THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story (8 page)

Grace reaches through the rear
window for a beat-up black leather jacket. As she removes it, we see the guitar
case sitting atop travel bags and a suitcase. The woman listens to the Deejay
on the radio as she slides into the jacket, lights up a cigarette and takes a
swig from a silver flask.

“When I was just a teenage boy,
way back in that bygone era known as the Seventies, my favorite band was a
group called Mathaluh.”

The name Mathaluh gets Grace’s
attention. She grew up on this mountain. The band members grew up on this
mountain before leaving to become first famous, then infamous in death. They
lived on now in urban legend alone, a cautionary tale of the dangers of
dreaming big and reaching for that dream at any and all cost.

“Tonight, in honor of the band
that so stirred my soul, we’re having a commercial-free tribute. Nothing but
the music of Mathaluh- from dust to dawn.”

A Mathaluh song begins to rise
from the stereo, first slowly, then gathering speed and volume. Grace grooves
to the music, a natural born rocker.

“Although they only released two
albums before their untimely demise, tonight we just might be able to dig up
some of their lesser known lost works. Here’s to you, Jeremy Jared, front man
eternal, wherever you are.”

Grace playfully answers the radio
deejay the way people do when they know no one is listening, “That would be
scattered across these mountains in a zillion pieces.”

“MATHALUH LIVES,” booms out the
radio so loudly it makes Grace jump. She stares through the driver’s side
window at the radio, feeling the rush of adrenaline and fear. The woman senses
the forest become eerily quiet behind her. She turns and looks. Fog is emerging
out the tree-line, moving towards her like an army of pale tilted ghosts. Grace
retreats back into the vehicle, rolls up the windows. Next, she tries to start
the car again.

"Please start, you piece a
shit. Please start.” The car turns over on command. Grace gets the hell out of
there.

Sunset.

We follow Grace's car as it
reaches its destination: a house in the woods with a stained-glass window on
the front door. It's the same house from the Prologue. Henry's house. The sight
of the house after all these years has an effect on Grace Lynn. Lights are on
inside. The woman is apprehensive. She doesn't know what kind of reception
awaits her.

Loveless leaned back and rubbed
his eyes. He now had his badass female rocker heroine. His backstory for the
woman ran deep: a complex woman whose past consisted of abusive relationships
with both male and female partners and drug and alcohol abuse. A year and a
half before returning to the mountain she had kicked a particularly nasty
cocaine habit. The hard stuff was now out of her system and her life, except
for wine, beer, Jack Daniels, and the occasional joint. After two abortions, a
short-lived annulled marriage, a DUI and an arrest for assault (a former
boyfriend thought it was a good idea to slap around Grace, who retaliated with
a kitchen knife, part of a cutlery set he had bought for her birthday), her
singing career had gone down in flames. Grace Lynn had the sullen angry tone of
an Alanis Morissette, the raw rebellious lyrics of a British punk rocker, and
the hard strumming guitar riffs of a heavy metal maven. Which meant that the
woman didn’t easily fit into any definable category in a city that fit
everybody into easily definable categories. If you were a director and your
first hit film happened to be a slasher flick, then you were designated a
horror director and all the offers you got from the studios were for monster
movies. If you were a shakespearean theater trained thespian whose first big
break came in a smash hit comedy, then you were a comedy actor. The music
producers who liked Grace’s music had no idea what to do with her. They didn’t
know how to market an original in a town full of carbon copies.

On top of that, Grace Lynn wasn’t
an easy person to be around. Especially when she drank Jack. Now the singer had
reached the end of the line. When Grace ran out of friends who would put her up
or deal with her shit, the singer was literally out on the street.

The woman became a number one
customer of pawn shops downtown, at various times taking loans on everything
she owned except the clothes on her back, her guitar and her Chevy Nova, which
she ended up sleeping in for her last two months in Los Angeles.

When she could finally take it no
more, the singer admitted defeat, packed up her stuff and left the city for
good.

She didn’t know what kind of
homecoming she would receive upon her return. Her father was dead. When he died
of liver failure from habitual heavy drinking four years earlier, she didn’t
return to attend the funeral. He was a hard-drinking Irishman who worked lumber
in the mountains his whole life. Grace and her father weren’t particularly
close. For her high school graduation, he gave her a black eye. The singer’s
mother didn’t deal with her husband’s death very well. Although in Grace’s eyes
the old woman should have thrown a party. Her father smacked her mother around
every time he got drunk, which was damn near every night. Her mother was in and
out of rehab and the psychiatric ward. Her grieving for her late husband was
ongoing.

As for Katherine Lynn, Grace’s
little sister Katie who was four years younger, the singer had no idea what her
life was like now. Hopefully she hadn’t followed in the family footsteps. The
siblings had been close until Grace left Katie behind. The day Grace left the
mountain, she never heard from her sister again. The singer would call, but
Katie wouldn’t take the calls. Grace would write, but never heard back.

As for the family home, her late
grandfather had paid off the house and land around it. Moreover, her
grandfather, knowing the instability of her parents, left the place in Grace
and Katie’s names. Only the two of them together could sell the huge old house.
Therefore Grace knew there was still a house left to return to, unless her
mother had burnt it down during one of her binges.

The coupe de grâce, as far as
Loveless was concerned regarding the backstory he had concocted for Grace Lynn,
was that the singer was born on October 31st. Halloween night.

She had returned home on her
birthday.

Later that night, after falling
asleep at the computer and trying to drag himself to bed - he made it no
further than the couch - Loveless woke to a symphony of howling coyotes. It was
well past midnight. After taking a piss, the filmmaker stumbled out onto the
balcony to view these creatures of the night. There they were up on a distant
hill, baying to a star-filled velvet sky. Loveless was actually fascinated by
the coyotes of the Arrowhead mountains. They weren't like any other coyotes he
had seen before. At one time, the filmmaker had lived in Calabasas in Los
Angeles, just beyond Woodland Hills. Calabasas was populated with ranches,
horses and soccer moms in screaming beamers. In the hills around his condo
there were plenty of coyotes roaming wild. They were mangy and ugly. However,
in Arrowhead, the coyotes were actually, in the filmmaker's opinion, beautiful.
Their brown coats shone. They looked fit and healthy. The coyotes didn't run
when you passed them on the road or in the woods. Loveless guessed that people
just left them alone here on the mountain. Coyotes were just wild dogs after
all. The filmmaker loved dogs. After his dog of fourteen years died quietly in
his arms, he didn't have the heart to get another. Even after many years,
Loveless still carried the grief of this loss inside of him.

Although the coyotes were
predatory, he still enjoyed their company, from afar. This gave the filmmaker
an idea. A deceased family pet would be the perfect catalyst to catapult the
story forward.

Earlier that day Loveless had
written the scene where Grace returned home and had a bittersweet reunion with
her sister Katie, who was torn emotionally about having her big sister back.
Katie, who was eking out a dismal existence working as a retail clerk in a
clothing store by the lake, had always been overshadowed by her big sister's
popularity in high school. Grace was the hip cool rebel everyone looked up to.
Although Katie loved Grace and had outgrown being mad at her sister for leaving
her, she had only been able to step out of the shadow of being
Grace's
little sister
once the singer was gone. Their mother was currently doing a
voluntary stint in the mental ward wing of the tiny hospital in Twin Peaks and
Katie had been living in the big old house all alone. To make Katie's emotions
even more fragile and conflicted, Loveless concocted a story vehicle where
Katie was now dating Russell, Grace's former high school sweetheart whose heart
the singer had crushed when she left him and the mountain. Of course Russell would
play a central role in this tale of possession and otherworldly seduction.

Then there was the major plot
point of the movie to be dealt with. A plot point was the device or event that
spun the story in a whole different, unexpected direction. Grace's unearthing
of the album was the adventure's main plot point. The filmmaker wanted Grace's
discovery to be interesting and atmospheric. That's where the dead dog came in.

Grace unpacks in her childhood
bedroom, old memories swirling around her. Perhaps that was all ghosts were:
old memories brought back to life by familiar places. Taking a break to go out
onto an upper deck balcony to smoke, Grace sees a metal foot locker sitting on
the railing. Curiosity draws her to it. Upon opening the box, Grace recoils in
horror. The old family pet dog is inside of it, her small corpse cold and
stiff.

"You just got back. I
couldn't find a way to tell you before," KATIE says as she steps out onto
the balcony to join her sister. "Pumpkin died two days ago. She was the
only family I had left. I haven't had the heart to bury her."  Katie
lowers her head. "I was trying to work up to it."

Grace reads her sister's pained
expression and senses what she wants. "Don't worry, Katie. I'll take care
of her."

"Really? Thank you so much.
You don't know what this means to me."

"Yes I do. Pumpkin was my
dog too."

"Bury her somewhere nice, so
she'll have a good view." Tears run down the younger sister's face.

In the dark, we see Grace hike
into the woods with the metal box, a flashlight and a shovel in hand. The
singer makes sure she goes far enough away from the house so Katie won't see
the grave marker - a stick with Pumpkin's collar and dog tag hanging from it -
until she chooses to visit it. The woman drops to her knees as she puts the metal
box down. She has found a resting place for the family pet atop a small hill.
'A nice spot.'

Grace lifts the shovel and brings
it down into hard earth. Low-level fog clings to the ground around her. The
woman begins to dig. It isn't long before she realizes there is already
something buried there. Scared at what she may find, but too fascinated not to
dig it up, Grace finds a package wrapped in plastic. She pulls it out of the
earth. It's the record album Henry had buried.

Grace reads the name on the
record out loud, "Mathaluh?" This is the second time today, she has
been reminded of the old rock band. "Weird freakin' coincidence."

Grace buries Pumpkin, takes the
album, and makes her way back to the house.

Grace enters the house through a
glass balcony door leading into the living room. She is greeted by a number of
lit candles around the room, mood lighting. A small store bought cake with lit
candles sits on the floor table by the couch. Next to it is a birthday card.

"You didn't really think I'd
forget it was your birthday, did ya? Kinda hard when it falls on a day like
today," Katie says as she sits up on the couch.

Grace smiles, touched.

With the rest of the story in
place - the set-up, introduction of major characters, and main plot point that
determined the direction of the story in act one, the twists and turns in act
two, and a good portion of act three worked out - Loveless became practically
obsessed with the screenplay's villain. Grace was the best protagonist he had
ever written. There was no doubt about that. The movie's antagonist would have
to be just as solid. For every hero there had to be a villain. The demon Jeremy
was Grace Lynn's nemesis. However, this character wasn't fleshed out nearly
enough in the short story the filmmaker had written during his lost weekend.
Also, Loveless didn't want the demon Jeremy to be some cliché boogeyman,
bursting out of closets like a cheap vaudevillian in a cut-rate horror movie.
He wanted this character's threat to lie not in his physical ability to tear a
person limb from limb or rip their throat out. He wanted him to be dangerous in
an entirely different way. The demon Jeremy needed to be a proxy for Lucifer
himself here on earth. To accomplish this, Loveless would have to fictitiously
recreate the characters of both Satan and Jeremy, so that he could better
understand their motivations. These scenes would of course not be in the movie.
The budget absolutely would not allow for it and they were better left to the
imagination. But it was important for Loveless to know that these scenes had
taken place when he wrote the demon Jeremy's dialogue. Then the audience could
feel the creature's pain and emphasize with him, while at the same time being
repulsed by him and wanting to see him sent back to the inferno. In all the
good movies he had seen, the filmmaker found himself at one point in the movie
rooting for the bad guy, or at least being able to identify with his
motivations. Loveless had once read an article about an actor who had been cast
as Adolf Hitler in a film. The actor had no idea how to play this heinous,
evil, and twisted historical character, until he approached the role with the
assumption that the
Fuhrer
was right. Then it all clicked for the actor.
It was scary, but true.