When I first joined Twitter, back in 2009, I concocted a story called The Psycho Murders, inspired by the 1973 Vincent Price film Theatre of Blood. I replaced theatre critics with film critics, and killed them off in ways inspired by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, as opposed to the original’s plays of William Shakespeare. I posted it on the social media platform in 56 increments of approximately 140 characters.
About a year ago I decided to expand this idea into a novella, set in and around the national press shows of 1990s London, which I had frequented in my role as film critic of The Sunday Correspondent, Tatler, New Statesman & Society, and The Sunday Telegraph. I thought the story might serve as a snapshot of that era, the early days of the internet and IMDb, before smartphones, wi-fi and Google, when print still ruled, and arts criticism was still a viable career choice, if only for the privileged few - mostly old white men.
The decade was also transitional for cinema in several fundamental ways, with film being replaced by digital projection, VHS replaced by DVDs, and practical special effects replaced by CGI. I thought it might be fun to try and reflect this, while obliquely commenting on the film culture of the period and namedropping a lot of film titles and film references; after all, it had worked for the author of Ready Player One, and I reckoned I could do a deeper dive and maybe mention films that not everyone had seen or heard of.
I wrote a few chapters, murdering a couple of critics before the rising cost of living got in the way, leaving me little time to kill off the others. But I am posting the first two chapters here as proof (and a reminder to myself) that I have been writing, even if I haven’t had time to finish anything. I must emphasise that, although some of the locations are (or were) real, all characters featuring in this work are fictitious, and any resemblance to myself or to other real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. And obviously I owe a debt to Anthony Greville-Bell, who wrote the Theatre of Blood screenplay, and Stanley Mann and John Kohn, who came up with the idea for it.
FILM CLUB CHAPTER 1: Waldo Fitzgerald at the Bateson Hotel
Waldo Fitzgerald's nostrils flared with distaste. He had specifically requested a no smoking room, but this one stank like an old ashtray. Thirteen years since he had lost his beloved mother to lung cancer, and he couldn't help but feel acute sorrow piercing his gut each time someone lit up in his presence. To honour her sainted memory, his telephone answering machine message - Waldo Fitzgerald is not here at present but kindly convey your message after the tone and he will endeavour to return your call - ended with the cheery reminder And remember, smoking kills!
But the stench was part of the package, he grudgingly allowed, and there was no question the squalor of the surroundings enhanced the disgusting thrill of this encounter by forcing him into contact with the sort of riffraff he usually took care to avoid. He never travelled by public transport, and his groceries were delivered twice a week from Fortnum & Mason. The films he had to watch were overflowing with lowlife, so he looked on occasions such as this as professional research. It was good to rub up against members of the great unwashed, now and again, to remind himself that they weren’t merely figments of the liberal filmmaking fancy.
Take the emaciated harpy lounging behind the reception desk. What a contrast to his own fragrant Mary! When he'd stepped into the lobby she'd quickly set aside the tattered paperback she’d been reading and exposed discoloured teeth in what might have passed muster as a smile in the sort of community one might find tippling Tennent's Super in a lean-to beneath the Westway. Black stringy hair that hadn't seen shampoo for weeks, insolent eyes rimmed with so much kohl she might as well have been punched in the face, and an accent so exaggeratedly posh he suspected she was taking the mickey out of his own. Nicotine-stained fingers, naturally, and chipped green nail varnish. He shuddered with distaste; like Ian Fleming, he preferred unvarnished fingernails. Ballerina pink was just about acceptable, but green was beyond the pale.
She'd handed him the key with a supercilious smirk, before returning to her book in a dismissive gesture that had vexed him more than it should have done, especially when he'd caught sight of the title. Why on earth would such a benighted creature be reading that? What gave her the right? How could a subhuman like her even wrap her head around it? But he bit back the snippy comment and headed for the lift.
As a bonus, in a dump like this there was never any danger of running into anyone he knew, or who might recognise him from his byline, or from one of his frequent TV appearances. He had worked hard to get to where he was now, not quite a household name, but almost, and had no intention of allowing his reputation to be besmirched. The only folk he was likely to bump into in this part of King's Cross were ignorant truants straight off the train from the north, or streetwalkers taking advantage of the hotel's competitive hourly rates. He shuddered at the thought of what might be going on in the other rooms at this very second, but it was a frisson not entirely devoid of pleasure.
While he undressed, slowly and methodically, folding his clothes as he shed them, he ran through the rest of the day’s schedule in his head. He never bothered to write it down because his mind functioned with the precision engineering of the platinum Abalone ticking on his wrist. He had come here straight from squash with his brother-in-law, so he could tick that one off. Now it was shower off the squash sweat; fuck Raoul; shower off the smell of Raoul; cab home to where Mary would be waiting with a Cuba Libre; change into a suit while sipping the Cuba Libre; write up his notes on the day’s films; fax his review to the offices of The Daily Motion while Mary was getting dressed for dinner; cab to Holland Park; dinner at the Emerson’s; amuse everyone with the outrageously reactionary aperçus that were his stock-in-trade; cab home; fuck Mary; sleep. Et voilà! Another perfect day. Waldo's life was full of them. He couldn't help feeling smug.
He stood sideways in front of the mirror and examined his naked body with satisfaction: the squash matches and skiing holidays were paying off, though perhaps he ought to add another weekly barbell session, just to tighten the upper arms. His hair was peppered with grey, but he wasn’t about to change that - dyed hair, like tattoos, was for the underclasses - but at least there was still plenty of robust growth.
He checked his watch again as he slid it off and placed it on the bed, next to his folded clothes. Another ten minutes before Raoul arrived, assuming he wasn’t going to be early, and Waldo had never known a rent boy be on time; these people had no regard for clients with busy schedules. He experienced a fleeting temptation to skip the shower, but personal fastidiousness won out. Despite the anonymity factor, though, he began to wish that he hadn’t let Raoul choose the meeting place. There were surely budget hotels more salubrious than this one. The niggling regret only intensified when he went into the bathroom, pressed the switch, and peered around at the tiny space illuminated by the flickering fluorescent light fitting, which buzzed softly like one of the many flies that had defecated on it. The bathtub was clean, more or less, but this was the only positive observation he could muster. The aggressive odour of bleach was almost certainly there to mask aromas that would have been even less agreeable. His nostrils flared again. A hypersensitive sense of smell, such as his, could ofttimes be a burden.
He put the plastic shower mat in place with a wry chuckle - wouldn’t want to slip in the bathtub and bang his head and get concussed, not in a place like this! - turned the taps and tested the water. Tepid but slowly warming up. There was a muffled rattling of pipes beyond the wall. He placed the laughably inadequate towel within reach, stepped into the tub and tugged the plastic curtain across. It wasn’t the Ritz, but the hot water felt good as it sluiced his muscles and swirled around his feet. He began to sing softly to himself. Pom pom pom. If Raoul really was a ‘Filippino Houseboy’, as the small ad in Meat Street had claimed, perhaps he could be persuaded to sing something in Tagalog. Waldo couldn’t help it; there was just something about the sound of that language that made him hard. Sure enough, he could feel his cock stiffening at the very thought. All the better to give the youth a sturdy welcome when he arrived!
Waldo revolved slowly on the spot, diligently soaping his underarms, groin area, and finally his face, upturned towards the shower head. Out of the corner of his eye he vaguely registered a blinking red light, no doubt indicating the water was hot. He allowed it to cascade down around him like an ephemeral bridal veil, and closed his eyes, all the better to soak up the moment.
When he reopened them he sensed that something had changed. The light. The interplay of shadows and flickering fluorescence had shifted, almost imperceptibly so, but he, Waldo, with the highly attuned sensibilities that enabled him to parse the films he had seen with expert precision, perceived it immediately. There was someone in the bathroom with him, casting rippling shadows on the plastic curtain. Damn it, he thought, the boy is early after all. He rinsed the lingering soap from his eyes and squinted afresh. It was almost as though there were more than one person. Three or four, at least, squished into the tiny bathroom. Had Raoul brought his friends? Did they intend to mug him? Or perhaps hold him down and bugger him mercilessly, one by one? If so, they had only to ask.
Then he saw the foremost figure was wearing a dress. A woman, then. A convocation of chambermaids? Did a dump like this even have chambermaids? He hadn’t heard knocking, but maybe the gushing water and rattling pipes had drowned it out. He added an item to his mental list: complain to the receptionist on his way out.
Then the plastic curtain was whipped aside and, in that moment, his incredulous brain registered four people, three standing shoulder to shoulder, one with a videocamera, and a few paces in front of them a woman, no, a man, but dressed in a floral-patterned dress and a terrible wig. His right hand was raised in a theatrical gesture, and in it was a large knife.
There was just time for Waldo to think You have got to be fucking kidding... before the knife slashed down diagonally. Waldo sucked in his stomach, feeling a twinge of accomplishment for all those abdominal exercises, so the first contact with the blade was shallow, and for a pride-filled moment he thought Missed me! But then a long line of red welled up like a brilliant lanyard, and although it was a shallow cut, as cuts go, it was deep enough to bleed, the bright red mixing with the hot water to swirl pinkly around his feet. Still incapable of taking the absurd situation seriously, he shrank back against the tiled wall, trying to ward off the next blows, but the knife slashed and slashed again, opening up further lacerations in his arms, abdomen, thighs. There were red streaks running down his legs and the water swirling around his feet was no longer pink but a light crimson, the colour of rosé, no, more like Beaujolais Nouveau. No, now it was Côte du Rhône… And what was that other full-bodied red he was thinking of? It was on the tip of his tongue… He reached out and tried to grab the attacker’s arm, just to slow everything down and give himself time to think, but to his surprise his fingers were no longer obeying the dwindling signals from his cortex. And then he was feeling nauseous and his knees buckled and he toppled sideways over the edge of the tub, trying to slow his fall by grabbing the plastic shower curtain but only succeeding in ripping it free of its moorings as he flopped facedown on the bathmat.
This is going to mess up my schedule, he thought. I need to call my wife and let her know I’m going to be late.
The bathmat reeked of stale cigarettes. With a mighty effort, he managed to twist his head so he didn't have to inhale it. He raised his rump as a prelude to levering himself into a kneeling position, aware as he did so that the pose was undignified, like a naked hippy in a Collapsed Dog yoga pose. But when he tried to move his arms, they refused to support him.
From somewhere above him, a man's voice recited, a tad mechanicallyu, as if he were reading off a cue card: ‘Mother! Oh God, mother! Blood! Blood!’
The last thing Waldo Fitzgerald saw, from his crumpled position, was the man in the dress squatting down and the blurred face coming closer, closer than was polite, rudely intruding on Waldo’s personal space, getting sharper, until the features beneath the wig swam into focus, and he recognised them.
You! But I thought...
Waldo didn't have time to complete the thought before he suddenly remembered the book the receptionist had been reading downstairs: Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood.
What a strange coincidence, he thought as the life drained out of his eyes like the last of the Côte du Rhône trickling down the plughole.
FILM CLUB CHAPTER 2: A Shower of Film Critics
‘Tea please,’ said Iris Archer, piling her plate with as many biscuits as it would hold: ginger nuts, custard creams, Bourbons. It was an exceptional selection this morning. Press offices didn’t always provide refreshments, so she took advantage of them when they were offered, even if she wasn’t hungry, because you never knew when a film would turn out to be so boring that the only way to stay conscious was non-stop snacking.
‘Sure you’ve got enough cookies there?’ asked Solomon Cooper. His tone, as always, was teasing, almost affectionate.
Iris pursed her lips. ‘You know when you're sunbathing and you spot a dark cloud on the horizon, and you watch it coming closer and closer with the depressing realisation that it will eventually park itself right over your deck chair and rain all over you? Well it's like that for me with Ben Leech’s films. I can see them getting closer and closer in the weekly schedules, and the prospect fills me with weariness. And then one day they're here, they’ve arrived, and I need all the biscuits I can get, just to survive them.’
‘Come now,’ said Solomon. ‘Stan the Bailiff was pretty good.’
‘The only film where I got so bored I ended up trying to read a magazine. In the dark!’ said Iris. ‘Have you even seen what this one's about?’
'You know I never read production notes,' said Solomon, who was proud of this rule and stuck to it doggedly. ‘Not until after I’ve seen the film. They invariably give away too much information.’
Iris shuffled through the printed pages until she found a synopsis. 'Irish postman, ex-IRA, falls in love with a Guatamalan refugee who works as a cleaning woman for an abusive American consul who's involved in a CIA conspiracy to overthrow the democratically elected government of a middle Eastern republic.'
'Sounds promising,' Solomon said without a trace of irony.
‘Bleeding-heart lefty rubbish,’ said Sebastian Prout, even though no one had asked him to contribute to the conversation. Nobody liked Prout any more than they liked The Daily Probe, the rag for which he wrote, mostly in very short paragraphs and words of no more than two syllables. Everyone called it The Daily Proboscis.
'No wonder the French keep giving him awards. The Palme d'Or is a reliable signifier of pretentious crap.'
'Not necessarily French,' said Solomon, who had helped award a few Palmes d'Or in his time. 'The Cannes jury is international.'
'Aw who cares?' said Sebastian. 'Pretentious elitist gits, the lot of them.'
'We need more British filmmakers like Leech,' said Iris, springing to the defence of the filmmaker she had just been disparaging. Prout and his wilful philistinism never failed to get her dander up. 'Give me drab British social realism over Heritage Costume pics any day. At least his films aren't embalmed slabs of historical theme park.'
There was a kerfuffle as the two PR people spotted another critic poised at the top of the steps. Beverly Belcher with her bird's nest hair, squeaky voice, baggy black clothes (she was said to be self-conscious about her figure, and refused to be photographed from certain angles because of her neck, parts of which had started to droop) and fuck-me shoes with heels so high she had to clutch the bannister for support as she negotiated the half dozen thickly carpeted steps leading down into the reception zone. The huddle of critics in front of the refreshment table parted like the Red Sea as she teetered through, exuding Eau d'Issey.
Iris and Solomon sighed. 'Milady is in the building,' said Solomon. 'How long will she last this time, do you reckon?'
‘Fifteen minutes. Care to make this interesting?'
'You're on,' said Solomon, slapping her open palm. 'I give it thirty.'
Iris raised her eyebrows. 'She'll never last that long, not with Leech.'
They both tried not to stare at Belcher as some of the younger and sillier critics shuffled up and tried to cosy up to her. Of all the reviewers present, she was the most influential and highly paid, which was ironic since she had never been known to sit through a film all the way through to the end credits. Her walk-outs were legendary, and attributed to some fashionable form of Attention Deficit Disorder rather than simple laziness or an urgent date with a Dry Martini. Watching no more than ten minutes of the film she was supposed to be writing about had never stopped her filling a double page spread with her ramblings, not all of them germane to the ostensible reason she was there, since she loved to hold forth about global politics, religion, and class differences, while her luckless stringer, who diligently watched everything the whole way through every week, had to cram half a dozen lesser releases into a five hundred word box.
There was only one thing sure about Beverly's writing, which was that it calculatedly went against the grain. If there was positive buzz about a forthcoming release, Beverly would be sure to rubbish it. If the director was a critically-lauded auteur with a long and honourable career, Beverly would show him no mercy, usually implying (without actually writing anything actionable) that he was a paedophile, or a Nazi, or an anti-Semite, or clearly suffering from dementia, or sometimes all four. Conversely, if a lame American teen comedy had attracted nothing but brickbats across the pond, Beverely would go out of her way to herald its UK release with fulsome praise. This was what cinema was all about, she declared. This was what the common man wants to see, even if Beverly herself didn't particularly want to see anything of it beyond the first ten minutes.
Iris found Belcher’s column a waste of time, but she understood the formula, and realised it didn't really matter if Beverly had seen only ten minutes of the film she was supposed to be writing about. She did sometimes wonder why Beverly bothered to attend press screenings at all. Why not just review the title, and the tagline, and the poster?
But she was envious of Beverly's generous contract with The Snark, and the lavish amount of space they granted her, since a Belcher special was guaranteed to get up readers' noses, generate sackfuls of angry mail and trigger multi-media debate. Iris would have given her eye teeth to get that much space to play with every week, but she wasn't sure she had the desire or energy to annoy that many people on such a regular basis.
When Archer and Cooper entered the screening room, they separated without a word, as was customary. Solomon made a beeline for his favourite seat, the position of which varied from screening room to screening room, but here at Fox it was halfway back, on the right. There was no real logic to this; it was just habit. Iris, meanwhile, settled into the seat she preferred, no matter where she was: front row, extreme left. When people asked why she always sat there, she gave them a quizzical look and replied why not.
'Doesn't it give you a headache?'
'Why would it?'
'But your neck... And your eyes. It's too close!'
'Says who?'
At this point, her interlocutors were invariably at a loss. They didn't like the front row because they were conventional, and conventional people liked to sit in the dead centre of the cinema, towards the back. The problem was, Iris explained, that there were so many conventional people they all wanted to sit in the exact same place, and unless they were prepared to sit on each other's laps, stacked like pancakes, that was impossible.
For Iris, there were multiple advantages to sitting at the front. Even when she arrived at the last minute, those seats were invariably the last to be filled, particularly the ones at the side, so she nearly always got the seat she wanted. In the event of a fire, her route to the exit wasn’t going to be blocked by a shuffling mass of critics even more geriatric but a lot less spritely than she was. And with luck, those philistines who chattered to each other or kicked the back of her seat during the film would be sitting in the centre of the cinema, out of earshot and kicking range. Mostly, the other critics were a well-behaved lot, but there were exceptions, such as Will Pleasence, the boy wonder with bad breath. He didn't even write for a newspaper, thought Iris, mentally tutting her disparagement. He was - what did they call it? - a blogger. Archer had never seen anything he had written because she didn't own a word processor, let alone one with an internet connection. Every week she typed out her copy on her old Olivetti, and - her one concession to modern technology - faxed it to the office. Up until only a few years earlier she had still dictated her reviews down the phone, but The Beagle had recently made most of their copytakers redundant. Archer couldn't say she was that upset about it, not when her printed writing came out riddled with silly errors, such as the time Jeff Bridges had murdered his wife with a 'calving' knife, or ‘live-hyphen-wire’ had someone emerged into print as ‘live python wire’.
Of course there were a few drawbacks to sitting at the front. If the screen was too high, it would sometimes make her neck ache, though after years of experimenting with oblique angles and judicious spinal tilt, she had learned how to avoid this. Sometimes she was so close she could see the texture of the screen itself, which gave large expanses of even the most flawless film-star skin a mottled appearance, like milk that was in the process of going off. But she had once read that the Surrealists liked to sit at the front, which made her feel vindicated. And Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut had first met in the front row of the Cinémathèque in Paris, which sealed the deal as far as she was concerned, even if she didn't like their films much.
The only problem with the extreme left seat at the front of the Fox screening room was that it was directly in front of Waldo Fitzgerald's favourite spot, and so she was obliged to listen to him tutting in disapproval or sucking the air in between his teeth every time someone on screen smoked a cigarette or took their blouse off or said the word 'cunt' (once a shocking rarity, but happening more and more, particularly in the bad British gangster films that had proliferated lately) or drank wine during pregnancy (women in French films did this quite a lot, Archer had noted) or otherwise offended his curiously puritanical mindset. She wondered why he had ever taken on the job of film critic since he never seemed to enjoy any of the films he was criticising unless they were Disney cartoons or subtitled auteurist offerings in which nothing ever happened. Perhaps he was on some sort of moral crusade, but if so, she wasn't sure what the moral was.
But Waldo was late this morning. This was unheard of. Waldo was never late, nor was he ever ill. He had a constitution of iron. Perhaps his taxi had got held up in traffic, though even this was highly unlikely, since Waldo prided himself on being punctual, always allowed for potential hold-ups, and enjoyed tutting at anyone who had the audacity to enter the screening room once the film was underway.
Just as the lights were dimming, Callum Jung slipped part the curtains into the screening room with his usual impeccable timing, quickly bussed Iris on the cheek and sat down in the seat next to her. He always left it until the last minute, but the regular critics had learnt to leave the seat next to Iris free. Any of the irregulars who dared sit there (which happened only rarely, since Iris Archer herself enjoyed near-legendary status, and no one wanted to incur her silent wrath) were politely persuaded to move elsewhere.
Archer liked having Jung as a neighbour. His only annoying trait was an occasional adolescent leg twitch that she had occasionally observed in some of the other young male critics, but she tolerated it in Callum because it wasn't all the time, and anyway he was vastly preferable to Stu Gormley and his wretched pen light flickering on and off at the corner of her eye, or Flavia Whitlock of The Anabaptist Clapper, whose personal bouquet was a pungent mix of apricot brandy and urine. Luckily for Archer, Whitlock was only ever dispatched to screenings of films deemed morally acceptable to her editors, which were becoming increasingly rare since they disapproved of nudity, violence, drugs, and alcohol, presumably including apricot brandy.
But Archer also liked it, secretly, whenever Callum leaned towards her during the film and murmured humorous aperçus into her ear. This didn't happen often, because he knew she disapproved of talking during films. But sometimes, during the latest brain-numbing ordeal spewed out by the laughable British film industry, she enjoyed the feel of his wispy beard tickling her cheek. And his observations were very funny, and usually unprintable, and she felt a bit thrilled whenever he decided to share them with her. He was, she had worked out, young enough, technically, to be her grandson, but once, after an exceptionally boozy lunch laid on by the distributors of a bad British comedy, he had put his tongue down her throat in a Soho alleyway and they had then sojourned to a private room above Gnashers, where Callum was a member, and copulated. There had been no time for post-coital lingering due to another press show at four o'clock, of a Chinese film to which Iris had given the most gushingly positive review of her life, even though the notes she had jotted down during the screening hadn't been very illuminating when she had pored over them afterwards, searching for clues. Neither she nor Young had mentioned what had happened that afternoon again, and his behaviour towards her hadn't altered one jot, but Iris had warm memories of the occasion, even if she had been so drunk she couldn't remember much about it. She retained the impression of a having had a marvellous time, though, and of the Chinese film being very prettily photographed. Not all the one-night - or one-afternoon - stands in her life had been so agreeable.
'Where's Waldo?' whispered Callum.
Iris shrugged, unsure as to why Young thought she might know the answer.
The Leech film took its usual course. The first ten minutes, set amidst oddly cheerful inhabitants on a South London housing estate, were followed by grim scenes of police brutality at a march protesting against CIA interference in Central American politics, and then, a loud sigh and the sounds of someone gathering their belongings with a great deal of rustling and snapping and brusque zipping of zips.
Making no attempt whatsoever to avoid blocking anyone's view, Beverly Belcher stood up and drew on her coat, her vast dark outline looming up on the screen as she teetered purposefully down the aisle, turned right and made a beeline for the door, getting slightly tangled up in the red velvet light-trap curtains as she did so, which sent a distracting shaft of light slicing across the carpet in front of the screen. The door failed to close properly behind her, so that Stu Gormley had to get up and tug the curtains back across.
Archer glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes. She had won! She half-turned to try and catch Solomon Cooper's eye, but his gaze was fixed on the screen. Christ, she thought. He really does get off on this stuff. There was no accounting for taste. But she liked Solomon, all the same. He was marvellously erudite, full of humorous anecdotes about the celebrities he had met or interviewed, and it was clear he was passionate about every aspect of the Seventh Art.
Iris lapsed into her customary Leech semi-coma, sometimes jotting things down in her notebook in an effort to stay awake. She supposed it fortunate that The Beagle was so right-wing, since it never worried them whenever she took potshots at politically correct pablum, though they sometimes looked askance when she turned her guns on films of the embalmed heritage persuasion, invariably adapted from the work of E.M. Forster or Henry James, often written and directed by men who had been knighted and who hobnobbed with her editors and their wives at parties and gentlemen's clubs. She'd had a couple of complaints and requests to tone it down; her editors didn’t care about the films, but they liked to maintain their inclusion on the guest lists.
After about forty-five minutes, as the screening room slowly filled with yawns and gentle snoring, the film stock changed. Up until now, the approach had been appropriately drab, apparently inspired by TV soap, but now it switched to grainy black and white, like 8mm blown up to 35mm, and the shooting style changed to wobbly handheld. Iris blinked. Was this a flashback coming up? The street looked vaguely familiar; she spotted a fuzzy King's Cross station in the background before the camera focused on a cheap sign attached to the side of a dilapidated Georgian terrace: The Bateson Hotel, but someone had crudely crossed out the O and the N and altered the H, so that it read The Bates Motel. Some sort of odd cinephile joke, thought Archer, chased rapidly by the thought that cinephile jokes weren’t Leech’s style at all. Then there was a flashy travelling shot - Archer couldn’t be sure exactly how it was done - up the side of the building and through a window on the fourth floor into a small room, where it introduced the viewers to a new character. In his fifties or early sixties, at a guess, but fit and trim, as became clear as, slowly and methodically, he removed his clothes, folding them neatly. He even folded his underpants.
The critics who were still awake snapped out of their reverie and sat up straight. This was radical stuff. Ben Leech wasn't known for nudity, or even for artistic flourishes such as the black and white, or the background thriller music that now struck up, all glissando strings. By his usual social-realist standards, this was virtually avant-garde.
The actor looked maddeningly familiar. Archer tried to work out where she'd seen him before. Her memory refused to be prodded. She leafed through the production notes in search of the cast list, but there wasn't enough light to make out the small print. Perhaps a younger person with fresher eyesight would have better luck. Just as she was debating with herself whether to ask Callum Young to take a look, he leant sideways to whisper ticklishly into her ear.
'Full frontal! Bloody hell, this is bold.'
It was indeed bold. Full-frontal male nudity was a rarity in British cinema, in fact in most cinema other than hardcore porn or extreme arthouse, though she cherished fond memories of Alan Bates and Oliver Reed's nude wrestling in Women in Love. She also recalled a glimpse of David Bowie's todger in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and a notorious TV showing of Body Heat in which the pan-and-scan process, swapping the 1.85:1 for a squarer format, had enabled viewers to glimpse William Hurt's cock at the edge of the frame. And then there was Harvey Keitel getting his kit off in Bad Lieutenant...
'Holy shit!' yelled Sebastian Proust, casting discretion aside. 'It’s Waldo!'
There was murmuring from the other critics, all of them now wide awake and realising something out of the ordinary was going on. On screen there was a cut to a bathroom, as the naked man stepped into the shower and a zoom in on his face, just before it was partially obscured by the plastic shower curtain.
No mistaking that face: it was Waldo Fitzgerald!
Why on earth would Waldo agree to appear naked in one of Ben Leech's films, Archer wondered to herself. Waldo Fitzgerald hated Leech - not the films themselves so much as the politics, which were the antithesis of his own. Was Leech blackmailing him? Had he found out about Waldo's Filippino house boy fixation?
The camera angle changed and so did the music, and now there was no mistaking those slashing chords: it was a cheesy synthesiser version of Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho.
There was a flurry of quick cutting. 'Cutting' being the operative word.
An insert of the outline of a woman, holding a knife.
The knife coming down.
Flesh peierced, again and again.
Blood streaming down the legs.
Blood spiralling down the plug hole.
Blood.
‘Mother! Oh God, mother! Blood! Blood!’
There was a communal gasp from the assembled critics.
This is no film, this is real, thought Archer, knowing as she did so that she was echoing a line from another film, but unable to stop herself.
'What the fuck?' Callum Jung said out loud.
The screening room erupted into a hubbub of shock.
Some critics bolted for the door where they became snarled up in a velvet curtain-wrapped bottleneck. Solomon Cooper headed in the other direction, waving his arms in an attempt to catch the projectionist's eye. But the projectionist's attention was evidently directed elsewhere, probably at one of his sandwiches or endless cups of tea. Or maybe the endless cups of tea had taken their toll and he'd had to nip out to the toilets to empty his bladder.
Iris Archer, still nailed to her seat, turned to Callum Jung and asked, 'Do you think we should we call the police?'
The first policeman on the scene politely asked the critics to stay in the building, but no one had much appetite for lunch anyway; tea and sandwiches were brought in but only Sebastian Prout and Clive Carver touched them. The afternoon screening was cancelled and replaced by an audience with Inspector Boot of Scotland Yard, who informed everyone that following Callum’s phone call, a squad car had been dispatched to an establishment near King’s Cross called The Bateson Hotel, where Waldo Fitzgerald's exsanguinated corpse had been found in one of the upper bathrooms.
'There was a corpse in the room and housekeeping didn't spot it?’ said Carver. ‘Remind me never to stay there.’
'The Bateson is not the kind of establishment gentlemen such as yourself would normally want to check into,' said Boot, giving Carver the once-over. 'Not unless you had an, er, illicit assignation. We currently have the manager in custody, but he claims to have been paid a fat wad of cash to vacate the premises for the twenty-four hours prior to discovery of the, er, cadaver by a cleaning woman.'
'Who paid him?'
'Dame with a posh voice.'
'Poor Waldo,' said Archer. 'He was a dick, but he didn't deserve this.'
'So,' said Boot, looking down at the notes he'd taken so far. 'You're saying this murder was deliberately filmed in black and white, in the style of a famous 1960s horror film called, er, Psycho?'
Solomon Cooper shook his head. 'Psycho was filmed with consummate artistry and skill. You think you see the knife going in, but you don't actually see that much. Not like this. This was hackwork, literally.'
'The only thing this has in common with the first murder in Psycho is that both victims were murdered in the shower,' said Barry Crusher. 'As far as we know, Waldo Fitzgerald hadn't just stolen forty thousand dollars.'
Boot looked up, interested. 'What makes you think he hadn't stolen forty thousand dollars? And why dollars? Why not pounds sterling?'
'And Psycho flips the narrative in a way few audiences had seen before,' said Stu Gormley. 'The character with whom they were identifying for the first forty minutes of the film is suddenly killed. Imagine the shock if you were watching it for the first time, with no idea what was going to happen!'
'So you think this murder was trying to, what was it, flip the narrative?' asked Boot sceptically.
'It was a manifesto!' said Will Pleasence of The Post-It. Everyone turned to stare at him and he squirmed, as though regretting having spoken out. No one thought of Pleasence as a proper critic since nothing he wrote had ever appeared in print. Archer felt sorry for him. It wasn't his fault he couldn't get a reviewing job on a real publication. Those positions were like gold dust, in very short supply; once you were installed in a post like that, there was no way on earth you would voluntarily quit.
'Manifesto?' asked Boot, cocking his head. 'How so?'
'What else could it be?' said Pleasence, less confidently now. 'A direct reference to the most memorable shower scene in cinema,'
Archer couldn't help herself. 'Could have been a reference to The 7th Victim. There's a shower scene in that too.'
'But not many people have see that,' Pleasence pointed out reasonably, but too late. The critics were off to the races.
'Or Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill. Or his remake of Scarface,' said Callum.
'There's a shower murder in Scarface?' asked Boot, jotting something down.
'With a chainsaw!'
'Well, this wasn't a chainsaw. It was a kitchen knife. We found it at the scene. Wiped clean of fingerprints, of course. Any other clues you people spotted?'
'Brian De Palma likes his shower scenes,' said Archer. 'There's another one in Phantom of the Paradise, a direct reference to Psycho, except that instead of a knife the assailant in Phantom uses a plunger. You know, those things plumbers use to unblock toilets?'
'Now why would he do that.' Boot was looking increasingly confused.
'High Anxiety, too,' said Solomon Cooper. 'The assailant is a disgruntled bellboy who attacks Mel Brooks in the shower with a rolled-up copy of The New York Times, so instead of blood spiralling down the plughole, it's printer's ink from the newspaper. And the bellboy is played by none other than future director Barry Levinson. Not many people know that!'
'I knew it,' said Archer.
'Well, I'm guessing the inspector here didn't.'
'How is this relevant?' Boot asked in exasperation, but the assembled critics were on a roll, trying to best one another with their arcane knowledge of lesser-known shower murders.
'There's a sleazy shower murder in Abel Ferrara's Cat Chaser,' said Barry Crusher. 'Full frontal male nudity, so that might be connected.'
'Abel... Ferraro?' asked Boot. 'Any relation to those chocolates?'
'Not forgetting Katharine Kamhi in Sleepaway Camp,' said Callum, whose knowledge of slasher movies was unparalleled even among the critical fraternity, the rest of whom rarely bothered to rent films on VHS. 'Which also contains a surprise full frontal scene.'
'Silence of the Hams,' said Sebastian Prout. There was a silence as the other critics cast their mind back to a title most of them had tried to forget, only broken when Prout added, 'So I guess The Daily Motion will be looking for a new film critic.'
Buy me a coffee!
(Is this how this works? I’m not sure. I guess we’ll soon find out.)
Great stuff, Anne, and I'd also love to read a completed novel if you ever get round to it! The fate of Waldo Fitzgerald made me chuckle, too. Not that I'd have ever wished such an ignoble demise on the real 'Waldo'. Or would I?...
I thoroughly enjoyed this, Anne! And you say it's unfinished? Oh dear, you need to get this going, it's just too much fun.