One

If you aren't horrified, you aren't paying attention. If you aren't terrified, you aren't really living. That's what Max Maurey believed.

In fact, Max loved horror so much that he'd devoted his life to making it. Which explained why he donned a tuxedo and rode a rented limousine to the Cinerama in Hollywood on a sultry August evening.

To celebrate the making. A new movie, to be exact.

Powerful searchlight beams swayed in the twilight, the iconic signal of a premiere. In this case, one of the most highly anticipated horror releases of 1988.

Moments later, his limo pulled up to the curb.

And outside—

The red carpet stretched under an illuminated marquee.

The theater's geodesic concrete dome loomed over the scene.

Covered in Jack the Knife III splatter logos, the step-and-repeat publicity wall stood ready to serve as backdrop for celebrity photographs.

Max put on a grin and stepped onto the pristine carpet like he owned it, which tonight he pretty much did.

Entertainment journalists craned their necks to see who'd arrived. The fans buzzed. Some of the guys sported leather jackets and shades like the titular Jack. Some of the ladies wore cardigans, skirts, and bobby socks to cosplay the bygone era in which Jack returned from the dead.

This party was just getting started.

Wearing his own tux, Jordan Lyman greeted Max with a puff of cigar smoke. With his curly mop of hair and mirrored sunglasses, the burly producer exuded the overblown masculinity of a porn star who didn't know the seventies were over.

On set, Max might be a creator god, but even he answered to a higher power—the moneyman. As he loathed Jordan for this alone, he couldn't resist a barb.

"Even when you dress up, you only look seedier."

"And you look like something that's afraid of daylight."

"Ouch." Max's hand jerked to pat his silver-streaked hair, which waved in random directions like a mad scientist's. "At least I look the part."

"Crazy eyes, baby," the producer confirmed.

"Crazy eyes?"

"Back when I met you, you were a man possessed by a vision. It's why I gave the first Jack the Knife the green light back in '79. And here we are."

"Here we are," said Max.

On top of the world. He'd traveled a long, hard road to reach it.

Working his way up the ladder in the New Hollywood of the seventies, Max had worn many hats. He'd messengered dailies, cut film as an editor, and wrangled sets as an assistant director. His dream of directing his own movies remained elusive, however, in an industry where the bigwigs didn't like to say no but enjoyed making you wait. A way of doing business that prompted Pauline Kael to label Hollywood the one place you could die of encouragement.

Then Max at last won his big break when Jordan wrote a check for $350,000 to develop Jack the Knife into a feature-length horror movie.

The pitch: Steven Spielberg's Duel meets the supernatural. Back in the fifties, a young man named Jack drove in a drag race on the Fourth of July. As a result of sabotage, he died in a fiery wreck. Decades later, he returns from the dead on Independence Day as an angry spirit of vengeance aimed at the town's teens.

Working twelve hours a day, six days a week, Max had shot the film over three weeks, hustling through a backbreaking twenty to thirty camera setups each day. He squeezed every angle out of the tiny sets. He rigged an Oldsmobile to pass as Jack's on-screen 1957 black Chevy Corvette. When the final movie printed, two-thirds of the end credits were pseudonyms to make the skeleton crew look bigger.

Despite all the sweat and love Max gave his film, he hadn't expected much. But this was 1980, two years after Halloween made lightning in a bottle. John Carpenter proved you didn't need massive budgets and Hollywood stars to make a successful horror movie. You only needed to deliver horror.

In Halloween's wake, the major studios poured cash into low-budget productions. The slasher era had arrived. In the end, Jordan sold the domestic and foreign distribution rights to New Line Cinema in a profitable deal.

Jack the Knifewent on to gross $12 million worldwide, an actual hit. Eight years later, Jack now held fourth place in the slasher pantheon behind Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers. And Max, always a misunderstood outcast, had become an important director.

"Do I still have them?" he asked in a quiet voice.

"Have what?" Jordan said.

"Crazy eyes. I'd like to know if you still see them."

"Every time I visit the set or offer a suggestion you don't like." The producer regarded him with a thoughtful expression. "You're actually nervous."

"It's just production hangover," Max said.

The emptiness and loss he suffered when the intense process of making a movie ended. But no, that wasn't it, not this time.

As he approached forty, he'd begun wondering if he'd accomplished enough. He could feel the slasher era coming to an end. This was the last Jack the Knife. Soon, he'd have to lead or follow on the next big thing. For the first time in nearly a decade, the future offered a blank page, ripe for a fresh story.

He didn't share this with the producer, who wouldn't understand.

Jordan toked on his cigar. "It's your night. Enjoy it while it lasts."

Max nodded, despite this sounding a bit ominous.

Limousines now packed the front of the Cinerama Dome. The fans screamed as they spotted celebrities.

Douglas Avery had arrived, the veteran B-movie actor and discount David Carradine. He played the role of Harbinger, warning the kids not to meddle with dead things, which they of course ignore. Also attending was the beloved, gravelly-voiced Wolfman Jack, who'd reprised his Jack the Knife II cameo as an earnest local radio DJ who fears the worst for his town.

Under the deepening dusk kept at bay by bright lights, the cast promenaded on the red carpet, stretching out their minutes of fame. Some paused to chat with fans and sign autographs while the rest headed to the step-and-repeat wall for press photos. Flashbulbs popped. Pumped on happiness overload, everyone wore a strained, bewildered grin they couldn't turn off.

Then the crowd really went wild.

Stepping out of their limo, Ashlee Gibson and Nicholas Moody smiled and waved. The Final Girl and Jack had finally joined the party. Seeing them holding hands, the fans howled even louder.

Max pictured the starry-eyed, hungry mob surging over the velvet ropes to caress and kiss and bite their idols. Rip them apart and devour them in grisly mouthfuls while the actors kept on grinning until nothing remained.

Imagining the worst shattering the normal had always been an occupational delight for the director. Looking at his leads, he felt little pleasure now. The crowd should have been cheering him for wrangling their difficult personalities into usable footage.

But no matter. Max didn't need the fans' love.

He needed their terror.

As long as they feared him, he was happy.

The cast and critics filed into the theater. The crew and extras had already claimed their seats. They'd entered through the stage door to form a boisterous gang nipping at flasks in the back rows. Most of the actors parked in the back as well, ceding the limelight to the story that would soon appear on the screen. Entertainment press and bigwigs filled the rest of the seats.

As for Max, he sat in the front row alongside Jordan and the producer's taciturn Saudi financiers. He let the hubbub wash over him and liked what he heard. The positive energy in the air had grown palpable. He checked his watch.

Time to get this show started.

Standing to face the crowd, he smiled as their applause washed over him.

"Welcome to the premiere of Jack the Knife III," Max said. "Horror's favorite highwayman returns. The Jack attack is back and better than ever."

The audience erupted in cheering. Next, he focused on the grumpy critics, who liked to tie movies to a resonant theme or trend.

"But really, this is a film about America reclaiming its lost innocence through violence in the Reagan era, only to discover it was never innocent to begin with. As aways, the franchise asks who the real monsters are."

Laying it on thick, though it wouldn't affect the outcome. Reviewers and critics tended to prejudge horror films based on whether they enjoyed the genre.

After catering to them, he next addressed the cast and crew.

"On a final note, it's well understood in our business that no man makes a motion picture. From the talent to the gaffer, a team makes the picture. That means there's a bit of every single one of you in this film. Thank you all for your hard work. Being your director has been an honor. Give yourselves a hand."

As the energetic applause faded, Max finished, "Now, get ready for America's favorite horror story to continue. As the wise men say, the third time's the charm. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Jack the Knife III."

With that, he cupped his hand and called out to the projectionist: "Roll film!"

The moviegoers whooped one last time. As the lights dimmed, the crowd settled down. The standard fifties doo-wop theme started up, tinny and distant as if haunting the present from a lost era.

A LYMAN ENTERTAINMENTS PRODUCTION

The words flared as if on fire before disappearing.

The black screen came to life with a vehicle point-of-view shot revealing yellow roadway lines zipping in headlight glare. A V-8 engine snarled, filling the theater's Dolby Stereo system with a wall of sound. In an instant, the viewer became transported to a lonely road on a humid summer night.

JACK THE KNIFE III

As the opening credits neared their end, Max smiled.

DIRECTED BY MAX MAUREY

He hoped the critics did hate it. He hoped they told America that Jack the Knife III made them puke up their popcorn and Jujubes. He hoped parents forbade their teens to see it and nuns ended up picketing it.

The more "normal" society shunned and feared him, the more power they gave him. Taboo and censorship packed theaters. Public disdain tribalized horror fans into rabid devotees. Because at the end of the day, society wasn't normal at all, and horror wasn't lowbrow.

Horror was populist.

When the industry considered your genre one step above pornography in terms of respectability, it became a license to do almost anything you wanted. And horror flourished in rebellion and pushing boundaries.

It was the Midnight Movie, the drive-in double feature, the titillating exploitation film, the vision to do something crazy and powerful with little money, its grit and amateur rough edges only making it scarier. It was an evil grin and a middle finger delivered to society's comforting fictions, a fractured mirror held up to the human condition. It was leering monsters, moldering corpses, strange bumps in the night, forbidden knowledge, steamy sex in the backseat under a frosty murderous gaze, an eerie children's choir setting the mood to venture into a derelict mansion on a dare.

In short, horror screamed punk rock, and it served as Max's sharp playground.

The open credits finished, the story began. With a real budget of $1.75 million, Jack the Knife III boasted a higher body count than its predecessors and three times the car wrecks. The additional shooting days and locations showed in the final product. The film flowed clean and smooth on the screen without any problems.

Back in 1980, production for the original Jack the Knife had ended with a raucous wrap party but no glittered and starred premiere. Instead, Max had bought a ticket at a seedy downtown theater to catch it in the wild.

He remembered the projectionist forgot to flip the Dolby switch. The bottom of the frame was cut off. Bits of dust blemished the imaging. Mortified, Max had sunk in his seat, his popcorn and soft drink ignored.

Then he'd heard the first anxious chuckle in the dark. He stopped watching the picture and just listened to the audience. A little more nervous laughter. Then sharp gasps. Long stretches of tense, pin-drop silence.

At the first horrifying kill, a woman had cried out, Oh my God!

Max smiled again at the memory. That night had made all the hard work worthwhile, a far bigger payoff than the money that started coming his way.

Tonight, the crowd reacted differently to Jack the Knife III.

They cheered.

They laughed.

When a hissing cat sprang off a shelf for the picture's early fake scare—a genre convention Jordan insisted on including—they let out a playful scream.

Everyone was having a great time.

Max produced an irritated growl.

He knew they were amping up their reactions for the benefit of the critics. He both encouraged and expected that.

That wasn't the problem.

The problem was that they were cheering and laughing at all.

When Jack doo-wopped around the walls and ceiling of Tina's bedroom—a technical feat involving shooting a revolving room—the audience went wild. An organ-rich, New Wavey interpretation of "Mack the Knife" with modified lyrics crooned from the Dolby system while the villain sang:

This monster has such sharp teeth, kid

And they grin oh so bright and white.

Just a switchblade has our Jack, kid

And it gets hungrier every night…

The blood drained from Max's face. "What have I done?"

The crowd wasn't scared. They were entertained.

They rooted for Jack to dispense his Greek-myth style of justice to a bunch of teenagers guilty of being jerks and having clueless parents. They wanted to see the monster deliver what these stupid kids deserved.

Happy with what he heard, Jordan smirked.

"They're laughing," Max complained.

Laughter didn't bother him. Horror and comedy had always been kissing cousins. A little nervous laughter defused the tension. Whistling through the graveyard. But this wasn't that kind of laughing. They were yukking it up.

And this wasn't horror. It was campy self-satire.

Jordan tilted his head to murmur, "You're talking over your own movie."

"I shouldn't have listened to you. All these changes you forced me into."

Giving Jack so much screen time that he stopped being scary, a rakish mix of James Dean and Jack the Ripper. Having him deliver one-liners after his kills that had the audience cracking up in the rows. The new Beauty and the Beast romantic attraction with the Final Girl. Phones ringing but ominous silence on the other end. A severed head discovered in the refrigerator.

Elements ripped off so many times they'd become standard tropes, capped by blatant Pepsi and Kentucky Fried Chicken product placements. Max had been so immersed in the project that he hadn't realized what he'd done.

"They made the movie better," the producer said. "Evolve or die. Listen to the people, Max. They love it."

"They hate it. They just don't know they hate it."

"I think we might actually squeeze another sequel out of this."

"We've taken the real fun out of it, and replaced it with—with—"

"Money's fun," said Jordan.

"It's just like every other slasher flick. Gimmicks. Cinematic junk food."

The man nodded sagely. "That's beautiful, how you put that."

"You think it's—?"

"Formula sells, baby. It's comfortable. And it's for everybody. Not just misanthropic freaks like you."

Max couldn't believe anyone paid for a ticket to a horror film to experience comfort any more than they hopped on a roller coaster to feel safe. They wanted to push outside their comfort zones.

The crowd kept cheering regardless of what he thought.

As Jack the Knife III neared its end, the dog everyone thought had died off-screen defending its master reappeared, ready to bravely chip in again during the final showdown. A bit of emotional manipulation that Max didn't mind, as he'd made a rule to never kill off animals in his movies. He could practically hear the audience grinning and tearing up behind him, though he couldn't bring himself to enjoy even this.

When in the final moments one last shock popped out of nowhere to suggest the story might continue—another Jordan "innovation" ripped off from other horror films—they all cried out. Then gave the closing credits a rousing ovation.

Even some of the grumpy critics were smiling.

"Christ," Max groaned. "I'm a hack."

"Cheer up," the producer said. "It's a birth, not a funeral. Mazel tov. Now stand up like a professional and take a bow."

Glowering, he obeyed, feeling about as punk as a cup of decaf coffee.