by Greg Kihn
Everyone held their ground, watching and waiting.
“Now, where was I? Oh yeah, you people are fulla shit! You know why? ’Cause the real star of this movie was not even invited!”
Landis shook his head. “What are you talkin’ about, Buzz?”
“Oh, as if you didn’t know!” Buzzy roared back at the top of his lungs. “There’s one star and one star only that makes this pukin’ picture worth a half a shit! He’s the guy who saved all ‘your asses, the one who’s gonna fill the theaters and scare the teenagers, and you pompous assholes didn’t even invite him!”
Buzzy took another stumbling step back, nearly tripping over his own feet. Landis couldn’t figure out his actions or where he was going with all this. Buzzy was just smashed, too drunk to make any sense, he thought.
“Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real star of this picture! Don’t look in your programs, you won’t find him there! He’s that hot new prospect that’s got all the ladies talkin’.”
Buzzy took another halting step backward. His hand went out and met the wall. Supporting his weight, he moved along the wall until his hand found the closet door.
The closet! Landis thought. That’s what he’s been moving toward this whole time.
Buzzy twisted the handle of the closet door, grinning like a mad dog all the while. The door opened a crack and Landis could see a hint of something white leaning against it from the other side.
“Here he is, the man of the hour! He’s hot, he’s sexy, and he’s dead! Folks, meet Johnny D.!”
Buzzy jerked the closet door open and the white, bloated, dead body of Johnny D. fell out. It hit the floor with an ungodly slap, facedown. The sound it made as it impacted with the hardwood was unimaginable. A solid, wet thud, like two hundred pounds of beef hitting a butcher’s counter, reverberated through the house. The sound of cartilage breaking as the face crunched into the floor was as clear and unmistakable as a fart.
People screamed. Becky Sears fainted into Tad Kingston’s arms. Beatnik Fred hunched over and began to vomit onto the floor.
The body settled. Then, the sound of a massive bubble of escaping gas hissed from somewhere deep in its throat and a stench from beyond hell filled the room.
Landis reeled, his eyes watering, toward the hall. There was a crush of hysteria and people fighting to make the stairs and fresh air.
Most ran out onto the porch. The unbelievable sound of a group of people vomiting over the railing filled the night.
Tears filled Landis’s eyes.
Buzzy Haller was completely insane.
24
“You’re the sickest piece of shit in the world, you know that?”
Buzzy just smiled. Landis slapped him across the face, his hand stinging as it hit bone. Buzzy turned with the blow, still numb from the liquor.
“Don’t smile at me!” Landis screamed.
Buzzy put his hand to his face and felt for damage. The red mark was spreading, but the skin was unbroken. He blinked and resumed sipping his coffee as if nothing had happened.
Landis continued to rage. “How could you? Jesus, you must have broken fifty laws to get him here. How did you do it?”
“It was easy,” Buzzy replied.
“Do the cops know?”
Buzzy shook his head.
“You are one sick muthafucker. What am I gonna do with you? I think you need psychiatric help. The morgue was one thing, but bringing him here … what the hell were you thinking?”
Buzzy smiled a crooked, goofy smile. He really was beginning to resemble a lunatic, Landis thought. Watching him now, hours later, while he coolly fended off questions, he actually seemed to be pleased with himself.
“I just thought that you couldn’t very well have a cast party without the real star of the picture. It’s not fair,” Buzzy mumbled.
Landis exploded again. “Cut the shit! The man’s dead! You’ve lost your mind, Buzz, you really have! Bringing him here last night was dangerous. Now there are witnesses.”
Buzzy laughed. “They’re the same witnesses you already swore to secrecy. What are they gonna say?”
Landis paced. He ran a hand through his rapidly thinning hair. “You’re gonna have to get rid of him. That’s all there is to it. The sooner the better.”
Buzzy looked up, the steam from the coffee swirling around his face. “What do you mean?”
“Just get rid of him,” Landis snapped back.
“You mean take him back?”
Landis stopped pacing. “No! No, don’t take him back. That would only make things worse. You might get caught. You’re gonna have to get rid of him the same way that people always get rid of bodies. Dump him somewhere.”
Buzzy snorted. “Where?”
“I don’t care where! Just get rid of him!”
Buzzy raised an eyebrow. Landis always wondered about that move. Buzzy could raise just one eyebrow at a time, arch it, and hold the position for sixty seconds. It was a gift. Landis could only raise both eyebrows at the same time. To be able to control them separately like that was a gift from God. Buzzy was touched.
He watched Buzzy’s eyebrow until the man spoke. “Sure, I’ll get rid of him. No problem.”
Later that morning, Landis went to meet with the distributors. His film was on the table, and it was now time to see what kind of action he could get. This was the side of the business Landis hated, the ass-kissing and the politics. He had never excelled at impressing people from a business standpoint. In fact, Landis repulsed people. That was part of his problem. Landis braced himself against the bullshit and drove into Burbank with his window down and his mind open.
He had told Buzzy to sober up and get rid of the body before he returned. Landis was shaken; Buzzy had actually succeeded in scaring him. The man was out of control. When Buzzy lost it, it meant that Landis, whose life was continually on the edge, might lose too. Buzzy was more than a friend—he was an integral part of Landis’s cinematic operations.
He was the monster maker. You can’t have a monster movie without a monster. Now, it seemed to Landis, Buzzy had become a monster himself. Dangerous and unpredictable, he threatened to bring down the whole house of cards on Landis’s head.
He had to do something.
First, Buzzy had to dry out. It was time for a trip to the hospital. Landis had taken Luboff in so many times they knew him by name. What must they think? That he was a friend to all the winos and junkies of the world?
Landis thought. Who cares? If I cared what people thought about me all the time, I’d be out of business. The main thing was to get Buzzy help.
Nineteen fifty-seven came to a close. The papers were full of Sputnik and the Dodgers were coming to town. Rock and roll had taken over the radio, and juvenile delinquents had taken over the high schools.
All over America, teenagers flocked to the drive-ins and became enamored with monsters. Aliens, vampires, creatures from lagoons, dinosaurs, giant bugs, mummies, mad scientists, and their hideous creations dominated the outdoor screens. The exploitation movie business boomed. Sales of cosmetics, blue jeans, motorcycles, guitars, leather jackets, and chewing gum skyrocketed.
Cadaver became a hit at the drive-ins; but, because Landis had oversold all the available shares in advance, most of the profits were gobbled up by the investors. Although he would never get the respect and recognition he longed for from his Hollywood colleagues, he did make a splash with the kids and became, for a short while, the king of the B-movies.
Then America changed, leaving Landis Woodley behind.
NOW
25
STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA 1996
Roberta Bachman’s office was elegant. She favored leather couches and modern desks. The art pieces that hung on her walls were all original lithos, signed and numbered by known artists. She bought the prints at an art gallery on Ventura Boulevard in Van Nuys, where she knew the owner. Roberta was chic, but not dumb; she never paid retail. She had learned over the years in the Hollywood community
that it was not how much money you actually had, it was how much money people thought you had.
In other words, the image game.
Roberta played that game well. She enjoyed it. It was tailor-made for a woman who made good money yet wanted to be perceived as a woman who made great money. Attractive and slim for a woman of her years, Roberta kept her hair shade of Lucille Ball red as a sort of trademark. Thus was she known and instantly recognizable around town. She had a self-contained prettiness that endured, and a confidence that overcame.
Savvy and tough, she knew Hollywood like a mapmaker. She’d held every kind of job in the movie business, and she knew all kinds of people, the good and the bad. Roberta owned her own home and business, had never married, and loved her life. She was the prototypical LA career woman—a buyer of designer clothes, a diner at exclusive restaurants, a driver of exotic cars.
Clint Stockbern was the exact opposite. His beat-up Volkswagen bug looked like what it was—barely adequate transportation for a man who barely made a living.
He carried the scars of a terrible case of adolescent acne but he was an otherwise handsome youth. His wardrobe consisted solely of T-shirts and jeans.
He sat in Roberta’s office, careful to keep his sneakers off her furniture.
“You didn’t tell me you knew him.”
“That’s right,” Roberta answered.
“But why?”
“This is your story, Clint. If you knew I knew him, you’d have wasted a lot of time bugging me for details. Hell, I could just as soon write the story myself.”
Clint looked out the window at the afternoon traffic in downtown Thousand Oaks and cleared his throat.
“He invited me back to look at some film,” Clint said proudly.
“What kind of film?”
“Rare stuff, outtakes, stuff the censors made him clip, I don’t know. He was vague about it. All I can tell you is I want to see it. It’s a collector’s dream.”
Roberta nodded. “Okay, but be careful.”
“Why? He’s just an old man.”
Roberta drummed a pencil on her desk absently. “What would you say if I told you that Landis Woodley was, at one time, madly in love with me?”
Clint smiled automatically. “I’d say, ‘Jesus Christ.’”
“And what would you say if I told you that we actually went out together a couple of times?”
“I’d say, ‘holy shit.’”
“And what would you say if I told you he confided all his deepest, darkest secrets to me?”
“I’d say, ‘why the fuck have I been all over town digging up rumors when you’ve got the facts?’”
It was Roberta’s turn to smile. “A story is a story. You still have to do your homework.”
“You’re the boss.”
Roberta sniffed. She was the boss, and as long as she was running the show, she’d put whatever writer on whatever story she wanted. It just so happened that Clint was a natural for this one. He was familiar with the subject matter, he was sharp and resourceful, and, she thought, a talented young writer.
“Why do you think I sent you out on this?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Because I like his movies?”
“Crap,” Roberta snorted. “His films are garbage. How you can watch ’em, I’ll never know. You’re a sick puppy, kid.”
Clint shifted in his seat.
“From what you’ve gathered so far, tell me what you think,” Roberta said.
Clint hunched forward, his face aglow. The sparkle of excitement in his eyes was intense. “I think there’s a curse.”
Roberta smiled. She looked over his head, letting her eyes drift across a Peggy Hopper Hawaiian print. She gathered her breath and asked, “Okay, why do you think that?”
“Because, several of the people who worked on Cadaver have all met untimely deaths. Most recently, a year ago, Buzzy Haller committed suicide. In 1989, Chet Bronski was murdered in his apartment, strangled. It’s still in the ‘unsolved crimes’ file at the LAPD. Before that, in 1971, Neil Bugmier disappeared off the face of the earth, again, no clues.”
Roberta nodded. “And you think it’s a conspiracy?”
“Conspiracies are for wimps. I think there’s a curse, a big, fat, juicy curse, and that’s the story I’m gonna write.”
Roberta smiled anew. “I knew you’d think that.”
“You did?”
“Of course. That’s why I put you on it.”
Clint’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“First of all,” she continued, “just getting in to see Landis Woodley is a challenge. I know that. He’s turned into quite the recluse, not to mention he’s just about the most unpleasant man in the known universe. I certainly wasn’t going over there. And it’s too good a story to go to waste.
“With your enthusiasm for his films and your encyclopedic knowledge of the man, the myth, the miracle, I figured you would find a way in. Then, once you got in, you’d be able to hold his attention, even if it was just some kind of sicko hero worship.”
Clint nodded. “Yeah, you were right about that.”
“He likes hero worship. He never got his due in the glory years,” Roberta explained. “I figured you were just the man for the job. A good curse story is dynamite, and you’re a good writer, Clint. Good writers are worth their weight.”
Clint ran his fingers through his hair, raking it back loosely. “The thing is—the story about real corpses in Cadaver is true. He actually confessed to it on tape: Now, that in itself is a hell of scoop and would sell a ton of magazines, but then I started thinkin’. I thought, hey, most of these people are dead.”
“Good, good, go on,” she said.
“Well, think about it. They use real corpses, later on people start dying. It’s like—they’re pissed off, you know? The dead are pissed off and they want revenge.”
Roberta nodded. “So?”
“So, they’re back from the grave and they want their residuals!”
Roberta thought Clint’s idea of a joke was weak. She let it crash and burn on her desk without flinching.
“What about the others?” she asked.
“What others?”
“Didn’t you check the rest of the cast and crew of Cadaver, to see who was left alive?”
Clint shook his head.
“Fred Sanchez, AKA Beatnik Fred, was Buzzy Haller’s right-hand man on the film. He was one of Buzzy’s pot-smokin’ buddies from San Francisco. He disappeared a year after Chet. They found his shoe out in the driveway.”
“Wow! Just one shoe?”
Roberta nodded. “There was blood on it.”
“Jeez.”
“Jonathon Luboff, overdose of heroin, October 31, 1958.”
Clint cocked his head. “I knew that.”
Roberta took a sip of some mineral water that had been sitting on her desk all afternoon. It was as warm and flat as the air in San Fernando Valley that day.
“Yes, I would have thought you’d know that, Clint. Everybody knew that Luboff was a junkie, and it was only a matter of time before he died, but, he was the star of the movie. Who’s to say it wasn’t an accidental overdose?”
Clint nodded. “I lost track of Tad Kingston,” he said with a tinge of resignation in his reedy voice. “I tried everything, tracked him every way I knew how, but he’s a blank page. Now, if he—”
“Canada,” she said.
Clint stopped talking.
Roberta continued, “He moved to Canada in 1966, made a few more terrible films and retired. He married Becky Sears. You wouldn’t know her, she was a script girl who worked for Woodley.”
“Great. I’ll look him up right now.”
“Dead,” Roberta said flatly. “Dead. Dead. Dead.”
Clint’s eyes widened. “Jesus Christ! Dead? Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Same deal, as far as I know. Strangled. He’d come back to Hollywood to bury his mother. They found him in his hotel room.”
Clint sl
id back into the chair. He started to put his frayed sneakers up on the chair across from him, but stopped in mid-swing. Roberta’s knowing eyes bored into him, and he lowered his feet back to the carpet. “Don’t even think about it,” they seemed to say, and Clint didn’t.
“Did you see Cadaver when you were young?” she asked.
“Sure. Of course. It scared the shit out of me.”
Roberta nodded. “You’re not alone. Aside from Night of the Living Dead, it’s most people’s favorite horror movie of that era, certainly the most frightening. Did it give you nightmares?”
“Boy, did it ever. I was one of those kids who had all the plastic models of monsters all over his room, and I also had my army men. At night, I was so scared that the dead bodies from the movie were gonna attack me that I set up my army men all around the room, facing the windows and doors. I had tanks, bazooka guys, everything, plus the model monsters to protect me. The only problem was that I thought that maybe during the night, the model monsters would come alive and turn bad and attack the army guys, then come for me. I was one screwed-up kid, let me tell ya. A couple of times I woke up to find that some of them had moved or gotten knocked over during the night. That made me wonder.”
“You’re still wondering, aren’t you, Clint?”
He nodded his head thoughtfully. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
“Well, there’s something sinister about that movie, something downright evil. I was convinced of that way back in ’57. If I was to tell you that there was a curse on that movie, even if you didn’t know about the corpses, you’d believe it, right?”
“I think I would,” Clint replied.
“Well, so would a lot of our readers. I think this story is huge. As far as the curse goes, I’ve suspected it for years. When Buzzy Haller died, I knew. I just knew. Landis Woodley is a very bitter man. I guess you found that out. Buzzy Haller was his best friend, his only friend. Buzzy was the last one to die. They all shared a secret. A terrible secret.”
Clint blinked. “Are you saying that Landis Woodley is behind it?”
