11. Then The Convention Part 1

Of course you already know about Cleo.

In December of 1998, Karson died in a car accident. Based on the braking-tire marks on the street and curb, authorities concluded he'd fallen asleep at the wheel and woke as he was about to careen off the road, through a guardrail, and death-roll down a steep embankment. There were no drugs or alcohol in his system. I didn't know he'd died until after Valentina's death from pancreatic cancer in 2008 and after the horror community discovered the assorted materials from our movie she had released online. Melanie had become a long-distance marathon swimmer in her thirties. She competed and placed in the top ten in four national events in the early 2000s. In 2006, she was training alone in the waters off Newport, Rhode Island, and presumably drowned. Her body was never found. Dan sold his production company in the summer of 1999 and dove into local politics. He was a second-term Rhode Island state senator and a weekly guest on a popular local talk-radio station when he died of a massive coronary in his sleep, February 2007. He was fifty years old, married, had three children. With Valentina's passing, I was the sole remaining major participant from Horror Movie who was still alive.

The deaths fed the lore and interest in Horror Movie. Scores of websites, blogs, YouTube channels, and Reddit threads were dedicated to the movie, conspiracy theories regarding what had happened on-set, the screenplay, and all things related to the actors and characters, especially the Thin Kid. Artists posted and shared their fan art: the Thin Kid as the goth, emo little brother of Jason, Michael, Freddy, and Leatherface; the Thin Kid walking hand-in-hand with Cleo, or Valentina, or Karson. I avoided reading the fan and slash fiction, and later, a randomly trending Twitter discussion about the Thin Kid's big dick energy. What's wrong with you people? In 2017 a popular true crime podcast produced by NPR featured Cleo, our film, and the aftermath. I'd declined to be interviewed, which made me look guilty in some people's view. I'd also declined to be interviewed for a proposed documentary called Cursed Films. Post-podcast, the size of our fandom grew exponentially. Horror Movie became as famous for not being made as Jodorowsky's Dune. The Thin Kid even started showing up in memes.

Cleo's family signed with one of Hollywood's largest agencies to field offers on her screenplay and to legally force YouTube to take down the scores of amateur filmmakers' attempts and interpretations of scenes, including three poorly made full versions of the film. My email inbox swelled with interview requests, and messages from agents and writers and directors and producers wanting to talk to me about the movie, wanting me to help with their reboot pitches. I hired a manager named Kirsten Billings. She was in her early forties, five-foot-zero, bragged about owning five weekday pairs of the same jeans, and swore like a character in a Tarantino movie. Her first act was to arrange my paid appearance at a regional horror-fan convention in Virginia. Her second act was to convince me it would be worth the investment of time and funds that attendance required.

August of 2019. I drove eight hours to the sweaty chain hotel at which Summer Scares was being held. I was paid a nominal appearance fee, a fee that Kirsten promised would go up after my maiden con voyage. The pandemic had put the kibosh on live appearances for a few years, but now that we pretend Covid isn't a thing anymore, she's been proven correct about the fee escalation. She also assured me I would make a lot of money by signing the stills of the Thin Kid that Valentina had released into the world. I was to charge forty bucks a pop for a signed official set photo. Kirsten suggested fifty. Part of the reason I drove and turned down the offer of a free flight was I didn't trust hotel mail with the boxes of photos I'd outlaid good money for, and I certainly didn't trust the mail with my mask. I planned to charge twenty bucks if an attendee wanted me to sign something of theirs and twenty if they wanted to take a picture with me. Again, Kirsten wanted me to charge more, but I was dubious. I was convinced I'd take a loss on the stills and the slick professional banner we'd made to display behind my autographing table.

I arrived at the hotel around 1 P.M., checked in, and received my neon-pink wristband, guest badge, and lanyard. I dollied my boxes of stuff to the celebrity room, which was to open to the public in an hour. The movie celeb tables lined the walls of the generic hotel ballroom. Black curtains hung in front of off-white/beige partition walls, and the carpeting was a similarly inoffensive bland color. In the middle of the room was a small rectangle of horror-author tables. Celebs and writers milled around and caught up with one another as presumably they'd all done this kind of thing before. My table was stationed between one of the Friday the 13th's Jasons and a woman who as a teen starred alongside a kid Stephen Dorff in The Gate.

I unpacked at an empty rectangular table covered in black felt. I arranged a selection of black, white, and silver Sharpies and then displayed my selection of three glossy photos I would sell and sign. One was a pic of the Thin Kid standing in the classroom's corner, covered in cigarette burns. You couldn't tell from the picture which burn was real. The night before the con, Kirsten had suggested step right up, step right up, and guess which burn is real for five dollars off could be my carnie-like pitch if things were slow. I'd pointed out to her that she'd promised things wouldn't be slow. She'd said "fuck" a few times, pretended to have a bad connection, and then hung up. The second glossy was of the Thin Kid standing silhouetted in the doorway at the other end of a long, darkened room. It's the scariest image and scene of the movie, if you ask me. You couldn't see any mask details, but it was a creepy-ass picture. I didn't like looking at it. My third glossy was not the most famous on-set photo of the three that Valentina had uploaded online, which some have dubbed the "impossible shot," but was instead my brand-new headshot in which I held a foam mannequin head wearing my mask. That was me: B-Movie Hamlet with Yorick. Kirsten had insisted on having the picture taken, and it was what she was sending around Hollywood.

After setting up my photos and the price list, I unpacked my mask, which was housed in a clear acrylic display case. I wouldn't let anyone touch the case or hold it for a photo, but if they wanted to take a picture of me holding it, that would be okay, I guess, and maybe I should've included that option on the price list. I had a cash box and a Square for my phone so I could accept credit card payments. I hadn't tested that out yet. Fucking hell, I didn't know what I was doing or why I was doing it, beyond money. Fifty years old with no career to speak of, I was adrift, and had been so since the last day on-set, if not before then. I briefly thought about packing up and hiding in my hotel room all weekend. Instead, I wrestled with my banner and its antagonistic folding stand. I was losing the wrestling match badly.

The writer at the table across from me asked if I needed help. I said, "All I can get."

His banner proclaimed he was "The Nightmare Scribe" in a slashing, spooky font. He had book blurbs not from Stephen King but from people and zines I'd never heard of declaring him to be the next Stephen King. He wore all black in the author photo and there were photoshopped wisps of ghosts flowing out from behind his head. Yeah, cheesy as fuck. But what did I know? I didn't even know how to put up my own banner.

He made quick work of hoisting my banner sail. It looked okay. Black matte background, the title HORROR MOVIE in white block capital letters, Arial font, my name underneath followed by "the Thin Kid" in quotations. The banner featured the three surviving photographic images from the original set. It was hard not to feel a bit like a fraud, given no one ever saw the movie, but at the same time, the movie existed. We had spent five weeks making it. Just because our movie was the tree falling in the forest for no one to hear or see didn't mean we didn't fall.

I thanked the horror writer for his help, introduced myself, and shook his hand. He was a head shorter than I was, his black hair was clearly a dye job, his Vincent Price goatee trimmed short like he'd been eating chocolate cake messily, and he dressed the same as he did in his banner. He asked if this was my first time doing a convention like this.

I asked the rhetorical, "Is it that obvious?"

He inspected my wares and said that I would run out of photos. The first-timers always did well at shows like these.

He wanted to talk more, and he was nice enough, but I felt trapped behind my table already and I had hours and days of being trapped behind the table to go. I wasn't good in forced social situations pre-movie, and that certainly hadn't improved post-movie. I could handle crowds but only when I could hide in them. I excused myself, went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, bought a tea from a vendor cart, and took a quick stroll around the celebrity room. I got head nods and half waves when there was eye contact, which I assume were acknowledgment of my guest badge, no real recognition, or begrudging recognition if some of them knew who I was and didn't think I deserved to be there for myriad reasons, which would've been fair. But at the same time, fuck them, man. I put in hard work on that movie, left pieces of myself at that abandoned school, and like everyone else involved in the film my life was if not ruined, then changed irreparably. So what if no one saw the final cut, or any cut? That didn't mean I'd cheated or shortcutted and was less deserving of the inexplicably strange fandom that had cropped up without any prompting from me. Not until Summer Scares, anyway. It would've been a hell of a movie. Five hundred thousand (more or less) Thin Kid fans can't be wrong.

Anyway, let's finish the celeb-room tour. Svengoolie was there, Joe Bob Briggs, too, plus a slew of famous slasher victims, the great actor Tom Atkins, who had a T-shirt with his cartoon visage and his last name under it (a brilliant T-shirt, and if I wore anything other than white T-shirts I would've bought one), two characters from the early seasons of The Walking Dead, and the guy who played Fuchs from John Carpenter's The Thing. Fuchs I wanted to talk to, but time was running short. I scurried back to my table.

In the final minutes before the doors opened, I played three-card monte with my photo arrangements, and there was a loud bang to my right. I jumped out of my fucking skin. The Jason actor hammered his sheathed machete into his table like a judge's gavel and announced there was one minute before the room opened. People laughed and applauded.

The Nightmare Scribe stage-whispered from across his table, "Get used to it. He'll do that at least once an hour."

Once the doors opened the flow of people at my table was near continuous. The first fans were a young man and woman, presumably a couple, both of whom had to have been born after the filming of Horror Movie. Fans. Do I call them fans? Fans of what, precisely? Fans of a movie that existed purely within their imagination? How different was that from the movies you've seen, really? After you've viewed them, they only existed in your head too. Bullshit dime-store philosophy or criticism or whatever you want to call it, but I thought I might try that line or something similar if confronted by a cynical non-fan. The couple wore matching round, black-framed glasses and garish Horror Movie poster-style black T-shirts, and they stood there blinking at me. Kirsten had instructed me to be kind, patient, and approachable and she didn't want to see any shit online about how I was an asshole, but she'd also said, in an eerie replay of a conversation I'd had ten years prior, I had to be mysterious, to "have an aura of mystery," and I wasn't to give everything away (what did I have to give away?), and to treat each interaction as a mini first date and that I desperately wanted the second date. Fucking hell, okay. In my most kind, approachable voice, I asked the young couple where they got the shirts, which I thought was a good opening line, one to get them talking about themselves. They said, "Online," sheepishly, as though they expected me to scold them. I then brought the mask case to the front of my table for them. They didn't say anything. I wasn't sure if it was awe or disappointment. I said in my older man's mysterious voice, "The mask looked better when I wore it," which is a villain's line if there ever was one. The fan couple giggled nervously and said the mask was amazing. They asked a question that I would field all afternoon: Was there a reboot of the movie in the works? I told them the original screenplay had been optioned and was in the early stages of development. One bounced on her toes, the other mini-clapped his hands, and they said they couldn't wait. Each one bought a photo, and because they'd done so, I didn't charge them for a selfie with me, and let them take a photo of the mask too.

The Jason guy had a fan in a headlock and his machete tip pointed at the fan's neck. Sure, he was having fun and his fans were eating it up, but I didn't like him. He was a bit obnoxious and full of himself for playing a character that had already been established. Look at me with my semiprofessional jealousy already.

The afternoon blurred by. I signed photos and fan art and had some fan art given to me.

A shy teenage boy who looked and dressed like Karson gave me a detailed pencil drawing of Cleo staring off blankly, eyes angled away from whoever might be looking back at her, and she carried the Thin Kid in a reversal of the famous picture of the Creature from the Black Lagoon carrying the white-bathing-suit-clad Julie Adams in his arms. Cleo's look somehow was her look. I thanked the artist, my voice quavering, and I couldn't look at the picture for long. I had to hide it in a cardboard box underneath my table before I started full-on ugly crying, and I quickly moved the Karson look-alike along. Jason slammed the table with his machete again. I gave him a look I couldn't back up. Sales were brisk, and the Square thingy on my phone worked. I shook hands and forced smiles for selfies. The Nightmare Scribe cut the line to give me three of his signed books. I thanked him and pretended like getting books from him was a big deal. A woman in the darkening forest of her forties asked if I'd kept in touch with Valentina after the trial. I told her the truth: mostly no, but I visited her a few weeks before she died. Nightmare Scribe popped back over, briefly described the plot of each book he'd given me and how they'd come so close to being optioned for film. I wished him luck. A twitchy guy showed me a tattoo on his arm of the Thin Kid sitting in the corner of a room. It was like looking at a memory. He asked if I had been in any other movies and that IMDb had me listed on a few things as being in preproduction. I told him they were mistaken. Nightmare Scribe returned with a bottle of water for me, and he asked if I had an agent or manager. I thought he was working up to ask me to give Kirsten one of his books. A young woman and her toddler in a stroller were next. The kid absently chewed on the head of a plush Cthulhu. She said that I should be blurring my face out, not revealing my identity, like in the movie. She kept saying "like in the movie," and it was all I could do to not say, "There was no movie," to be rid of her. She lingered. I offered clunky answers to questions that weren't questions, and the thudding silent aftermath should've been a cue for her to move on. She didn't leave my table until she bought one of everything and took a staged photo of me with her drool-slimed kid, and I had to open my mouth wide and pretend I was going to eat the squirming little grub. Her I charged full freight for everything. After a few more people, Nightmare Scribe returned to tell me his manager was pitching him as a creator, not a writer because no one in Hollywood respected writers. The Jason actor overheard, slammed the table with his machete, and bellowed, "The only good writers are dead ones." Someone in my line whispered, "Too soon." Nightmare Scribe laughed too loudly. I ignored Obnoxious Jason and made commiserative noises and said things to the writer like "That must be tough" and "They always fuck you at the drive-thru." This time he didn't go back to his table but edged over slightly so the next person in my line could step up. The writer kept his half of the conversation going, saying actors like me had it easy, all things considered. That, I didn't like. So, I asked him if he in fact had considered all things. I signed photos and Nightmare Scribe told a story about a friend who'd had their contractually due credit scrubbed from the film's posters, and another friend who had a movie come out on a streamer and the streamer was trying to cut her out of sequel rights to both films and books, and another friend who had a movie tie-in edition of one of her books squashed by the studio and egomaniacal director. The guy for whom I was signing photos was himself a young writer. He was riveted by the tales of writerly woe and likely secretly thrilled as being the righteously aggrieved makes good daydream fodder. The fan ended up following the horror writer to his table. Well played, Nightmare Scribe.

I got plenty of disgusted and appalled looks and heard disapproving whispers from folks who scurried by my table. The one openly antagonistic fan (well, I probably shouldn't call him a fan, right?) wasn't my last visitor of the afternoon, but I might as well pretend he was for the purposes of this audiobook retelling.

This guy was a part of a group of three. The other two, a man and a woman in their twenties, both sporting multiple piercings and many tattoos, were excited to talk to me. They were friendly, and conversation with them was not awkward or uncomfortable in the least. They were fun and disarming, and honestly I began to relax for the first time that afternoon, thinking, Okay, this isn't so bad, I can do this. Then their friend stepped between them. He wore a gray The Shining T-shirt emblazoned with a maze and a red baseball hat backward. On one hand, he was one of the only people in the room not wearing a black T-shirt. On the other hand, man, the douche-bro hat was a warning sign, a red flag worn backward. He had that sneering, dismissive expression unique to dudes who know more than everyone else in the room and they can't wait to tell you about it.

He said more than asked, "Mind if I look at your hand? Up close."