Candle in the Attic Window.
An anthology of Gothic horror.
Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
and Paula R. Stiles.
Introduction: An Open Door.
Gothic fiction is one of the building blocks of contemporary horror. Try to picture the current horror landscape without Frankenstein"s creature running around, Dracula crawling up the side of a castle, or Poe"s House of Usher coming down. Jane Eyre, Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House have left their fingerprints all over horror literature.
Candle in the Attic Window is an anthology featuring some of the cla.s.sic Gothic themes, as interpreted by modern writers. This means that, although there are some period pieces, the tales and poems do not take place in a singular, gloomy castle with Victorian characters. The aim of the anthology is not to reproduce exactly the Gothic fiction of yore, but to bring a new spin to it. In short, to take that mysterious house, that wide-eyed heroine, that air of decay, and infuse them with fresh blood.
Picture yourself standing at the curb of the road. Your cell phone has gone dead. A tall, dark house looms upon a hill. The wind whips your coat. You open the iron gate and climb the steps towards the front door. A sickly, yellow light streams from the windows. High above, you think you see the oddest thing, a flickering candle in the attic window.
What awaits inside this house? Cursed objects, love that culminates in destruction, obsessions, ghosts, skeletons, a hidden pa.s.sageway, revenge from beyond the grave, and, of course, a secret in the attic. Come into our home and meet the horrors we"ve a.s.sembled for you.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R.Stiles.
Dwellings & Places.
"Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson.
A Fixer-Upper.
By Amanda C. Davis.
I had an uncle: very rich.
He died without a child, which Is how I got the whole estate.
I"ll tell the truth.
It"s pretty great.
Oh, sure, the wind just howls at night And branches sway and block the light And sometimes, just before a storm, When air is cool and earth is warm, A mist will rise upon the moor And drift and slither to my door And then I think I hear a knock Some nights, I lose my breath in shock I see a glow upon the terrace But then remember: I"m an heiress!
No stupid noise is too much ha.s.sle To occupy this gorgeous castle.
And yes, okay, the nights are long And, I"ll admit, the wind is strong, And sometimes, from a distant hill There comes a howl that sends a chill From skin to bone to nerve to spine.
(Don"t worry, though! I"m doing fine.
It"s only drafty, just a bit, And hard to keep a candle lit.) I"ll kill the mice within the wall And stop that clanking down the hall And figure out who"s screaming when The windows shiver in the den A little plumbing and, with luck, The seeping pipes will come unstuck.
I"ll fix the electricity.
I"ll make this manse a home; you"ll see.
And then my friends will finally visit!
This place isn"t creepy, is it?
Except the mist upon the moor ...
A knock!
Hold on.
I"ll get the door.
Amanda C. Davis likes her houses haunted and her moors thick with mist. Her horror stories have appeared in Shock Totem, Triangulation: End of the Rainbow, and Necrotic Tissue, among others. Find out more about her, or read more of her work, at Seventh Picture.
By Orrin Grey.
An exterior shot of the mansion through the windshield of a van, pulling up the curving drive. The camera turns until it"s looking through the pa.s.senger-side window, keeping the facade of the building in view. It looms up, big and dark in front of a lowering grey sky. The kind of fake-Spanish, fake-Gothic mansion that you only find in Hollywood.
The van stops; the camera shakes and jostles as everyone gets out. In a finished film, there would be a cut here, but instead, there"s just a tangle of voices and thumps, blurred shots of elbows and knees and the back of a girl"s head.
A girl"s voice, maybe belonging to that same head, says, "So, we"re here?"
The camera stabilizes, the front door of the house in focus now. "This is it," the cameraman"s voice says, startlingly close in your ear. "This is where it all happened."
Zach Gordon, Director It was an unexpected coup, getting to use the house. They say no one"s been there in years, but if you"ve ever seen one of Zenda"s films, it"ll probably look familiar to you. Most of them were shot there. The front stairs are the ones that the Red Death comes down in The Crimson Masque. There"s a hallway that shows up three times in The Phantom Hand, standing in for three different hallways. And, of course, the exterior and the entryway show up as the house in The Enterprise of Death.
They tell me that all those rooms are still intact. Still just the way Zenda left them. The only rooms that the fire got were the ones in the back.
The crew goes into the mansion, followed by the camera. The film here is dull from shadows and the interior is black as a tomb, only bits of ambient light coming in through holes in windows and broken skylights. It"s next to impossible to see anything, just dim figures jostling in front of the camera, until Caleb York starts setting up portable lights, filling the entryway with a glow that momentarily blinds, then chases back the darkness.
The rest of the crew appear in the light. Danielle Monroe is probably the girl who spoke earlier, the one whose head was briefly in-frame. She stands now, staring up at the domed ceiling of the entryway made semi-famous by countless mid-afternoon cable showings of The Enterprise of Death. Off to the side stands Alexia Cole, her once-black hair now shot with grey streaks, though the colour doesn"t come through on the camera. Her hair just looks dingy in the semi-darkness. Finally, Thom Dorn, big and jockish, stands and examines the huge round table that dominates the centre of the entryway.
"It"s a prop," Danielle says. "It"s the table where they have the seance in The Dancing Skull."
"It"s not a prop," the cameraman"s voice says again. He must be Zach Gordon, the Director. He walks the camera over to get a better shot of the table and his fist appears to rap on it, to demonstrate its solidity. "They moved it out for Enterprise of Death, but the table sat here all the time. When Zenda had parties here, this is the table they sat around. It was the one in The Dancing Skull, too. Like everything else in this house. Zenda used what he had."
Danielle Monroe, The Dark of the Matinee Blog Arnold Zenda produced and directed only six movies during his lifetime, five of them with Victor Prince. Prince was born "Norman Thompson", but he legally changed his name, probably at Zenda"s urging, in an attempt to brand himself as a sort of poor-man"s Vincent Price.
Prince wasn"t Price, though, any more than Zenda was Corman or Castle, the men he seemed intent on imitating. But, together, they made some serviceable B-movies that found decent play, and a few fans on lazy-afternoon cable programs and late-night horror features. Most were low-rent Gothic horrors or supernatural thrillers. The Enterprise of Death is probably the best-known, a sort of locked-house murder mystery with ghostly tinges a la Castle"s House on Haunted Hill, but the best of the bunch is almost certainly The Crimson Masque, a direct knock-off of the Corman/Price Masque of the Red Death. The Red Death costume in it may be straight out of Chaney"s Phantom of the Opera, but the decadent tone of it works a lot better than you might expect, given some of the other films in Zenda"s oeuvre.
That makes it extra unfortunate that what would have been his seventh film, an immediate follow-up to The Crimson Masque, never happened. Or, rather, was never finished.
The camera pa.s.ses through the house. Everything is dim and dusty and festooned with cobwebs. The only illumination comes from flashlights and hand-held lanterns.
As the crew walks around, different people exclaim about different rooms that have appeared in different movies. Mostly, Danielle points them out, or Zach does, but once Alexia says, "I spent the night in this room once. During shooting." They"re standing in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It looks almost indistinguishable from most of the other bedrooms, the pattern of the faded wallpaper maybe a little different, the furniture in different places. "My mom was here with me. I slept in that bed. Or tried to."
"Why wasn"t more of this stuff sold?" Caleb asks.
It"s Zach who answers: "The house still belongs to Zenda"s estate. Some kind of distant relative. Zenda wanted it left alone, so, for the most part, it has been."
They pa.s.s through room after room, hallway after hallway, seemingly intent on getting footage, however murky, of them all. Finally, they come to the back of the house, where huge, billowing sheets of plastic bulge and whip in the wind from the growing clouds that threaten a storm at any moment. Everyone stops, staring, and the camera follows their gazes up and out. The light changes, because now, the camera"s outside, or near enough, looking through the blackened ruin of the mansion"s back rooms. The ceiling here is completely missing and what"s left of the walls stand up like charred, black bones.
Caleb York, Doc.u.mentary Crew Zach knew about Zenda before we got into filmmaking. We both did. We"d seen his movies on Sat.u.r.day afternoons when we were kids, though neither of us really remembered them all that well. I remembered the monster at the end of Isle of Blood, but couldn"t remember the t.i.tle of the movie, and I remembered being irrationally scared of the crawling hand in The Phantom Hand, in this one scene where it crawls up onto some guy"s windowsill.
Zenda wasn"t exactly an influence on either of us, though. It certainly wasn"t his movies that got Zach interested in doing this doc.u.mentary. It was the movie he didn"t make. The mystery of it, y"know?
n.o.body knew anything about it, except the working t.i.tle. The King in Yellow. It came from a collection of short stories by this guy named "Chambers". It was also the name of a play that showed up in those stories, that was supposed to drive the people who watched it crazy. Good material for a movie, right? And right up Zenda"s alley. But then there was the fire, and Zenda and Prince both died in it, along with another person, an actress named "Agatha Wray", who was never in anything else that we know of. Along with them, the fire burned up the only known print of the film. Or, as much of the film as had been shot by then.
n.o.body even knows what the movie was going to be about. Was it an adaptation of a story from Chambers" book, or was it supposed to be the play itself? Or did Zenda just pilfer the name?
The surviving actors who"d done any work on the film all claimed that they were given their scripts a page at a time and that the pages were collected again at the end of each day"s shooting. All that any of them ever remembered was that there were character names that matched fragments of the fictional play. "Ca.s.silda" was one, and "The Stranger". But that could mean anything, or it could mean nothing.
Anyway, that"s what grabbed Zach, like I said. Not Zenda, but the mystery of The King in Yellow. Of what it could have been.
The camera is stationary now, steady, obviously resting on its tripod. It points toward the table in the entryway, and toward the crew who"re gathered around it, but it doesn"t focus on them. Do they even know it"s running? They talk amongst themselves, mostly too quietly to be heard clearly. If they were being filmed on purpose, you"d think they would speak up.
There are cans of beer sitting on the table. Someone says something about coasters, and there"s laughter. Thom traces his finger across the dust on the surface of the table and holds it up.
The conversation rises and falls, allowing bits and pieces to be distinguished. They"re talking about Zenda, about how each of them heard of him and what brought each of them to this house. Danielle is trying to explain her blog to Alexia, who has never seen it. "Old movies just seem to capture weirdness better than new ones," Danielle says loudly, warming to her subject. "Back when there were smaller crews, when things were made by hand. Weirdness slipped in that way, infiltrated, got in through the cracks and the c.r.a.ppy special effects. When you watch an old, weird movie, you feel like you"re watching something real, but also something not real, too. Like something from a dream, or an alternate universe. A universe where the sky"s a painted backdrop and fake trees grow up out of the fake ground."
There"s laughter and Danielle seems a bit embarra.s.sed by her vehemence. More drinking follows, more talking, but nothing of substance. Eventually, they all agree to get some sleep on the cots they"ve brought with them. One by one, the lights are dimmed or extinguished and then, in the dark, someone turns off the camera.
Alexia Cole, Former Actress I never wanted to go back to that house. Zach said I was the only actor who"d ever been in one of Zenda"s movies that they could track down, but I don"t know. I don"t know who else was in them, or if they"re dead, or in hiding, or working, or retired. I don"t know if Zach and his company even tried to track anyone else down. I don"t much care.
I was the little girl who gets kidnapped in Gothic!, Zenda"s first movie. I was 13 at the time. After that, I was in a few other movies, always little parts: someone"s daughter, someone"s niece, a girl someone talked to in a flower shop. I was in some commercials as I got older, and then I got a recurring part in one of those murder mystery TV shows. Evenings at Sullivan"s, I don"t know if you"ll remember it. I wasn"t a main character or anything. I was a waitress at the t.i.tular bar where the amateur detectives got together to solve the crimes. That"s it. My hair was always in a braid down my back. Anyone who recognizes me at all these days usually recognizes me from that.
After my mom died, I quit the business. She was always the one who"d wanted me to be an actress. I bought a partial share in a restaurant up in Seattle and I never looked back. That sounds good, doesn"t it, that I never looked back? But of course I did, or I wouldn"t be here.
I"m not honestly sure why I agreed to do this doc.u.mentary. Nostalgia? I don"t think so. The paycheck they offered me for it was a pretty big incentive. Easy money for spending a weekend in Zenda"s old house, dredging up the past.
I"d forgotten about the nightmares. They started back up the night after I agreed to the job. I used to have them all the time after filming Gothic! They"d have been enough to make me quit right then, if it hadn"t been for my mom. But I can"t ever remember them after I wake up. Just that there"s a white hand. That"s it. You"d think I"d been in that stupid Phantom Hand movie, instead of Gothic! But, truth be told, I never even saw it. I never saw any of Zenda"s movies, not even my own, and I don"t care to.
The camera comes back on to darkness. There"s nothing to see, but there are sounds. Movement, people talking. "Did you hear that?" a voice says, close by.
"Someone screamed?"
"Is everyone here?"
A light comes on, from somewhere off to the side of the frame, blinding.
"Where"s Alexia?" Danielle says. "What happened to Alexia?"
"Maybe she went to the bathroom?"
The camera is lifted up and carried along as the group moves, at first in different directions and then en ma.s.se toward the staircase. There they find Alexia, standing at the bottom, staring up. She looks strangely white in the dark, as though her clothes got lighter since she went to sleep. She"s staring up into the shadows at the top of the stairs and doesn"t seem to notice them approach, until Thom puts his hand on her shoulder. She jerks away, turns to stare at him with big, dark eyes.
"h.e.l.l with this," she says, after a long, silent moment. "h.e.l.l with this!" Danielle tries to approach her, but Alexia pulls away. "No. I"m leaving. I"ll call a f.u.c.king cab. You guys can take it up with my lawyer how much of that money I don"t collect. I"m gone."
She walks away, headed toward the front door. Danielle disappears off camera, following her. The camera stays, swiveling up to peer into the darkness where Alexia was staring. "What happened?" Thom"s voice asks quietly. "What did she see?"
Thom Dorn, Doc.u.mentary Crew.
Before we got started, I sat down and watched all of Zenda"s movies over one weekend. In order. I don"t know what I was expecting. Some kind of connection, maybe? Some overarching something that you wouldn"t have noticed normally? Some indication of the mystery that was coming?
I got nada. Zilch. They"re just a bunch of c.r.a.ppy old movies. There"re some good bits and mostly, they"re harmless. Just boring. But man, it"s disappointing, y"know? Whenever a movie gets lost, or disappears, or never gets finished, you always want it to be something special. A masterpiece. Something magic. And chances are, this thing, this King in Yellow, chances are it was just going to be another boring old horror movie, destined for an eternity of afternoon cable.