How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive

Fifteen

Max liked living alone, and he hated waiting. For five days, he didn’t get his way on either score.

Stretched out on his bed, he read the latest issue of Variety.

He cut his toenails over the wastebasket.

He wondered if he should get another dog.

The grating clack of a typewriter started up again downstairs, rattling like a machine gun over the muffled pounding of Led Zeppelin IV. Someone, at least, was having fun.

Every keystroke galled him. He’d always produced his own scripts. He used an electric typewriter. Dorothy wrote on the portable manual typewriter she’d brought, a cherry-red Olivetti Lettera 25.

Day and night, she typed while bourbon and takeout flowed like room service into his office. The main floor now smelled like buffalo wings, patchouli, and incense. Mariel gave him a daily affronted reminder that she couldn’t clean in there, glaring as if expecting him to do something manly to defend himself against this home invasion.

Max concluded that being haunted by the living was worse than sharing a house with a restless ghost. Though confined to a single room, the writer made his home feel crowded with her outsize psychic footprint.

Downstairs, the bell dinged at the end of another line. Led Zeppelin IV climaxed and started again at the beginning.

Respect the creative process, he told himself.

The only problem was the process took time, and he didn’t have it. Jordan wanted film in the can by January.

Setting aside Variety, Max left his bed to gravitate toward the window. He pried the blinds open enough to peer out. No light at the school playground, which remained shrouded in darkness.

He’d become convinced his macabre dream hadn’t been a dream at all. In a few weeks, the full moon would rise again, and he’d have to face Raphael and Helga at the bonfire. Lady Susan too.

Maybe he shouldn’t get another dog.

Something stirred in his peripheral vision, down the road.

At the edge of the pool of amber illumination cast by a streetlight, a car had parked. Someone sat behind the wheel, as if waiting for something.

It gave him a bad feeling. In the past week, his life had gone beyond assuming odd events were pure coincidence.

Padding downstairs, he approached the office. Through the closed door, Robert Plant moaned about a stairway to heaven. He knocked.

“Fuck off,” Dorothy screamed back at the top of her lungs. Still typing.

“Do you do any—?”

“I’m in the zone!” she howled again, and then: “What do you want?”

“I was wondering if you do any bird-watching.”

“Why?”

“You strike me as the type.”

The clacking stopped. The music cut off.

The door burst wide to reveal Dorothy wearing her feathered bolero, a pair of gym shorts, and nothing else. Her face wet with tears.

She took a ragged breath. “Hell, yeah. I love bird-watching.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m great!”

“You’re crying…”

The writer blanched. “Poor Penny. It’s all her fault. All of it.” Lamenting her protagonist’s flaws.

“So, the script is coming along?”

She swept her arm to present the typewriter surrounded by glasses, empty bottles of bourbon, and the latest plates of greasy chicken bones. A stack of paper rested next to it, far taller than needed to make a ninety-minute feature film. If Wishes Could Kill, in the process of its creative birth.

“Of course,” Dorothy said.

“It’s a script, not a novel, you know.” He looked away. “Would you mind covering yourself?”

“I would mind,” she replied. “Anything else, or can I go back to work?”

“I wanted to know if you have binoculars. You know, for bird-watching.”

“What did you see? An owl?”

“An interloper,” said Max.

“Roger that.” The writer shuffled through the crumpled papers littering the floor to root through her oversize suitcase next to a rumpled sleeping bag. At last, she produced a pair of spyglasses and handed them over.

“If you spot a nightjar, let me know,” she said. “They’re beautiful birds.”

“Thanks. So, when do you think you’ll finish—?”

The door slammed in his face. Robert Plant sang again. After a throaty, frustrated growl that didn’t sound quite human, the clacking resumed.

Max returned to his bedroom to peer once more into the night. The car remained parked at the edge of the light. He switched off the lamps in the room and aimed the binoculars, adjusting the focus knob until he gained a clear image.

Officer John McDaniel sat behind the wheel of his police cruiser, eyeing Max’s house with the patient gaze of a basilisk. He sipped from a thermos.

Well, well, Max thought. Maybe you are an interesting nemesis.

McDaniel no doubt pictured himself the hero in a cop drama. A thriller where the tough, no-nonsense maverick obeys his instincts first and his excitable police chief second if ever. He bucks the system and its confining and self-defeating bleeding-heart rules about civil rights. Doing it his way—even if it costs him his badge—as the main thing he values is justice.

In the end, the lawman nails the bad guy, proving he was right all along.

Max chuckled. The cop didn’t know it, but this was no police drama. Rather, he was in one of the horror movies he held in such high disdain. The bumbling deputy trope. The head-scratching cop who always shows up too late to do anything except bear solemn and gawking witness to the gory aftermath.

A part of Max wanted to invite the muscle-bound cop inside for some decent coffee. They’d talk about movies and maybe laugh the whole thing off. A part of him wanted to confess, get caught, show McDaniel where he’d buried the camera.

Another enjoyed the game. His nemeses had always been Jordan, needy actors, crew mistakes, the MPAA censors. A movie director was supposed to be a god while on set, but he wasn’t. In the end, he enjoyed very little control, a glorified puppet on strings. Golden’s apparatus changed that dynamic.

Not that he needed it. His movie had the potential to be powerful without his little deus ex machina. With a strong enough story and deft direction giving it the right documentarian feel, he thought he had a real crack at making his perfect horror movie, and it wouldn’t involve killing anyone.

But he could use it. You know, if he wanted.

All he had to do was dig it up.

Knowing this gave him a heady sense of power. The power over life and death. For the first time, he truly understood how Jack felt. What his teen audience likely felt too while watching the latest Jack the Knife movie.

McDaniel posed minimal threat, but Max didn’t need any plot complications. Returning downstairs, he knocked again on the office door.

“Leave me alone,” the writer shrieked.

“Wrap it up tonight,” Max called back.

“You’re breaking my flow!”

“We’re taking a road trip in the morning.”

The typing stopped. Dorothy flung the door open again, breasts akimbo.

“Where?”

“We’re going to do some location scouting.”

A proposition to which she agreed, but only after he promised to bring her a fresh bottle of bourbon to water her demons.

Surrounded by empty dirt and patches of scrub, the I-10 highway cut the desert in its endless pursuit of the horizon. Flying down the road with the top down, Max downshifted to swing southbound onto route 86.

He wasn’t the sort to be truly happy about anything, but the desolation satisfied him. No meddling producers, wheedling agents, or one Officer McDaniel acting out his police procedural fantasies in nocturnal stakeouts. Just blue sky, speed, and free thoughts. Reading his notes on the script, even Dorothy remained quiet and still for the ride.

Then the writer ruined it by shouting into the wind.

“What do you mean, I need a pinch point?”

She held a sheaf of paper splayed like a losing poker hand. Max glanced over and saw his red scribble marring her neatly typed scenes.

“Script writing is different than writing fiction,” he reminded her.

“No shit, Sherlock! Want to hear a saying among us writers? In publishing, you hear constant nos until you finally get a yes. In Hollywood, it works the other way around.”

“A scriptwriter needs to follow a very tight story structure,” Max lectured.

He explained how the character changed through conflict punctuated as a series of story beats organized in four acts: the normal, the protagonist reacts, the protagonist attacks, the protagonist goes all in.

Desire thwarted by opposition, followed by catharsis. Flaw, change, the hero becomes whole. Inciting incident, rising obstacles, climax, denouement.

Every scene building the story bit by bit, while the theme slowly manifested in the viewer’s mind until it burst.

“That still doesn’t answer my—” The wind whipped a page out of Dorothy’s hand and whisked it away onto the road behind. “Oh, fudge.”

Max turned the wheel again to hop onto route 111. Following the telephone poles, he passed palm trees and a long train of boxcars standing in the hot sun.

“Between each act is a turning point, a catalyst that changes everything,” he explained. “The pinch points have a different purpose. They’re at around a third and two-thirds into the script. These are scenes where the antagonist’s power is displayed. The audience should feel the pain.”

“You mean like when the Grand Moff blows the hell out of Alderaan right in front of Princess Leia in Star Wars?”

“That would be a fine example of a pinch,” said Max.

The writer frowned at the bundle of paper in her lap. “Connect the dots. I’m not sure if this is easier or harder than it looks. It feels rigid with rules.”

He said, “You give the director, actors, and the rest of the team scenes and dialogue as a simple blueprint. Then you trust them to build it.”

Dorothy scowled to let him know what she thought of that. A solitary creative animal, she didn’t trust anyone. A would-be auteur and a misanthrope to boot, Max empathized. But motion pictures weren’t made in a vacuum.

Despite the difficulties of working with a team, the process often delivered unexpected and beautiful results. A keen-eyed director of photography who captures the perfect light. A skilled prop master who transforms an Oldsmobile into a 1957 Corvette. An inventive actor who delivers a poignant interpretation of a minor character.

Or, in this case, a talented writer. Max had to admit Dorothy brought something to the table. Her dialogue proved natural and character-revealing. She just had to follow the rules or at least know them well enough to break them with intent. They were trying to make a movie, not win a literary award.

“Can it be a flashback?” she wondered.

Eyes on the road, he nodded.

The writer reached down to pull her portable typewriter onto her lap. Threading a sheet of paper onto the platen with the roller knob, she levered the carriage until she had the guide positioned. Then she started banging the keys, which responded with a staccato series of clunks.

The bell dinged, and she slammed the carriage return to start a new line. “This movie business is art by committee, isn’t it? High pressure, constant change, giving up control to other people.” She blinked in surprise. “I’m actually having fun.”

“Maybe we should trade places,” he said dryly. “You haven’t seen the worst of it yet. Working with others means giving up a lot of yourself.”

“Ha!” Dorothy held up another sheet of paper marred in red. “There’s no way I’m cutting this line of dialogue. It marks a major change in Penny’s thinking.”

Max glanced at the page and sighed. Case in point. But she was right.

“Fine,” he growled. “But we’re going to end up with a six-hour movie.”

He swung the MG onto a cracked road leading off into empty dirt and scrub. A solitary sign greeted him: WELCOME TO BOMBAY BEACH.

He’d read about this place. He’d always been curious about it.

Max believed it might be a perfect location for his horror movie.

What a disgusting place. But also beautiful.

The largest lake in California had formed by accident. The Salton Sea did not exist a century before. In 1905, flooding overwhelmed irrigation channels cut into the Colorado River. The river dumped itself into a basin to form a new inland sea.

Around fifty years later, a carefree resort town appeared on the eastern shore: Bombay Beach, built on the southern tip of the San Andreas Fault.

Through the sixties, the town boomed as a destination for water skiers, anglers, yachters, and the likes of Frank Sinatra. But the lake, fed by irrigation runoff from farmland, was already dying.

The contamination from the runoff spread disease among birds. The skyrocketing salinity produced waves of dead fish amid massive algal blooms.

In the seventies, two tropical cyclones flooded the town and sank part of it. Most of the population fled, leaving a handful living in small homes and trailers on dusty lots. A third of the town closest to the beach remained abandoned, a bleached and rusty wasteland surrendered to the tides.

A perfect movie set, depending on the movie.

Max parked near the Ski Inn, the town’s single watering hole. Resettling his old bucket hat on his head, he strode down a gravel road into ruins baking in the desert heat. He wore a Fuji camera looped over his neck and a satchel stuffed with pencils and drawing paper in case the inspiration to do some storyboarding called. He carried a tape recorder and microphone slung over his shoulder.

A good old-fashioned location scout.

Dorothy remained in the car, still clacking on her Olivetti, oblivious to the Atomic Age ghost town sprawling around her.

The smell hit him first. Salt, chemicals with a gasoline tang, and fishy rot. Nothing he could do about that. He could hear the actors and crew bitching already, but that was show business.

Singular derelict buildings stood like structures washed ashore by some ancient supernatural storm. Pelicans and egrets perched on rusting shacks and the odd tilting telephone pole, sickened to lethargy by cholera and botulism. Though filled with tetanus hazards, these structures offered terrific shooting locations. A small hotel. A mobile home half-sunk in drying mud.

The rancid breeze brought a canine bark, which made him flinch.

Bad girl, Max thought in rising panic.

Only it wasn’t Lady Susan. Another bark replied, setting off a cluster of howls. He recalled hearing that feral dogs roamed the area, yet another hazard.

It was all so perfect.

Mopping sweat from his brow, Max pressed record and raised the microphone to his lips.

“There’s a little drive-in,” he said. “A handful of old cars were abandoned here. You can imagine ghosts waiting an eternity for the picture to start.”

He took a few snaps with the Fuji, but the sea called to him. Past the humped sea wall, it sprawled green in the sun. Not an emerald green, but a darker shade far more sickly and algal. More Linda Blair and Exorcist than the fabled city of Oz. The green of sludge. It glistened at the water’s edge like crud on a zombie’s teeth.

As Max approached the sea, the stink grew stronger. In happier times, beachgoers once packed the shore, swimming and sunbathing. A thick salted crust clumped with dead and dying tilapia now blighted it.

Max narrated everything he saw into the recorder and captured more images. The sand crunched under his footfalls. Only it wasn’t sand.

This place just got better and better.

“Bones,” Max cried with delight into the mic. “Millions of them.”

They crackled under his tennis shoes.

“The beach is coated in bleached bird and fish bones. When the water laps the beach, they shift around and make this terrific sound…”

He’d always been a solid believer in using audio as a way to create texture and identity, build dread, and deliver shock. For him, a surprise scare depended as much on a sudden wall of sound as on its visual aspect.

He closed his eyes to let the morbid rustling wash over him. He’d tell his soundman to record the tiny bones shifting in the lapping water and use it as a constant unnerving background noise, like crickets on a summer night. An audio bridge across the whole second half of the movie.

Bit by bit ramping up in volume toward the climax—

An aerosol roar intruded. He frowned up at a passenger jet still climbing to full altitude on its daily journey from LAX to Tucson, Houston, or some other southern city. The Salton Sea, it appeared, straddled a flight path. Something to note during shooting, a bit of diegetic sound his crew would have to work around.

Max explored the shoreline further, cataloging fresh discoveries. Graffitied and windowless ranch homes stood surrounded by broken furniture, one reduced by the elements to a skeletal wooden frame. Salt-encrusted posts stuck out of the water like rotten, chipped teeth.

So deliciously moody. He went inside a few of the buildings to explore and took plenty of photos for future storyboarding.

I can see it now, he thought.

It was all starting to come together in his head, where his film would exist waiting to be shot and edited.

For the monster, he’d use Jaws as a model. In Steven Spielberg’s movie, the shark wasn’t visible until near the end, and even then for only a sum total of four minutes of screen time. Before then, it existed largely in the audience’s mind and scared the crap out of them. For Max’s new movie, he’d use an eye. The all-seeing eye of a god. Penny’s wish awakens it. Its very gaze kills.

Dorothy had proposed shooting the opening scenes at her hometown of Big Bear Lake, a village standing at about seven thousand feet above sea level and no stranger to Hollywood productions. Most recently, War Games and Better Off Dead had been shot there. Beautiful greenery surrounded it. Yes, this was where the wholesome folks of Lonely Pines would march into a lake.

In his mind’s eye, a slugline appeared:

EXT. NATURAL SCENERY—DAY.

A sleepy main street in the pale light of dawn. Log houses, clean and orderly yards. A small park where children play. A sign: WELCOME TO LONELY PINES. Mist drifts across a lake calm as polished glass. Trees stand like silent sentinels in a dark and brooding forest. Ferns drip with dew. Feet plod through a meadow. The bare legs of a young girl, blue jeans worn by a man.

PENNY’S FATHER frowns in concentration as he walks. His metal detector sweeps the tall grass. Following, PENNY stares at his moving feet. This outing was supposed to be time spent together, though she feels alone.

She asks: “Why are people mean to each other, Daddy?”

He does not answer her, his own gaze locked on the ground.

“Why are they mean to me?”

The detector beeps with a find. PENNY’s disappointment turns to hope.

The story kept playing in Max’s mind. Once little Penny makes her wish to be left alone, the screen goes black, and then the eye flashes open, just a teasing glimpse. Then back to Lonely Pines, which we now see from its stalking point of view. To show this, he’d switch to a Panaglide gyroscopic body mount that John Carpenter’s opening sequence in Halloween had popularized for the slasher genre.

Suddenly, the eye has agency.

Some critics hated the trope of showing the killer’s point of view, lamenting that audiences wound up rooting for the villain. Max would make it scary again. The Panaglide-mounted camera would take a long walk through the forest straight up to Penny’s daddy, who breaks into a lunatic grin right at the lens; Max would speed up the tracking shot in editing like in The Evil Dead.

A leitmotif sound effect next accompanies quick, tight shots of a crowd in fog, bodies packed and surging in tumult, disappearing into the water. The whole sequence slightly overexposed to show it as taking place in a past, dreamlike time.

After that, a few scenes, shot on a soundstage in LA, would present the surviving children now living their separate unhappy lives as adults. Destined to reunite and one day return to their old, dead town to finally say goodbye.

Then bang, Bombay Beach gets its turn.

EXT. DESERT RUINS—DAY.

A dead bird rolls in the toxic surf among millions of tiny bones and other strange sights. Salt-crusted posts in the water. Houses reduced to leaning skeletons. A half-buried ancient TV set. A drive-in screen slowly crumbling. Desert all around. A desolate world revealed in lurid colors.

A sign: WELCOME TO LONELY PINES.

Extreme close-up on a pair of eyes taking it all in with regret. The camera sluggishly pulls back to reveal PENNY and her childhood friends, fellow survivors of the day their town walked into the lake.

They have come to open old wounds that never healed. Discover truths that should not be known. Confront the burden of living after so many died.

To finally say goodbye.

This done, they will die next as PENNY’s wish reawakens.

Dorothy’s story of grief and sought redemption, coupled with Max’s grisly slasher layer. The film now played complete in his mind, awaiting its construction.

If the story wasn’t real, it was the director’s job to make it so.