Day Player
Jonathan Berzer
It’s lunch. The man and woman sit on plastic chairs at a plastic table. He eats a BLT with chips. She’s having a tuna and kale salad with sparkling water. After lunch, he’s going to kill her. He’ll probably have to kill her forty or fifty times for them to get it right. He looks up from his sandwich with a wan smile and she smiles back. She’s already splashed with blood. The blood stains on her top look fake, or maybe it’s because she’s eating kale and scanning her phone at the same time. He’s dressed in an atrocious plaid shirt he wouldn’t be caught dead in—loud boxes of green, blue, white and black—and black workman’s pants and boots. He looks like a Russian plumber, and as his dad is a Russian plumber, he looks like his dad. His childhood was inundated with shit, he often jokes. He’s hardly needed wardrobe; he could’ve just raided his father’s closet. The man he plays has no dialogue and an ax to grind. It’s the most screen time he’s ever had, and yet he says not one word. All that vocal training gone to waste, he thinks with wry amusement.
Since it’s lunch, the union forbids anybody to do anything but eat and stand around. He glances at the crew and other cast members. Those who aren’t talking to someone are involved with their phones, and even those who are talking to someone are involved with their phones. It’s the pace of the business; hours of waiting for a five second shot.
As he has nothing to say on screen, he comes to the set each day uncharacteristically chatty, but having spent day after day with everyone here, he finds he’s quickly exhausted most conversation topics.
“Jen,” he says to his castmate. Jen looks up with a start as if she’s been called to the set. “Today’s my birthday,” he remarks offhandedly, like he’s throwing away a line.
“What, no way. Why didn’t you say anything?”
He shrugs. He doesn’t care if anybody knows it’s his birthday, but it is something new to talk about.
Jen looks at him with delight. “Happy birthday. What’s the damage?”
“Forty-five.”
She whistles like he’s revealed a big secret. “All right,” she says with approval. “You don’t look forty-five.”
He thinks he looks older, but she sounds sincere so he thanks her.
“That’s great, Will. We should all go for a drink.”
“Ah, that’s okay. I don’t wanna make a big deal of it.”
“Hey, it is a big deal. Forty-five,” she says, sliding a forkful of tuna into her mouth. “I’m still freaking out about twenty-nine.”
“Yeah, that’s serious,” he says with a vague memory of what it was to be that young, remembering how being that young didn’t seem young at the time. Now of course, it feels silly.
“I’m dreading it,” she says in a near whisper. “Won’t be the ingenue anymore. It’s coming for me. Like an ax murderer,” she says this with a laugh. “Have we ever worked together?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You seem familiar. Maybe you just look like some guy who killed me once before.”
“I get that a lot.”
“They all look alike to me.” She nods and puts down her phone. “I had a great mentor. She told me to appreciate everything you get, especially the people you work with, crew, management, everybody. The last thing you want is a bad rep. That will kill you.”
“If I don’t first,” he says with a laugh. He finds it odd that an actress who’s made her living being killed and brutalized, dying one horrible death after another should have the need of a mentor. “Who was she?”
“She was somebody big awhile ago. She was on the fast track, but she had an attitude. Young, full of herself. After a while, nobody wanted to work with her. Now she coaches women on how to avoid the traps.”
“The industry is a fickle master,” he says. “Some people, usually men, get a pass no matter what. Some people, usually women, never get a second shot. Once word gets out you’re difficult, that’s it. You’re toast.” He looks her over, trying to decide what it is about her, if she has that undefinable something that will get her off the kill list and into serious roles. He’s been a pretty good judge of talent, but that seems to have little to do with it.
He once worked with a young pretty-boy up-and-comer who hauled off and slapped him in the middle of a scene. It wasn’t in the script. Will was playing a waiter, the pretty-boy, his customer. To the wanna-be star, it just felt authentic. Will wanted to grab the guy by the throat and knock his teeth out. Will has the build of a Russian serf, a body meant for swinging an ax, felling trees, easily twice the size of the little shit, but he couldn’t touch him. The young actor was being groomed for leads and Will was just a day player. To this day, Will needs to make the most of every opportunity he gets, so he sucked it up and requested the young man not do that again. The actor has since gone on to dozens of starring roles and has been lauded by the industry for his authenticity, his commitment to risk, as well as his insatiable drug habit.
Will, on the other hand, has come to terms with his place in the pecking order. He’s not handsome. His face is blunt and large, his hair thin. He has the look of someone who could be prone to bursts of violence. He makes a good mugshot. This was not how it was supposed to go. He came west from New York after twelve years of theatre, doing a lot of Beckett, Pinter, and Sam Shepard. He was not surprised to be offered the role of the heavy, but when the roles degenerated into the silent killing machine, he began to question what he was doing, but the money was consistent, and he’d developed a bit of a following. He has a fan club, though the people who write in ask the weirdest questions. They are not the kind of fans he’d ever like to meet: they want to know if he keeps trophies; if he would ever consider killing somebody for real; if when he kills somebody in a scene, does it feel like real life, and does he have nightmares about it.
“You work a lot,” Jen says in a reassuring way.
“Yeah, it’s funny. I do a part, then I think, That’s it, they’ll never call again. Then they do. You know how it is. You become addicted to that contact, that call, that email. Being desired—you’ll do anything to have that feeling never stop.”
“Yeah,” she says with a long sigh. “You seem like a pro. You probably invest wisely. I’ve been killed eleven times,” she says flatly. “I’ve killed fifty-six people.”
“Wow, that’s kind of a lot.”
“It is.” He bites into the second half of his BLT. “Do you think it’s a bad thing?”
“It’s not porn. It’s just fun,” she says. “People can separate entertainment from what’s real. Everybody loves a good scare. Like roller coasters.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been telling myself. When my kids were younger, I didn’t let them know what I did. They thought I was a spy.”
“That’s funny.”
“Yeah, but I’d like them to see me do something real. At first it was a laugh. Now it’s a job. Like porn.” He tosses off a laugh. “It’s paid for my swimming pool.”
“There you go,” she says. “You’ve made it. When you can afford a pool, you’re there.”
Lunch ends. The walkie-talkie of a production assistant squawks and squeaks. A gurgling male voice summons everyone to the set. “They’re ready for you,” the PA says to them, not specifying which you he’s referring to, so the two actors assume it’s a plural you. They stand from the table and toss their paper cups and plates in a garbage can the size of a dishwasher. The PA named Josh asks Will if he needs a moment to prepare.
“Prepare? To swing an ax? To cut someone’s head off? No. I was born for this.” His remark doesn’t get the laugh he expected.
Josh nods as if he’s taking in sage advice from a legend. The two actors follow him to the set, which is a ‘70s colonial dining room with colonial china cabinet, white colonial wainscoting, and a crystal chandelier hanging over an eight-foot colonial dining table. It’s here, in this sedate, fake eighteenth century family dining room that Jen will be beheaded.
“You ever seen a real dead body?” she asks as they sit on a ripped leather sofa in the opposite room.
“Yeah,” he answers solemnly. “I have. More than one.”
“Someone you knew?”
“Yeah. And a stranger. Both kinds.”
“Me too.”
He waits for her to ask for details, but she doesn’t. She’s waiting for him to volunteer. He doesn’t want to talk about death with the young woman he’s about to kill. He doesn’t want to talk about real life in this absurd place.
“Look at this set,” he huffs. “It looks like my grandmother’s house. What is the…” he can’t find the words he’s looking for. “Is there supposed to be some deeper meaning in this? Irony?”
“Well, my character, this is her safe space. This house, this room. So to have her killed in the place where she’s most at home, that ups the terror. What’s scarier, a monster in a dark alley or a monster on a beautiful day at the beach?”
The director has been loitering. “That’s right,” Carla says. “That’s what we’re all about.”
Carla has the air of a wrangler. She is an experienced equestrian who favors boots and denim and hair untouched by fashion. She is sturdy and stands with authority. Will can sense Jen’s resolve melt whenever Carla is around. If Carla is the wrangler, Jen is the calf. Will thinks that must make him the bull, but he doesn’t feel bullish. He feels more like a lost herd animal, the old one that falls behind and is easy prey for wolves.
“Turning conventions on their head,” Carla adds with air quotes and extra emphasis on the word head. She has them take their places.
Gabe the prop master holds out a bloody ax for Will. It’s not a real ax. The handle is wood and plenty heavy, but the head is painted foam. Under the lights and through the lens filters it will look real enough. Gabe grins as he hands the ax to Will with no shortage of ceremony. “Knock ‘em dead,” he jokes.
Will looks down at the ax as he stands on his mark and waits as the camera and lights swarm around him. “An ax? Really?” he says to no one in particular. “I’m an ax murderer, isn’t that kind of a joke?”
“You got it,” answers Carla.
“Is anybody gonna take that seriously? Shouldn’t he use something less predictable?” Will casts his eyes around the room. “If we’re going for irony, how about a casserole dish, or a carafe, or an egg beater?”
“You’re not feeling the ax?” Carla asks, though it’s clear she’s made up her mind.
“Hey, I’m a psychopath. I’ll go with whatever.”
Jen takes her place in a straight-back colonial chair with a frilly seat cushion in pink and pale green. Her wrists are bound to the arms of the chair with rope. A makeup artist is adding muted colors to the skin under her eyes to make them look more distressed, as if she’s been crying for days. She smiles up at Will like a baby chick that thinks he’s its mother
“He should strangle a litter of puppies after this,” he mutters.
Carla pats him on the back. “I like your thinking.”
Will takes a few slow-motion practice swings as they try to agree on what angle looks best for the camera. First, it will be tight on him, then her, then the ax. Carla likes the idea of not showing Will’s face as this adds menace and amps up fear.
“The thing you can’t see is always more terrifying than the thing you can,” she says.
“I don’t know,” says Will. “A bloody guy with an ax charging at you is a little more scary than the creak of a floorboard at the end of a dark hall. The sound in the dark could be a cat.”
Carla is the rare woman who directs horror, and rarer still, her horror embraces all the cliches––especially the brutal deaths of innocent women––and flips them, as a woman director choreographing the slaying of a woman is seen as subversive or heroic.
“Everybody’s seen everything,” Carla adds. “They come in thinking they know what they’re gonna get and we surprise ‘em. Audiences love that the victim is stupid, or maybe deserves what she’s getting because she’s a bitch or a brat. The audience can feel superior. Maybe there’s justice in poor Jen getting decapitated. But what if Jen’s pure as snow? What if Jen is a cute little puppy? Nobody’s gonna enjoy that, and that’s the point.”
He finds himself agreeing with Carla and likes the idea, imagines viewers tuning in for a jolly good fright, then turning it off because there isn’t anything jolly in these deaths. Isaac the stunt coordinator steps in to talk body mechanics, how Will’s arms will be positioned and how he’ll swing and at what point Jen’s to die. Should she scream, should she look pathetic and pleading, should she close her eyes? Carla hangs back listening and looking on with her fist over her mouth.
“I wanna try something.” Carla takes the ax from his hands and grips the end of the handle. “Instead of coming in from the side, I wonder if you could come straight down on the crown of her head. Instead of a clean slice, you split her in half like a watermelon. Her face, her head, it just gets cut right down the middle.” Carla demonstrates, moving the ax slowly until the blade rests on the part in the center of Jen’s long blond hair. “You don’t kill her, you destroy her, like squashing a bug. What do you think?”
Carla looks at him with the face of a maniacal teen boy. He sees in her face a mania that in adults is confused with passion. Carla is out to make an artistic statement with an ax. But who is he to judge. These shitty movies have made it possible for him to be who he is today, to own a house and provide for children and support a wife both financially and psychologically, as a man with money coming in makes for a much better partner than a man who stares at screens and drinks himself into oblivion.
On the drive in that day, he’d been listening to Dolores O’Riordan, and he had to pull to the side of the road to let the album finish. When she was alive, he’d never paid much attention to her music. But that morning, he sat heavier in the driver’s seat, soaking in every word, every inflection in each song, as if hearing a prescient calling from the beyond. When the album ended, all he could do was stare through the windshield and mutter, “God damn it.”
He sags under the weight of his fake ax and lets the head drop to the ground while leaning on the handle. As Carla and Isaac discuss killing technique, Will steps off his mark. He is awash in fatigue as if he’d really been swinging the ax for hours on end, doing real work for which a family or a village depended.
“Do you think,” he says to Carla, “that all this contributes to greater acts of violence in the world?”
Carla takes this in, gives him an approving nod. “Okay, use that.”
“Use that?”
“Yeah, bring that to the surface, that anger, that ambivalence, let’s try that.”
“You want me to channel the doubts I’m having toward this role and this movie into the act of performing this role in this movie.”
“Yes, I do.” She hits him on the chest with both her fists. It’s a form of congratulatory salute, like he’s arrived at the point she’s been steering him to all along.
“Can I say something?” Jen is still tied to a chair. “Can we get on with it? I was in a good place and I don’t want to lose it.”
Carla calls for camera and sound and steps out of frame. The grips and the techs slip to the side. Now it’s just what will appear on screen, Jen and her killer. They’re going to try it several different ways. Jen spends the first dozen takes screaming and fighting to get away. Then when she’s spent her energy, she uses her fatigue to express a desperate pity. Her eyes gleam and glisten, they become cartoon size, and she looks at him as if she is truly afraid to die. He pantomimes splitting her head open, swinging a foot to the side of her, his weapon cutting nothing but air. As he does so, he experiments with different motivations—godless rage, sexual frustration, hatred of his mother, revenge for sexual abuse at the hands of his father, revenge for humiliation at the hands of a woman, bizarre psychosis that equates blood spatter with ejaculation, cannibalism brought on by feelings of inadequacy, or blood lust at having been mauled by an animal and now becoming the animal in order to overcome his fear.
In reality, he is none of these things. It’s all just play, but he’s surprised how easily it is for him to tap into the hate necessary to appear convincing. He is not a hateful man, more of a big teddy-bear dad, the fun dad at the end of the cul de sac who builds treehouses and fixes kids bikes and scooters in the driveway. The beer-drinking, ballgame dad who looks like he could’ve played ball once upon a time.
His kids are all old enough now to know what he does. They love it. It gives them a perverse thrill the way kids are able to become ecstatic over slimy, gross and disgusting things. They point out his likeness on sites, DVD boxes, and billboards with a shout and a laugh and brag to their classmates that their dad keeps all his old weapons from all his movies neatly organized in the garage, and that they’re real, and he really did some of those things in real life, and that’s why he’s so good at it. Will tells them not to say things like that, as in reality the garage is home to nothing more exciting than bags of fertilizer and two economical sedans with a combined mileage of 210 thousand miles. Once, over a dinner of quesadillas, he asked his kids what they thought about his movies, and at first they were gleeful and ridiculous, but then he asked them what they really thought, asked them to really think about it, and they became silent, hesitant, traded confused looks with each other, not wanting to give the wrong answer, not knowing what the right answer was.
“Does it bother you that what I do could encourage people to kill?”
They didn’t think so. The oldest said it’s just make believe, just fun. The younger one confessed softly that the movies scared him, though of course, he’s never seen any of them, but the pictures of his angry dad scare him, but he knows it’s not real, though it gives him nightmares sometimes. That was enough to make Will want to give it up right then and there, but then his wife needed eye surgery, and his younger son needed to move to a private school, and he started thinking about how life would be in ten, twenty, thirty years, and he decided to get as much as he could while he could, because one day the phone would stop ringing, and he would only be good for some brief appearance at a freak festival.
Carla calls him back to work and almost by instinct, he steps into frame and into character. He swings the ax five times, making horrid animal sounds, sounds that scare even him, then he does it five more times with no sound at all, expressionless, effortless, like a machine that punches holes in metal ten thousand times a day. Through it all, Jen looks up at him like a living corpse. She’s beat him to it, dead before he gets to her so the joke will be on him.
Jonathan Berzer
It’s lunch. The man and woman sit on plastic chairs at a plastic table. He eats a BLT with chips. She’s having a tuna and kale salad with sparkling water. After lunch, he’s going to kill her. He’ll probably have to kill her forty or fifty times for them to get it right. He looks up from his sandwich with a wan smile and she smiles back. She’s already splashed with blood. The blood stains on her top look fake, or maybe it’s because she’s eating kale and scanning her phone at the same time. He’s dressed in an atrocious plaid shirt he wouldn’t be caught dead in—loud boxes of green, blue, white and black—and black workman’s pants and boots. He looks like a Russian plumber, and as his dad is a Russian plumber, he looks like his dad. His childhood was inundated with shit, he often jokes. He’s hardly needed wardrobe; he could’ve just raided his father’s closet. The man he plays has no dialogue and an ax to grind. It’s the most screen time he’s ever had, and yet he says not one word. All that vocal training gone to waste, he thinks with wry amusement.
Since it’s lunch, the union forbids anybody to do anything but eat and stand around. He glances at the crew and other cast members. Those who aren’t talking to someone are involved with their phones, and even those who are talking to someone are involved with their phones. It’s the pace of the business; hours of waiting for a five second shot.
As he has nothing to say on screen, he comes to the set each day uncharacteristically chatty, but having spent day after day with everyone here, he finds he’s quickly exhausted most conversation topics.
“Jen,” he says to his castmate. Jen looks up with a start as if she’s been called to the set. “Today’s my birthday,” he remarks offhandedly, like he’s throwing away a line.
“What, no way. Why didn’t you say anything?”
He shrugs. He doesn’t care if anybody knows it’s his birthday, but it is something new to talk about.
Jen looks at him with delight. “Happy birthday. What’s the damage?”
“Forty-five.”
She whistles like he’s revealed a big secret. “All right,” she says with approval. “You don’t look forty-five.”
He thinks he looks older, but she sounds sincere so he thanks her.
“That’s great, Will. We should all go for a drink.”
“Ah, that’s okay. I don’t wanna make a big deal of it.”
“Hey, it is a big deal. Forty-five,” she says, sliding a forkful of tuna into her mouth. “I’m still freaking out about twenty-nine.”
“Yeah, that’s serious,” he says with a vague memory of what it was to be that young, remembering how being that young didn’t seem young at the time. Now of course, it feels silly.
“I’m dreading it,” she says in a near whisper. “Won’t be the ingenue anymore. It’s coming for me. Like an ax murderer,” she says this with a laugh. “Have we ever worked together?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You seem familiar. Maybe you just look like some guy who killed me once before.”
“I get that a lot.”
“They all look alike to me.” She nods and puts down her phone. “I had a great mentor. She told me to appreciate everything you get, especially the people you work with, crew, management, everybody. The last thing you want is a bad rep. That will kill you.”
“If I don’t first,” he says with a laugh. He finds it odd that an actress who’s made her living being killed and brutalized, dying one horrible death after another should have the need of a mentor. “Who was she?”
“She was somebody big awhile ago. She was on the fast track, but she had an attitude. Young, full of herself. After a while, nobody wanted to work with her. Now she coaches women on how to avoid the traps.”
“The industry is a fickle master,” he says. “Some people, usually men, get a pass no matter what. Some people, usually women, never get a second shot. Once word gets out you’re difficult, that’s it. You’re toast.” He looks her over, trying to decide what it is about her, if she has that undefinable something that will get her off the kill list and into serious roles. He’s been a pretty good judge of talent, but that seems to have little to do with it.
He once worked with a young pretty-boy up-and-comer who hauled off and slapped him in the middle of a scene. It wasn’t in the script. Will was playing a waiter, the pretty-boy, his customer. To the wanna-be star, it just felt authentic. Will wanted to grab the guy by the throat and knock his teeth out. Will has the build of a Russian serf, a body meant for swinging an ax, felling trees, easily twice the size of the little shit, but he couldn’t touch him. The young actor was being groomed for leads and Will was just a day player. To this day, Will needs to make the most of every opportunity he gets, so he sucked it up and requested the young man not do that again. The actor has since gone on to dozens of starring roles and has been lauded by the industry for his authenticity, his commitment to risk, as well as his insatiable drug habit.
Will, on the other hand, has come to terms with his place in the pecking order. He’s not handsome. His face is blunt and large, his hair thin. He has the look of someone who could be prone to bursts of violence. He makes a good mugshot. This was not how it was supposed to go. He came west from New York after twelve years of theatre, doing a lot of Beckett, Pinter, and Sam Shepard. He was not surprised to be offered the role of the heavy, but when the roles degenerated into the silent killing machine, he began to question what he was doing, but the money was consistent, and he’d developed a bit of a following. He has a fan club, though the people who write in ask the weirdest questions. They are not the kind of fans he’d ever like to meet: they want to know if he keeps trophies; if he would ever consider killing somebody for real; if when he kills somebody in a scene, does it feel like real life, and does he have nightmares about it.
“You work a lot,” Jen says in a reassuring way.
“Yeah, it’s funny. I do a part, then I think, That’s it, they’ll never call again. Then they do. You know how it is. You become addicted to that contact, that call, that email. Being desired—you’ll do anything to have that feeling never stop.”
“Yeah,” she says with a long sigh. “You seem like a pro. You probably invest wisely. I’ve been killed eleven times,” she says flatly. “I’ve killed fifty-six people.”
“Wow, that’s kind of a lot.”
“It is.” He bites into the second half of his BLT. “Do you think it’s a bad thing?”
“It’s not porn. It’s just fun,” she says. “People can separate entertainment from what’s real. Everybody loves a good scare. Like roller coasters.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been telling myself. When my kids were younger, I didn’t let them know what I did. They thought I was a spy.”
“That’s funny.”
“Yeah, but I’d like them to see me do something real. At first it was a laugh. Now it’s a job. Like porn.” He tosses off a laugh. “It’s paid for my swimming pool.”
“There you go,” she says. “You’ve made it. When you can afford a pool, you’re there.”
Lunch ends. The walkie-talkie of a production assistant squawks and squeaks. A gurgling male voice summons everyone to the set. “They’re ready for you,” the PA says to them, not specifying which you he’s referring to, so the two actors assume it’s a plural you. They stand from the table and toss their paper cups and plates in a garbage can the size of a dishwasher. The PA named Josh asks Will if he needs a moment to prepare.
“Prepare? To swing an ax? To cut someone’s head off? No. I was born for this.” His remark doesn’t get the laugh he expected.
Josh nods as if he’s taking in sage advice from a legend. The two actors follow him to the set, which is a ‘70s colonial dining room with colonial china cabinet, white colonial wainscoting, and a crystal chandelier hanging over an eight-foot colonial dining table. It’s here, in this sedate, fake eighteenth century family dining room that Jen will be beheaded.
“You ever seen a real dead body?” she asks as they sit on a ripped leather sofa in the opposite room.
“Yeah,” he answers solemnly. “I have. More than one.”
“Someone you knew?”
“Yeah. And a stranger. Both kinds.”
“Me too.”
He waits for her to ask for details, but she doesn’t. She’s waiting for him to volunteer. He doesn’t want to talk about death with the young woman he’s about to kill. He doesn’t want to talk about real life in this absurd place.
“Look at this set,” he huffs. “It looks like my grandmother’s house. What is the…” he can’t find the words he’s looking for. “Is there supposed to be some deeper meaning in this? Irony?”
“Well, my character, this is her safe space. This house, this room. So to have her killed in the place where she’s most at home, that ups the terror. What’s scarier, a monster in a dark alley or a monster on a beautiful day at the beach?”
The director has been loitering. “That’s right,” Carla says. “That’s what we’re all about.”
Carla has the air of a wrangler. She is an experienced equestrian who favors boots and denim and hair untouched by fashion. She is sturdy and stands with authority. Will can sense Jen’s resolve melt whenever Carla is around. If Carla is the wrangler, Jen is the calf. Will thinks that must make him the bull, but he doesn’t feel bullish. He feels more like a lost herd animal, the old one that falls behind and is easy prey for wolves.
“Turning conventions on their head,” Carla adds with air quotes and extra emphasis on the word head. She has them take their places.
Gabe the prop master holds out a bloody ax for Will. It’s not a real ax. The handle is wood and plenty heavy, but the head is painted foam. Under the lights and through the lens filters it will look real enough. Gabe grins as he hands the ax to Will with no shortage of ceremony. “Knock ‘em dead,” he jokes.
Will looks down at the ax as he stands on his mark and waits as the camera and lights swarm around him. “An ax? Really?” he says to no one in particular. “I’m an ax murderer, isn’t that kind of a joke?”
“You got it,” answers Carla.
“Is anybody gonna take that seriously? Shouldn’t he use something less predictable?” Will casts his eyes around the room. “If we’re going for irony, how about a casserole dish, or a carafe, or an egg beater?”
“You’re not feeling the ax?” Carla asks, though it’s clear she’s made up her mind.
“Hey, I’m a psychopath. I’ll go with whatever.”
Jen takes her place in a straight-back colonial chair with a frilly seat cushion in pink and pale green. Her wrists are bound to the arms of the chair with rope. A makeup artist is adding muted colors to the skin under her eyes to make them look more distressed, as if she’s been crying for days. She smiles up at Will like a baby chick that thinks he’s its mother
“He should strangle a litter of puppies after this,” he mutters.
Carla pats him on the back. “I like your thinking.”
Will takes a few slow-motion practice swings as they try to agree on what angle looks best for the camera. First, it will be tight on him, then her, then the ax. Carla likes the idea of not showing Will’s face as this adds menace and amps up fear.
“The thing you can’t see is always more terrifying than the thing you can,” she says.
“I don’t know,” says Will. “A bloody guy with an ax charging at you is a little more scary than the creak of a floorboard at the end of a dark hall. The sound in the dark could be a cat.”
Carla is the rare woman who directs horror, and rarer still, her horror embraces all the cliches––especially the brutal deaths of innocent women––and flips them, as a woman director choreographing the slaying of a woman is seen as subversive or heroic.
“Everybody’s seen everything,” Carla adds. “They come in thinking they know what they’re gonna get and we surprise ‘em. Audiences love that the victim is stupid, or maybe deserves what she’s getting because she’s a bitch or a brat. The audience can feel superior. Maybe there’s justice in poor Jen getting decapitated. But what if Jen’s pure as snow? What if Jen is a cute little puppy? Nobody’s gonna enjoy that, and that’s the point.”
He finds himself agreeing with Carla and likes the idea, imagines viewers tuning in for a jolly good fright, then turning it off because there isn’t anything jolly in these deaths. Isaac the stunt coordinator steps in to talk body mechanics, how Will’s arms will be positioned and how he’ll swing and at what point Jen’s to die. Should she scream, should she look pathetic and pleading, should she close her eyes? Carla hangs back listening and looking on with her fist over her mouth.
“I wanna try something.” Carla takes the ax from his hands and grips the end of the handle. “Instead of coming in from the side, I wonder if you could come straight down on the crown of her head. Instead of a clean slice, you split her in half like a watermelon. Her face, her head, it just gets cut right down the middle.” Carla demonstrates, moving the ax slowly until the blade rests on the part in the center of Jen’s long blond hair. “You don’t kill her, you destroy her, like squashing a bug. What do you think?”
Carla looks at him with the face of a maniacal teen boy. He sees in her face a mania that in adults is confused with passion. Carla is out to make an artistic statement with an ax. But who is he to judge. These shitty movies have made it possible for him to be who he is today, to own a house and provide for children and support a wife both financially and psychologically, as a man with money coming in makes for a much better partner than a man who stares at screens and drinks himself into oblivion.
On the drive in that day, he’d been listening to Dolores O’Riordan, and he had to pull to the side of the road to let the album finish. When she was alive, he’d never paid much attention to her music. But that morning, he sat heavier in the driver’s seat, soaking in every word, every inflection in each song, as if hearing a prescient calling from the beyond. When the album ended, all he could do was stare through the windshield and mutter, “God damn it.”
He sags under the weight of his fake ax and lets the head drop to the ground while leaning on the handle. As Carla and Isaac discuss killing technique, Will steps off his mark. He is awash in fatigue as if he’d really been swinging the ax for hours on end, doing real work for which a family or a village depended.
“Do you think,” he says to Carla, “that all this contributes to greater acts of violence in the world?”
Carla takes this in, gives him an approving nod. “Okay, use that.”
“Use that?”
“Yeah, bring that to the surface, that anger, that ambivalence, let’s try that.”
“You want me to channel the doubts I’m having toward this role and this movie into the act of performing this role in this movie.”
“Yes, I do.” She hits him on the chest with both her fists. It’s a form of congratulatory salute, like he’s arrived at the point she’s been steering him to all along.
“Can I say something?” Jen is still tied to a chair. “Can we get on with it? I was in a good place and I don’t want to lose it.”
Carla calls for camera and sound and steps out of frame. The grips and the techs slip to the side. Now it’s just what will appear on screen, Jen and her killer. They’re going to try it several different ways. Jen spends the first dozen takes screaming and fighting to get away. Then when she’s spent her energy, she uses her fatigue to express a desperate pity. Her eyes gleam and glisten, they become cartoon size, and she looks at him as if she is truly afraid to die. He pantomimes splitting her head open, swinging a foot to the side of her, his weapon cutting nothing but air. As he does so, he experiments with different motivations—godless rage, sexual frustration, hatred of his mother, revenge for sexual abuse at the hands of his father, revenge for humiliation at the hands of a woman, bizarre psychosis that equates blood spatter with ejaculation, cannibalism brought on by feelings of inadequacy, or blood lust at having been mauled by an animal and now becoming the animal in order to overcome his fear.
In reality, he is none of these things. It’s all just play, but he’s surprised how easily it is for him to tap into the hate necessary to appear convincing. He is not a hateful man, more of a big teddy-bear dad, the fun dad at the end of the cul de sac who builds treehouses and fixes kids bikes and scooters in the driveway. The beer-drinking, ballgame dad who looks like he could’ve played ball once upon a time.
His kids are all old enough now to know what he does. They love it. It gives them a perverse thrill the way kids are able to become ecstatic over slimy, gross and disgusting things. They point out his likeness on sites, DVD boxes, and billboards with a shout and a laugh and brag to their classmates that their dad keeps all his old weapons from all his movies neatly organized in the garage, and that they’re real, and he really did some of those things in real life, and that’s why he’s so good at it. Will tells them not to say things like that, as in reality the garage is home to nothing more exciting than bags of fertilizer and two economical sedans with a combined mileage of 210 thousand miles. Once, over a dinner of quesadillas, he asked his kids what they thought about his movies, and at first they were gleeful and ridiculous, but then he asked them what they really thought, asked them to really think about it, and they became silent, hesitant, traded confused looks with each other, not wanting to give the wrong answer, not knowing what the right answer was.
“Does it bother you that what I do could encourage people to kill?”
They didn’t think so. The oldest said it’s just make believe, just fun. The younger one confessed softly that the movies scared him, though of course, he’s never seen any of them, but the pictures of his angry dad scare him, but he knows it’s not real, though it gives him nightmares sometimes. That was enough to make Will want to give it up right then and there, but then his wife needed eye surgery, and his younger son needed to move to a private school, and he started thinking about how life would be in ten, twenty, thirty years, and he decided to get as much as he could while he could, because one day the phone would stop ringing, and he would only be good for some brief appearance at a freak festival.
Carla calls him back to work and almost by instinct, he steps into frame and into character. He swings the ax five times, making horrid animal sounds, sounds that scare even him, then he does it five more times with no sound at all, expressionless, effortless, like a machine that punches holes in metal ten thousand times a day. Through it all, Jen looks up at him like a living corpse. She’s beat him to it, dead before he gets to her so the joke will be on him.
