Horror Show

by Greg Kihn

  He dived to his side on the couch, keeping his head well below the horizon line of the back of the overstuffed monstrosity that protected him. Shivering with revulsion, he imagined their ugly little black bat-feet dancing through his hair, scratching his scalp as they frantically tried to escape.

  “Those bats bother you, don’t they?”

  Woodley coughed again, violently. He doubled over and gasped for breath in between the spasms. Despite the tremors in his hands, he managed to take another sip of whiskey, calming his convulsing frame.

  “I love ’em,” Woodley said at last, sliding back into the Naugahyde backrest of his adjustable Universal-Lounger. “They’re fourth generation, you know. They’ve been scaring chumps like you for years.”

  Clint blinked. What could he say? He righted himself and took a peek over his shoulder. The bats had settled.

  He compulsively checked his tape recorder yet again.

  “Yeah, they bother me. Bats give me the creeps. I didn’t expect it, you know?” Clint said.

  Woodley nodded. He knew.

  “Would you like to move outside and finish the interview out on the deck?” Clint asked, knowing what the answer would be.

  Woodley shook his head defiantly, then plowed ahead with his story as if the question had never been asked.

  “We were under the gun, over budget, the usual situation. My special effects budget was about a hundred bucks. You can’t make a good monster for that price, at least one that will scare people. Shit. I had two zombies in full makeup, Buzzy Haller and some other guy, some beatnik. I’d used them in every shot and I was concerned that the audience would recognize the same two faces. I needed something different. We were shooting a scene where one of the cadavers rises up from the slab and strangles Tad Kingston, who was playing his usual dim-wit teenager role.

  “I couldn’t have Buzzy do it, cause he’d been in the last shot. The other guy was no good either. I’d overexposed the both of them. There was supposed to be a whole army of zombies, and I was trying to make two seem like fifty.

  “So Buzzy gets this wild idea to use some of the real cadavers. They keep ’em in this big refrigerated vault with drawers that slide out.”

  Clint shivered, visualizing. “Jesus …” he muttered.

  Woodley smiled. “Yeah. So Buzzy figures out how to get the drawers open. They had every kind of corpse you could imagine. Some of them were pretty horrible, I’ll tell ya.

  “We checked about five of them, until we found this one guy who was really ripe. I think he was an itinerant, a bum. God knows what he died from. He’d been dead for a while, that was obvious. I even remember the drawer number, I don’t know why. Sometimes you remember little details like that years later. It was drawer 66, like in ‘get your kicks on Route 66.’

  “So Buzzy hauls him out, gets behind him, and … ah, you sure you want to hear this?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. Please go on.”

  “He works him like a marionette.”

  “Holy shit,” Clint whispered. He resisted the urge to check the cassette machine again.

  “This guy stank. I don’t know how Buzzy did it. He was a trouper, or one sick puppy. Probably a little of both. He had to work like hell to get the guy to bend. Rigor mortis, you know. It was positively ghastly, if I do say so myself.”

  Landis smiled again. Thin, dry lips parted, revealing stained teeth. Pale, receding gums flashed. It was the smile of a very old and sick predator.

  “I could light my cigar, you know. The smoke keeps ’em away.”

  “What?” Clint asked.

  “The bats.”

  “The bats?”

  “Yeah, they can’t stand the smoke, it makes ’em keep their distance. Should I light up?”

  Clint nodded.

  Landis chuckled, another first. “Works every time,” he smirked, his lungs rattling, “So, where was I? Oh yeah. Kingston balked. I can’t say that I blame him. He threatened to walk out on the whole production, said he had ‘standards.’ Ha!, that’s a laugh. I wound up offering him more money.”

  “How much?”

  “Chump change,” the old man said with obvious disgust. “That turkey would do anything for money. Believe me, I know.”

  “He did it?”

  “Damn right he did it. In one take. Kingston should have gotten the Academy Award for that, except that he wasn’t acting. He was scared shitless. The guy looked great on film—the dead guy, not Kingston. He wound up being the star of the picture. We used him in at least twenty shots, and he never complained.”

  Landis paused, waiting for a laugh, then continued. “We even used a few of his dead buddies. Easiest bunch I ever worked with. Real pros. They worked cheap, too.”

  Clint’s jaw dropped. Never in his wildest dreams did he think he would get all this. But there it was, immortalized on tape. Did the old man tell the truth? Could this be just another one of his scare tactics?

  “Are you serious?” Clint asked.

  “As a heart attack,” Woodley replied. He edged forward on his seat.

  “I go in for a close-up. Chet Bronski is the cameraman, a prince, and he’s pulling in just as Buzzy thumbs one of the eyes open. I’ll tell ya, we all shuddered to see what was gonna happen. The camera zooms in and …” He paused. “… and it’s full of worms.”

  Landis flopped back in his lounger again. He raised his glass to his lips, then stopped, leveling his gaze into Clint’s face.

  “That shot made the movie,” he said, then swallowed the last of the whiskey.

  “Worms?” Clint whispered.

  “Yeah, squirming like amoebas. They started coming out, right on cue, and I held that close-up for at least sixty seconds. Onscreen, it seemed like a half an hour. People in the theaters shrank down in their seats and gasped. Christ, what a moment! I was at the Royal Theater in Anaheim for the premier. In those days you always opened out of town, and people started screaming. Some lady barfed. It was my crowning achievement on film. I scared the shit out of ’em.”

  He put the glass down and tapped his knee.

  “That’s my business, scaring people.

  “That poor son of a bitch was a movie star after he was dead. Can you believe that?”

  Clint shook his head.

  “I guess you could say people were dying to get in my flicks,” the old man rasped, more coughing laughter spraying from his mouth.

  Landis Woodley’s eyes glimmered. Pig’s eyes, Clint thought. Cruel and tiny, they were perpetually squinting out at an unforgiving world.

  “Cadaver went on to become my highest-grossing movie ever,” the sandpaper voice continued. “It played the drive-ins for years. I still see it on late-night TV.

  “I should have gone on to bigger and better things, but that shyster Sol Kravitz talked me into those idiotic rock movies. Nothing but trouble. Music stinks. It’s death at the box office. These kids, these teenagers, they don’t spend money. They steal. I lost so much of my own money on Big Rock Beat, I almost went out of business.

  “I learned my lesson—there’s nothing like scaring people. They never get sick of it.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “You know the sound of a gunshot?” the old man asked. Clint nodded. “Everybody overdubs a big boom,” Woodley pointed out. “It’s a standard sound effect, every library has dozens of ’em. What I did in Snuff Addict was, in the scene where the guy kills the chick, I let the actual sound of the gun, a crack, stay in. That evil little crack is nasty. That sound scares people more than those cannons you hear in all the movies now. Listen to a real gun, it sounds like ‘pop!’ and it’s ominous. Sometimes, when you want to scare someone, less is more. The real fear is up here,”—he tapped his head—“inside your brain.”

  Clint nodded. “What do you think scares people the most?”

  Landis considered the question, then said, “Many people fear the dark, you know, and movie theaters are dark. I don’t know. They’re afraid of dying, of being alone, but
isn’t that what happens to you when you pay your way in and sit there staring at the wall? Your own life is suspended, forgotten temporarily. You huddle in the dark, alone, waiting to be seduced by what’s up there on the screen.”

  He tried to light his cigar, but it was too wet and short to function. He gave up and put it down with a sigh, as if his whole life was like that now, a used-up cheap cigar. “People are scared of what they don’t understand,” he continued. “I scare people because no one has ever understood me.”

  Snuff Addict was a very disturbing film. Clint had seen it, of course. Woodley made it during the 1961–65 era, a very dark time for him. He’d been reduced to making skin flicks, peep-show loops, and worse. Landis had, once again, preyed on people’s worst perversions, and his sick movies went for the jugular even then. He sought out the strange, the bizarre, the most depraved fetishes for his subject matter. It ultimately proved too much for even the porn houses.

  Clint wondered if Snuff Addict contained a real murder. Now that he knew the truth about Woodley, nothing was out of the question.

  In the early seventies, when the sex film industry was somewhat legitimized, the world left Landis Woodley in the cold once again.

  After Cadaver, and the ill-advised Big Rock Beat, he only made one more legitimate feature, the rarely seen Cold Flesh Eaters, a waste of celluloid in every critic’s book.

  The rapidly diminishing quality of his work eventually eroded what little credibility he had, and in a few short years Landis’s name meant box office death. You could only fool people so many times, then they got wise.

  Sitting across from the old man, Clint felt himself becoming strangely detached. He felt as if he’d stepped outside the scene, watching himself doing the interview.

  He knew everything about Landis Woodley that had been made public. His infamous career, his brief success, his spectacular failures, his scandals, and his well-documented perversions.

  Tip of the iceberg, Clint thought.

  “Those bats are only active at night. That’s why I keep it so dark in here,” Woodley said, changing gears again. Clint nodded. The old man seemed as much a creature of the dark as the bats.

  “They eat everything.”

  The old man’s conversation had a peculiar kind of logic to it once Clint began to recognize the pattern. There could be only one topic, whether he talked about the bats, the film industry, Buzzy Haller, the IRS, or dead bodies. The topic was fear. Landis Woodley appeared obsessed with it.

  Fear. Clint was the addict, and Woodley the dealer.

  “Nobody ever found out, of course, and we all took an oath of silence. The shoot was wrapped up in three days, and that was it. The censors were all over that picture, though, as if they knew something, which they didn’t. I had to cut some stuff, but we still outbloodied National. RKM was happy, and we brought home a winner.

  “Cadaver was your apex?”

  Woodley nodded. Outside the windows the sun was setting. He’d noticed the lengthening shadows and the diminishing light before Clint and was reveling in it. In the dark he came alive.

  Woodley leaned forward. “It’s a hell of a world, isn’t it? When the pinnacle of a man’s life’s work is a low-budget horror movie full of real corpses.”

  He looked at Clint as if he expected a response. Clint remained silent.

  “You want to see some footage?”

  Clint cocked his head. Did he hear that right? Did the old man want to show him some film?

  “I got some outtakes, some footage the censors made me take out. They said it was too gory, not suitable for public viewing. Those wimps, they used to run this town. Shit, you couldn’t even say the word ‘sex’ until 1967. I got some great stuff, Buzzy and the corpses at the morgue, some mutilation stuff …”

  Mutilation stuff? Clint almost said something, then caught himself. What had they been doing down in the abattoir? Carving people up?

  “Sure, I’d love to;” he heard himself say. “Can I bring a photographer?”

  The thought of watching those grainy old black-and-white films, full of real corpses, alone in this house with the old man made him uneasy.

  “No, no photographers, just you.”

  Clint looked a shade doubtful and the old man picked up on it. “I’ve got stills, posters, half-sheets, lobby cards, scripts, everything, your article would really kick some butt. Maybe you could make some real money. You want to make money, don’t you, kid?”

  Clint nodded.

  “Good, thought so,” Woodley rasped. “You’ve got a hell of a start. Come back tomorrow night, nine o’clock. I’ll show you some shit that’ll make your hair stand up.”

  Landis busied himself pouring another shot of booze.

  A strange noise knifed up from below. Clint was about to turn off his tape recorder and end the interview when the sound froze him. It sounded like a moan, a painful, horrible, half-human moan.

  “What the hell was that?” Clint asked.

  Woodley’s face blanched. The sound had clearly alarmed him as well.

  He spilled a portion of his drink on the already-stained rug at his feet. His head turned to one side, like a dog listening to a violin. The moan came up again, low and pitiable, from beneath their feet. It was the most unpleasant and disconcerting sound that Clint Stockbern had ever heard.

  “What is that?” he asked again.

  Clint stood up, suddenly acutely aware that it was no longer light outside.

  Landis looked up at him. He was still seated, still in denial.

  “You heard it, too?”

  Clint nodded.

  “Christ, I thought I was the only one,” Landis growled. “I thought it was in my mind.”

  Clint surveyed the room. The bats were still. Only the sound of the moaning disturbed the quiet. It came again, the low frequency of it raising Clint’s blood pressure another few notches.

  Landis rose slowly from his chair. His hands trembled even as they grasped the arms. His fingernails, Clint noticed, were too long. Their color was an unhealthy yellow.

  Woodley looked to the hallway, his mind far away.

  “It’s coming from beneath us,” Clint Whispered.

  “Yeah,” Landis croaked.

  “What’s down there?”

  “The projection room. There shouldn’t be anyone down there; I keep it locked up. That’s where I store all the films.”

  Landis said the words Clint didn’t want to hear. “Let’s go down and take a look.”

  Clint turned back to the old man. “I … don’t think so—”

  “What are you, scared?” Landis leered. Clint considered turning around and walking out, but he didn’t want to destroy the relationship he’d spent all day nurturing. Suddenly it occurred to him that this could be another one of the old man’s tricks, a test to see how much Clint could take.

  “Well—” Clint felt like saying yes, and letting it go at that, but the fear excited him to new heights. Something inside would force him down there, he knew, something would make him face more fear. “Okay,” he said.

  They descended the steps carefully. Clint stayed close behind Woodley, his eyes darting from corner to corner. The stairs were narrow and creaked like stage props, the light stingy and unreliable. Clint’s hands tingled.

  “Watch out. My pet owls are in here,” Woodley droned. Almost on cue, wings beat through the air in front of them. Unlike the bats, these wings were large and dry, moving across the ceiling in long, feathery flaps. Clint ducked.

  “Christ, they’re big!” Clint gasped as one sailed past his head.

  “Ketupa owls. I get ’em from Central Africa.”

  They reached the bottom of the steps and entered a long room with a door at the far end. Light came from a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It cast sharp shadows, well-defined and ugly, on the discolored walls. It smelled like a basement.

  Clint stepped on something that crunched under his foot. “What the hell? Aren’t these—”

  “Bone
s. They eat mice whole, and spit up the hair and bones afterward.”

  Clint winced and tried to avoid stepping on the little bundles of horror. Landis, ever the keen observer said, “Are you all right? You look a little pale.”

  Clint wiped his face with his hand and nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. Do you have rats?”

  “Nah, the owls get ’em.”

  They crossed the room and opened the door. Landis led the way into a large, windowless, rectangular room. A movie screen occupied the far end, with several rows of theater seats arranged in front of it at a discreet distance. A huge old commercial projector, the kind used in movie theaters in the fifties, sat on a table behind the rows of seats. It was a gray metal monstrosity, all reels and gears, and it dominated the back of the room like an evil robot.

  “I watch my old movies down here,” the old man said. “I’ve got original prints of all of them, first-class stuff. The seats and projector are from the old Avalon Theater in Westwood. Beautiful, huh?”

  “Yeah, nice,” Clint replied. The thought of the old man down here alone at night, watching those horrible old movies with real corpses in them while the projector flickered behind him, was too much. The room fascinated Clint. It heightened his fear, providing a rich growth medium of mystery. He could imagine the wet cigar and the whiskey, the bloodshot eyes staring up at the images of Buzzy Haller and Tad Kingston as they manipulated the legions of the dead. He shook his head to clear away the demons.

  “Great seats, great theaters, and some damn good movies,” Landis muttered, “It was another era.”

  Clint nodded.

  “These seats are from the balcony. I wonder how many kids—”

  The moan came again, cutting the old man off like a clap of thunder. It was loud in here, unnaturally loud, and in it Clint could hear the unmistakable sound of pain. Hideous and gutteral, it rose from the floor like a wounded spirit.

  It hung in the air, slowly fading away, as if it were recorded in an echo chamber. Clint held his breath.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered. “It’s coming from the floor. It sounds like someone’s dying down there. Is there a … a subbasement?”