More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I’m dressed in my usual uniform; faded black jeans, a white T-shirt, and a world weariness that is both affect and age-earned.
I lean across the tabletop, lifting my foot away from the leg’s clawed foot. The table quakes.
I was cast as the “Thin Kid.” That and my obvious physical attributes, and a thirst for blood.
student loans that I would default on twice.
The twitchy glances, look-aways, and the we-don’t-know-who-we-are-yet-but-I-hope-other-people-like-me half smiles we were all made of in college
But if she wasn’t broken yet, she would be, as the world breaks us all.
She and I had once attended a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and later at Hugo’s she explained expressionism with the aid of scratchy sketches on bar napkins: the strange, moody, angularly distorted set design represented the interior reality of the story.
It was one of those absurd and perfect bar conversations that young, new friends have, portentously vibrating with perceived and real discovery. I can’t decide if I’m now incapable of such a discussion because I know too much or because life has proven that none of us knows anything.
Back then I measured my future in weeks, and I assumed the far-future me would be a responsible and skilled adult who could figure a way out of any mess the now-me might make.
He wasn’t comfortable with us, two women, running the show.
The mask is ugly and grotesque and familiar, and we cannot stop staring at it because all monsters are mirrors.
atop
“neck drippings.”
The latest was an adaptation of the cult classic punk-meets-haunted-house novella Please Haunt Me, written by Elizabeth Hand.
A movie—any movie, even one that fails—is a conversation with the viewer who chooses to engage. This movie will communicate emotional truths that can only be communicated by the language of film and of horror. If we do it right, the movie will speak to us now as it would’ve thirty years ago and as it will thirty years from now, if any of us are still around, projecting movies onto the walls of ruined buildings.”
Just because it’s pretentious doesn’t mean it’s not true, or that I don’t want it to be true.
I think most of us have our personality, our character, plainly etched in a wordless language on the skins of our faces, as obvious as a bleeding heart on a sleeve.
“rolling wardrobe rack from hell,”
Cesare
“I took off my clothes and put on a mask. No big deal.”
“We’re all someone’s bad guy eventually.”
“How about a fjord?”
“Who’s Cesare?”
We cannot know what she is thinking. We can never know what exactly she is thinking. Her mind -- just like anyone else’s mind -- is a turned-over poster.
The terrible ones are predictable, follow a pattern, and make her feel safe but in an unsafe way. Horror movies should make us feel the opposite, shouldn’t they? Still, she watches all the horror movies she can, repeatedly, and she buys the posters and stares at them until she flips them over to be re-scrutinized later at the time of her choosing. The hope is she’ll find a movie that changes her in the way she didn’t know she wanted to be changed.
We can’t know what he is thinking. We can’t know what anyone else is thinking, even when they tell us.
phantasmagoria.
(a mouse? a small gray squirrel?)
both vessel and void,
it drudges a vital aspect of the wearer that it lays bare upon its surface.
folklore canon thanks to an interview I did with the website Bloody Disgusting in 2019.
I’ve moved eight times in the years since filming the movie, and each time I tried to leave the mask behind. I tell them moving on is important, despite what it is we’re doing now with the new version of the movie. I also tell them how after every move I’d somehow find the mask inside some random box when I unpacked at my new place.
a found object is always cursed.
The Thin Kid will be a character name he tries on and wears for a few hours a day, and when filming is finished, the Thin Kid will not be an inextricable part of who he is. The Thin Kid will be as easily forgotten as the unremarkable, aging man he will become.
it’s too late to dive inside, to hide what they’ve already seen.
the Thin Kid from behind, arms out wide and his legs and feet held up, slightly bent, in a way that makes us think he is floating**).
--The teens in the abandoned school classroom shouting cruelties into the face of a seated Thin Kid.
scene (teens walking proud now, accepting condolences with head nods and waves),
--The teens standing with their backs to the Thin Kid, laughing and talking and having a great time.
--The teens club the Thin Kid with plastic WIFFLE BALL BATS.
we think, perhaps, everyone in the film is in hell even if the teens don’t realize it themselves.
We’re doing to him what the teens are doing. We’re complicit.
**The mask around his neck no longer fits loosely. The rubber latex folds that once dangled and flapped almost comically at the base of his neck are FUSED, melded into his skin. There are no sharp lines or hard borders that we can see between mask and the Thin Kid’s neck.**
They stub out cigarettes all over the Thin Kid’s body. The Thin Kid’s cries and whimpers fade, diminish, like he’s a dying clock.
If I am to make this more dramatic, imagine a young and bored Jacob Marley shuffling down the lonely school hallway, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, the links in his chain wallet jangling for our future sins.
