“Then tell me yourself. Who are you, Jennifer?”
She smiled politely and settled back into her chair. “Sit down, and I’ll tell you. Turn the camera on. Let’s finish.”
Alan did as she asked. The light had all but gone from the world outside, and he drew shut the curtains. He gestured for Mark to return to his place at the sound board. In a couple of minutes they were ready to record. He resumed his seat and took a deep breath.
“Tell me what you want to tell me,” he said.
“Lionel was a monster. He was charming and funny when he needed to be, but once you got right down to it, he only cared about what he wanted. Power. Over the people in his life, over his actors, and over me. Especially over me.” As she continued to speak—describing Lionel’s exacting direction, his rages, the way he eroded her will over a period of several days before the barn scene, insulting her abilities and criticizing her appearance when she disrobed for the night’s shoot, leaving her vulnerable and defenseless—that rancid odor intruded into the room once more: first an unpleasant tickle in the nose, swelling quickly into the brute stink of decay.
Alan ignored it for as long as he could bear to; then he pulled his shirt up over his mouth, squeezing shut his watering eyes. Jennifer continued talking for a few seconds, then trailed to a stop. She made no effort to cover her nose, nor did she seem offended by the smell. She only seemed sad.
“Jesus,” Alan said. “What is that?”
She continued as if he hadn’t said anything. “When I realized what had happened—what had moved into me—I came out here. I wanted to be far away from people so it couldn’t hurt anyone. I wanted to isolate it. Lionel didn’t care. He followed me, and I was too weak to refuse him. He wanted to feed it and see what happened. He wanted to make a documentary—the film that would make him a star. The two of them together overwhelmed me for a while. But Lionel didn’t last long. The people loved me.” She stopped. “Well. It was really the demon they loved. But they thought it was me. Maybe that’s the same thing. They did what I wanted them to do.”
Somebody killed him…a mob of folks tore him to pieces.
“So Lionel was filming when he was here? Where are the reels?”
“Under the house.”
“Buried? They might be ruined.”
“Not buried. In the nest.”
“What are you talking about, Jennifer?”
“After Lionel was gone, it was just the two of us. It was strong, but I was stronger. I locked myself in this house, cut myself off from everyone. I killed it, finally. I starved it. It took years. So many years.” She put her hands on her chest, her belly. “It’s rotting inside me now.”
Alan fought back a wave of nausea. His head swam. “What do you mean? What do you mean it’s rotting inside you?” He stood up, for what purpose he wasn’t sure. He was confused. He needed fresh air. The stink had grown even worse. It was like something physical in his throat. “What did you show Mark?” he said. “What was it?”
From the corner, Mark started weeping. He didn’t try to stifle it; he sounded like a child who had lost something, or was lost himself.
“I didn’t mean to.” Jennifer’s voice trembled, her resolve crumbling. “When he told me I was crazy, I just—I got so angry. I lost control for a minute. I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“Jennifer. Please let me see.”
“Not here,” she said. She rose from her chair and headed down the hallway to her bedroom. The stink of decay followed her. She left a tarry sediment on the floor with each footstep. Alan put the camera onto his shoulder and followed.
Her bedroom was unlit, the bed itself upturned and leaning against the wall, its underside covered in a heavy layer of dust. A great hole had been excavated in the floor, rough steps descending in a steep gradient. Darkness pulsed from inside it.
Jennifer began to change. Her clothes fell from her body in rotten tatters, like the wrappings of a mummy. The skin shifted on her body, turning a pallid gray, covered with black patches of mold. It glistened with some kind of interior light—a luminous rot. She seemed taller, stronger, more beautiful. She was naked, but her body was androgynous: gorgeous, magnetic, dead. Through her failing flesh he saw an equine skull bearing too many pale, sightless eyes. She was at once regal and putrid, her body wavering between her own elderly form and the holy beauty of the Corpse, as though seen beneath rippling water.
The light on his camera surged and went out.
Alan fell to his knees, his cognition crumbling beneath the weight of this like rotten wood. Something primordial in his brain shrieked and danced. His clasped his hands together under his chin, his lips seeking a prayer he’d never learned.
“Don’t you pray to it,” Jennifer said, her voice leaking from that cracked skull like a gas. “Don’t you dare.”
Alan couldn’t fathom the strength of resolution it would have taken to do what she had done. To endure a contest of wills that spanned decades, to tame a hunger that had crossed the gulf between this world and whatever aching hole it had crawled from—it beggared the mind. It cast into harsh relief the meandering path of his own life: the passive hoping, the cowardly wait.
Even in death the Corpse exerted its influence. Alan felt the snapped-bone shock of a fundamental reordering in his brain. He peered through its eyes. He saw that Mark was dead, despite the heart beating the blood through his body. Like Tom and the people of Templeton, he had borne witness to a beauty so terrible that it would ruin everything that followed it. Mark felt his body rotting around him and would long for an escape from it for whatever years remained to him. Alan saw a small handful of people making their way along the empty road from Templeton, the bartender and a few others, not pulled by the mysterious impulse of decades ago but by a doomed hope that she remembered them, that she called them back to her. They would wait outside her house as they had before, shivering in the dark, though this time no light would come. And he saw Jennifer Drummond, her whole life thwarted by the desperate war she’d fought for her own body and her own mind, lonely now in her victory.
She descended into the hole, and he trailed behind her. The stuttering, decayed light from her body illuminated the walls in brief flashes. It was a nest, walled in human faces, scores of them peering out from battlements of melded flesh, their mouths blackly gaping, their eyes cataractous and blind. It was like walking through an abandoned wasps’ nest. Once, it rang with screams and hosannas.
Their silence now was obscene. The demon was dead, but this woman still lived. She was still sweetly beautiful, she still yearned to fill her heart’s need. “Is it too late?” she asked.
She started to dance, a gorgeous rotted thing, undulating in the way she had done so long ago. Tears spilled down Alan’s face. He fixed the camera on her, recording it all using her own spoiled light. He was making terrible sounds. They echoed in the nest and soon it seemed the faces joined his effort, like a choir in a cathedral.
FAMILY
Lisa Morton
“DO YOU WANT to go see a horror movie?”
Dave looked up from the script notes he was jotting on his iPad. Fiona lounged in the conference room doorway, arms crossed, eyebrows raised.
His hand paused, stylus in midair. “I wanted to finish getting these comments down for the next draft…”
“So get them down and let’s go.”
Dave frowned, slightly perplexed; Fiona had been in the same script conference he had a few moments ago. In fact, Fiona was the one who’d gotten him, an unproduced American screenwriter with a legendary spec action script as his entire résumé, this job.
“There’s a lot here…” Glancing at what he’d already written down, Dave couldn’t see how they possibly expected him to deliver a revised draft of Hard Chase in time. They’d flown him to Hong Kong and agreed to put him up in a hotel for a month, and that had been three weeks ag
o. These executives liked working closely with their writers; would they cut him loose once he returned to the States?
Fiona looked over her shoulder before stepping into the room and sitting next to him. When she spoke, her voice was soft, but she couldn’t have been too worried about anyone overhearing because she hadn’t bothered to close the door. “Trust me, the script is going well. I work with these guys, I do a lot of these meetings, I can tell.”
“Really?”
She smiled. “Really. They’re glad they brought you over for the job.” Dave didn’t know the junior development executive well, but he had no reason to disbelieve her—she’d worked with the writers on Dragon Galaxy’s last hit, an action comedy called Run to Chill, so at just twenty-eight Fiona Shu was respected within the still mostly male upper echelon of the company. He knew they were also impressed by the film degree she’d acquired from an American university, to say nothing of the fact that she was equally fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin, but he wondered just how much power they’d really let her wield. A vice president of production named Li Ka-fai had exclaimed angrily in Cantonese halfway through the meeting; even though Fiona had calmed the man down, Dave was still sure he’d lost the job.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret.” She lowered her voice and leaned in. “We’re talking to Chow Lok-hang about directing.”
Dave looked up. “Chow Lok-hang? As in, the Chow Lok-hang? I didn’t even realize he was still alive.”
“He’s retired, not dead, but he’s considering making this his big comeback movie.”
“You know Chow’s Greener Fields is the whole reason I got interested in Hong Kong cinema. Well, that and The Killer.”
“I know. I read your blog on it.”
Dave smiled, shook his head. “Of course you did.” He paused for a second before asking, “Wasn’t Chow part of that whole Hong Kong way of making movies where they didn’t use scripts?”
Fiona shrugged. “Times have changed. If Hong Kong wants to compete against South Korea and the mainland in the global market, we need great scripts. Chow knows that.” She stood, and spoke loudly. “Now finish up those notes, and let’s go get scared.”
* * *
Fiona dragged him down to the subway station. As they stood on the platform waiting for the next train, she checked her phone. “There’s a three-thirty showing in Tsim Sha Tsui. We’ll just make it.”
The train pulled in and they boarded. At this time of the afternoon, it was only half-full. Dave took a seat near an elderly woman whose face was so creased it was hard to make out her features. He imagined asking her what she’d lived through, what she’d seen, if she’d spent her life in Hong Kong or had (as so many others) come here from somewhere else. He wished he was more fluent in Cantonese, the vanishing tongue still spoken throughout Hong Kong.
As the subway carried them beneath the harbor and toward the Kowloon Peninsula, Dave asked, “So what’s this movie called?”
“Family.”
“And why are you so interested in it?”
“You haven’t heard of it?”
He shook his head. “I’ve barely had time to eat over the last three weeks, let alone follow the new movies.”
“It’s a first-time female director named Fan Chiu-yi, who we’re thinking about working with.”
“Ah. So that’s why we’re abandoning work in the middle of the day to go to a movie.”
Fiona shrugged. “Well, that’s part of it, but I’m also really curious about this one. It’s about a dysfunctional family in Guangzhou. The grandfather’s an old-school patriarch who won’t give up traditional ways, and he’s always clashing with the rest of the family, especially his granddaughter, who’s in the tech industry.”
“So how is it a horror movie? I mean, aside from the idea of anyone working in the tech industry.”
Fiona gave his arm a friendly punch and then went on. “The grandfather dies and comes back to haunt the rest of the family.”
Dave thought back to what he knew of NRTA, or the National Radio and Television Administration; they reviewed all films released in China and were notorious for banning anything with even a whiff of the supernatural, which didn’t jibe with the state’s Communist philosophy. “So it’s a horror movie like the one that was so big last year…what was it, The Door or something?”
Grinning, Fiona said,“You mean the one that turned out to be all in the protagonist’s head?”
“I thought that was the only way to get a ghost movie past NRTA.”
“I thought so, too, but somehow Family did it. It just finished its first week on the mainland and was a big surprise hit.”
Dave thought back to the glorious Hong Kong horror films of the ’80s, movies like A Chinese Ghost Story or Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain that had gleefully embraced fantastic happenings—giant tongues pursuing victims through nighttime forests, monks fighting demonic energy balls with their endlessly long eyebrows, seductive fox spirits seducing naive young warriors—and rued the passing of that enchanted era. “It’s probably too much to hope for even one hopping vampire.”
Fiona laughed, mainly because she’d recently admitted to Dave that she’d never seen a single entry in the Mr. Vampire series (“I was too young”). “I think this one is more serious than that.”
“Too bad,” Dave muttered.
The train pulled into the Tsim Sha Tsui station and they disembarked. Fiona led the way past herb shops, souvenir stalls, a McDonald’s fast-food joint, and a 7-Eleven convenience store as they spoke idly of people they worked with, which executives Dave should be most cautious around, and the vanished Kowloon Walled City, a massive city-within-the-city that had been torn down when Fiona was five. She didn’t remember that, but she’d been nine when Hong Kong had been given up by the British and set up as a special administrative region under China, and she remembered enough to know the city had changed since then as it had wrestled with its new identity. In the past, there’d been less tension, fewer soldiers and protestors, more money and opportunity.
Dave talked about his family, about how he was still close to his father, a retired engineer, and his mom, a teacher. His only sibling, Matt, lived in Boston; Dave hadn’t spoken to him in a year. He confessed to Fiona that he’d always felt like a failure in his father’s eyes, that his father didn’t consider screenwriting a “real job.” She did her best to assure him that his father must be very proud of him.
When they reached the theater, Fiona chose their seats, paid for two tickets, and led the way as they filed in.
Around twenty patrons were seated for the matinee, a mix of older retired people and a few younger students. As they waited, Dave scrolled through his phone, checking a couple of sites for #familymovie.
The comments included “scariest movie EVER,” “I was so scared I couldn’t sleep for a week,” and “how did the government let this out?”
“Wow,” Dave muttered, causing Fiona to look up from her own phone. “The comments on this movie are intense.”
“I know,” she said.
The lights went down and after a few commercials, the movie started. Dave was relieved to find it bore English captions. He was also startled to see the name Fan Lung show up in the credits. “Fan Lung?” he whispered to Fiona. “The Fan Lung who was a Shaw Brothers star?”
“Yes. It’s his first movie in nearly forty years. The director is his granddaughter.”
The opening half hour of the movie sketched in the Hui family’s history: their home in Guangzhou, where the grandfather, played by Fan Lung, had once worked as a tax collector for the government and still remembered when the Yangtze River had been filled with British vessels and pirates. His son was a mix of old and new, a man who’d worked hard for the government but had never held to his father’s severe and inflexible ideas of traditional values. The grandson had moved to
Canada, leaving both father and grandfather angry, but the daughter had stayed; she worked as a programmer for a major tech firm and was a true capitalist. The mother was a quiet woman who’d spent her life obeying the men around her. Mother (a classic character actress Dave recognized from dozens of Hong Kong movies) secretly burned with resentment toward the men around her, evidenced by glares they never saw, the way she scrubbed dishes with angry energy, the small confidences she shared with her daughter.
Family certainly didn’t have the setup of a typical horror film; in its first thirty minutes, no one died, no spirits were glimpsed, and the audience watched quietly. It was shot in dark, shadowed hues, with corners of the frame fading off into darkness, but that look served it well as a drama about a family ruled by a strict patriarch who appreciated only the values of the past.
Then, at the thirty-five-minute mark, the grandfather died.
Five minutes after that, a young woman to Dave’s right cried out, “Gui!”
He blinked, jerking upright in his seat—what had she said? Had he missed something? He peered at the screen, confused; the scene was mother and daughter in the kitchen, sharing memories of the grandfather.
An older man two rows below Dave gasped. He abruptly rose and fled the theater.
Leaning over to Fiona, Dave asked, “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered back.
In the movie, the mother erupted in anger, revealing how she’d secretly hated the old man her whole life, a life full of petty dismissals and major cruelties perpetrated on her.
A woman on the other side of the theater choked back a terrified sob and staggered out, doing whatever she could to avoid looking at the screen.
The film continued with the old man’s funeral, for which the youngest son returned from Canada. He argued with his father about his choice. As they shouted at each other, the daughter stood by, silent and disregarded. When the funeral ended, the brother left Guangzhou and the father finally turned to the daughter, accepting her as the real heir of the family. The ending was sweet without being maudlin as the family reconciled around the daughter.
Final Cuts Page 11
