How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive

by Craig DiLouie

Genres: Ghost; Occult & Supernatural; Horror

Synopsis

From Bram Stoker Award‑nominated author Craig DiLouie comes a darkly humorous horror novel that sees a famous 80s slasher director set out to shoot the most terrifying horror movie ever made using an occult camera that might be (and probably is) demonic.

Horror isn't horror unless it's real.

Max Maury should be on top of the world. He's a famous horror director. Actors love him. Hollywood needs him. He's making money hand over fist. But it's the 80s, and he's directing cheap slashers for audiences who only crave more blood, not real art. Not real horror. And Max's slimy producer refuses to fund any of his new ideas.

Sally Priest dreams of being the Final Girl. She knows she's got what it takes to score the lead role, even if she's only been cast in small parts so far. When Sally meets Max at his latest wrap party, she sets out to impress him and prove her scream queen prowess.

But when Max discovers an old camera that filmed a very real Hollywood horror, he knows that he has to use this camera for his next movie. The only problem is that it came with a cryptic warning and sometimes wails.

By the time Max discovers the true evil lying within, he's already dead set on finishing the scariest movie ever put to film, and like it or not, it's Sally's time to shine as the Final Girl.

Release date: June 18, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 320

Sample

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 Knife went 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.

Max was born on a stormy night in 1950 while Sunset Boulevard and The Breaking Point showed in theaters. He grew up in Binghamton, New York, where his father worked as a shipping manager and told a joke every night at dinner.

One night, Dad said, “We had to fire one of our employees today. On his way out the door, he told me all along he’d been moonlighting as an actor on the side.”

Mom filled six-year-old Max’s plate. “Oh, is he any good?”

“I think he’s fantastic. I mean, all these years he’s been at the warehouse, he convinced me he was actually working.”

While Max laughed, Dad face-planted in his pork chops and mashed potatoes.

“Dad?”

A sudden and massive heart attack had killed him.

For Max, it left a permanent psychic imprint. A dark truth learned too young.

The world isn’t fair, he thought.

At the funeral, the pastor told him his father had ascended to a better place.

Max stared at him. “Better than my house?”

“He’s in heaven,” the pastor said. “Heaven is perfect. He’s happy there.”

“Because of God. God can do anything.”

“That’s right. It’s why we pray.”

For the first time in his life, Max wondered why God allowed bad things to happen to good people. On the spot, his child’s mind reasoned that one of two axioms must be true. God couldn’t stop evil, which made him weaker than evil. Or God could stop it but didn’t want to, which made him kind of monstrous himself.

Max’s first taste of cosmic horror.

Mom squeezed his hand. “Dad isn’t really gone. He’s smiling down at us right now.”

Max sensed a con everyone agreed upon to make everything bad about life actually feel nice. Like the actor at Dad’s warehouse pretending to work.

“Tell me a joke,” he said.

On the drive home, he looked out the window at the pink houses flashing past. Everyone else’s lives seemed perfect. More of the big con? They had to be hiding something behind all those curtains.

If they weren’t, then he must be a freak.

Mom went back to work to support them. At school, Max curled into a ball under his desk during a duck-and-cover drill to practice surviving an atomic war. He lay there expecting the bombs to drop this time, but they never did.

At home, he watched television hoping someone might articulate the thoughts and ideas that felt way too large for him. The world seemed oblivious and happy. As he got older, his belief this was a lie grew.

Then he discovered Shock Theater on channel 7.

At a nocturnal hour, Cool Ghoul John Zacherle introduced old Universal horror movies with macabre humor. Tiptoeing downstairs after Mom turned in for the night, Max sat two feet from his TV set to gape at Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Invisible Man.

Watching gave him a delicious thrill. Not only was he breaking the rules, but the films struck him as forbidden and arcane knowledge. A glimpse of real taboo. A window into his own troubled soul. These fictional monsters mirrored the dark truths and questions he wrestled with in his life.

Afterward, he went to bed quaking over what might be under his bed. The greatest of fears, he learned, wasn’t what you saw but what you didn’t.

The nightmares came soon after.

When Mom caught him staying up and then discovered his stash of EC Comics and Weird Tales, she flew into a rage. She worried whether his obsession with horror affected his development and whether the nightmares damaged his brain.

“It’s not healthy for you,” she yelled.

Max disagreed. These stories didn’t hurt him.

They were saving him.

Either way, he grew into a tall, gangly, and pasty kid who didn’t fit in. A boy who preferred the serenity and quiet desperation of the night to the earnest, social day. After the sun went down, the shadows recast the familiar as the unfamiliar, a breeding ground for terrors both imaginary and real.

As for the nightmares, they’d transferred to his waking hours, during which he reimagined the mundane world as scenes in horror movies.

At school, Max felt like a freak. Even the outsiders shunned him. Then he discovered Famous Monsters of Filmland.

The first issue he read had the great Vincent Price on the cover along with a bold invitation to catch pics from The Pit and the Pendulum. Max bought and hid it under his mattress, where other boys stashed Playboy.

The magazine told him he wasn’t weird at all. Okay, he was still weird, but he wasn’t alone—there were many other weirdos like him.

In fact, there was a community.

While America sank into Vietnam, Max avidly consumed movies and TV shows like Thriller, Way Out, and The Twilight Zone. He read every issue of Eerie and Creepy. When he caught Psycho as a rerun at a late-night theater, he began to admire the artistry behind the stories he loved.

The forty-five-second shower scene in Hitchcock’s masterpiece had taken a week to shoot, he learned, and involved seventy-eight camera setups. The next time Max cracked open Famous Monsters, he didn’t just see a community. He heard a clarion call to contribute and lead.

He wanted to direct movies.

As the sixties reached their messy end, Max arrived at the School of Theater, Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles. His education in filmmaking welcomed him like a blank page, full of potential but also intimidating. He loved it all, right down to the iconic palm trees and four-hour-long classes at Melnitz Hall, where he learned things like Freudian interpretations of Citizen Kane.

Even here, however, he found himself an outcast. The weird and twisty kid who wanted to direct horror movies. Another milestone in what would be a lifetime of horror shaming.

The censorial Production Code had died a few years earlier, resulting in an explosion of gore before the New Horror of the seventies refined the genre for the emerging yuppies. Eager to push boundaries, Max shot his first student film in his dorm room in grainy 16mm using bell lights fitted with wax paper as homemade diffusers. Titled Martyr, it told the story of a man tortured by his malicious doppelgänger. He turns the tables and kills it, one bloody piece chopped off at a time, only to discover he literally fought and killed himself by suicide.

Max’s snooty classmates loathed it, wondering who allowed this uncultured, blue-collar weirdo into the same film school as the next crop of Kubricks and Fellinis. Behind his back, they called him the “enfant terrible,” a man out to break not society but film itself. When they reached the real world, many of them would one day try their hand at horror as an easier path into directing, but for Max, it had always been his sole destination. His professor also hated the short, declaring that Max’s ambition far exceeded his years and that he confused art with bad taste.

Nonetheless, Max had found his home in every meaning of the word.

By the end of his film school years, the blank page with which he’d started had filled to bursting. The school of hard knocks awaited him. Long was the way and hard, but he never gave up on his dream. With Jack the Knife, he finally grabbed it by the tail and rode it to the top of the Hollywood horror scene.

For Max, the real horrors were nuclear war and Vietnam. Watergate and Charles Manson. The Summer of Sam and the energy crisis. The hostage taking in Iran and AIDS. Blackouts and riots and Three Mile Island. Growing old, not being able to afford rent, bringing children into this world.

Dad dropping dead after telling a killer joke at dinner.

Finding out he had the same heart defect as his father.

Horror helped Max process all of it with monsters he could safely fear. Fears he could face with a sense of wonder. Terrors he wanted to create for others so they could share in its bitter but cathartic medicine.

No more curtains hiding dirty secrets in pink houses. No American exceptionalism to the universal savagery of the human condition. No sweet icing plastered over life’s existential turds. No more false justice.

His audiences would see and feel it all in gory detail.

To Max, it was as healthy as eating carrots.

Grinning with jack-o’-lantern intensity, the Bel Air mansion welcomed all comers to the Jack the Knife III premiere after-party. Floodlights articulated the hulking architecture. The silhouettes of partyers flickered like black candlelight in its bright windows. Every time Max visited Jordan’s palatial estate, he received a visual reminder of how badly he was being ripped off.

Lookie-loos flocked to Hollywood each year hoping to sight celebrities in their natural habitat. They came for the glitter and went home with the grime. What most people pictured as Hollywood was actually a small group of communities such as Beverly Hills. There, the industry’s aristocracy lived in palaces secured in gated glamor and guarded by their own cops. Everything looked clean and beautiful, stretch limos drove date-palm-lined avenues, and the post office offered valet parking. They even painted the fire hydrants silver.

Bel Air wasn’t Beverly Hills, but it was very close.

Max entered a spacious vestibule facing a grand staircase. Like a resume of influence and power, awards and photos adorned the entry walls. While celebrities and famous directors provided the face of Hollywood, people like Jordan Lyman ruled it behind the scenes by handling the cash that powered the illusion factory.

Producers could be studio moguls green-lighting projects, execs submitting to corporate boards, or indie companies packaging distribution deals for the big studios. Jordan had worked as all three, making a name at MCA/Universal and Columbia before jumping again to do his own thing as an indie producer. Max considered his relationship with the man something of a Faustian bargain.

Leaving the vestibule, he entered a vast living room overlooking a glowing swimming pool. Here, cast, crew, and friends of Jack the Knife III mingled and laughed among sprawling furniture, expensive art, and soft lighting. Caterers circulated bearing trays of hors d’oeuvres. An INXS song piped through the house speaker system. The partyers shined with needy, manic cheer.

Gazing at this scene, Max pictured himself as a director in a horror film who wants to escape before an ancient evil manifests to consume them all. Too late: Blood drips from the ceiling. It plops into drinks, runs like scarlet mascara down leering faces, disappears on shrimp kebabs into chomping mouths. Looking into their red eyes, he realizes the merriment is all phony.

He is already in a trap, and they are the evil.

A peal of laughter swept through part of the crowd, and Max flinched.

A familiar gruff voice: “Welcome to the Hotel California.”

He sighed. “I think I need a stiff drink.”

“You earned it, Maximillian.”

Raphael Rodriguez had worked with Max on the entire Jack trilogy as special makeup effects master. The man who put the splatter in Max’s splatter flicks.

When Tom discovered Pam screaming on a meat hook in the third act and pulled her off, it was Raphael’s gore that geysered from her back. When the released counterweight dropped an anvil onto Tom’s head and Tom’s skull exploded like a watermelon, that was Raph’s work too.

Specifically, blood he made from corn syrup mixed with food coloring and other ingredients. Brains from cauliflower, bread, and gelatin.

If Max loomed behind his movies as a master of illusions, Raphael performed . . .