Midnight Movie: A Novel (2 page)

He said, “I didn’t get it. It was a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy.”

I said, “A guy who knows a guy who knows a guy.”

He said, “Yeah. A guy who knows a guy who knows a guy.”

I said, “So you’re telling me that the guy who knows the guy who knows the guy broke into my mother’s house? Because as far as I know, the only print was in my mom’s basement.” It actually wasn’t my mom’s house anymore. It was mine. I’d been renting it out on and off since I moved out to Los Angeles ten years back. Free money for those dark days. See, when you make the kind of films I make, and when you write the kind of screenplays I write,
and when you hate dealing with major studios as much as I do, you have a lot of dark days.

Dude said, “Toeb—”

I said, “It’s To
-bee.
”

Dude said, “Sorry, To-
beeeeee
,” all sarcastic-like. Prick. He went on: “I can assure you that nobody broke into your mother’s house. The fact is, I don’t know where the guy who knew the guy who knew the guy got it. But it doesn’t really matter, because everybody at South by Southwest is excited about it, very excited. We’d like you to come down to the fest and screen the film.”

My initial reaction was,
No way
. Yeah, it would’ve been nice to go back to Austin and check out the fest, but I didn’t even recall what the hell
Destiny Express
was about—I was pretty sure there was some zombie sex involved—and I didn’t want to get up in front of a room full of horror geeks (geeks such as myself, mind you) and sound like a dumbass. But I
was
curious, so I decided to let the conversation play itself out.

I said, “Where would we be doing this dog-and-pony show? The Performing Arts Center?” The PAC, which was smack in the middle of the University of Texas campus, was just about the coolest auditorium in Austin. They staged musicals, and big concerts, and film festivals, and the like. Sometimes the goddamn Wiggles performed there, but I couldn’t hold that against the PAC bookers. You got to pay your employees, because everybody’s got to feed their family, and a Luis Buñuel retrospective wasn’t going to rake in the dough like goddamn Greg, goddamn Jeff, goddamn Murray, and goddamn Anthony. And don’t ask me why I know all the goddamn Wiggles’ names. I’d rather not discuss it. Suffice it to say that if those Aussie freaks ever show up at my doorstep, I’m getting my Colt.

Anyhow, Dude said, “Nope. Not the PAC. We wanted it to be more intimate. We were thinking about the Cove.”

I said, “The Cove? Man, I guess you guys don’t think much
of me.” You don’t go to the Cove to watch a movie. You go to the Cove to shoot pool on what is undoubtedly the shittiest pool table in Texas, and get into a fight, and find a girl who’ll let you put it where your girlfriend won’t let you, or buy some shitty skunk weed, or get royally fucked-up on warm beer and watered-down whiskey. If you’re keeping score, I’ve done all of the above.

Dude said, “Yeah, sorry about that, Toeb—”

I said, “Toe-bee.”

Dude said, “Right. To
-beeeeee
. I know it’s a shithole, but it was the only venue that wasn’t booked. But it doesn’t matter where we do it. We could do it on a bedsheet tied between two phone poles, and it’d still be great. You’ll lead a discussion. You’ll sign autographs. You’ll shake hands. You’ll hang out. You’ll have a few Black Straps. We’ll fly you down, and put you up, and feed you, and get you onto every guest list on Sixth Street. And we can pay you, I don’t know, ten grand?”

If I’d have been drinking something, you’d have seen the biggest spit-take you can imagine. I said, “Ten grand? You’re shitting me.”

Dude said, “What, ten’s not enough? How’s fifteen sound? Or twenty?”

I said, “Insane. Twenty sounds insane. Hell, even
two
grand is insane.”

He said, “Insane good, or insane bad?”

I said,
“Insane
insane. Listen, Dude, I know for a fact that you can only fit about sixty people in the Cove—”

He interrupted. “Actually, they did some remodeling. It’s
way
bigger now.”

I said, “How much bigger is
way
bigger?”

Dude said, “Like, the capacity is ninety. They’ve expanded by a third. Pretty awesome, right?”

I said, “Okay, let’s you and me do some simple math here,
Mr. McGee. If you were going to break even on this, you’d need to sell the place out for about one-fifty a ticket. Nobody’s paying a buck fifty to see a movie that some smart-ass kid did. Maybe they’d pay one and a half bills to see, I don’t know, Leatherface fuck up Dick Cheney live onstage. But not this. Not some teenage vanity film. Seriously, Dude, why in God’s name would you fork over five figures for this?”

Dude said, “Prestige. You’re Toeb Hooper—”

I said, “I’m not
Toeb
Hooper, man, I’m Toe
-bee
Hooper.”

Dude was quiet for a second. I heard some papers ruffling, then he said, “You sure about that? I’m pretty certain it’s Toeb.”

I almost hung up on him then and there, but—and I’m not proud of this—I wanted to hear him out, because I needed the bread. My last two movies had tanked, and I was still paying out the nose for that goddamn divorce—which I’m sure you read about in the papers, and I’m not going to get into it right now—so my bank account wasn’t in any shape to finance a film. Plus, the last payment for
Carrie
hadn’t come in yet, and the Fox accounting department wasn’t known for its speed, so who knew when the hell that would show up. Twenty grand could get me to Greece, where I was hoping to shoot my new flick, which I was going to finance myself—it was a splatterfest straight out of 1975, and even with the
Saw
flicks doing their thing and putting asses in seats, there wasn’t a studio in town that’d touch
this
one—and I could scout locations and start putting together a crew. That way, when the
Carrie
money showed—and when I got another investor or three on board—I could get started immediately.

So I told Dude, “First off, I can promise you that it’s Toe-bee, not Toeb. And second off, have you actually watched
Destiny Express
?”

He said, “Yes. It’s brilliant.”

I said, “Thanks, man. Now, what the hell’s it about?”

The
Destiny Express
press release showed up on February 27. I immediately thought about doing a long profile on Hooper, but that moron Dude McGee couldn’t, or wouldn’t, schedule an interview quickly enough for me to hit my deadline. He did, however, invite me down to his office to watch the movie, with the proviso that if I wrote about it, I wouldn’t give away too much of the plot. I told him that professional reviewers and spoilers don’t mix, so he said I could drop by whenever I wanted to. I told him I’d be there in an hour. Or less.

We critic types are supposed to be unbiased, but I have a major affinity for old-school horror—give me some Hitchcock, some Hammer flicks, and some George Romero, and I’m a happy boy. But I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Tobe Hooper, thus the moniker of my lame little punk trio. All of which was why the second I hung up with Dude McGee, I MapQuested directions to that moron’s office, hopped onto my bicycle, and sped across town.

Turned out his office wasn’t an office. It was a basement. In his parents’ house. Where he was living.

Dude looked like a low-budget Harry Knowles—big and bearded, but without Knowles’s charming sense of self-deprecation. He was of indeterminate age—maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty-five—strident, and obnoxious, and the close confines amplified both his loudness and his loutishness. He asked me if I had any trouble finding the place, then he belched. It smelled like salami. Actually, the whole place smelled like salami. I told him no, I found the place just fine, then I asked him if we could get started, because I wanted to turn this article in by the end of the day. That was a lie. I just wanted to see the movie, then get out of there, because the scent of luncheon meat was seeping into my pores.

But he insisted on giving me the grand tour. To the right, there were his five wide-screen monitors that enabled him to simultaneously play five different video games or watch five different DVDs. To the left, his, quote,
astoundingly valuable comic collection
, unquote. Now, I know very little about comics and even less about collecting, but one thing I am aware of is that you’re supposed to put each book in a plastic cover, then store them in a condition-proof container of some sort, like a file cabinet or a safe. Dude had his books in bales of one hundred, tied together with twine, sitting inside of moldy, battered, uncovered cardboard boxes piled up to the ceiling. My younger brother Arthur collects comics, and I knew he’d be appalled if he saw Dude’s casual, uncaring method of storage.

And the farther we went into the basement, the worse the salami smell became.

Dude led me through the maze of ratty boxes, high-end computer equipment, and a very tiny but very fancy-looking chemistry lab to a big utility room. In between a furnace and a rusty washer/dryer, he’d set up a movie screen, the kind of pull-down, marked-up screen that I used to watch filmstrips on in second grade. At the other end of the room, there was a single folding chair and bridge table, on top of which sat an unstable-looking movie projector. Dude told me to take a seat, then asked me if I wanted a beer. I said no, thanks, I should watch the movie so I can get back home and write the article. I pulled out my notebook—not my laptop, but actual, honest-to-goodness paper—and Dude slapped it out of my hand.

I said, “What the hell, man? What’s the problem?”

Dude said, “You can’t take notes, and if you insist on doing so, I’ll throw you out on your ass.” He was smiling while he said it. Not sure why. Maybe to soften the blow.

Now, if this wasn’t a Tobe Hooper movie, I’d have told Dude to fuck off and then left. But it
was
a Tobe Hooper movie, so
I sucked it up and told him to roll film. He said, “Excellent. Forgive me if I won’t be joining you. The first ten minutes were enough for me.”

I thought,
Thank God
, then told Dude, “I’ll be fine.” Frankly, I was ecstatic he was leaving. He was one of those people whose innate wrongness made every interaction uncomfortable and distracting, and since I couldn’t take notes, I needed to be completely focused on the movie.

So.
Destiny Express
.

The credits were pretty funny, although I don’t think they were meant to be. It was a sexy little high school girl wearing a Catholic schoolgirl uniform, flipping through cue cards, kind of like Bob Dylan eventually did in the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video several years later. I doubt D. A. Pennebaker got the idea from Tobe Hooper, but it was oddly similar. The first card said, “A TOBE HOOPER FILM.” The second: “DESTINY EXPRESS.” The third: “STARRING GARY CHURCH.” The fourth: “CO-STARRING HELEN LEARY.” The fifth: “AND CLAIRE CRAFT.” The sixth: “CAMERA AND SOUND BY DARREN ALLEN.” The seventh: “MAKEUP AND SPECIAL EFFECTS BY WILLIAM MARRON.” The eighth: “WRITTEN, DIRECTED, CONCEIVED, AND BRIEFLY NARRATED BY TOBE HOOPER.” Only six people. Talk about a skeleton crew.

Then there was a jump cut to a suburban cul-de-sac that was filled with birds, and trees, and perfectly coiffed lawns. The camera panned around in a half circle before stopping on a young man—a boy, really—sitting on a porch, staring off to his left. He coolly turned forward, gazed into the camera, then nodded and said, “Good afternoon, dear viewers. My name is Tobe Hooper. You don’t know me. I could be a nice guy. I could be a liar and a thief. I could even be a killer. You can believe everything I tell you. Or you can ignore every word that I say. Or you can burn
this film into a pile of ashes.” He paused, ran his hand through his crew cut, then said, “But if I were you, I’d listen carefully. Because I have the camera. And I know the truth.”

He stood up and began pacing back and forth, no longer looking into the camera. “I’m speaking to you from Austin, Texas. It’s a quiet little town, Austin is. Nobody pays much attention to us. That’s a bad idea. Like I said, you should listen carefully. You might want to get your friends and family to join you in front of the screen. They need to see this.”

And then there was another jump cut to a man—or possibly a boy made up to look like a man—curled in a fetal position, wearing a filthy, tattered shirt and no pants. He was covered with some sort of dark glop, probably mud, but since the movie was in black and white, it was hard to tell exactly what it was. The thing—I guess you could call it a man-boy—stayed on the screen for a total of only two seconds, enough time to make one hell of an impression, then it cut back to Tobe, who said, “Did you see that? I know it was only there for a second, but I couldn’t let you see it for too long. Because you’d go mad. And then you’d die. And then you’d become undead. And then you’d kill your loved ones.” Another cut to the man-boy, who was now limping across the screen, with some kind of clear slime oozing out of his ass.

And then back to Tobe. “Some people think the word ‘zombie’ derives from the word ‘jumbie,’ which is how people in the West Indies refer to ghosts.”

Another quick shot of the man-boy. The clear slime was now leaking from both his ass and his ears.

Back to Tobe. “Some people think it comes from ‘nzambi,’ which is African for ‘spirit of a dead man.’ ”

Back to the man-boy, whose eyes were now leaking a thick, dark goo. Pretty good special effects for a sixteen-year-old. I made a mental note to ask Tobe about it at the screening.

Back to Tobe. “But we here in the South, here in the stinking
bowels of Texas, we believe that it comes from the Creole word ‘zonbi,’ the translation of which is,
A dead man brought back to life without free will or the ability to speak.
”

And then the man-boy limped slowly into the frame and hacked off Tobe’s arm with a machete.

As I watched the blood gush out of Tobe’s shoulder, I actually gagged. I don’t know how blood looks when it’s coming out of a freshly amputated limb, and I don’t know if young Tobe Hooper did either, but this looked pretty damn real. The oozing ass and the leaking eyes were excellent special effects, but the arm-chop was astounding.