Dead Funny

by Robin Ince

  ‘Charming,’ said Hastings. ‘Utterly charming. I always get such a frisson when I visit ordinary people. I so rarely get the chance. I’ve met the pope, you know? Well, a pope. Can’t remember which one. And the Dalai Lama. Terrible fraud. He’s not a llama at all. Of course, when I was a boy – don’t let the accent fool you, it was beaten into me at the central school for speech and drama – I was dirt poor. A South London lad. Came into my own in the sixties, of course, when everyone was suddenly looking for authenticity, for a bit of rough, some dropped aitches and glottal stops. God, those were the times. Knocked about with Caine and Stamp and the Richardsons – Charles and Eddie – the torture gang – not dear Ralph, although I did appear with him in a disastrous experimental version of Richard the Second in which I played the Duchess of Gloucester. Best forgotten. Which it is.’

  ‘What are you the most proud of?’ asked Maria. ‘Which of your films?’

  ‘A little film I made in Ireland called The Sea is Singing. Beautiful, quite beautiful. You can’t get it on DVD, though. I asked the B bloody FI if they had a print. They said no. It was on their list of lost masterpieces. It was all financed as some kind of tortuous tax dodge thing and they were forced to bury all the prints at sea. It was pure poetry. I played the priest, Father Donovan. Wonderful! The word Oscar was discussed. Not lightly. Filmed it in a tiny town on the west coast. They banned us from the local pub in the end, after we’d drank it dry for the third time.’

  Mark wondered if Hastings went on about how brilliant he was in The Sea is Singing (there were three whole chapters in his book devoted to it, which Mark had skipped through to get to the horror stuff) because there were no existing prints of the film to contradict him. Mark certainly had no interest in trying to find it – and he’d tracked down several films believed lost – because it wasn’t his thing.

  ‘Not any of your vampire films?’ said Maria. ‘I mean, they’re the ones that made you famous.’

  ‘What is fame, my darling? It is meaningless. You can’t eat it. You can’t fuck it. Though it can fuck you. Of course I am grateful for those films, they made me a star. I wouldn’t be here today with you if it wasn’t for them. I’d be an old man sitting alone in a home for retired actors somewhere, remembering his early failures and the handful of starlets he’d managed to roger before his luck ran out. But, yes, Lord Carnifex was my crowning triumph. Those films . . . Tomb of Carnifex, Plague of Carnifex, Blood Curse of Carnifex, Carnifex and the Monster from Beyond, Carnifex Apocalypse, Carnifex and the Dragon Warriors. Bloody awful, that one, all ninjas and nudity, but made shit loads of money. But were they art? Were they poetry?’

  ‘Does that matter?’ said Maria. ‘They were entertaining. They scared me when I first saw them . . . and you were pretty damn sexy in them as well.’

  ‘Wasn’t I!’ roared Hastings and he sat down rather too close to Maria on the sofa.

  ‘You must come upstairs,’ said Mark. ‘I have to show you my collection.’

  ‘Ah, that’s a phrase that used to fill me with unbridled joy.’ Hastings addressed this to Maria. ‘“Would you like to come upstairs?” Spoken not by young boys, I hasten to add. Or even young girls. I always liked them ripe. I was never part of the Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris brigade – and there are many more of them still walking around out there, I can tell you. For me it was starlets, harlots, dancing girls, make-up girls and MILFs, as they are called these days. In my time, we just called them housewives. Dear God, the stairs I’ve climbed. Now, though, the phrase fills me with horror!’ He formed his forearms into a cross, as if warding off an attacking vampire. Mark stepped back, not sure where this was going, uneasy for a moment.

  ‘Aaaargh!’ Hastings cried out. ‘Not the stairs! Anything but the stairs!’

  ‘It’s just that most of my collection is up there,’ said Mark. ‘I have a special room . . .’

  ‘I’ll bet you do. They always have a special room.’

  ‘I could help you up,’ said Maria, and Hastings brightened.

  ‘It’s my knees,’ he said. ‘My knees. My back. My prostate. My bowels. My raddled living corpse of a mortal shell. But if it’s upstairs I must go, then upstairs I shall go. Lead on, my torturer.’

  Hastings wasn’t exaggerating. It took him an eternity to climb the short flight of narrow stairs, grasping the banister and hauling himself from one step to the next like he was attempting Everest. Maria supporting his other arm and Mark coming up behind in case he toppled backwards.

  He huffed and puffed and swore, his knees audibly popping and creaking. Mark felt sorry for the old guy, guilty that he was putting him through this. But it wasn’t like the house was massive. These weren’t like the famous stairs in Hounds of Carnifex, which had curved up to a dizzying height and had apparently swallowed up most of the design budget.

  Once they were up, Maria left them to it, much to Hastings’ disappointment, and Mark led him into his room. His special room. His Black Museum, as he called it.

  Two walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with books. The other walls were lined with shelves that had been built over the windows and which threatened to collapse under the weight of memorabilia: action figures, statuettes, busts, props, awards for some of the horror story collections he’d edited . . .

  ‘Recognise this?’ he said, picking up a pair of rubber fright hands that Hastings had worn in the cheapo quickie Night of the Lost Souls; handling them as gently as if they were baby rabbits.

  ‘Nasty things,’ said Hastings. ‘They smelt after a while, you know.’

  ‘And these,’ said Mark pointing to a pile of documents preserved in plastic wrappers. ‘I have the shooting scripts for every Carnifex film you made except for Carnifex Redux.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Hastings. ‘It was a bucket of dead shrimps. Made no sense at all, the writer went quite mad and it was finished off by his fourteen-year-old daughter. At least, that’s what it felt like at the time. Do you know, to this day, I have absolutely no idea what Redux even means, but it wasn’t necessary for me to understand all that blither they made me spout, I just squirted it out like the whippet shit it was. I just had to sell it, you see? To make it sound convincing. I mean, demons and blood suckers and curses and spells and talismans and magic amulets. It’s all so much Billy Bollocks. Now what’s this?’

  Hastings had spotted Mark’s projector. All lined up and ready to go.

  ‘You’ll like this,’ said Mark and he pulled the screen down from where it was mounted on the ceiling. He flicked some switches on the projector and turned out the lights. The opening titles of Hastings’ very first horror film, Demonicus, flickered into life.

  ‘Great Scott,’ Hastings breathed. ‘I haven’t watched this in fifty years.’

  ‘I have a near-perfect 16 mil print,’ said Mark. ‘Found in Australia.’

  There on screen was a much younger Hastings, tall and virile and looking at home in his fifteenth-century tights and cloak. He crossed the castle set and threw himself upon a young blonde in a diaphanous white gown.

  ‘Sophie Barber,’ said Hastings. ‘Dead. And there’s old Michael Mulroney. Dead. I don’t remember the other chap. But he’s dead, too. Shot himself. Twice, the bloody incompetent. All dead. All gone. But look at them, floating on your screen. They’ve been captured as light. We’re watching their ghosts. Making them dance for us one more time.’

  He walked to the screen and touched it. The image of his younger self projected on his back and white hair.

  ‘Turn it off, boy,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t stand it anymore.’

  Mark did as he was told and switched the lights back on. Wondered how to cheer the old guy up.

  ‘What about him?’ he said, pointing to a small bronze bust. ‘He said you were the greatest film actor Britain had ever produced.’

  ‘Did he?’ Hastings bent down and peered at the bust. ‘He looks vaguely famil
iar. Was he my accountant?’

  ‘It’s Robert Aickman,’ said Mark.

  ‘Aickman? Aickman? It rings a bell in some distant steeple.’

  ‘He wrote horror stories, or strange stories, as he called them. Edited the Fontana Books of Great Ghost Stories.’ Mark nodded to a bookshelf. The Fontana series was there, next to his Pan Book of Horrors, all thirty volumes.

  ‘Robert Aickman?’ said Hastings. ‘I met him, you know. Little fat man, bad teeth, took himself rather seriously. I liked him, though. He had brains. It would have been the late seventies. One of my producers wanted him to write a zombie script for him. Aickman came up with some wonderful stuff, but it wasn’t what they were looking for. They wanted exploding heads and cannibalism. He gave them wit and mystery and unease. I was to have played a travelling salesman. It was all very grey and mundane. I liked it. The studio didn’t. It never came to anything. Often wondered what happened to Aickman.’

  ‘He died,’ said Mark. ‘1981. Cancer.’

  ‘There’s your real horror,’ said Hastings, descending further into gloom.

  ‘I had no idea he’d ever written for films,’ said Mark. ‘How far did it get? Was there a script? A treatment even?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Hastings.

  ‘That’d be worth something,’ said Mark. ‘An Aickman script. If I could get hold of that.’

  ‘I wish you luck.’ Hastings didn’t sound like he meant it.

  ‘Who was the producer? Where did he work?’

  ‘Anvil films,’ said Hastings and he gave a little shudder. ‘The years I spent working for those bastards!’ This seemed to fire him up again. He strutted about the room, glaring at Mark’s collection. ‘I put those venal swines on the map. Made a fortune for them, and what did they do when I was in trouble? They dropped me. ‘Peter Hastings? Never heard of him!’ Do you know, I’ve never received a penny from DVD sales on any of my films with them, some loophole in the contract. ‘Carnifex’s Overdraft’. That’s the film I should have made for them. They’re the real bloodsuckers, the real vampires. You know there are several types of vampire? Those that feed on your soul. Those that feed on your blood. Those that feed on your fame’ – he looked at Mark, gauging his response; Mark just kept on smiling blandly – ‘those who feed on your wallet. And then there’s him . . . Gaaaark!’ Hastings had stopped in front of a lobby card for Taste the Blood of Dracula, signed by Christopher Lee.

  ‘The most boring man in Christendom,’ said Hastings. ‘I should have added another type of vampire: those that sap your will to live. Those that feed on any lively and interesting thoughts you might have. Never get trapped in a lift with Christopher Lee, you’ll want to eat your own legs.’

  Mark thought Hastings was being rather hard on the man. But he couldn’t blame him. There was no doubting that Christopher Lee was the most famous of the two vampires. Hastings had often been called a poor man’s Christopher Lee, although their performances were entirely different. There was an almost supernatural strangeness about Hastings in full flow that Lee never had. There was real madness in him. And whilst Christopher Lee had gone on to play villains in every major film franchise except Harry Potter – Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Count Dooku in Star Wars, Saruman the White in The Lord of the Rings – Hastings had gone on to star in exploitative late-night youth TV programmes and several rather grubby court cases.

  Mark really needed to distract him now.

  ‘Here,’ he said, opening two louvered doors to reveal a large closet. ‘I’ve got to show you this.’

  ‘Must you?’ said Hastings, who was looking rather tired. ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Bear with me.’

  Mark pulled a little string to switch the light on. There were two rails of clothing in here. One had the various cosplay items that he and Maria liked to dress up in, and on the other the costumes from films that he’d collected at eye-watering expense. He showed Hastings his Nosferatu outfit, complete with bald wig and protruding front teeth.

  ‘Ah,’ said Hastings, brightening. ‘The first and still the best. Max Schreck as Count Orlok. Had their asses sued off by Bram Stoker’s widow. There was something rat-like about Schreck’s performance that I liked. And you know the rumours, I suppose?’

  ‘That he was a real vampire?’ said Mark.

  ‘There’s more of them about than you know,’ said Hastings and he winked. It was then that he spotted Maria’s Vampirella outfit.

  ‘Might I?’ he said, and lifted it off the rack. Held it to his face and inhaled deeply. Mark stood there awkwardly.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could ask her to put it on for me for a minute, do you?’ Hastings asked. ‘I can’t do anything anymore, but I can still dream.’

  ‘Well . . . I’m not sure. She . . .’

  Hastings laughed full into Mark’s face. He had hot breath and gleaming white teeth.

  ‘I’m only joking, you poor lamb,’ he roared. ‘Do you really think I’m a sex pest?’

  Mark did, actually. Hastings was trying to joke his way out of it, but his reputation had gone before him.

  Mark moved to the other rack.

  ‘This is what I really wanted to show you.’

  Each item was carefully wrapped in a dry-cleaning bag. He flicked through them, the hangers scraping along the rail. A suit worn by Max von Sydow in The Exorcist, one of Sean Connery’s jockstraps from Zardoz, a red coat from Don’t Look Now, and there . . . he carefully lifted it off the rack, pulled up the plastic covering, and passed it to Hastings.

  ‘The actual cloak you wore in the first three Carnifex films,’ he said and saw a light come on in Hastings’ ­weary eyes.

  ‘Might I put it on?’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mark. ‘In many ways it’s yours.’

  Hastings slipped it on and suddenly he was Carnifex again, the vampire Lord who had thrilled filmgoers, terrified them and sent a sexual frisson through their ranks. He was broken down and decrepit, but there was still a core of majesty to the man.

  ‘I can feel the years drop away,’ said Hastings. ‘How do I look?’ He gave a dramatic twirl.

  ‘Magnificent.’

  ‘Do you know, there’s been some talk of trying to do one last Carnifex. But Anvil won’t release the film rights and I won’t work for those bastards again.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mark. ‘But it might happen?’

  ‘Carnifex will rise again!’

  He made a sweep of the room and then stopped, staring at the wall.

  ‘Could I do it?’ he said. ‘The thought of trying to remember lines fills me with the deepest horror. Funnily enough it was easy when I was drunk, I never thought about it, but now I’m sober I wonder how the hell I ever managed it.’

  ‘But you look great in that,’ said Mark. ‘Nobody did it better. Simon Staylus was rubbish when he took over.’

  ‘Wasn’t he?’

  ‘I really hope you can swing it.’

  Hastings turned slowly from the wall.

  ‘All I need is the teeth,’ said Hastings.

  This was the moment Mark had been waiting for.

  ‘I’ve been saving the best till last,’ he said. ‘You won’t believe this. It took me years. It was an amazing piece of detective work, but I got them.’ He marched over to the shelves and carefully opened a specially made velvet covered wooden box. There, sitting inside on a little cushion, was a full set of teeth, the canines in the shape of vampire fangs. Hastings stared at them in wonder.

  ‘My teeth,’ he said. ‘My own teeth.’

  ‘I really hope they are,’ said Mark. ‘But I was a little suspicious. Why a full set of teeth, and not just the fangs?’

  ‘Had my own teeth kicked out by a jealous husband in 1968,’ said Hastings and he slipped out his brilliant white choppers. Of course they were false. His face sagge
d and he suddenly looked a hundred years old, shrunken and diminished. He was dribbling slightly. And then he picked up the vampire teeth and slotted them deftly into his mouth. He grinned in a way that made Mark back away. Hastings had gone from being a pathetic old man to a young and virile vampire Lord. It was electrifying.

  ‘The rumours were true,’ he hissed, the voice of Carnifex filling the room. ‘It was you who had them.’

  He stalked closer towards Mark.

  ‘Schreck wasn’t the only one, you know,’ he said. ‘What? You think my curse was the demon drink? It wasn’t drinking alcohol that sent me mad.’ He bared his fangs and pressed Mark against the wall, exposing his neck.

  Mark swallowed, and then felt the old familiar hot blood rise in his veins, the age-old, feral wolf’s blood. He felt the stirrings of life in his reptilian brain. He pulled back his own lips and smiled at Hastings, showing his own sharp fangs.

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘And her, too?’ said Hastings, deflated. ‘The bride of the beast?’

  Mark nodded. ‘Her, too.’

  ‘I knew she wasn’t a virgin.’ Hastings slumped into a chair. ‘But I was still looking forward to tasting her.’

  ‘I often wondered,’ said Mark. ‘I thought I’d seen something in you. But come on, you’ll stay for dinner, I hope. I’ll open some vintage haemoglobin.’

  Contributor Notes

  Mitch Benn is an award-winning comedian, musician, presenter and author. He has released seven albums and is the author of the acclaimed science fiction novel Terra (his debut book) and its recent follow-up Terra’s World. Mitch has also featured as the voice of Zaphod Beeblebrox in a touring production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  Katy Brand is an award-winning writer, comedian, actor and journalist. She has appeared in numerous films, TV shows, radio programmes and live events. In 2008 she won the Best Female Newcomer Award at the British Comedy Awards for Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show, which ran for three series on ITV. Since then she has written extensively across all genres for herself and others, including screenplays, sit-coms, sketch shows and for national newspapers and magazines. Her first novel, Brenda Monk is Funny, was published in 2014.