He could hear the tag lines from the end of the corridor.
The flamethrower was still ignited, and his eyes were crimson with reflected flame.
“Everyone has nightmares about the ugliest way to die…” The melodramatic Voice Over beckoned him on, closely followed by another choice snippet: “Prepare yourself for the ultimate experience; this video cassette will change your attitude to life…”
He reached the room in time to hear the most famous one: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating it’s only a movie, only a movie, only a movie…” The words dwindled into silence as he stepped up behind the leather sofa, staring at the screens.
There they were: the DPP 39, each video nasty taking its individual turn to show off on the screens, one offensive clip after another, the fifteen monitors showing different films at the same time. He saw throats ripped out alongside dismemberment, rape, eye-gouging, scalp-ripping, chopping, burning… endlessly looped. A treat for the senses, a riot of the cheapest gore and terror. Horror stripped down to its primal bone in grainy VHS.
And in amongst the narrated tag lines, Tommy caught snatches of dialogue—quotes from Nasty Hell: “They’ll eat your eyes first, then your nose and lips while you’re still alive, then your brain and then you’ll die…”
He stalled before the phantasmagoria of vileness. He could see it now for what it was—had he really fought with his Dad to defend this shit?The words attacked him from all three sides of the room.
“I was sure the best way for the filthy lesbian to die was for her to burn…”
“Too real to be simulated, too shocking to be ignored…”
“Brother eats brother, mothers devour their offspring in a chain of foul slaughter until nothing will remain but the bare earth, soaked in putrefying flesh…”
The volume crept up. The soundtracks battered inside his head, repeating, overlapping, destroying his mind.
“Rape her… rape her!”
“We’ve really put ourselves in the shit this time, staying to film the last bit.”
“The more you rape their senses the more they seem to like it”
“A vile film for vicious sex criminals…”
“Violence beyond reason, victims beyond help…”
And one more insistent than all the others, burrowing like a hate worm into his soul: “The actors and actresses who dedicated their lives to making this film were never seen or heard from again…”
He raised the flamethrower. His finger was on the trigger when the screens blanked out. Then flickered back into life depicting his father’s face again. He seemed to be delivering a lecture from fifteen screens, although he only had an audience of one.
“In 1983 The Daily Mail and other tabloids whipped up a moral fury that instigated the rise of the nasty for their own selfish reasons—to sell papers…” His father frowned in digitally-manipulated disapproval. “But the papers did too good a job of demonising it—of making it a definable essence. They made the monster potentially tangible in every household that possessed a VHS player. An as yet formless creature with the sole aim of creating and perpetuating evil. It stretched out tendrils and began to exert a subtle grip on weakened minds in living rooms across Great Britain. Our insulated isle revelled in the intolerance, hatred and seething violence it encouraged.”
Tommy’s fingers twitched. He ached to burn those screens, that pompous face that was his own kin. The talking head continued its monologue: “But then the right wing politicians saw their opportunity and conservative oppression crushed the burgeoning force of evil by driving it underground—entirely unwittingly of course—and again not through altruistic motivations, but to further their own careers.”
The images changed again, and now a man occupied all of them, a man unfamiliar to Tommy. Pasty-faced, scarred by acne, his hair lank and damp and falling over his thin face. This face shunned the sun as much as society had almost certainly shunned the person it belonged to. The narrator elucidated all in Mr. Wallace Snr’s educated tones: “Here was a man unloved by the beautiful, who grew to cherish the stark ugliness rooted in us all. A failure of a man, a student of cinema who had no discernible talent. A man of mean tastes and squalid desires. A perfect vessel for the Nasty to further its cause. For along with the laxer moral focus the twenty-first century brought, a more liberal attitude towards censorship arrived too, and the Nasty made a resurgence.”
Tommy listened, despite his hatred and his anguish—which was becoming a dead thing, numbed by the horrors. He watched the face on the monitors and the voice lulled him, as it had when he was a child with the occasional bedtime story. His grip on the trigger loosened.
“Obsessed with video nasties, this failure, this Abject Man, had channelled all his non-existent talents into making cheap underground horror films on DIY DVD which stimulated nobody. But inspiration was at hand. When this Shunned Man undertook a lonely video nasty marathon in his flat one long weekend, he was taking the Devil by the horns and singing along to all His best tunes. The essence of the Nasty which had been fortifying its existence in the ether, fastened on his sleaze and horror-channelled mind. It battened on him like a vampire bat gorging on sadism, joining with him, transforming him…” Tommy’s father, the venerable former MP for Gloucester South, bowed his head in mock respect. “His delusions of grandeur were enflamed. While he still retained a shred of humanity he believed his new ‘enlightenment’ would enable him to influence minds in a way never believed possible before, through the medium of film. He believed he would go down in history. Hitchcock, De Mille, Peckinpah…Tarantino! These would be talentless infants in comparison. When he commenced his new film, inspired by the force now roosting within him, he believed he was creating his life work. His Masterpiece. True Art. But these were the trappings of the ego of a disillusioned young man. His legacy would be far greater than personal glory… In time, the Director became something else. The Visionary of the Vile, or Mister Nasty… Call him what you will, he is humanity’s nemesis.”
And now the screens switched again. Tommy’s father was gone, replaced by a montage of real death, real horror, all too familiar to Tommy. He saw Andy Hill, impaled on a tree. There was Graham the wrangler, his forehead leaking brains around the thrusting drill bit. There Rona, her breast ravished brutally; Lana, Mark, everyone from the Malmesbury Massacre. He saw Vicky in her Snuff bedroom… Finally he saw a young man he didn’t recognize at all, dying in a blood-filled bathtub—and even though he didn’t know him, he knew what he was. A virgin, a prototype killing. An experiment to kick the whole foul process into play.
Tommy could read much in those flickering images of butchery. He could see into the mind of the monstrous genius the loser had become. He saw how the first killings had been clumsily performed, probably by the Romanian criminals—and one had almost certainly been an extra on Professor What—the Director had recruited with promises of financial gain. And it wasn’t until Malmesbury that you perfected your Art was it, and the physical spirit of the Nasty was invoked? When the killers became something more than a gang of immoral henchmen and transformed into monsters that had stepped right out of the videos themselves…real artists at work!
As the last of the real death scenes froze on a close up of Vicky’s scared cobalt eyes, Tommy perceived the extent of the web he had been ensnared in. The Director had been systematically remounting the most horrifying scenes from the list of banned films, and in so doing had fed the vileness hidden inside himself, and instigated—
“The end of civilization…” The Honourable Mr. Wallace was back. “The end of rationality. Rome, Greece, Mesopotamia…all fell through their own decadence. And the greatest civilization of all time will go the same way, destroyed by the basest, innate desires that lurk in the human soul, baying for horror, for horror and for blood.” A pause. Silence filled the room, apart from the soft burn of the small flame drooling from the nozzle. “That is his gift to humanity: to let everything slide into the chaos of depravity and Total Violence. Not so much a director then, but a conductor leading the Orchestra of Horror that will play out over mankind’s final credits. Believe me: this is the End”
Another change. This time the screens all showed the same image of a young man and woman that were vaguely familiar to Tommy. They were bound to wooden chairs in what looked like different ruined cottages—maybe the two Tommy hadn’t checked out when he crept through the hamlet earlier. It was only when the giant from Absurd untied the young girl, snapping her bonds easily, that Tommy recognised her. He’d last seen her in the Factory audition waiting room. The monster carried her to an oven and opened the door. The oven was already lit. Tommy could almost feel the heat escaping in waves. He didn’t want to observe the giant force her head inside, didn’t want to see her face begin to pop and blister, her dark hair to sear and fall, but something made him keep watching. On another screen in a different cottage, her audition companion was waiting his turn. Fat bulged over the rope fastening him to the chair. His head drooped. When Absurd had finished baking his friend’s face away, the giant would come for him too. Tommy could see what awaited him; a circular saw at a cutting table. It wouldn’t be long before that blade was set in motion.
When it was all over (and Tommy had to see it all) Jasmine returned to life on the screens.
Naked, writhing, on the hook. Then an edit cut and a close up of her face slackening in horror as she realized the extent of her betrayal. Tommy would have appreciated the irony, but his mind was too full of Red. He watched her burn for the second time that day, her death amplified, multiplied, a world of flame and terror that filled his eyes, his head.
Jasmine… Media Whore extraordinaire. Fuck anyone, anything for a role. The morality of an SS Doctor locked in the body of a hooker. A dangerous combination. She fucked you for a role, after all. Fucked you over as well. A strutting player led by ego, nothing more.
He saw it all now, so clearly…and the Red bloomed.
He swung the flamethrower towards the screens. He would burn them all. And if this nightmare film was here, he would find the master print and burn that too. Burn everything. Burrrrn.
His finger caressed the trigger, as, for the last time, his father’s face replaced Tommy’s lover all around the room.
“That’s a wrap,” the former MP said simply, and the door in the far wall opened.