Final Cuts Quotes

“Is there a mystery more charming than the calligraphy on ancient gravestones?”
― Usman T. Malik, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“The horrors would follow, their paths laid down in the light of a younger sun.”
― Brian Hodge, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“If fairy tales had taught me anything, it was that the blackest-hearted wish granters possessed limits ... and that wishes generally had a nasty catch.”
― Laird Barron, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“With his back turned on the life-giving sea, he eventually sets off waddling toward the mountains of the interior. There’s more disturbing footage from polar regions, but it’s the implications that needle at me. The penguin’s journey is certain death. Were they to catch him and bring him back, the biologist explains, he would only head for the mountains again. It sounds like the voice of experience, as if they’ve tried and failed. The penguins refuse to be saved.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“He took this door differently, turning the knob slowly, easing the door open, standing off to the side. The smell intensified, but even worse than that, he heard a soft, unpleasant noise, something he couldn’t identify but he instantly hated. He didn’t want to hear it, wanted to run away from it. It was a kind of card-shuffling sound, real low, lots of little sounds joined together, one after the other, but it wasn’t hard-edged like with cards. It was wetter, softer around the edges, and constant. Jordan peeked inside, his heart hammering worse than it had even when he was on the firing step, waiting for the word, for the whistles, to go over and up into the shrieking, machine-gun-drumming terror of an assault… There was a body on the narrow bed. A woman. Probably. She had been wearing a nightdress, which had been white, and was now uniformly a faded pink, and shredded into fragments. Things moved on the body. Insects, Jordan thought. Or worms. Or something…his eyes and brain couldn’t process what he was seeing. Lots of tiny things roiling across what was now just a lump of meat, the skin long since gone, half the flesh, too, and even the bones diminished, foreshortened… Eaten. Jordan choked back the bile in his throat as he worked out what he was seeing.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“I peeled back her collar while she sat there, suddenly frightened for her. I didn’t know what I was going to find. But I know I hadn’t been expecting that. The skin underneath was the same color and texture of petroleum jelly. No blemishes, no bite marks, no discolorations. No veins. Only an off-white creaminess glimmering like she’d bathed herself in oil.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“The girl—what the fuck was her name? May, Madeline, Maggie, it all blends together, their names like someone else’s pleasure—made a noise, and I glanced over to her. Smoke bled from her nostrils, the hinge of her parted lips. There was dust floating from her mouth, motes of silver in the filthy air. Her eyes had a rim of frost. Like cataracts. Like she was going blind. She blinked at me once, slow, and soaked in the backwash of Emil’s lighting, she didn’t seem completely real.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“Roger’s eyes metronomed over the girl, restless, lingering longest on the spade of her crotch, nearly visible under her cheap black robes. The girl was thin. Chopstick thin without the barest netting of fat. I remember thinking, with some kind of sororal regret, that she’d shrivel in a few years. Just like I had. Not that it mattered. Not that this mattered. When we wrapped up this project, I was gone. Back to New York and its skyscrapers and its smiling, shining, successful, dead-eyed hopefuls.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“This is us,” Roger whispered to me, conspiratorial, his arm thrown over my shoulder. As with everything else, he’s precise with the eggs, too: a motion of the spoon, and the yolk bloomed across the china like a small sun. “We got this. I got you.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“We tried a few times, but Roger said Maria didn’t have it in her to be a leading lady. Too much grit in her lopsided grin, too much nose to her raw-boned face. Killer as the foil to the sweetheart, sure, but too saw-toothed for a happy ending. He casts her as the femme fatale, the big bad, and it works: Maria’s expressions were a broken heart caulked with bitter pride, vulnerable and crystalline. If you ask me, we didn’t need the girl. Maria could have done it, played the wounded thing come home to a country full of someone else’s ghosts.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“hosts, and girls who wore their sequins like someone else’s forgotten shine.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“Her mouth was a red word of worship. I remember that. Red like she’d lipsticked it with blood. I stared at the petaling of her lips, the way she pursed them, incisors briefly lettering the plush flesh. Unlike the rest of them, she could sing: big operatic notes. A little rough along the higher registers, sure, but her voice when it plunged was smoky as the belly of an old whiskey cask.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“Cathy looked to the staircase before following Ben to the living room. It didn’t sound like anybody else was home. Didn’t he say he lived with his parents? Didn’t he say they were a little older? Needed his help around the house? It smelled like Ben needed a little help around the house.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“I got a better idea,” he said. He smiled then. A warm, genuine smile that had Cathy believing he was feeling good again. That she had done the very thing all partners want so desperately to do: she had stopped him from feeling bad.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“Jim Bradley shook his head. Cathy didn’t want to admit it, but he had the unmistakable look of someone who was in the right.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“Cathy recognized the voice before her last name was spoken. She turned to see her ex-boyfriend Kevin standing behind her in the bookstore. Her stomach sank a little. But, one of the by-products of meeting a man later in life was that he would end up meeting some ex-boyfriends along the way. She didn’t think Ben would mind. It was a part of life. Part of being forty.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“The stringent scent of cleaner washes out past us.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“Can that happen, at the end of your life? Can you become a killer in your dotage, in your golden years? Can you want control of the remote enough that murder’s your best option? Nobody will suspect you. There’s no motivation anybody can claim, there’s no first attempt, there’s no bad history, there’s no evidence anybody can find. Just, one day you saw a bright, curled piece of silver in some sliced pears you’d just opened, and you looked up from them to the horrible old movie filling the living room, and you nodded maybe. Maybe. It can happen, I think. It did happen.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“More like I dreamed it. More like I zoned out in the movie as a form of self-defense, and in that zoned-out state I worked up this grand story for how your father, he killed your mother, Sheel, really, serious, I solved the case. Also, there is a case. As proof, of course, I could take a can from the pantry, it doesn’t matter what, and mess with its angle in the can opener until it leaves sharp little slivers of metal behind. At”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“What she was doing was watching TCM and eating tiny slivers of metal. If her health plan paid for more or better imaging, maybe the jig would have been up, and it all could have been an accident, bad luck, one failing kitchen appliance trying to kill her, her husband unwittingly involved. As it was, she just kept getting chewed up from the inside. And nobody suspected anything, least of all Sheila. Her mom was the right age for her body to be failing in unexpected ways, wasn’t she? It was a tragedy, it was sad, but it wasn’t any kind of real surprise. It’s what we all have waiting for us, surely. Only, it didn’t have to be. Not for my mother-in-law. Did she know right at the end, too? Did she finally see a glittering shard in her corn or peas and look up to her husband, watching her spoon this in? At that point, coughing up blood, blood in the toilet, her stomach and intestines in revolt, all failing, did she just guide that next bite in anyway and turn back to her classic movie? I don’t know. She was from that long-suffering generation, though. The one that would rather hide a thing like this than involve her own daughter. The one that would rather her daughter keep a father she could believe in.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“IT’S NOT THAT my seventy-two-year-old father-in-law is actually going deaf, it’s that he’s a, in my former mother-in-law’s words, “lazy-ass listener.” I say “former” for her because she passed three years ago, kind of right on schedule as far as I’m concerned, but my wife Sheila’s still kind of torn up…not so much about her mom being gone, her insides chewed up, bubbling up red down her chin, as that the two of them never made up proper before she went. Which, again: nothing all that surprising, this is the way things go about 99 percent of the time between moms and daughters, as far as I can tell. Either way, the result of all this is that, with his wife gone, Sheila’s dad’s been kind of letting their apartment go to hell. Crusty dishes tottering on every flat surface, newspapers and engineering journals stacking up into fire hazard after fire hazard, the whole place an ashtray, pretty much. So, to pick up her dead mom’s slack—though it’s also her two brothers’ slack if you ask me—Sheila commits to cleaning her dad’s place up one Sunday. I offer to help, of course, it’s what you do when you’re married, when you’re shouldering burdens together, when it’s a team effort, and then it turns out that the best way I can help out is by ushering her father out of the apartment for the afternoon.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“The irony I’ve always found most haunting about Grizzly Man was how close it came to avoiding its ending, thus never being made at all. How close Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard came to going home. They’d called it a season, packed up their gear, and got as far as the airport ticket counter before deciding to return to the Alaskan bush awhile longer. As if they’d heard a call to go back. Had Lydia seen this, and never told me? She would know I had. And trusted I would understand exactly what it meant when, after a trip to the bathroom at Vancouver International, I found her seat in our gate’s waiting area empty. Or if not right away, I’d get the message eventually. When I missed our flight, too, I couldn’t say if it was because I was still waiting for her to come back. Or because I wasn’t aware of when everyone else started to board. Or because I was trying to work up the courage to go after her, but couldn’t get past my fear of the mess that might be waiting. Mostly I wished I’d paid more attention to how much of herself Lydia must have seen in Stefan—alive in the wrong time, unable to see anything more ahead for her. All I’d ever wanted was someone to watch movies with, and talk about what they meant before we went to bed. Profound ones. Silly ones. All the ones in between. It seemed so simple, so little to ask for. So why couldn’t I have reached out a hand’s length farther, and accepted it? But as I sat transfixed by the sky, by the clouds and all they concealed, the maker of teeth made it clear. That’s not how this universe works. That’s not how any of this works.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“Before Lydia and I could make it to the car, that keening I’d hoped to never hear again began to shred the night air, rising in pitch beyond the range of human ears.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“It’s a lie, it’s a lie, I’m screaming inside. I think of paralyzing venoms and morphine dreams. You’re only seeing what will keep you docile… But try telling him that. As Stefan sags further, a gap opens between them, and in the hostile interplay of firelight and shadow, I catch a glimpse of the network of gnashing maws at the chaotic center of Jaeger’s being.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“I’ve heard agony and I’ve heard ecstasy, but I can’t tell what I’m hearing from Stefan now. I only know I’ve never heard anything like it, and hope to never hear it again, a jubilant keening that warbles and wails to a point no human voice could go without breaking, except his continues onward, upward. He folds in half, backward, no longer able to hold himself upright—only Jaeger is keeping him standing. On his upside-down face is a wide-eyed look of transcendence and awe. Yogis spend their entire lives hoping for one peek at whatever he’s seeing.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“But who could yearn to be on the wrong end of the knife and fork? That’s his real interest here. They’re out there…and dear god, he finds them. “I’ve always lost myself in other people,” says a nervous young woman in an empty room with peeling windowsills. “It’s never enough. Why not carry it all the way?” A middle-aged man on a park bench leers into the camera, something lascivious in his gaze, as if he’s filming for a dating profile. He squeezes his thigh. “I’m thick. I’m meaty. Juicy. Who wouldn’t want me?” A couple, too. The man looks smaller than the Amazonian woman to begin with, the contrast exaggerated by the way he hunches on the floor beside her wrought iron chair. He strokes the leather of her knee-high boots. She stokes his hair the way she would a favored pet. “I want to be in her belly,” he whispers. “I want to pass through her. I want to become a part of her. Then neither of us will ever have to be lonely again.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“Maybe he was annoyed by the criticism he got for the scene in Grizzly Man during which he listens to Timothy Treadwell’s death over headphones: Why should he get to hear it and we don’t? There was no need—the coroner had already given a play-by-play account. The voyeurs still wanted more. They wanted to hear raw mortality.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“The map led us over civilization’s ragged rim, to the edge of the Northwest’s boreal forests. Evening came on all at once, the sky’s last light choked out by old growth pines and cypress lining the roads like shaggy towers. Our”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“If the Chicago we’d left behind was all lake-frozen winds, Vancouver was wet springtime chill, with swirls of rain drizzling from banks of black clouds that scraped over the coast with the ponderous density of tectonic plates.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“out between us, when we’d given it a try one tentative time, after I, too, learned what it was like for a marriage to implode. Lydia had been empathetic and understanding, and knew how to make great popcorn and buy ice cream and pour shots of tequila, and for sure she had a god-tier movie collection. It could’ve been a rom-com from the eighties: geeky late bloomer grows up and finally gets his chance with the dream girl who was out of his league when they met, because she was nine years his senior. By the time we took our short-lived tumble, the age gap didn’t seem nearly as prominent, but the dynamic still wasn’t quite right, and maybe never could be. There was no shaking free of the worry over what Lydia saw when she looked at me. She would always remember the bruises, the confessions. She would always remember how back then my dad kept insisting he was only trying to knock the fag out of me, and I’d thank him someday. She would always remember why I got into schlocky videos in the first place: I thought if he came through and saw I was watching something with lots of boobs, he’d leave me alone. Only it didn’t work that way. The world is full of carnivores intent on devouring their young, and if one rationale gets invalidated, they find another.”
― Ellen Datlow, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles