was suicide … and there was a note. I saw it. It was in his own handwriting.”
“But his body was never found.”
Landis coughed again, spraying the air in front of him with an unhealthy blizzard of sepia-toned particles.
Clint leaned back.
“Right, no body. To tell you the truth I’m not sure I believe it even now. I guess it is possible that he went and threw himself off a cliff or into the ocean or something like that. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see old Buzz walk in here right now.”
Clint checked his notes. “He was a good friend, wasn’t he?”
“None better. And he was a real artist, too. When it came to clay and latex he could do anything. He made the monster suit for Blood Ghouls for a hundred dollars. The damn thing was so unwieldy that nobody could wear it, so Buzzy ended up playing the monster himself. He had to keep it on all day. We were shooting around the clock. Anybody else would have passed out. Not Buzzy. He built a flexible straw into the headpiece and sipped his vodka tonics for hours. If you watch the finished cut, you’ll see the monster starting to weave a little. That’s Buzz.”
Clint smiled. He had seen the finished product, and he knew exactly what Landis was talking about.
“That was one of my favorite monsters. It really seemed to breathe and have expression.”
“That was the thing about Buzzy—he could make a monster human. If there’s nothing human in a monster, it won’t scare you much. The trick is, you gotta make the audience see some of themselves in it. That’s when you scare the piss out of them. Buzzy knew that. That’s why he went the extra mile under all that latex.”
The old man leaned forward, his breath like kerosene. The more he leaned in, the farther Clint leaned back.
“Tell me the story about Attack of the Haunted Saucer.”
“You mean Buzzy’s effects?”
“Yeah, that’s a classic, and I’m sure our readers would love to hear the truth.”
Woodley sat back in his chair and took another sip of whiskey. Clint relaxed.
“We’d come to the end of the line on Saucers. The budget was gone. We were flat out broke, and I literally had only a few feet of film left. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but we still didn’t have an ending. We were screwed. I didn’t know what I was gonna do. We had these spaceships that had to be destroyed to save the earth and some footage of Tad Kingston telling Deborah DeLux not to worry, and that was it! No more money for actors, cameramen, not even a cup of coffee. So Buzzy glued some paper plates together, soaked ’em in gas from outa my Buick, and set ’em on fire. He threw ’em at the camera and I rolled the last of our film. It wasn’t great cinematography, but it gave us an ending. People paid to see that movie, too.”
Clint found himself enjoying the interview. This was just the kind of stuff he’d wanted. The readers would eat it up. The booze had loosened the old man’s tongue sufficiently. The time had come for Clint’s big scoop, and he felt the tension rise as he wondered how he would get into it.
“Ahh,” Clint stammered, “just last week I was reminded of another film you guys worked on.”
“Which one?”
Clint took a breath. “Well, I was researching another story, and I happened to be reading about the LA County Morgue …”
Landis squinted. “Yeah?”
“And it reminded me of a rumor that’s been floating around Hollywood for years.”
The old man’s face froze. His eyes bored into Clint’s face like a pair of blue steel drills.
“Yeah? What about it?”
Clint began to sweat. It surprised him how scared he felt just talking about it.
“Well, I was wondering if there was any truth to that rumor.”
Clint imagined Landis Woodley’s goodwill drying up like a desert stream. His voice took on an icy edge.
“What rumor is that?”
Clint cleared his throat.
“The rumor that you used real corpses in Cadaver?”
Silence.
Clint thought he’d blown it. The rumor happened to be one of those old Hollywood chestnuts repeated by every film student since 1957. Like the famous Tijuana donkey story and the Spanish fly myth, it was neither fact nor fiction. It had become legend.
“I guess it’s time I told the truth about this and got it off my chest,” Woodley sighed. “I’m sick of all this bullshit. People have been whispering behind my back for years, and it’s been haunting me. That rumor, that story, is what put me out of the feature films business.”
He stared at Clint, and the young man looked back at him, unblinking. Clint could imagine the old man reading his mind.
If he wanted to blame that rumor on why he was drummed out of the movie business, fine. Clint wasn’t about to mention the fifty other reasons, starting with the fact that his films stopped making money.
Clint knew from discussions with Roberta Bachman that the rumor had actually improved business for a short while. There had been talk that the old man himself had started it. Whether it was true or not, it had kept interest in the film sharp over the years, giving it a whole new cult audience as time
went by.
The old man cleared his throat and rocked back, warming to the task. “You have to remember the way we made movies back then, like I said, it was different. There were no rules. We took chances. The budgets were minuscule, time was tight, the business was bizarre. I don’t know, looking back, it all seems so … so grotesque.”
Clint checked his tape recorder.
Landis cleared his throat. “It was Buzzy’s idea. He figured out how to get those drawers open.”
2
“We were shooting at the morgue and we had to be out by 5:00 A.M. They let us work the graveyard shift, no pun intended. In those days you could do a location like that without too much crap, and of course we were in and out before anybody had a chance to complain. The LA County Morgue was a great place to shoot. It had been used in a bunch of cop shows, but never a horror movie. We were the first. I had gotten permission to shoot late-night as long as we were out by dawn, when the bodies started coming in from the night before. LA was bad even then. The morgue was a busy place.”
Landis Woodley stopped, tried to puff on his unlit cigar, and raised an eyebrow.
“You ever been to the morgue?”
Clint nodded.
“Inside?”
“Well, no, never inside,” Clint replied.
“It’s a scary place. Smells like a sausage factory in there. They keep it pretty cool, too. I guess that goes without saying. Everything you touch is sort of, I don’t know, clammy … Working down there all night was giving all of us the creeps.
“There was only one guy there, a custodian, and he liked wine. We were basically on our own.
“Anyway, we were getting twenty shots a night, a breakneck schedule. RKM was breathing down our backs like a pack of goddamn hyenas. They were outgrossing us over at National, making millions on the Unearthly Terror series. There was a war going on between the two film companies. They kept trying to outdo each other in the horror department. We found out that they were using pig’s blood and cow brains in Terror, trying to be the scariest, the bloodiest. Well, one thing led to another …”
Clint heard the bats flutter behind him and fought a natural inclination to duck. He lost.