The Remaking

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  The casting director still wouldn’t look up.

  Was Amber supposed to wait?

  Should she just start?

  Get it over with?

  Amber noticed the Pall Mall dangling between the casting director’s fingers. The cinder had sunk through the cigarette, unsmoked, a slender tail of ash threatening to break at any moment, like a gray salamander escaping its attacker by snapping off its own appendage.

  There was no color in the casting director’s hair, as if it had been sapped of all its pigment, reduced to ash. She seemed tired. Her shoulders drooped. How many girls had she seen already? How many times had she heard the exact same lines, repeated the exact same way? The tone? The inflection? The singsongy lilt of hundreds of girls would haunt her dreams forever. Amber had been haunted by these words, too, the dialogue drifting into her own dreams. But when she heard it, she only heard one voice. The voice. The very voice of the ghost girl herself, as if this witch had tutored her on how to deliver the lines. The recitation.

  Amber now knew how to cast the spell.

  The casting director finally glanced up. Her eyes settled on Amber for the first time.

  Actually saw her.

  She hesitated.

  Halted, even.

  Amber wasn’t positive, but she swore she saw the casting director’s eyes widen. Did her pupils just dilate, like black holes widening within the cosmos, swallowing Amber whole?

  The casting director took her in.

  Savored her.

  She leaned forward, holding the rest of herself up with her elbows. “What’s your name, young lady?” There was warmth in her voice.

  Amber cleared her throat as quietly as possible. “Amber Pendleton.”

  “And what part will you be reading for us today, Amber?”

  Amber straightened her spine, trying hard not to glance over at her hovering mother. She exhaled, letting the room settle before responding, just as she had practiced with Mom a million times before. “I’ll be reading the part of Jessica Ford.”

  Just then, the ash detached itself from the casting director’s cigarette, as if the mere mention of Jessica’s name were enough to send it toppling. When it hit the table, flakes of gray scattered everywhere, all over the casting director’s notepad. Freckles on a ghost.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Jessica.” The casting director abruptly caught herself. Laughed at her own folly, coughing wetly. “Sorry. I meant Amber. Whenever you’re ready, Amber.”

  TWO

  They were bleeding him out. Slowly. Methodically. They really wanted this to hurt. Sadistic sons of bitches. They wanted him to feel every last drip, until there was nothing left. Not a single drop of his life’s work left in him.

  A million and one paper cuts. That’s how these financiers kill you. All the script notes. All the budget cuts and penny pinching. All the compromises he had to make, just to tell his story.

  So many sacrifices. Lee Ketchum had to kill his darling just to get her onto the big screen.

  His darling Jessica.

  The financiers wanted to take his movie away from him. It no longer resembled his story. The story he’d been born to tell. The story he’d been dying to tell for years now. Years. Ever since he was a boy. Ever since he’d first heard the legend of the Little Witch Girl.

  To this day, Ketchum could still recall what it felt like to sit around that campfire as a kid. The flames lapping at his face, warming his cheeks, while the back of his neck felt so cold. He sensed the presence of the pine trees at his back. Some old coot from town fancied himself the unofficial historian of Pilot’s Creek. If you got him soused up enough, he’d mouth off over just about anything. All the seedy secrets the people from his hometown wished to keep cloistered.

  But there was one story the kids from Pilot’s Creek were always dying to hear…

  The Little Witch Girl.

  There’s nothing like the feeling of a ghost story taking over your imagination. Seizing your dreams. The goose bumps rose up along Ketchum’s arm as he let the story seep into his subconscious.

  Jessica Ford had haunted him for years. The number of bedsheets he’d yellowed throughout his childhood, all thanks to the nightmares she conjured up in his sleep. Jessica had made him a bedwetter. Not even Godzilla or Christopher Lee or Bloody Mary could’ve done that. Even when he was no older than ten, Ketchum knew her story would make a great movie.

  A great horror movie. And he was going to be The One to make it.

  To tell her story.

  He wanted kids all across this country to piss in their PJs, just as he had when he first heard her story.

  Jessica Ford was his muse. If he didn’t make this movie, somebody else surely would. Only a matter of time until some other filmmaker found out about her. Beat him to it.

  Her story was dying to be told. Legends like hers don’t stay local forever. They spread. They cross county lines. They pop up around campfires all across the country. They seep into the subconscious of other kids just like him. Ripe storytellers, all of them. One kid tells their friends and then those friends tell their friends and then they tell theirs and on and on, until there isn’t anyone left who hasn’t heard it. Heard about her.

  Her.

  Ketchum coveted the tale. He was like a possessive lover, all through his teens. He had to hide her. Protect her. Save her for himself. He wanted her story to be his and only his. He wanted desperately to keep her story a secret, like a butterfly sealed up inside a mason jar, until he had the opportunity to tell it the way he wanted to.

  Jessica belonged to him.

  Nobody else.

  No one escapes Pilot’s Creek, Virginia. His hometown was a black hole that sucked its citizens in and never spat them out. It was common for kids to graduate from high school, move down the block from their childhood home, and merely repeat whatever it was their parents did. They worked and married and had babies and died, not necessarily in that exact order.

  Nobody made it out of this town.

  Nobody escaped.

  Ketchum was one of the lucky ones. He left right after graduation, and he never looked back. He was free. Finally free of Pilot’s Creek. Its pull. But his thoughts often returned to Jessica. Always Jessica. There was a persistent whisper in his ear.

  Come to me…

  Come to me…

  Come…

  His time would come. Soon it would be his turn to tell her story. The fortieth anniversary of her death was just around the corner, coincidentally dovetailing with his final year in film school. He could hammer out a draft and raise the money and he could be shooting in less than a month.

  But his version needed to have depth. To turn the screw, as it were. Really explore the darker themes that resonated for him. Focus on the mother-daughter relationship.

  Focus on Jessica and Ella Louise. The tragedy of their story.

  The true story.

  Nobody would finance his film. Nobody wanted a melodrama with ghosts. His script collected dust. Ketchum was ready to give the screenplay a pauper’s funeral, burying it in his desk among all his other unproduced films. A mass grave of hackwork. Nobody would mourn these unmade movies. Nobody would even know the ghost of Jessica Ford ever existed.

  Until he met the Teraino Brothers.

  Paulie and Butch Teraino swore they were in the plumbing business. They had some extra cash they needed to launder through a new business venture, and wouldn’t you know it, everybody was making movies on the cheap these days. Porno or horror, take your pick. As long as something made its way onto the screen, the whole endeavor would be a perfect write-off.

  Every filmmaker must make sacrifices.

  Collaboration, it’s called. The question for the director becomes, How much of my own story am I willing to compromise in order to get this movie made?

  The conce
ssions started off simple. They always do. Small tweaks. Swapping genders for a particular character. Perhaps raising the age for someone older to play?

  And what about a little more skin? You know, for the drive-in crowd?

  We want people to see this movie, right?

  To sell tickets, we need a hook. For the kids. Something that’s gonna rope them in. And what sells tickets better than a little T&A? Perhaps a bit more gore? Drench that screen in red, all right?

  Before Ketchum knew what happened, he had sold the soul of his film. He sacrificed Jessica on the altar of a blank check. He had tried so hard to sell the Teraino Brothers on his personal vision and hadn’t they agreed to bankroll his movie?

  “So,” Paulie had said, “what’s with this story here?”

  Neither of these men had necks. Their throats were swaddled in a stack of sweaty inner tubes. Chins upon chins. Their fingers looked more like raw, gray sausages. They had called Ketchum into their office, which was really nothing more than a faux-wood-paneled mobile home situated on a construction site that never seemed to have any construction going on.

  Ketchum had painted the portrait as best as he could. Time to tell the story he’d been dying to tell all his life. “Imagine a woman disowned by her own family,” he said. “A pariah among her peers. The local kids toss rocks at her whenever she passes. Calling her names. Spitting on her.”

  “Okay.” Paulie had shrugged at his brother, more focused on his cuticles. “With you so far.”

  “Now”—Ketchum had kept at it—“imagine that woman having a child. Out of wedlock.”

  “Had a few of those,” Butch had muttered.

  “Nobody knows who the father is. Her daughter’s birth is a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. An immaculate conception of the darkest kind.”

  “Did I miss something?” Butch had interrupted again. “Where’s the blood?”

  “The ending,” Ketchum had cut in. “I was just getting to the ending. A group of superstitious men make their way to Ella Louise and Jessica Ford’s house in the middle of the night. They drag them out into the woods. They tie them up and burn them at the stake.”

  “So…it’s a witch movie?”

  “Yes. Yes, a movie about what happens when we let our prejudices get out of hand. Consider The Crucible. The tragedy is in the fact that no one actually knows—”

  “The Crucible?” Butch clearly had been annoyed by this reference.

  “Arthur Miller? About the Salem witch trials? But it’s really about McCarthyism?”

  “So you’re saying they’re not witches?”

  “No. No, they will be witches. Both of them. But…misunderstood witches. And therein lies the tragedy. Imagine the horror, the heartbreak, when Jessica gets her revenge on the townspeople of Pilot’s Creek. She makes them pay for what they did to her and her mother.”

  Fine, his financiers had said, relenting. But need they remind Ketchum, this was supposed to be a horror movie. There better be some blood on the screen. They were more worried about the poster. “Show a skeleton’s hand reaching out from the ground or something,” Paulie had suggested.

  Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave.

  The original title had been much, much worse. Paulie fancied himself a screenwriter. He wanted Easy Rider directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. Hippies were in, big-time, thanks to Dennis Hopper. As long as Billy and Wyatt were still revving their choppers all the way to the box office, the Love Generation could easily be injected into just about every genre.

  Hippie mystery. Hippie sci-fi. Hippie porno. Only a matter of time before there was hippie horror.

  The storyline evolved—devolved?—into a quintet of cardboard counterculture stoners roaming the southern states in their Winnebago, scaring the local squares with their shaggy hair and talk of free love. One night, the group gets a flat in the middle of nowhere and decides to set up camp just outside quaint Pilot’s Creek. One hippie chick realizes their RV is next to a cemetery, so she and her peacenik pals hop the fence and start toking up on a tombstone.

  The grave of none other than Jessica Ford.

  The Little Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek.

  A mound of dirt encircled by interconnected crosses, as if to keep evil forces out.

  …Or perhaps it’s to keep them in?

  The ground is choked with weeds. Nobody has cut through the swath of underbrush for years. The tombstone is overwhelmed with ivy. That hippie chick—Cassandra in the script—reaches over the fence and yanks the ivy away. Etched on the headstone, they read:

  HERE LIES JESSICA FORD.

  MAY SHE ALWAYS BURN.

  What a bizarro thing to have etched onto a tombstone. Especially for some kid.

  All seventeen years of her.

  Cassandra gets the bright idea to hold some sort of séance, to commune with Jessica’s spirit and all that. See if she died at peace. Groovy. The hippie quintet sit in a circle along the circumference of Jessica’s grave and take hold of one another’s hands, calling out to her. They pass around a spliff as Cassandra performs her special brand of hoodoo-spiritualist mumbo jumbo that doesn’t even come close to sounding like an actual séance. The scene devolves into an orgy. All that free love happening on top of Jessica’s resting place only ticks her off.

  She rises. Rises from her grave. She’s pretty sexy. Totally naked as she emerges from the earth. Not a single burn mark on her. The guys think this is all pretty far out. They’ve just conjured up some hot ghost chick and now she’s beckoning, beckoning the boys to come closer.

  Come closer…

  Come closer…

  Come…

  The witch girl exacts her revenge against these pitiful hippies for the rest of the script, all sixteen remaining pages of it. Breasts and blood are spilled in grim, titillating fashion.

  So what was the original title?

  Jessica Drinks Hippy Blood.

  They were killing him.

  His story.

  Couldn’t they see that? The financiers were murdering his movie and they hadn’t even started production yet. His story had been hijacked by hippies. A page one rewrite.

  What about the truth, Ketchum kept insisting. I want to tell the true story.

  Whatever that meant. The Teraino Brothers could care less.

  It always went back to that night for Ketchum. That night around the campfire. Listening to the crazy old codger spin his yarns while slipping sips of whiskey. How many times had the old fogey told that exact same story to kids just like Ketchum? How many boys sat around that same campfire, listening to him yammer on about their hometown, just waiting to hear the story of the Little Witch Girl and her mother? How many dreams had she infected? How many short stories had she inspired? How many manuscripts for unfinished novels were collecting dust in desks or under beds at this very moment? How many notebooks had the mad ramblings of her tale?

  How many movies?

  No, she had chosen him. Ketchum knew it. Out of all the poets and novelists and troubadours, he was The One.

  Jessica chose him.

  It felt particularly galling to Ketchum that the investors insisted they change Jessica’s age. For what? Just to get a little more T&A on the screen? He could just imagine her rolling over in her grave right now. No, Jessica had to go back to her real age. She had to be a child.

  What if she was angry at him?

  What would she do?

  It was a silly thought, a childish thought, but Ketchum couldn’t stop himself from dwelling on it. What would Jessica do if he didn’t tell her story the right way?

  The way she wanted it told?

  What if he failed her?

  He was the director. He was the writer. He was an auteur. But there was an unseen presence, a silent investor if you will, that Ketchum couldn’t help but be aware of.

 
To hell with the producers. Fuck the financiers. Ketchum was working for one investor and one investor only. Jessica was the executive producer, as far as he was concerned.

  She called the shots.

  Ketchum was no Orson Welles. All the investors wanted was a drive-in cash-in delivered on time and on budget. All Ketchum wanted was to translate his nightmares onto the big screen. Production meetings became custody battles. Long, drawn-out hissy fits between filmmaker and financiers, with the producers serving as intermediaries.

  There was no money. Two hundred thousand dollars, if that. Technically, the budget was more like $180,000—but the producers didn’t tell the director that. That meant shooting on location. No sets. No building anything. Day-for-night. No night shoots, for the love of God.

  Twenty days for production. Not a single day more.

  The real tug-of-war was fought over Ella Louise. The financiers wanted a rising starlet cut from the same cloth as Fonda. Bardot.

  They wanted blond.

  Buxom.

  Nora Lambert was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Nobody was going to ever mistake Nora as some cornfed beauty queen. Her olive complexion deepened on-screen, a Mediterranean siren. Not some fallen southern belle.

  She’s not right for the role, the Teraino Brothers insisted. She doesn’t look the part.

  What Ketchum hadn’t told the financiers was Nora was his girlfriend. He had written the part just for her. He embedded the text with her cadences. Her inflections were Ella Louise’s inflections. The voice that lifted off the page had always been Nora. When he started to assemble the movie in his mind, constructing the shots, he saw her. Always her.

  This was the hill Ketchum was willing to die on. The role required intensity, he argued, a level of ferocity not seen on-screen. He needed somebody with chops. Someone unafraid to plumb the depths of feminine psychosis. Someone unapologetic. Willing to go the distance—and further. Deeper. All the way to the very depths of hell…and then crawl her way back.