Final Cuts Read online
ALSO EDITED BY ELLEN DATLOW
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Alien Sex
The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People (with Terri Windling)
The Best Horror of the Year, Volumes 1–12
Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales
Black Heart, Ivory Bones (with Terri Windling)
Black Swan, White Raven (with Terri Windling)
Black Thorn, White Rose (with Terri Windling)
Blood Is Not Enough: 17 Stories of Vampirism
Blood and Other Cravings
Children of Lovecraft
The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (with Terri Windling)
The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen
The Dark: New Ghost Stories
Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea
Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Doll Collection
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories
The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm (with Terri Windling)
Fearful Symmetries
The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest (with Terri Windling)
Haunted Legends (with Nick Mamatas)
Haunted Nights (with Lisa Morton)
Hauntings
Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
Lethal Kisses
Little Deaths
Lovecraft Unbound
Lovecraft’s Monsters
Mad Hatters and March Hares
The Monstrous
Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy
Nebula Awards Showcase 2009
Nightmare Carnival
Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror
Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex
Omni Best Science Fiction, Volumes 1–3
Omni Book of Science Fiction, Volumes 1–7
Omni Visions, Volumes 1 and 2
Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe
Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells (with Terri Windling)
Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (with Terri Windling)
Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy (with Terri Windling)
Silver Birch, Blood Moon (with Terri Windling)
Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers (with Terri Windling)
Snow White, Blood Red (with Terri Windling)
Supernatural Noir
Swan Sister (with Terri Windling)
Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories
Teeth: Vampire Tales (with Terri Windling)
Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30th Anniversary Anthology
Troll’s-Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales (with Terri Windling)
Twists of the Tale
Vanishing Acts
A Whisper of Blood
A Wolf at the Door: And Other Retold Fairy Tales (with Terri Windling)
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Volumes 1–21 (with Terri Windling, Gavin J. Grant, and Kelly Link)
A BLUMHOUSE BOOKS/ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, JUNE 2020
Compilation copyright © 2020 by Ellen Datlow
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Blumhouse and colophon are trademarks of Blumhouse Productions, LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress.
Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525565758
Ebook ISBN 9780525565765
Cover design by Mark Abrams
Cover image of film strip © Wylius/iStock/Getty Images
www.anchorbooks.com
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
CONTENTS
Cover
Also Edited by Ellen Datlow
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by Ellen Datlow
DAS GESICHT
Dale Bailey
DRUNK PHYSICS
Kelley Armstrong
EXHALATION #10
A. C. Wise
SCREAM QUEEN
Nathan Ballingrud
FAMILY
Lisa Morton
NIGHT OF THE LIVING
Paul Cornell
THE ONE WE TELL BAD CHILDREN
Laird Barron
SNUFF IN SIX SCENES
Richard Kadrey
INSANITY AMONG PENGUINS
Brian Hodge
FROM THE BALCONY OF THE IDAWOLF ARMS
Jeffrey Ford
LORDS OF THE MATINEE
Stephen Graham Jones
A BEN EVANS FILM
Josh Malerman
THE FACE IS A MASK
Christopher Golden
FOLIE À DEUX, OR THE TICKING HOURGLASS
Usman T. Malik
HUNGRY GIRLS
Cassandra Khaw
CUT FRAME
Gemma Files
MANY MOUTHS TO MAKE A MEAL
Garth Nix
ALTERED BEAST, ALTERED ME
John Langan
About the Authors
About the Editor
Permissions
INTRODUCTION
From the first moving picture publicly shown in 1895—the Lumière brothers’ fifty-second film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (translated into English as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station)—the medium has maintained its hold on society’s imagination. There’s a power to movies—watching them in the privacy of one’s home or in the weird intimacy of a darkened theater with hundreds of strangers all looking at the same thing on the screen.
The first real horror movie, only about three minutes long, is The Haunted Castle, also translated as The House of the Devil, made by French director Georges Méliès in 1896. However, an argument could be made that the one-minute-long Le squelette joyeux, The Dancing Skeleton, made by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895—meant to be more amusing than scary—is the very first. Another of Georges Méliès’s early horror films, Une nuit terrible, translated as A Terrible Night, also came out in 1896. It’s about an insomniac, played by Méliès, who discovers a giant spider on his bed and fights it off. The X-ray Fiend, made by George Albert Smith in 1897, is little more than a scene of a man and woman flirting and a professor turning on an X-ray machine (a brand-new invention) so that the audience sees them as skeletons, something that today seems comic but at the time would likely have frightened the audience. Both Méliès and Smith made other little horror films in the next couple of years. In 1898 two horror films were released by a Japanese film company: Shinin no sosei, which translates to Resurrection of a Corpse, and Bake Jizo, which translates to Jizo the Spook, both written by Eijiro Hatta.
And horror movies have continued to be made ever since.
Surprisingly, there have been only a few anthologies featuring movie horror and dark fantasy: the most prominent are David J. Schow’s Silver Scream; Midnight Premiere, edited by Tom Piccirilli; It Came from the Drive-In!, edited by Norman Partridge and Martin H. Greenberg; The Hollywood Nightmare, edited by Peter Haining; and my own, The Cutting Room, a reprint anthology.
So an anthology of all new dark and strange fiction inspired by cinema and television seems like a natural in our worldwide movie-obsessed culture. Stories about inexplicable happenings on the screen and behind it, Final Cuts contains accident-prone rehearsals, spectral performances, shadows that appear only on film, home movies made for one person to view, snuff films, the worldwide phenomenon of livestreaming everything, and even movies made to open our world to terrifying, otherworldly creatures. Some of these stories examine the rich arcana and artifacts of movie lore; some create new ones.
A seemingly innocent domestic drama made in Hong Kong has a startling effect on its viewers; a serial killer in Pakistan wants his execution televised all over the world; a film set in Kuala Lumpur is host to dark and hungry ghosts; a moviegoer obsessed with a lost documentary made by Werner Herzog discovers more than he bargained for. These are only a few of the stories featured herein.
I invite you to this journey into the surreal, the uncanny, the dark hidden behind, in front of, and even within the silver screen.
With thanks to ReelRundown.com for the historical information.
DAS GESICHT
Dale Bailey
A FLY ALIGHTS ON THE TABLE, grooms itself, is gone.
Even now, after all these years, it is all the old man can do not to recoil. Even now, he remembers the flies. Even now, he dreams of them.
He looks at the woman across from him. She is young, impossibly so. His experience of aging—and he is now irrefutably old, born at the rag end of a long-dead century—is that he lives on unchanged while everything around him grows progressively younger.
His infirmities give this notion the lie. He looks at the world through a film of cataracts. Constipation binds his guts. But inwardly, he feels the same as he’d felt five decades ago.
Inwardly, he is terrified.
Udo Heldt’s words have lodged inside his head like fishhooks. Peel back the surface of the world and it’s all butchery, isn’t it? Everything. Butchery and filth and corruption.
What will this young woman—this Eleanor Farrell—make of the sentiment, he wonders. For it’s Udo Heldt who brought her here.
She’s come to ask about Das Gesicht.
She’s come to ask about The Face.
* * *
He’d nearly turned her away.
He’d spent more than fifty years trying to unlive it, disremember it, undream it from his dreams, and if he had not been entirely successful, neither had he wholly failed. He was eighty-eight years old. He’d spent the first third of his life chasing down his aspirations. He’d spent the rest of it running away from them. He’d renounced the calling that had summoned him across an ocean, to the broken shelf of a continent not his own. He’d forsaken the lush boulevards of Los Angeles for the grimy streets of Brooklyn. He’d abandoned the woman he’d loved.
No.
He did not want to think of Udo Heldt.
He did not want to think of Das Gesicht.
“The film is lost,” he’d told her when she called. “It was never released. Why should it interest you?”
“It may not have been released, but it was screened. I’ve tracked down nearly a dozen oblique allusions to it,” she said. “Three or four diaries, a handful of letters in private collections. No one wanted to talk about what actually happened at the screening—but no one seemed to be able to forget it, either.”
“Please, Miss—”
“Farrell,” she said. “Look, Mr. King. It’s of historical interest, if nothing else. Lon Chaney was said to be there. James Whale. A handful of others. Pola Negri. Tod Browning. They were universally revolted by it. Chaney called it vile, Tod Browning blasphemous.”
“It was a long time ago. No one wants to hear those old stories.”
“I promise you. I’m not doing some Hollywood Babylon hack job,” she’d told him.
“You are chasing ghosts,” he’d said.
“Even ghosts should have their say.” And then, to his undoing: “You should give her a voice. After all, you loved her, didn’t you?”
She didn’t say her name. She didn’t have to.
There had not been a day in nearly sixty years that the old man had not thought of her. Not one. Not since the day in 1919 (had it really been so long ago?) when he’d strolled into a Berlin cinema on a whim. Not since he’d seen her in Küss Mich, a movie of little distinction, in a role of even less. The next day, he’d returned to the theater with Heldt. And when the lights went down, the director, too, through the camera’s eye, saw not the woman on the screen—not Catrin Ammermann, as she was then billed—but the woman she was striving to become.
By the time she took the role of the young wife in Der Verdammte Schlüssel almost a year later, Heldt had dubbed her Catrin Amour. But it was the man operating the camera—it was Heinrich König, it was the old man—who’d made her a star.
Now, in his dim, second-floor walk-up, with traffic whispering outside the curtained windows and dust sifting down on the tables and the antimacassars and the framed black-and-white photos that throng every surface—now that Eleanor Farrell has flown across the country to speak with him—now that her little cassette recorder is unwinding its reel, patient as the hours—now that Catrin Amour is dead and beyond hurt—now, he can say it. And why shouldn’t he? All her life she had been no one and she had wanted desperately to be someone. All the great ones are alike in that way, he tells Miss Farrell: they are forever chrysalids on the verge of a magnificent transformation. That is the secret of his profession. You do not shoot the woman in front of the camera. You shoot the woman she wishes to become.
“Alchemy, Udo called it,” he says.
“What was he like?”
How is he to answer that, the old man wonders. He remembers Heldt as a small, sinewy man, with a shock of dark hair and fervid, black eyes. He remembers his near-crippling limp, the legacy of an Allied round at Passchendaele. “I’m lucky to have a leg at all,” Heldt had once told him. “The fucking surgeon was a butcher. He should have cut the fucking thing off and handed me a crutch.”
The cinema was his crutch.
Only on the set did Udo Heldt know anything akin to joy—and even there, his fury infused every frame the old man had shot on his behalf. Der Verdammte Schlüssel, his first film, ends with the gory decapitation of Bluebeard’s young wife, betrayed by the bloody key.
“Did you serve in the war?” Miss Farrell asks.
The old man nods. He’d been wounded in the first days of fighting, at Liège. Unlike Heldt, he’d been spared the endless horror that followed: the gas, the artillery, the grenades, and, most of all, the vast wasteland of barbed wire and landmines between the rat-infested trenches, where Lewis guns spat out death at five hundred rounds a minute, and flyblown corpses bloomed like roses.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Heinrich König had survived intact.
The war had scoop
ed out Udo Heldt’s soul.
* * *
The old man falls into silent rumination.
Miss Farrell gets up to look at the photos. They stand by the dozen on bookshelves and end tables: flappers and vamps and innocents alike, icons of the silent era: Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Theda Bara. So many others. The old man wonders if Miss Farrell sees herself among them. She is not a beautiful woman; she is pale and freckled, with a sharp nose and green, inquisitive eyes. But in the right hands—in his hands—the camera could be coaxed to love her.
Such is the alchemy of the aperture, the paradox of the eye.
Heldt was already musing aloud about these issues when he wrote Die Wölfe. They had storyboarded the film together. The old man can remember it almost shot by shot even now, though little footage survives beyond the scene that juxtaposes the hunter’s death against his wife’s garden party, crosscutting his face, twisted in horror as he is torn apart by wolves, with those of the revelers, garish with laughter, and effectively dissolving the line between agony and exhilaration.
No one but Heldt could have conceived that sequence.
No one but the old man could have shot it.
Miss Farrell runs her finger across the top of one picture frame. Lifts another one to her face.
“Clara Bow,” the old man says.
He can lay his hand upon any one of the photos, even in the dark.
“This is you beside her?”
“Yes.”
He studies her studying him, measuring him against the amiable rogue in the photo, with his unhandsome, equine face. He is no longer so tall. His jacket hangs upon him. His age-yellowed collar sags at the neck. His tie is too narrow.
It has been years since he’s entertained a caller.
“You came to Hollywood in ’21,” Miss Farrell says, placing the picture back on the shelf, angling it into something proximate its original position. He will have to adjust it when she is gone.
“Yes,” he told her as she takes her seat across from him. “Sol Wurtzel at Fox had seen Die Wölfe. We came together, the three of us. Udo would have it no other way.”
They’d crossed on the Hansa, an unhappy time. The old man, Heinrich, had been in love with Catrin Amour, of course. He’d been in love with her from the moment he walked into that Berlin cinema. But she had eyes only for Heldt. Somewhere along the way he’d become ihr Liebhaber, her lover, her Svengali. Catrin believed that he’d made her a star, little understanding that he could not have done it on his own. He needed the camera eye. The camera needed the man behind it.