by Ellen Datlow
“Your Jack was not a very nice guy. If he didn’t invent the seven deadly sins, he improved on them. He also messed around with black magic. It’s not supposed to work for you people, but—”
“ ‘You people’?” Anna May says archly.
“Do you wanna hear this or not?” I say, and she nods. “Black magic isn’t supposed to work for you people in the natural world.” I pause to see if that’s all right with her; it is. “But sometimes, something dangerous gets lost and ends up where it shouldn’t, and someone’s stupid or evil enough to use it. Which Jack did. He summoned the devil and sold his soul for riches and good looks and a big schwanzstucker and who knows what else.”
“Did people even know to do that in the year six hundred?” Anna May says doubtfully. “I’m not sure ‘the devil’ was a term used before—”
“Ms. Perlmutter,” I say, feeling very, very tired. “Deals with the devil are as old as mankind, and there’s always been some genius who thinks they can pull a fast one on the devil and get away with it. Your uncle Jack sold his soul to the devil for whatever they had back then that would be like wealth and fame and lots of gratuitous porn-style sex. But eventually the party was over, and the devil came to take Jack to hell.”
Anna May almost asks a question, then thinks better of it. “Go on.”
“On the way to hell, they pass an apple orchard, and Jack tells the devil he wants an apple to eat on the way. The devil tells him to help himself. Jack goes up the nearest tree, tries to pick a nice juicy-looking fruit, and falls down. He gets up, climbs the tree again—same thing. This happens half a dozen times before the devil loses it and tells Jack to stay put, he’ll get it for him.
“As soon as the devil climbs the tree, Jack whips out a knife and carves a cross on the bark, trapping the devil there.”
Now Anna May looks a bit shocked. “Dirty trick.”
“You have no idea. The devil’s furious, but Jack won’t scratch out the cross, and the devil can’t make him. Jack leaves him there and goes off to live out the rest of his no-good, nasty life, and when he dies, as all people must, he heads for heaven. But heaven doesn’t take people who sell their souls to the devil, not even if they manage to get out of the deal by screwing the devil over. So Jack goes off to hell. He knows the devil’s long out of the tree and ready to get some payback. But if the devil fell for that dumb apple tree trick, Jack thinks he might be able to pull another fast one, even on the devil’s home turf. But when Jack gets there, the demon on the door tells him he’s not welcome, get lost.
“Jack raises a stink, and finally the devil himself comes out to tell him that hell doesn’t have to take him just because heaven won’t. Jack is out in the cold—the real cold, where there’s nothing and nobody. There isn’t even any daytime, only darkness. Jack wants to know what he’s supposed to do and where he’s supposed to go and how can he even find his way around when it’s dark all the time. So the devil tosses him an ember of hellfire and says he can use that for a lantern, don’t say I never gave you anything, now get off my lawn.
“Jack had to carry it in his pocket, which hurt like hell—real hell—but didn’t kill him. After a while, he got the idea of carving a turnip and using it as a lantern. This happens to be the direct ancestor of the jack-o’-lantern. Most people don’t know that.”
“That’s some story,” Anna May says.
“And you’re not mad at me anymore for cheating you out of immortality?” I can’t resist teasing her a little.
“Not a bit,” she says. “When you threw that thing—that lantern—through me, I felt it in a way I didn’t when he was trying to get me to hold the handle. It was—I don’t know how to describe it. Ghastly. A sense of unending, relentless loss. It was quick, only a second, but I never want to feel it again. It must have been worse for you—”
“Forget it,” I say, because there’s nothing I’d rather do myself. “All Souls’ Day isn’t over for another few hours. Wander around some more if you want. Eventually someone’ll be along to take you to what comes next. Don’t ask me what that is. The living never even get a hint. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says. “Thanks. I owe you my, uh, afterlife.”
“My pleasure,” I say, and take myself down the hill and away from the Perlmutter crypt as fast as I can without actually breaking into a run. It’s very foolish to run around in a graveyard in the dark, and I’m done doing anything foolish for a while.
Lost in the Dark
John Langan
Ten years ago, Sarah Fiore’s Lost in the Dark terrified audiences. Now, on the anniversary of the movie’s release, its director has revealed new information about the circumstances behind its filming. John Langan reports.
I
PETE’S CORNER PUB, in the Hudson Valley town of Huguenot, is a familiar college-town location: the student bar, at whose door aspiring underage patrons test their fake ID’s against the bouncers’ scrutiny and inside of which every square inch is occupied by men and women shouting to be heard over the sound system’s blare. Its floor is scuffed, its wooden tables and benches scored with generations of initials and symbols. More students than you could easily count have passed their Friday and Saturday nights here, their weekend dramas fueled by surging hormones and pitchers of cheap beer.
During the day, Pete’s is a different place, the patrons older, mostly there for its hamburgers, which are regarded by those in the know as the best in town. A few regulars station themselves at the bar, solitary figures there to consume their daily ration of alcohol and possibly pass a few words with the bartender. Between lunch and dinner, the place is relatively quiet. You can bring your legal pad and pen and sit and write for a couple of hours, and as long as you’re a good tipper, the waitress will keep warming your cup of decaf. The bartender has the music low, so you can have a conversation if you need to.
This particular afternoon, I’m at Pete’s to talk to Sarah Fiore. To be honest, it’s not my first choice for an interview, but it was the one location on which we could agree, so here I am, seated in a booth at the back of the restaurant. The upper half of the rear wall is an unbroken line of windows that curves inward at the top, for a greenhouse effect. I’m guessing it was intended to give a view out over the town, but the buildings that went up behind the bar frustrated that design. Still, they provide plenty of natural light, which must save on the electric bill.
It’s Halloween, which seems almost too on the nose for the interview I’m here to conduct. Already, small children dressed as characters from comic books, movies, and video games wander the sidewalks, accompanied by parents whose costumes are the same ones they wear every day. I see Gothams of Batmen, companies of Stormtroopers, palaces of Disney princesses, and MITs’ worth of video game characters. There are few monsters, which saddens me, but I’m a traditionalist. In a couple of hours, the town will host its annual Halloween parade, for which they’ll close the lower part of Main Street. It’s quite a sight. Hundreds of costumed participants will assemble in front of the library—just up the street from Pete’s—and process down toward the Svartkill River, which forms the town’s western boundary. Once there, they’ll turn into the parking lot of the police station, where they’ll be served cider and doughnuts by members of the police and fire departments, accompanied by the mayor and other local officials. I find it quite sweet.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should add here, while we’re still waiting for Sarah Fiore to arrive, that she and I know one another. Specifically, she was my student twenty-one years ago, in the first section of Freshman Composition I taught at SUNY Huguenot. She was in her midtwenties, settling down to pursue a degree after several years of working odd jobs and traveling. She was a big fan of horror movies, wrote several essays about films like Nosferatu (the original), the Badham Dracula, and Near Dark. We spent fifteen minutes of one class arguing the merits of The Lost Boys, much to the amusement of her fellow students. After the semester was over, I occasionally bumped into Sarah in the hallways of one
building or another, which was how I learned that she was transferring to NYU for its film program. I told her she would have to make a horror movie.
Eleven years later, when Lost in the Dark was released, I remembered our exchange. I hadn’t seen Sarah since that afternoon in the Humanities building, had no idea how to get in touch with her to offer my congratulations for her good reviews. “A smarter Blair Witch Project,” that’s the one that sticks in my mind; although the only thing Sarah’s film shares with Eduardo Sànchez and Daniel Myrick’s is its reliance on handheld cameras for the faux-documentary effect. Otherwise, Lost in the Dark has a much more developed narrative, both in terms of the Bad Agatha backstory and the Isabelle Price main story. The sequels did a lot to perpetuate the brand and helped to add Bad Agatha to the pantheon of contemporary horror villains. Sarah’s involvement with these films was limited, but she pushed for J. T. Petty to direct the second, and she reached out to Sean Mickles to bring him in for the third. As a result, you have a trilogy of horror movies by three different directors that work unusually well together. Sarah’s sets up the story, Petty’s explores the history, and Mickles’s does its weird meta-thing about the films. While her name is on the fourth and fifth movies as producer, that had more to do with the details of the contract her agent worked out for her. Recently, there’s been talk of a Lost in the Dark television series. AMC is interested, as is Showtime. There have been a couple of tie-in novels, and a four-issue comic book published by IDW.
Truth to tell, I think a good part of the continuing success of the Lost in the Dark franchise has to do with its Halloween connections. It didn’t hurt the original film to be released Halloween weekend, and whoever thought up giving away Bad Agatha masks to the first dozen ticket buyers was a promotional genius. Plastic shells with a rubber band strap, they were hardly sophisticated, but there was a crude energy to their design, all flat planes and sharp angles. An approximation of the movie’s makeup, the masks captured the menace of the character. It’s the eyes that do it, especially that missing left one. The bit of black fabric glued behind the opening gives the appearance of depth, as if you’re seeing right into the center of Bad Agatha’s skull and the darkness therein. The last I checked, one of the original masks was going for four hundred dollars on eBay. The versions that have been released with each subsequent Lost in the Dark installment have varied in execution (though a colleague said that the mask she received was the best thing about the fourth movie), but they’ve become part of the phenomenon.
Throughout this time, Sarah Fiore has kept herself busy with other projects. She wrote and directed two films, Hideous Road (2009) and Bubblegum Confession (2011), and was director for Apple Core (2012). She wrote and directed the 2014 Shirley Jackson documentary for PBS’s American Masters, which was nominated for an Emmy. With Phil Gelatt, she cowrote an adaptation of Laird Barron’s “Hallucigenia” that John Carpenter was rumored to be considering. Yet none of these movies or scripts has attached to her name the way the Lost in the Dark series has. For the most part, she’s borne this with good grace, expressing in numerous interviews her gratitude for the films’ success.
While not inevitable, it’s hardly surprising that, in today’s short-term-memory culture, any work of art with staying power is going to be milked for all it’s worth. In the case of the original Lost in the Dark, this means a celebration of the movie’s ten-year anniversary. There’s a special-edition Blu-ray with an added disc full of bonus features, screenings of the film in select theaters, and a new batch of Bad Agatha masks. Plus, the announcement that Takashi Shimizu has signed on to direct the sixth Lost in the Dark movie, which is supposed to herald a bold new direction for the franchise. None of this is especially remarkable; much lesser films receive much grander treatment.
What is of note lies buried within the fifteen hours of new footage on the Blu-ray’s bonus disc. There’s a forty-minute group interview during which Sarah and Kristi Nightingale, who was her director of photography, and Ben Formosa, who played Ben Rios, sit around a table with Edie Amos of Rue Morgue discussing the origins and shooting of the movie. It’s the kind of thing film geeks love: behind the scenes of their favorite film. There’s a pitcher of water on the table, a glass in front of each participant. Sarah sits with her elbows on the table, her hands clasped. She’s wearing a black linen blouse, her long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Kristi leans back in her chair, the mass of her curly brown hair springing from underneath an unmarked blue baseball cap. A black-and-white Billy Idol, circa Rebel Yell, sneers from the front of her white sweatshirt. Ben has shaved his head, which, combined with noticeable weight loss, gives him the appearance of having aged more than his former companions. The red dress shirt he’s wearing practically glows with money, an emblem of the success he’s enjoyed in his recent roles. Edie sits with a tablet in front of her. Her oversize round glasses magnify her eyes ever so slightly.
The conversation flows easily, and the first fifteen minutes are full of all sorts of minutiae. Then, in response to a question about how she arrived at the idea for the movie, Sarah looks down, exhales, and says, “Well, it was supposed to be a documentary.”
At what she assumes is a joke, Edie laughs, but the glance passed between Kristi and Ben gives the lie to that. She says, “Wait—”
Sarah takes a sip from her water. “I’d known Isabelle since NYU,” she says, referring to Isabelle Router, who played the ill-fated Isabelle Price. “She was from Huguenot, which was where I’d done my first two years of undergrad. We kind of bonded over that. She knew all about the area, these crazy stories. I was never sure if she was making them up, but any time I went to the trouble of fact-checking them, they turned out to be true. Or true enough. That’s why she was at school, for a degree in cultural anthropology. She wanted to study the folklore of the Hudson Valley.
“Anyway, we kept in touch after we graduated. I landed a position working for Larry Fessenden, Glass Eye Pix. Isabelle went to Albany for her doctorate. There was this piece of local history Isabelle wanted to include in her dissertation. She’d heard it from her uncle, who’d been a state trooper stationed in Highland when she was growing up. Sometime around 1969 or ’70, a train had made an unscheduled stop just north of Huguenot. This was when there was a rail line running up the Svartkill Valley. Even then, the trains were on their way out, but one still pulled into the station in downtown Huguenot twice a day. This was the night train, on its way north to Wiltwyck. It wasn’t very long, half a dozen cars. About five minutes after it left town, the train slowed, and came to a halt next to an old cement mine. A couple of men were waiting there, dressed in heavy coats and hats because of the chill. (It was only mid-October, but there’d been a cold snap that week. Funny, the details you remember.) No less than five passengers said they witnessed a woman being led off the very last car on the train by one of the conductors and another woman wearing a Catholic nun’s veil. None of the passengers got a good look at the woman between the conductor and the nun. All of them agreed that she had long black hair and that a man’s overcoat was draped across her shoulders. Other than that, their stories varied: one said that she had been bound in a straitjacket under the coat; another that she’d been wearing a white dress; a third that she’d been in a nightgown and barefoot. The woman didn’t struggle, didn’t appear to notice the men there for her at all. They took her from the conductor and the nun and, guiding her by the elbows, steered her toward the mine opening. Before anyone could see anything more, the train lurched forward.
“I suppose that might’ve been all, except one of the passengers was so bothered by what she’d seen that she called the police the minute she walked in her front door. The cops in Huguenot didn’t take her seriously, told her it was probably nothing, the engineer doing someone a favor. This was not good enough for our concerned citizen, who went on to dial the state police next. Their dispatcher said they’d send someone out to have a look. Isabelle’s uncle—what was his name? John? Edward?”
“Richard,” Kristi Nightingale says. She is not looking at Sarah.
“Right, Richard, Uncle Rich,” Sarah says. “He was the one they sent. It was pretty late by the time he reached the old access road that led to the mine. He told Isabelle he didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t a pair of fresh corpses. He stumbled onto the men ten feet inside the mine entrance. One had been driven forward into the wall with such force, his face was unrecognizable. The other had been torn open.”
“Wait,” Edie says, “wait a minute. This is real? I mean, this actually took place?”
Sarah nods. “You can check the papers. It was front-page news for the Wiltwyck Daily Freeman and the Poughkeepsie Journal for days. Even the Times wrote a piece on it: ‘Sleepy College Town Rocked by Savage Killings.’ ”
“Well, what happened?”
“Nobody knew,” Sarah says. “The whole thing was very strange. Apparently, the dead men were the same guys who had met the woman from the train. It turned out they were brothers who came from somewhere down in Brooklyn—Greenpoint, maybe. I can’t remember their name, something Polish. Neither of their families could say what they were doing upstate, much less why they’d been waiting at the mine. Nor was there any trace of the conductor or the nun. All of the convents within a three-hour radius could account for their residents’ whereabouts. The conductor who had been working that section of the train was a new guy who didn’t return the next day and whose hiring information turned out to be fake. Of the mysterious woman, there was no trace. The police searched the mine, the surrounding woods, knocked on the doors of the nearest houses, but came up empty-handed.
“There were all kinds of theories floating around. The most popular one involved organized crime. There used to be a lot of Mafia activity in the Hudson Valley. They had their fingers in the local sanitation businesses. Great way to dispose of your rivals, right? The story was, they also used some of the old mines and caves for the same purpose. In this version of events, the woman had been brought to the mine to disappear into it. Whoever she was, she or someone close to her was guilty of a particularly grievous trespass, and this was the punishment.
