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
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 felt a pang of sorrow piercing his gut each time he saw someone light up. To honour her memory, he had recorded an answering machine message that ended with a jovial flourish, And remember, smoking kills!
But, he grudgingly allowed, the reek was part of the package, and there was no question the squalor of his surroundings enhanced the disgusting thrill of this encounter by forcing him into contact with the sort of riffraff he normally took care to avoid; he never travelled by public transport, and his groceries were delivered twice a week from Fortnum & Mason. The films he watched in the course of his working day were teeming with lowlife, so he looked on occasions such as this as field research. It was good to rub up against members of the great unwashed, now and then, if only to remind himself that such creatures weren’t just figments of the liberal filmmaking imagination.
Take the emaciated harpy lounging behind the reception desk. What a contrast to his own fragrant Laura! When he'd stepped into the lobby she'd quickly set aside her tattered paperback and exposed discoloured teeth in what might have passed muster as a smile in the sort of community one might find subsisting in rotting shacks below The Westway. Nicotine-stained fingers, naturally, and chipped green nail varnish. 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. 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 ought to have have done, especially when he'd caught sight of the title. Of all the books in the world, why would such a benighted creature be reading that? How could a subhuman like her even understand it? But he bit back the comments and headed for the lift.
He was consoled by the knowledge that, in a dump like this there was never any danger of running into anyone he knew, or who might recognise him from one of his regular 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 people one encountered in this part of King's Cross were witless 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 went, he ran through 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 playing 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 Laura would be waiting with a dry Martini; change into a suit while sipping at the dry Martini; write up his notes on the day’s films while Laura 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 Laura; 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 biceps. His hair was peppered with grey, but he wasn’t about to change that - hair dye, like tattoos, was for the underclasses - but at least there was still plenty of growth.
He checked his watch again as he slid it off and placed it on the bed, next to the folded clothes. Another ten minutes before Raoul arrived, assuming he wasn’t going to be late, and Waldo had never known a rent boy be on time; these people had no regard for packed schedules. He experienced a fleeting temptation to skip the shower, but 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 come up with. The aggressive odour of bleach was almost certainly there to mask aromas that were even less agreeable.
He slapped the plastic shower mat down in the bathtub with a wry chuckle - wouldn’t want to slip in the bathtub and get concussed, not in a place like this! - turned the taps, toggled the setting to ‘shower’ and tested the water with his hand. Tepid, but slowly warming up. There was a muffled rattling of pipes from somewhere 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 those glottal stops that made him hard. Sure enough, he could feel his cock stiffening at the very thought. All the better to give the young man a sturdy welcome as soon as he arrived!
Waldo revolved slowly on the spot, diligently soaping his underarms, groin area, and finally his face, upturned towards the shower head, where he paid little heed to a small red light, no doubt blinking to indicate the heat was on. He allowed the wet warmth to cascade down around him like an ephemeral bridal veil, and closed his eyes, all the better to savour the moment.
When he reopened them he sensed 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 saw with forensic 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 if 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’d only had 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 at the door, 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 crammed shoulder to shoulder, one holding a video camera, and a few paces in front of them a woman, no, a man, in a cheap wig. His right hand was raised in a broad 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 his first contact with the blade was superficial, 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 preposterous 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 about Syrah grapes, but to his surprise his fingers were no longer obeying the 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. I need to call Laura and let her know I’m going to be late.
The bathmat stank of stale cigarettes. With a mighty effort, he managed to twist his head so he didn't have to inhale the smell. 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 voice was reciting mechanically, ‘Mother! Oh God, mother! Blood! Blood! Blood!’
The last thing Waldo Fitzgerald saw, from his humiliating buttocks-raised 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, becoming sharper, until the features beneath the wig swam into focus.
Waldo blinked lazily. You! But that’s not...
The thought trailed off and was shouldered aside by a vision of the book the receptionist had been reading downstairs: Hitchcock’s Films Revisited.
Chapter in that about Psycho, he thought, What an odd communi… no, consequenti…. coinciquence, what’s the word… as his life circled the drain and the light faded his eyes.
FILM CLUB CHAPTER 2: A Shower of Film Critics
‘Tea please,’ said Iris Archer, piling her plate with as many biscuits as it would support: Gingernuts, custard creams, Bourbons. It was an exceptional selection this morning. Press offices didn’t always serve refreshments at these gigs, so when they were provided Archer took advantage of the offer, even if she wasn’t hungry. She would wrap the extra biscuits in a napkin and stow them in one of her coat pockets, because you never knew when a film would turn out to be so boring the only way to stay conscious was non-stop snacking.
‘Sure you’ve got enough cookies there?’ asked Solomon Cooper. But his tone was affectionate.
Iris pursed her lips. ‘You know when you're sunbathing and you spot a dark cloud on the horizon, and 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’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.’
‘You think so? I got so bored I ended up trying to read a magazine. In the dark! Have you seen what this one's about?’
'You know I don’t look at production notes before the screening.' Cooper was proud of this rule and stuck to it doggedly. ‘They always give away too much information.’
Iris leafed through the sheaf of printed notes until she found a synopsis. 'Irish postman, ex-IRA bomber, 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, inserting himself into the conversation even though no one had asked his opinion. 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. Someone had once called it The Daily Proboscis, and the unfunny nickname had stuck.
'The French keep giving him Palm Doors, a reliable signifier of pretentious crap,' said Prout.
Cooper, who had helped award a few Palmes d'Or in his time, shook his head. 'The Cannes jury is international.’
'Aw who cares?' said Prout. 'Pretentious elitist gits, the lot of them.'
'We need more British filmmakers like Leech,' said Archer, 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.'
Prout seemed ready to prolong the exchange into something soul-deadening and interminable, but Cooper and Archer allowed themselves to be distracted by a minor kerfuffle. The PR people had spotted another critic approaching and were vying with each other to be the one to meet and greet 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, reeking of Eau de Garce.
'Milady is in the building,' Solomon Cooper said to Iris Archer. 'How long, do you reckon?'
‘Fifteen minutes. Care to make this interesting, Sol?'
Cooper slapped her open palm in approval. 'A fiver says thirty.'
Iris raised her eyebrows. 'She'll never last that long, not with Leech.'
They both tried not to stare in horrified fascination as some of the younger and sillier critics tried to cosy up to Belcher. Of all the reviewers present, she was the most highly paid, which was ironic since she had never been known to sit through a film as far as 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 second stringer, who diligently sat all the way through the week's less prominent releases, had to cram half a dozen reviews into a four hundred word box.
There was only one thing consistent about Belcher's writing: it was always contrary. The more positive buzz there was about a forthcoming release, the more Belcher would rubbish it. If the director was a critically-lauded auteur with a long and honourable career, Belcher would show him no mercy, usually implying (without writing anything actionable) that he was a paedophile, or nazi, or antisemite, or suffering from senile dementia, or sometimes all four of these things simultaneously. Conversely, if a lame American comedy had already been clobbered by critics across the pond, Belcher would go out of her way to shower it with praise. This was what cinema was about, she declared. This was what the common man wanted to see, even if Beverly herself didn't want to see anything beyond the first ten minutes.
Archer did sometimes wonder why Belcher bothered to attend press screenings at all. Why not just review the title of a film, or the tagline, or the poster? But she envied Belcher her generous contract with The Snark, and the lavish amount of space they granted her, since the weekly column was guaranteed to get up readers' noses, attract sackfuls of angry mail and trigger multi-media debate. Archer would have given her eye teeth to have that much space on the arts pages, but wasn't sure she had it in her to annoy so many people on a regular basis.
When Archer and Cooper entered the screening room, they separated without a word, as usual. Cooper 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 behind this; it was just habit. Archer, meanwhile, settled into her own favourite seat: front row, extreme left. When people asked why she always sat there, she gave them a quizzical look and said 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 usually ran out of things to say. 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, Archer would explain to anyone who cared to listen, was that there were so many conventional people they all wanted to sit in the exact same place.
For Archer, there were multiple advantages to sitting at the front. Even if she arrived at the eleventh hour, those places were the last to be filled, particularly the ones at the side, so she nearly always got the seat she liked. In the event of a fire, her route to the exit wasn’t going to be blocked by a shuffling mass of geriatrics, even though (she was forced to admit) she was herself one of the oldest critics in the room. And with luck, those anti-social idiots who chattered or kicked the back of her seat would choose to sit somewhere in the centre of the cinema, out of earshot and kicking range.
Mostly, her fellow critics were a well-behaved lot, but there were exceptions, such as Will Pleasence, the boy wonder with bad breath, who couldn’t stop fidgeting. Once, when his constant squirming had been getting on her nerves during a half-baked romantic comedy, she’d told him to calm down and take a Valium. He shrank back like a whipped dog, and she wondered afterwards if she’d been too harsh, but he took care never to sit next to her again, so she consiodered it a job well done. He didn't even write for a proper newspaper, she thought. He was - what did they call it? - a blogger. Archer had never read anything Pleasence had written because she didn't possess a word processor, let alone an internet connection. Every week she typed her copy on an Olivetti portable, and - her one concession to modern technology - faxed it to the office. Until recently she had dictated her reviews down the phone, but The Beagle had made the last of their copytakers redundant. Archer couldn't say she was upset about that, not when her writing had so often come out riddled with silly errors, like that time Jeff Bridges had murdered someone with a ‘calving knife’, or when ‘ice-hyphen-cream’ had been transmogrified into ‘ice python cream’.
Of course there were 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 the worst of 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 slightly mottled appearance, like milk that was 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 Archer was concerned.
The only problem with Fox’s front and extreme left was that it was directly in front of Waldo Fitzgerald's favourite spot, so Archer had to listen him tutting in disapproval or sucking air in between his teeth each time anyone on screen lit a cigarette or unbuttoned their blouse or said 'cunt' (once a shocking rarity, now a regular occurrence in the bad British gangster films that had proliferated lately) or otherwise offended his curiously puritanical mindset. She wondered why he had ever taken on the job of film critic in the first place, seeing as the only films he ever enjoyed were innocuous Disney cartoons or subtitled French arthouse with wall-to-wall dialogue.
But Fitzgerald was late this morning. This was unusual. He 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 unlikely, since Fitzgerald prided himself on being punctual, allowed for potential hold-ups, and thoroughly enjoyed tutting at latecomers who had the nerve to enter the screening room after the film had started.
As the lights were dimming, Callum Jung slipped past the red velvet light-trap curtains, quickly pecked Archer on the cheek and, with his usual impeccable timing, sank into the seat next to hers just as the opening credits came up on screen. Archer liked having Jung as a neighbour. His only annoying habit was an occasional adolescent leg twitch that she sometimes observed in some of the young male critics, but she tolerated it in Jung 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 The Anabaptist Clapper’s Flavia Whitlock, who emitted a heady bouquet of apricot brandy and urine.
But Archer also liked it, secretly, whenever Jung leaned over during the film and murmured humorous aperçus into her ear. This didn't happen often, because he knew she disapproved of people talking during films. But sometimes, during the latest brain-numbing ordeal vomited up by the British film industry, she would be pleasantly diverted by his wispy beard tickling her cheek. His observations were very funny, and usually unprintable, and she was thrilled whenever he decided to share them with her. He was, she had worked out, young enough 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 Jung was a member, and copulated noisily. 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. Neither she nor Jung had mentioned 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.
'Where's Waldo?' whispered Jung.
Iris shrugged, unsure as to why Callum 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 endless grim scenes of police brutality at a march protesting against CIA interference in Central American politics. They were interrupted by 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 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 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 shut properly behind her, so Stu Gormley had to get up and tug it closed and pull the curtains back across.
Archer glanced at her watch. Eighteen 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 The Beagle was so right-wing; it never worried them when she took potshots at politically correct pablum, though they tended to look askance if she turned her guns on films of the heritage persuasion, usually adapted from the work of E.M. Forster or Henry James, often written and directed by men who hobnobbed with her editors and their wives at parties and gentlemen's clubs. She'd had a couple of requests to tone it down; her employers didn’t care about the films, but they did like to maintain their presence on all the right guest lists.
After about forty-five minutes, as the screening room was slowly filling with the sound of gentle snoring, the film stock changed. Up until now, Leech’s approach had been the usual drab realism, apparently inspired by a TV soap aesthetic, 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 in confusion. Was this a flashback? 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 crossed out the O and the N and altered the H, so that it read The Bates Motel. Some kind of film buff joke, thought Archer, thrown off balance because film buff 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 early sixties, at a guess, but fit, 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 for artistic choices such as the grainy black and white, or the synthesised thriller music that now struck up. By his usual social-realist standards, this was avant-garde. The actor looked maddeningly familiar. Archer tried to work out where she'd seen him before. She leafed through the production notes in search of a cast list, but there wasn't enough light to make out the small print. Perhaps a younger person would have better luck. Just as she was debating whether to ask Callum Jung to take a look, he pre-empted her by leaning sideways to whisper 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 Archer 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 theatrical 1.85:1 for a square TV format, had enabled viewers to glimpse William Hurt's cock at the edge of the frame. Then there was Harvey Keitel getting his kit off in Bad Lieutenant. Archer wondered if she could sell her arts editor on the idea of a feature about Penises in the Movies. Probably not, though it might be worth a try.
'Holy shit!' yelled Sebastian Proust, not bothering to be discreet. 'It’s Waldo!'
There was an outbreak of muttering from the other critics, all now wide awake and realising something out of the ordinary was going on. On screen there was a cut to a bathroom. An overhead angle, as the naked man stepped into the shower. Then another cut, to the naked man's face just before it was partially obscued 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? wondered Archer. He 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 Fitzgerald'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 reworking of Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho.
There was a flurry of incontinent editing.
An insert of the outline of a woman, holding a knife.
The knife coming down.
The flesh pierced, again and again.
Blood streaming down the legs.
Blood spiralling down the plug hole.
Blood.
Blood.
The assembled critics gasped as one. This is no film, this is real. Archer knew she was echoing a line from another film but couldn’t help herself.
'What the fuck?' Callum Jung said out loud.
The screening room erupted into a delayed hubbub of shock.
Some critics bolted for the door where they became snarled up in a curtain-wrapped bottleneck. Solomon Cooper went in the other direction, flapping his arms in an attempt to catch the projectionist's eye through the small window at the back. 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. The afternoon screening was cancelled and replaced by an audience with Inspector Boot of Scotland Yard, who informed everyone that after Callum Jung’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 bathrooms.
'There was a corpse in the room and housekeeping didn't spot it?’ said Clive Carver. ‘Remind me never to stay there.’
'The Bateson is not the kind of establishment gentlemen such as yourself would normally 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 to vacate the premises for the twenty-four hours prior to discovery of the, er, cadaver by a cleaning woman.'
'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 horror film called Psycho?'
‘You’ve never heard of Psycho?’ Stu Gormley asked incredulously.
‘The wife and I are theatregoers,’ said Boot. ‘We don’t hold with all the nudity and violence you get nowadays.’
‘But Psycho came out nearly forty years ago!’ said Carver.
Solomon Cooper shook his head at Boot. '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 editing is a shambles.'
'The only thing this has in common with Psycho is that both victims were murdered in the shower,' said Barry Crusher. 'As far as we know, Waldo Fitzgerald didn’t steal forty thousand dollars.'
Boot looked up, interested. 'What makes you think he didn’t steal forty thousand dollars? Why that specifi sum? And why dollars? Why not pounds sterling?'
'Psycho flipped 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 suddenly killed. Imagine the shock!'
'So you think this murder was trying to, what was it, flip the narrative?' asked Boot sceptically.
'It was a manifesto!' said Will Pleasence. Everyone turned to stare at him.
'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. 'Not necessarily. Could have been a reference to The Seventh Victim. There's a shower scene in that too.'
'But not many people know about that one,' Pleasence pointed out reasonably. But too late, because the other critics were off to the races.
'Or Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill. Or his remake of Scarface,' said Callum Jung.
'There's a shower murder in Scarface?' asked Boot, jotting something down.
'With a chainsaw!'
'Well, this wasn't a chainsaw. It was a large 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 uses a plunger.’
'What kind of plunger?' Boot was looking increasingly confused.
‘Those things plumbers use to unblock toilets.'
'High Anxiety, too.’ It' was Solomon Cooper’s turn to chip in. 'The assailant is a disgruntled bellboy who attacks Mel Brooks in the shower with a rolled-up copy of The New York Times. Instead of blood spiralling down the plughole, it's printing ink from the wet newspaper. And the bellboy is played by none other than future director Barry Levinson. Not many people know that!'
'I knew that,' said Archer.
'Well, I'm guessing the inspector here didn't.'
'How is this relevant?' Boot asked in exasperation, but the critics were on a roll now, trying to one-up 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 too, 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, which 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 sudden awkward silence, only broken when he added, 'So I guess The Daily Motion will be looking for a new film critic now.'
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.