There’s a soft, dark spot in my heart for bad horror movies. As a teenager, I used to work at a used car lot near a small-time entertainment store. About once a week, after cleaning out globs of coagulated soda from cup holders or vacuuming years of matted dog fur from polyester car seats, I’d reward myself with a trip there. It was primarily a record story, but off to the side, on a single cart, was their entire collection of horror films.
There were, of course, the classics:
Nightmare on Elm Street
The Blair Witch Project
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Hellraiser
The Exorcist
But, even better, were the ones I’d never heard of:
The Last Horror Movie
Murder Set Pieces
Faces of Death (this one probably put me on a list of some sort)
Paranormal Entity
I’d only buy a couple at a time, that way I’d be sure to watch them all before next week came around. After several months. I had amassed quite the collection.1 My favorites tended to be the lesser known ones with little to no production value. These felt more authentic to me. It was like having a more direct connection with the director. These films weren’t filtered through the red tape of MPA meetings or test screenings. Their bizarreness remained intact. Just when I thought I had seen every possible way a human body could be cut, burned, flayed, electrocuted, cooked, or amputated, there was always another movie out there ready to top it.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then shameless absurdity is the father.
That’s what I like about the genre. Horror is a place to celebrate absurdity. A good horror film can make you scared of a ghost. A great horror film can make you scared of green pea soup. That’s a skill—taking your audience from the safety of their own world to some uncanny world where lunch is terrifying. The hardest part is getting them there. In some sense, belief isn’t just suspended, it’s completely turned on its head. I always relished when I could find a movie in that single cart that had that effect on me.
Allow me to offer something similar.
Watching the Korean version of The Creature from the Black Lagoon at three a.m. after being awake for twenty-four hours was not as fun as I expected. Being high certainly didn’t help. Was that water dripping from my laptop screen? Ectoplasm? The black light must be making me see things. I needed a cigarette.
We weren’t allowed to smoke on our balcony, but to be fair, I was pretty sure we weren’t allowed to smoke meth in our apartment either. But no one knew, so no one cared, except for the girl upstairs. She yelled at me last night for the cigarettes—claimed she had asthma. I could have sworn a man lived up there.
Where was I?
The glow of the black light leaked from my bedroom window onto the balcony. It still didn’t help. The Space Needle should have been right there, just shy of the horizon, but it wasn’t. None of downtown was visible. It was as if it were erased from the skyline. I felt too dizzy to smoke, but I lit the cigarette anyway.
It took several drags before I comprehended why I couldn’t see the city. It hadn’t been erased, it was just covered by fog. A large black cloud had sunk into it—easy to miss in the equally dark night sky. The surrounding lake must have been feeding it. Isn’t that how fog works? I could have sworn I read that somewhere.
I sat down on the bare concrete. They had made us take our futon inside. I guess it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing. If that were the case, I probably shouldn’t be allowed out here either. My whole body was coated in a vernier of dried sweat. It was actually several layers, each one trapping specks of dirt and grime between the others. My forehead had it the worst. I’m not sure why. I rubbed at it with the back of my hand.
There they were again.
The flotsam. They usually started in my periphery—buzzing visuals that may or may not have been real. This time they undulated on the roof across the street. I turned to stare. The movement stopped. I took a long drag of my cigarette, hard enough to hear the filter burn, before staring back harder. Now, the shadow grew. I knew I wasn’t crazy. It spilled across the roof—a writhing mass that twisted and pulled itself forward. It moved too slow for me to be afraid, so I watched until my cigarette burned out.
It had gotten nowhere.
That couldn’t be right. It had been moving this whole time. How could something creep forward for that long, but stay in the same place? I decided that this one wasn’t real. It was just a standard hallucination, nothing to worry about. But, admittedly, it was getting harder to tell.
I was back in my room. I didn’t remember falling asleep. Did I fall asleep? The black light was still on and it was still dark outside. Since I was sitting up, I assumed it was the same night. I'd have woken up fully horizontal if I had been passed out for longer than an hour. Dead leaves danced from outside. They scuffed against the concrete and each other. How was I able to hear them? It took my eyes several blinks to adjust to the darkness before realizing my window was open. Cold air leaked through.
I went to shut it. Had I left it open this whole time? The blinds clinked against the glass, so I held them still. Looking outside, the Space Needle was still gone. In fact, the roof across the street was now missing, the building beneath it too. Everything but the iron railing of my balcony was gone. Erased. Was I still asleep?
I flipped on the outside light and squinted. Suspended in its yellow beam were several wisps of gray. Fog. That’s what it was. It must have made its way over from downtown. Jesus. I needed something to ease my mind—something to sleep. My stockpile of downers was much lower than my stockpile of uppers, but I decided to take some anyway. The old bed springs compressed with my weight—however little was left—as I lay waiting for my heartbeat to soften to a light thud-thud, thud-thud. The dead leaves danced.
Something wasn’t right.
Why didn’t the upstairs neighbor yell at me earlier? I had been expecting it, but she never did. The entire apartment complex had been silent all night. No footsteps, no dings from the elevator, no muffled conversations. When was the last time I saw an actual human being? My chest tightened. Breathing became difficult. This happened almost every time I mixed downers with uppers, but this was more painful. Where was everyone?
I knocked a pile of DVDs across the floor while trying to stand back up. I needed fresh air. The apartment was dead silent except for me stumbling out the balcony door. The fog was thick. Being outside didn’t help. It was impossible to breathe in, you could only swallow. I gripped the railing with both hands to try and center myself. My knuckles turned white. Even the ground below was shrouded. It was like trying to stare into the bottom of the ocean.
There they were again.
The flotsam. They spun around me, everywhere. I tried rubbing my eyes and face against my shoulder. It didn’t help. They were in the fog itself. They were the fog itself. How did I not realize this earlier? My torso constricted. It was trying to strangle me. I gripped harder. My knuckles could have burst right through their skin. Breathing was a torturous task. After several wheezes, it let go, not entirely, but enough for me to get quick relief. The breath was sweet, but I managed to only get one in before the process repeated again.
Constriction.
Retraction.
Constriction.
Retraction.
The fog was breathing. It was an entity. I left the balcony for my room, but the window was still open. There was no escape here. I stumbled out of my room and towards the front door with no idea of where I was going.
The hallway lights were on. They always were. I felt my way down the hall, trying to keep balance, as I worked towards the emergency stairwell. There was no hint of life here. The fact that the lights were still on made it worse. I could have sworn I saw fog bleeding out from the fixtures. Once I made it to the stairs, my bare feet slapped against the metal, echoing like a distress signal. I took them three at a time—all five floors—until I had made it to the street.
It was no use. The ground may still have existed, but all else was black. Even if I were to escape, where would it be to? The world would be devoid of life. Isn’t that what was happening? The fog would consume us all. I relented, letting myself sink against the brick wall. I didn’t even have a cigarette. The box in my pocket was empty. No last meal, I guess. I shook the loose tobacco into the growing void.
My chest constricted again. I may have even yelped. The air squeezed a bit more life from me. It was accompanied by a flash of purple—a small blink of light in the swirling dark. It occurred again, just outside my periphery. I turned to see it happen again. Then there was another, and another, and another—dozens of tiny rifts in space, popping in and out of existence.
This wasn’t just some entity, I thought. There was something on the other side, something trying to come through. I buried my head into my hands. Even with my eyes closed I could still see the violet pulses. I couldn’t see what was on the other side, but I could hear. Whatever they were, their shrieks thundered like an ascending horde of dying electric eels.
This isn’t real, I thought. But that didn’t matter.
One of my crowning adolescent achievements was when our local Hollywood Video went out of business. They had to sell all their inventory, and they had to do it for cheap. Ten dollars never bought me so many movies.
I love this