Supplementary Notes: The “Dusk Curse”
Tamar Dusk
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The “Dusk Curse” [ edit ]
Following public backlash after Dusk’s testimony before HUAC, rumors about the existence of a “Dusk curse” began to circulate among film crew who had worked on Ryback’s productions with Dusk. Much like the “Exorcist curse”[14] or “Poltergeist curse”[15] of later decades, where a statistically unusual concentration of on-set misfortunes were attributed to supernatural influence supposedly arising from the subject matter of the films, any accident or disruptive event was retroactively blamed on Dusk’s presence, even on days where she had not been on set. However, film researchers during the 1960s documented and verified a number of statistical oddities in the history of Dusk’s productions[16]:
Incidence of suicides among on-set crew, averaged over the body of Dusk’s work, was approximately 25% higher than normal (the median range).
Reports of violent behavior and assault on the part of crew members were nearly 50% higher than normal.
Incidence of divorces among on-set crew was approximately 40% higher than normal, with an exceptional pattern—over 75% of proceedings were initiated by the male partner.
The number of on-set crew who later went into therapy for significant psychological problems, ranging from major depressive disorder to drug addiction and antisocial personality breakdown, was approximately 30% higher than normal.
Skeptics have explained this discrepancy by noting Ryback’s production company was known for saving money via deliberately waiving industry hiring standards, something for which Ryback faced several union sanctions in his career.[17] It is also true that despite the supposed danger of Dusk’s presence on set, very few staff ever resigned from a Ryback production once principal photography had begun; the statistical patterns observed above did not hold true for anyone actually performing on camera during the production, whether they shared scenes with Dusk or not. Nonetheless, rumours of a “Dusk curse” have continued to circulate ever since filming wrapped on Dusk’s first major role, and persist to this day.
Transcript torcdusk.mp3 continued:
RP: You say it was a side effect? A side effect of what?
TJ: Tamar didn’t have a word for it. If I had to come up with the kind of term you’d use on your website, Mr. Puget, I’d probably call it “psychosynthesis” or something like that. But even that’s misleading, because it suggests that what was happening was natural for her. It wasn’t.
RP: What are you talking about?
TJ: The effect she had on other people, and the effect that…other people, their attention, their…worship…had on her.
RP: Okay. Which was?
TJ: (SIGHS) That what they wanted from her inevitably ended up making her into something else, something which would fill a very particular hunger. Something…inhuman. (PAUSE) Less so in person, or so she said; if she’d only been a theatrical actress, then perhaps the effect might have—scattered among the crowd she evoked it from, somehow. Dissipated. What really changed things, however, was the camera’s lens, the camera’s eye. The camera’s ability to fix her image as a sort of…moving idol to be played and replayed at will, as a literal object of worship.
RP: Worship. For who?
TJ: Her fans, of course, and the filmmakers who fed them. People like Ryback, like Quent—though I don’t think Quent really knew what he was cooperating with, whereas Ryback knew exactly what he was doing. (ANOTHER PAUSE) People like them…or like me.
RP: And—I’m sorry, I’m lost. How did you know about all this, again?
TJ: Tamar told me, of course. (BEAT) Ah, I’ve buried the lede…that’s the term, yes? Lily’s grandmother always told me I couldn’t ever keep to the point of a story. (ANOTHER BEAT) Give me a moment, please; I’ll show you the proofs I was saving for the end.
When I finally got Quent to agree to a set visit, I went out and bought myself a Polaroid camera. I was hoping for some shots of myself and Tamar, of course, but I was genuinely fascinated by everything else, too. You said you’d seen The Torc; you should recognize a number of the faces.
RP: Wow. There’s Quent—holy crap, he looks young. This guy played the lead, right?
TJ: Steven Paulson, yes. And Bill Walker, he played the villain, the would-be modern-day Druid—“busiest actor in Canada,” they used to call him, for a while. That’s Claudette Beecroft, the love interest. This was the day we filmed in High Park. Look at the skyline.
RP: No CN Tower, Jesus. So weird. Wait, is that—?
TJ: Yes. That’s her.
RP: Are you sure? I’m sorry, it’s just—she looked a lot younger, in the film.
TJ: I took that shot when she arrived, at the start of the evening’s shooting. I was lucky enough to catch her again when she left, later that night. Let me find it. Here—there she is, getting into her town car.
RP: (PAUSE) I don’t understand. Didn’t she bother taking her makeup off?
TJ: That’s what everybody assumed. But I was the principal investor; I got to look at the budget, their production schedule. There were two American films shooting in town and they’d already gone through five DOPs—directors of photography. People just kept quitting, jumping ship. They had one makeup assistant, plus barely enough money to cover basic blood effects. Nowhere near enough time, or skill, to shave forty years off someone’s face, not even for the ostensible star.
RP: What are you saying?
TJ: I’m saying that when Oleg knocked my camera off a table and broke it next time I visited the set, it wasn’t an accident, and we both knew it wasn’t an accident. Which was why I didn’t bother buying another one.
RP: Did Quent know?
TJ: Honestly, I don’t know what Quent knew, or didn’t. Or when he figured it out for himself, if he did; he had his own problems, lots of them. Rewriting the script every night, for one. Feeding Tamar her lines from behind the camera. But I watched and I learned, and one evening I came by when both he and Oleg were away, just in time to overhear one of the PAs saying Ms. Dusk’s dinner had arrived. I jumped in and said I’d take it to her, in her trailer, and nobody saw anything wrong with that. I remember that when I lifted my hand to knock on her door, I could actually see it shaking…my God. I’m shaking now.
She looked up when the door opened. She smiled at me. I don’t think anyone else in my entire life smiled at me the way Tamar did, not even my wife on our wedding day. Does that sound terrible? It should.
I expected her to be different, in person. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t different, at all. Things…bent, around her. All the light in the room went in her direction. Like a halo. But her eyes…her eyes. So dark. I don’t…I can’t possibly…
RP: (AFTER A MOMENT) Doc?
TJ: Yes. I’m sorry.
I served her, like a waiter. She told me to sit down. Took a bite, chewed it, swallowed. Then she looked back up, and said, in that husky voice: “You know, don’t you?”
RP: Know what?
TJ: That’s what I asked. She just shook her head, and sighed. Said something like: “No, it’s better that way. Even suspecting protects you, for a little while, as acting out the story protects me, and them—the other performers. The flow only ever goes one way, Nikolai told me; those who feed can’t be fed upon.” I asked: “Nicholas Ryback, you mean?” and she said, “Yes.” Was that why she’d only ever worked with him? And at this she actually laughed, and I would have felt stupid, except by then, I had no room left to think of myself.
She laughed, and she said: “He knew before I did. They were the ones who told me where I come from, what I was…Nikolai and the little secret church he belonged to, back in Los Angeles. That city is full of cult
s, always, like Rome before the fall. All the names they gave me—nocnitca, gorska majka, plachky, mrake. They told me what I would become, what they wanted me to become, but Nikolai only went along with it so far. He knew a good thing when he saw it, after all; he had plans for me, for himself. So he taught me how to use the movies to stave it off, slow it down. Suspend it, perhaps even for good.”
RP: …What?
TJ: I think you heard me, Mr. Puget.
Supplementary Notes: Terminology
(from the Freihoeven Institute files, compiled and written by Dr. Guilden Abbott)
Nocnitca (Polish), Gorska Majka (Bulgarian), Plachky or Kricksy-Plaksy (Slavic), Mrake (Croatian)—the night flyer, night moth, night hag, night maiden. All versions of this archetype seem to trace back to the phenomenon known as night terrors, the Mara or night-Mare, an apparent confusion in the hypnagogic stage of pre-REM sleep during which the conscious mind snaps awake but the body remains functionally paralyzed. Very specific hallucinations will then ensue, along with a literally pressing sense of dread, anxiety, and immediate physical danger. Sufferers often speak of a dark figure standing over them, a woman who trails her long hair down their bodies, a beautiful but faceless figure whose appearance shifts from attractiveness to awfulness almost at random.
Sometimes, in its “night moth” form, the Mara is seen to hover above the sleeper, borne on filmy, insectile wings which also appear spun from her own hair. At other times, it crawls on the floor like a caterpillar or larva, rising to suck at the sleeper’s face with a circular mouth full of lamprey-esque teeth. Sometimes, in its “night flyer” form, the Mara unfurls itself ritualistically from a standing cocoon whose outer skin is often described either as stiff and peeling, much like the bandages of an Egyptian mummy, or soft and folded in on itself yet knotted at the top, like an Elizabethan-era burial shroud. In this last form her face is “blank as the moon yet set with two great black jewels for eyes, its expression impossible to read and her hair a glittering swarm about her, floating in every direction like a mist.” (Hélas Manzynski, Grandmother’s Tales [Hope & Gershwin, 1922], translated by Morden Jegado.)
Theosophically speaking, the moth is both a psychopomp and a symbol of the soul. Similarly, just as the moth was once said to subsist on tears sipped from the corners of sleeping nightmare-sufferers’ eyes, the Mara is said to both siphon off and inspire its victim’s dreams. A secondary stream of mythology suggests that—night terrors aside—these dreams can’t possibly be entirely nightmarish, since the point of the exercise is to keep the sufferer as much asleep as possible while still allowing the Mara to conjure the emotions she supposedly feeds upon. This clearly seems to align the Mara with stories of incubi and succubi, first found in Roman tradition—male and female daimons who lie full-length upon sleepers of the opposite sex, arousing them with fantasies of passionate activity, then sucking out the resultant yin-yang energy. Repeated visits from an incubus or succubus will eventually bring about deterioration of the sleeper’s health and mental state, or even death; in The Hammer of Witches, mediaeval tales have been collected that imply these creatures can shift form from male to female at will and vice versa, sucking sperm from male victims in order to impregnate female victims with parasitic phantom babies.
In some tales, the Nocnitca is known to visit when one sleeps on one’s back, hands folded on the chest (a position allegedly called “sleeping with the dead”). According to some folklore, night hags are made of shadow, may also have a horrible screeching voice, and might allegedly also smell of the moss and dirt from her forest of origin. Finally, a stone with a hole in its centre is said to be protection from the Nocnitca, since she can only be glimpsed while awake by looking through such a lens or frame. Otherwise, she will remain perfectly invisible, subsumed into the body of her unlucky mortal host.
RP: So…Nick Ryback was in a cult. A Hollywood cult.
TJ: So Tamar Dusk said.
RP: I mean—there’s a lot of those, right? Tom Cruise, that kind of—
TJ: Oh, you’re thinking of Scientology? Nothing that recent. I think she meant older things, odder things. And as to whether or not Ryback was in the cult or simply associated with them somehow, well—I think he had been, yes. That he might even have been looking for someone like her, for them. But when he found her, I think things must have changed for him. I can’t see how they wouldn’t have.
At any rate, when I asked Tamar what she meant, her face went through a…transfiguration, is the only word. All her mouth did was turn down the slightest degree, and suddenly I had to fight to keep from sobbing, even though her own eyes were absolutely dry. And she said, so quietly I could barely hear her: “I am a person, still, you know. Like anyone else. I want to live, to love—but it is hard, so hard, to do either. And when an alternative is offered, no matter how deeply you may suspect it might be a mistake, you have to try. You cannot…not.”
And then it was as if she’d woken up, and she looked at me and said, “You are Oleg’s friend, the dentist. The one with the money.” And I said yes, I was, and she leaned forward and grabbed my hands—I literally lost the ability to breathe—and she said, “If you love me, take the money away. Stop paying for this. If they cannot pay the crew, they cannot finish.” And I said I’d given my word, and she said, “It is not you who will pay the price for keeping it. I beg you. Go.”
And then her expression changed again, and her voice got deeper. And her hands were moving in mine. And—somehow, I don’t know how—she was suddenly speaking perfect Polish, with the accent of my parents. And she said, “If you need another reason, I can…encourage you.” And she was leaning toward me, closing her eyes, and I was closing mine, and—
I don’t know what would have happened if the PA hadn’t knocked on the trailer door right that second. Logically, why would I have been in danger, after all? She had just begged me in sheer desperation to do something only I could do. Doing anything that might…damage me…would have made no sense, and yet. I got the feeling that she was not entirely in control of herself, in those last moments. That something, some—instinct—had taken her over. And when the PA’s knock broke that trance, I don’t even remember fleeing. I only remember finding myself in my own car, shuddering and gasping, like I’d climbed out of a bath of ice.
RP: Jesus.
TJ: (PAUSE) The next day, I called Oleg. I told him I was pulling my funding. That he was no longer welcome as a patient at my practice. Well, he was extremely unhappy, and made some unpleasant suggestions about how he could change my mind, until I pointed out that I’d been his dentist for a year and a half and could make sure the police learned everything they’d need to know to find him, right down to his Social Insurance Number, his birth certificate, and his dental records. And that was the end of my involvement with The Torc, the last time I ever saw any of them in person.
RP: But it didn’t work. The movie came out anyway.
TJ: (DEEP SIGH) I know. I went to see it; I was one of the few who did, in its very brief and limited run. Somehow, Quent had found just enough resources to produce that final sequence, along with whatever interstitial material he needed to fill in the gaps to his satisfaction. I suspect he did most of the final photography himself.
RP: What makes you say that?
TJ: Well, it’s pure speculation, at this point. But…in epidemiology, the term “natural immunity” refers to people who are born with the antibodies to a particular disease already in their system. There are people who are tone-deaf, who literally can’t hear the difference between music and noise; there are those who can’t tell red from green, and those who can’t see colour at all. So it has always seemed to me that if certain…influences existed, certain…methods of exchanging metaphysical energies, let’s say—then some people would also be naturally insensitive to those, as well. Whatever…effect Tamar had on most around he
r would simply roll off them.
RP: You think Ryback might’ve been like that?
TJ: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even know if what happened to him was related to Tamar at all; people do just get cancer. But if he was—and if Quent was another one—it would explain why Quent was able to finish the film without any…issues. Especially if he did everything himself.
RP: (PAUSE) But he couldn’t have, could he? Not if The Torc’s final sequence wasn’t shot until after you left the production. There’s too much F/X work in that scene for it to be a solo job. Too many extras, for that matter—there’s like, what, thirty, forty people in the glade, not including Tamar? No way Quent did the aging makeup on all of them himself. Or the lighting, for that night shoot. And Tamar herself, the perspective changes, the distortions, the way he makes her look, like, twelve feet tall near the end, that’s not—
Jesus.
Oh, you’re not—Doc, tell me you aren’t serious.
TJ: Like I said, Mr. Puget, pure speculation.
Still. I’ve been an amateur student of Canadian film for over forty years now; I’ve read dozens of articles about Niall Quent, and seen all his interviews. He’s not a man shy of talking about himself. Yet The Torc is one film he’s never discussed in detail. He’s never even said much about working with Tamar Dusk, beyond the usual rote phrases about what an honour it was, how wonderful a person she was, all that…bullshit. (PAUSE) If you play this for Lily, can you cut that out?
RP: No. Look, Doc, if what you’re talking about really happened, how the hell could Quent—and Oleg, I guess—get away with it? Forty people dead, or disappeared? I don’t care how much money you throw at something, you can’t cover that up!
Final Cuts Page 32
