"Stage Blood" in The Hollywood Journal

Check out a new piece I wrote for The Hollywood Journal to celebrate Halloween!

It begins, "It is twenty years ago, and I am watching Tiffany, apple-faced and wholesome, holding a straight razor and standing in a bathtub filled with blood..." Read on HERE...

Stage Blood

It is twenty years ago, and I am watching Tiffany, apple-faced and wholesome, holding a straight razor and standing in a bathtub filled with blood.

“Are you okay? Do we need to stop?”

Soaking wet in only a thin cotton shirt, she trembles. She seems entranced by the blood running down her arms and legs. “No, I’m fine,” she assures me, her eyes suddenly sparkling. “This is perfect.” Then, possessed by something dark and unexpected, Tiffany stares right at me, and slowly runs the straight razor over her tongue.

The blood is fake; the razor is a blunt-edged prop, but several of the film students packed into my apartment bathroom cry out in alarm. I nearly drop the Super-8 camera. Later, when I’m hand-cranking the film, thin as correction tape, through the dim viewer, I re-watch this moment over and over, and each time I shudder.

By day Tiffany is a polite and prudent bank teller, but for that one moment she is Lilith, terrifying and sublime, rising from a crimson lake to take her revenge on the sons of Adam. Somehow, the stage blood has evoked a metamorphosis.

And, somehow this is all connected to the Halloween re-release of The Exorcist in 1979. Now I am thirteen-years-old, sitting in an auditorium with hundreds of civilized adults, watching a girl around my age gleefully abuse herself with a crucifix, splattering her bed-sheets and smearing the blood across her mother’s face. I look at adult faces in the audience, frozen and impassive. How is this happening? How is this okay? Much later, I will wonder if the horror, violence and perversity in my screenplays are just echoes of that primal childhood trauma.

All my memories of Hollywood are soaked in stage blood. I mopped up bloody footprints between takes on Slumber Party Massacre III. I trashed the blood-speckled plastic that wrapped Laura Palmer’s corpse. I combed through a draft of Halloween: Resurrection finding synonyms for “stab.” I counted the number of beheadings in a draft of Conan The Barbarian and decided to limit myself to six. I accidentally spilled a pint on the floor of my brother-in-law’s Jeep so that for years afterwards, every time it rained, his car would bleed.

I have been paid to write around twenty-five screenplays and teleplays, and not one of them didn’t call for stage blood. This really shouldn’t surprise me.

Blood is a metaphor older than language, originating on the walls of caves. Blood evokes ritual sacrifice and the fragility of human flesh. Blood means madness, panic, and transformation. Blood is the puncture of order and the gushing of chaos.

It’s the flood from the elevator doors in The Shining. It’s the stain on the teeth in Jaws. It’s not so much the pig-bloodied prom dress, but the look in Carrie’s eyes. What blood means, what I want stage blood to mean, is terror in the sublime.

But usually, it doesn’t.

Instead of poetic or uncanny, the stage blood that bubbles up in my credited movies and television often turns out campy, unintentionally comic, and only mildly grotesque. Still, I keep a vial of it by my writing desk. For me, Halloween will always be about the feeling I got when Tiffany let blood spill out of her mouth and run down her chin, her lips curling into a ghastly little smile.

"Haunting Melissa" Both Scares and Innovates

First watch the trailer...

Haunting Melissa is a new kind of viewing experience.  It's not a film (although it was created by the producer of Mulholland Drive and The Ring.) It's not a TV series (although it is serialized, appearing over the course of days, weeks and months.) And, it certainly is not a bundle of webisodes (though it is delivered by an app made exclusively for the I-pad and I-phone.)  Watching Haunting Melissa doesn't feel quite like any of these things.  It's something innovative, exciting... and very, very scary.

Now go download the free App:  Haunting Melissa

As a friend, collaborator  and  filmmaker with a burning interest in new technologies and new distribution models, I had a chance to observe Neal Eddlestein conceive, create and deliver Haunting Melissa.  Over the next couple days I will be interviewing Neal, and blogging about what this project could mean for independent filmmakers looking for new ways to tell stories, reach audiences and monetize their content.

As a fan of the uncanny tone and intensity of David Lynch as well as the surreal supernatural horror of The Ring, I couldn't be more drawn to the story itself.  I was able to get a sneak peak at some of the later sequences, and they truly have the unsettling quality of both a hazy nightmare and a decent into madness.

Interviews, discussion and analysis to come.  Stay tuned...

Melissa Herself

Why YOU Should Write "Stigmata 3"

“Why the Hell does THAT guy keep getting work?”

I know that’s what you’re thinking. You read my past credits (Halloween 8, Cube 2, The Crow 4) and you say to yourself, “Those movies were CRAP. I could do better than that.” Maybe you have a horror script in your drawer right now that is you think is pure gold. Maybe you’ve read in the blogs that I wrote a script called Hercules for Millennium films, or that I will be re-writing Subterranean for Beacon, or that I’ve handed in a draft of Stigmata 2 for MGM and your rolling your eyes with indignation and disgust.

Well I’m going to explain to you why I keep getting work, why self-respecting writers and filmmaker’s like me would ever do straight-to-video sequels like Stigmata 2, and why when you are offered the job to write Stigmata 3, you should take it.

First off, when movie executives decide to hire me as a writer, let’s say on Stigmata 2, they do it because they have read screenplays I’ve written for movies that never got made. That screenplay in your drawer? Yeah, I’ve got a dozen of those, and the primary reason I get work is that mine are better.

Secondly, one of the first hard lessons of screenwriting is that a good script is no guarantee of a good movie, and that when the movie doesn’t turn out well, very few people will know or care that your well-written screenplay didn’t make it through the process.

In 2002, the original script for Cube 2 was good enough to land me a multi-picture deal at Dimension Films. Afterwards however, my Cube 2 script was completely re-written by two other writers, one of whom was the producer. The movie that came out contained virtually nothing from my original script. That’s how it goes on most films. It’s just the nature of the film production.

And, I shouldn’t complain about being rewritten. On both Halloween 8 and Crow 4, I was hired as a script doctor to “polish” other writers’ scripts. I did the rewrites on the eve of production, and tried my best to make improvements. Again very little of my work made it to the screen, but the money was good, and enjoyed collaborating with the people involved.

You see, that’s what screenwriters do. They work on films, both high and low. Before he wrote Lone Star, John Sayles wrote Alligator. Before he wrote award winners like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, David Cronenberg did movies like Rabid and Parasite.

Take the example of the purest, film-artist I know, Jacques Thelemaque. His films have won awards in European Festivals from the kind of judges who only like movies by Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky. He’s president of Filmmaker’s Alliance, a grassroots organization dedicated to supporting film artists outside the studio system. You’re not going to find an artist more dedicated to his personal vision (read his excellent blog, A Filmmaker’s Life). But do you want to know what he does as his day job? He produces little straight-to-video horror films with titles like “Within,” “Midnight Movie,” and “Augie and the Wolf.”

The fact is that you CAN do both.

But what’s that? You say you can’t possibly compromise your vision? Then finance your films yourself. Join a group like Filmmaker’s Alliance. Learn the perils of independent filmmaking and self-distribution. That’s just what I did. And as a result, I won a contest and a grant at the DGA given by FA, Kodac, and Panivision to make a short film just the way I want to, with no rewrites and no compromises.

Meanwhile, I make my living writing little genre movies. I write action. I write horror. I write thrillers. I do it because it’s fun. I do it because it’s a lot easier than loading trucks and more interesting than making lattes. I do it because I love the thrill of writing “the car explodes” and then watching, months later, a REAL CAR EXPLODE.

How can I stand having my name on movies that some people mock and despise? It’s part of the job. No matter what movie you work on you must be prepared for the possibility that it could turn out to be an embarrassing disaster. You have to be prepared to take the heat, or worse yet, the complete… unmitigated… indifference.

That’s the risk I’m taking writing Stigmata 2, and so far it’s worth the risk. People are telling me, in mildly shocked tones, that the first draft is “actually, really good.” As rewrites continue I will continue to throw all my passion into the project, and I remain optimistic that this time, against the odds, my work will make it to the screen, and that this time... it will turn out really, REALLY well.

So, maybe that horror screenplay in your drawer really is pure gold. Maybe it will win screenwriting contests and score you an agent. Maybe movie executives will read it and be so impressed they will offer you the opportunity to write Stigmata 3, the follow up to the surprise straight-to-video hit Stigmata 2. If that happens, don’t be a jackass…

… take the job.