“No meat! No meat!” cries a soldier, ravenous, holding his belly. “Shut up Wilson!” shouts a rebel, scared he might be next. Starving Revolutionary War grunts huddle around a campfire at midnight, shivering in their long johns and frayed coats, drawn faces making them appear as animated corpses. The soldiers stumble over a rectangular crate covered with snow in the corner of a barn somewhere on a farm. Wiping away the frost, they realize the crate is a coffin with Cyrillic markings when a vampire leaps into the frame and claws their throats open, blood squirting from rubber tubing, death throes gurgling, unable to warn the others about the Strigoi slurping at the jugular fountain. A soldier enters the shot and strikes a threatening martial arts pose—
“Those were my men, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben, not your dinner!”
A light shower of Gold Medal flour shakes through the air from the rafters of a distressed farmhouse off Ventura Boulevard in Thousand Oaks. The hut floor is covered in so much flour if it rained they could make enough gruel to feed the entire Revolutionary Army at the real Valley Forge.
“Cut!” screams Thør Rosenthal. “Is that a burrito wrapper in the shot?”
The offending Baja Fresh wax paper is thrown away by a skinny PA wearing a Lucio Fulci’s Zombie T-shirt. An exasperated Thør turns to his cinematographer, who lights up a smoke: “We got it.”
(Below-the-line troopers, young, exhausted, devoted to their director, arrive on set with wheelbarrows of one-pound bricks of Gold Medal flour, shaking out “snow” all over the shed until the chain-smoking production designer is satisfied.)
“Moving on!” shouts the first AD. “Scene seventy-eight!”
Lips stained orange from stuffing his face with handfuls of Cheetos, Larry Mersault hangs out by the snack table, amazed at this ninety-nine-cent recreation of Valley Forge in Southern California.
“Craft service table is for the crew,” says Martha Washington, dressed in a Revolutionary War outfit.
Mersault: “Are they shooting your death scene next?”
“I don’t have a death scene. I’m the star,” says the saucy ingénue.
Mersault marvels at all the extras dressed in ragged colonial times gear; the FX guys applying claws and bald caps and white sclera contacts to transform Washington’s revolutionary soldiers into “feeders.”
“Quiet on the set!”
The FX mavens finish rigging the latex body suit with exposed ribcage and pulsating heart.
“Rolling!”
Thør Rosenthal notices Mersault lurking around the video village and slides the reader into his director’s chair to take in the feeding scene.
“Speed!”
The SAG-eligible actors take their places and bare their teeth, ready to tear the soldier apart.
Thør: “Ready, Martha?”
Martha: “What winks and fucks like a tiger?”
“Action!”
The soldiers at Valley Forge shred open the latex skin on the victim’s chest, howl at the top of their lungs, gnaw on the drippy flesh, and raise the fatty intestines between their hands. Thør encourages all of them to gorge more fervently, then he jabs a finger at “Martha,” her cue to enter the frame. Shadows of violence flicker over Martha’s expression of pure terror; on the video monitor, her mouth opens, but no sound comes out as she hides under a corpse and watches the creeps of Valley Forge slink away from the arrival of General George Washington flashing wooden teeth, revealing a pair of splintery fangs, giving a speech about the “dark winter.”
“Cut! We got it!” says Thør.
“Moving on!” yells the first AD.
On the video monitor, Martha Washington looks into the camera and winks.