Sergio’s story is like any other fan’s story. It’s a story I’ve heard so many times before, from so many different film buffs exactly like him. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s very passionate about what he’s talking about. Not one bit. It’s just that his story is no different from the legion of fans who’ve shared similar tales of stumbling upon Jessica for the first time.
His story isn’t his own.
It’s hers.
I can’t help but take pity on these kids, these boys, when they tell me their story. Always so heartfelt. So impassioned. They have this burning desire, this innate need to express how much this movie meant to them as kids. How it changed their lives. Haunted their dreams.
I haunted their dreams, they all say.
But it’s not true.
Whenever I hear them say this, I always want to respond—No, no, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me at all. It was Jessica…
Always Jessica.
She is the one on-screen. She’s the one in the movie. I was just her conduit. A ripe vessel for possession. But instead of saying this, instead of saying a goddamn thing, I simply nod and smile and listen to them. I’m all ears, boys…Listen over and over again to the same story.
The name of the video store might change…
Video Kingdom.
Hollywood Video.
Video Emporium.
The town might be different…
Minneapolis.
Winnipeg.
Richmond.
It doesn’t matter which state…
Arkansas.
North Carolina.
Nevada.
The song remains the same, as they say, no matter where I hear it. No matter who sings it. Like a cover version. A broken record.
I could tell Sergio’s story for him, if I wanted. I could tell the story, all their stories, for these boys, if I chose. I know their story by heart now.
By heart.
Sergio was seven when he first saw the VHS cover for Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave. Every day after school, he would ride his bike to the local video store. Video World was tucked into a topiary-bordered alcove of the Stony Point Shopping Centre, just a swift five-minute Schwinn sojourn from his front door. No bigger than a boutique, this early-’80s video store was tiny in comparison to the cancerous sprawl of the Blockbuster Video chain that would begin to metastasize its way through suburban strip malls. It would eventually put all the mom-and-pop operations like Video World out of business, but not yet.
Sergio was one of the lucky boys. He pushed through his preadolescence just before the big blue-and-yellow Blockbuster awnings started cropping up across his quiet hometown.
He had found his home away from home.
Walking into Video World after locking up his bike, he lost himself in a Shangri-La of Betamax and VHS. Every inch of wall space was lined, floor-to-ceiling, with videocassettes. Each four-by-seven-and-a-half-inch VHS cassette contained a different story, just waiting to be told, and Sergio made it his mission to watch them all. Or as many as his allowance would bear.
Hidden at the very back of the store, buried behind comedy, family, and drama sections—but before he reached the “private room” of adult films at the very, very back—there was a single row of videos that were off-limits to children such as himself.
The horror section.
This—this was where fear resided. Every kind of horror Sergio could think of—or not think of—was on display. Boys and girls weren’t allowed to rent videos from this shadowy edge of the forest. A kid like Sergio couldn’t help but feel a shift in the atmosphere upon entering the aisle, suddenly surrounded by so many R-rated movies. The carpet seemed to darken, was stained somehow. Even the air had a miasma of decrepit breath to it, thicker than the air in the children’s section. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be here. But he had to go deeper. Take just another step in. See if he could make his way past the titles that begin with the letter A.
Past the Bs.
The Cs.
He was suddenly immersed, surrounded by images of sheer terror. These horrors were captured on magnetic tape and sealed inside their own cardboard boxes, like gift-wrapped packages. The horror section presented a series of portraits as if they were on display in a gallery. A monstrosity exhibition. Evil Dead. Night of the Creeps. The Company of Wolves. The Deadly Spawn. Faces of Death. Def-Con 4. Xtro. The Stepfather. The Driller Killer. The Stuff. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I Spit on Your Grave. The Dead Pit. Black Roses. Headless Eyes. Magic. Black Christmas. He Knows You’re Alone. Cellar Dweller. Mother’s Day. The Prowler.
Too many to count.
Too many to see.
But Sergio knew he had to watch them.
Watch them all.
Video after video displayed its own package. A snapshot of a victim caught in that instant just before the axe crashes down or a zombie covered in the gory remains of its last meal.
Sergio could still describe them all.
Every last cover.
The corpse of a college coed sitting in a rocking chair, a clear plastic bag still wrapped around her head. A pair of living eyeballs slithering out from their sockets. The silhouette of a man wielding a butcher knife, inches away from his stepdaughter and her defenseless dog.
Come on, kid, each box seemed to whisper. Go ahead. I dare you. Slip a video off the shelf. Go ahead and pick any horror film and take the cassette into your hand. Rub your finger over the cardboard cover. Feel its softened edges? Feel how fuzzy and worn the corners are?
Now look at the cover…Pick one.
Take it.
See.
Sergio grabbed Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave.
It’s me on the box.
Me as Jessica.
Just a little girl.
A scorched ghost, complete with an intense close-up of my bare skull. A pair of milky eyes, settled into my sockets, stared right back at him. Sans eyelids. Sans flesh. Sans any space between us. I’m reaching out for him, my hand outstretched as if the spirit of the Little Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek were a breath away from lifting off the box and grabbing him by the throat.
The tagline at the bottom read: Jessica wants to play…with you!
There was nothing left of me but the bones. My skin had burned away in the picture.
But the eyes. A pulpy wetness remained. There was a shine to them. They shimmered. How they had survived the fire while the rest of me had completely flaked away is anybody’s guess, but here they were, silently accosting this young boy. Pining for him and only him.
Yearning for him.
Sergio couldn’t tell if this incinerated girl was in pain or in a fit of horrific ecstasy, but her eyes—my eyes—continued to stare straight at him, boring their way into his psyche. They followed him through the aisle. All they did was look—look at Sergio, watching him as he dropped the cassette cover to the floor and ran crying out of the store. He thought they were alive. That the cover had come to life, possessed by the ghost of Jessica. She had come for him.
The truth was much duller than that. Thanks to a particular 3D-printing effect the studio did for the VHS cover, the glossy eyes on every cover popped out from the rest of the box. They’d spent more money on that gimmick than on the movie itself.
And it worked.
That was all it took to separate Jessica from the rest of the films on the shelf.
Boys just like Sergio had the exact same experience, all across the country. They all thought I was staring at them. That I was haunting them.
Coming for them.
Most of these horror movies drifted off into a sea of beta-obscurity, lost forever in a back catalog of forgettable movies.
Not Jessica. Somehow, the cover art remained indelibly sketched on Sergio’s subconscious. The image wrapped itself around the deeper recesses of his brain and refused to let go. For years, even to this day, the one VHS cover Sergio could never shake, could never free himself of…was mine.
Was me.
“It was like you were reaching out to me,” he said. “Like you wanted to touch me.”
Of course he wasn’t the first person to tell me this. I’d heard it so many times before. But I acted as if he were the first.
My first.
That he was the only one who’d had this personal experience with the movie.
With me.
Sergio may have been too young to actually watch the movie at the time—but he didn’t need to. The cover artwork was enough. This was the true horror: not the film, but his preadolescent mind taking that snippet of visual information from the front cover—an act of violence, a look of terror, a ghost girl—and letting his own narrative develop from there.
The cover was all it took. For him, the cover was the movie. He watched his own personalized version of Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave in his imagination that night, every night. He didn’t need his parents’ VHS player. He had his dreams. He couldn’t escape the made-up movie manifesting itself in his sleep. He couldn’t escape me.
So he came back.
To me.
He rode his bike back to Video World the very next day. He marched straight into the horror aisle and found me, back on the shelf, waiting for him. Staring at him. Hungering for him to play.
And then the next day.
And the next.
Always back to me. To that hungry look in my eyes.
That yearning.
He had to have me. He knew these cassettes had a plastic chip embedded within them that would set off an alarm at the front of the store. He knew he couldn’t steal the cassette. That didn’t matter.
All Sergio wanted was the cover.
All he wanted was me.
He slipped the cassette out and left it on the shelf, naked. He stuffed the softened cardboard box down his pants and waltzed right out of the store, acting perfectly normal.
He freed me. Now he had me all to himself.
Forever.
Sergio tells me all this during my screen test. He keeps talking over dinner afterward. Over drinks back at his apartment.
He tells me his story in between kisses. As he undresses me.
He tells me his story as his breath deepens, intensifies. He tells me when he finally climaxes and rolls over onto his bed.
He tells me his story as the sweat along my skin begins to cool and suddenly, I’m cold again. So cold. The story never changes. The only difference is the person who tells it.
“So,” I ask in my best Greta Garbo voice, just next to him. “Did I get the part, Mr. Director?”