Never Drown Alone: A Story of The Ring, Friday the 13th, and True Love

I'm busy enough that I don't write much fanfic anymore, but this summer I made a secret pact with Ryan Boyd. Pursuant to our pact, I wrote a story idea that I've been thinking about for years. It's a crossover between two Horror icons that requires you be fairly weird to enjoy it. 

Friends, I love being fairly weird. 

Ahead of all the Horror movie blogging I'll be doing in October, I want to share this with you. I call it...

Never Drown Alone

She was like the revenge of all the snarls of hair stuck in all the drains in all the world. There was more hair than skin, swirling out at all angles as she darted through the chlorine-reeking pool. Unlike the other students, she went lap after lap without ever coming up for air. Jason never saw her face.

A voice behind him taunted, “You haven’t done your laps.”

Jason knew better than to turn around, and he still did it. It was a reflex.

There was nobody there – not corporeally. How he hated ghost bullies. A red balloon floated in front of Jason’s eyes.

Pennywise chided, “What’s wrong? Do you need your mommy?”

Another voice said, “Don’t you know? He can’t swim.”

That one was Paimon. Pennywise and Paimon, the new popular kids in school. The popular kids always hunted in packs. You never knew when the next attack was coming.

They were both invisible, save for the balloon that drifted closer to Jason.

Jason held up his hands, and tried to swat the red balloon away. It burst, the sound echoing throughout the swimming pool, and he lost his balance for a moment. Someone shoved him hard and he stumbled toward the pool, careful to keep from falling in.

Pennywise asked, “Afraid you’ll drown again?”

Paimon said, “We’ll help you learn.”

Jason barely braced before the next shove came in a gust of fetid air. It was harder than any shotgun blast he’d ever felt, and sent him sprawling through the air. The humid warmth of the pool sprang up even before he hit it. Then he was underwater, that chlorine sting in his eyes, and up his nose, and filling his lungs. The water always got in Jason’s lungs.

This was drowning, and he thrashed, and in his idiot reflexes, tried to stab the pool. Pools didn’t bleed, and waving his arms, he barely got his nose above water, the stuff streaming through every hole in his mask. His eyes were muddied, and he couldn’t even see the invisible figures that blinded him.

Pennywise said, “Looks like you’re short another lifeguard.”

Their voices always sounded the same, harmonizing into laughter. He reached for them, and all he got was a handful of balloons. They didn’t float down here.

Paimon shouted, “What’s she doing?”

“Hey, fuck you—”

The world filled up with the sounds of bursting balloons, and Jason thought he went under again, but he was lifted up. Something caught his hand, like a thousand steely strings wrapping around his fingers. He sprawled forward onto the edge of the pool, groping for whoever had caught him, ready to ring Pennywise’s neck if this was another game.

There were no clowns, and no invisible ghosts laughing. There was only the sloshing of the water, and something dripping to his left.

Hair was tangled around his hand, and it writhed free, going back to its owner. It had pulled him out of the drowning. The figure of hair that had been swimming laps paused at the edge of the pool, and inside it, eyes darker than coal bored into him. It was like a power drill to the mind. It stung and was nice at the same time.

He was used to staring. He stared back. It was all he knew how to do to thank her.

The girl and all her hair dove back into the deep end without a word.

That was for the best. Jason had never been good at banter.

The Halloween List: The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Bay of Blood, and Blood and Black Lace

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970)

These movies have been my first exposure to Italian Giallo, a sub-genre that feels like an evolutionary link between Murder Mysteries and Slasher Films. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage follows Sam Dalmas, an American writer living abroad in Italy, who one night stumbles across an attempted murder inside a museum. Although he’s trapped in the antechamber, he manages to call the police, and then has to wait, just feet away from a woman he can’t help further.

Shockingly, the victim survives passing out from her injuries. More shockingly: she isn’t the only assault victim to live through the movie. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage doesn’t view death like a contemporary film. People survive reasonable injuries, and people like the writer are haunted by what they see. Death isn’t easy to achieve, and it’s also too weighty to shrug off. Sam can’t forget the horrible imagery, and spends the rest of his time in Italy trying to track down the attacker where the police have failed.

An Alternate History of Friday the 13th

Anyone who cares already knows that Jason isn't the killer in Friday the 13^th. It's his mother, avenging his drowning. He then rises from the dead in the sequels with decreasingly comprehensible continuity, but how funny would Friday the 13th Part 2 have been if it was just about teens making the tarnished camp work? Camp Crystal Lake has an awful reputation, but just like most real life sites of horrors, there isn't another massacre. Just teens with nowhere else to go trying to make cash out of a camp.

Then Friday the 13th Part 3 features too many rich people buying lakefront property, and the counselors wishing a serial killer would whack them. But he doesn't. The zoning board is the villain. It's probably a bad Comedy, nothing like the next movie.

Friday the 13th Part 4 was the film no one expected to be nominated for an Oscar. It opens with kids playing in the lake while their parents ignore them, referencing the drowning of Jason Voorhees. What we don't expect is the children discovering Jason's body. It's not a monster, but the fish-eaten remains of a child no older than themselves, and the public discovery shakes the Crystal Lake community. More Stand By Me than a Slasher flick. Adults are finally brought to trial over negligence, and children reckon with how the adults in their lives haven't prepared them for mortality. The parents reckon on their shortcomings. "We are all the shadow of Jason" becomes a national slogan, a t-shirt, and a meme before the internet.

Part 5 is the movie everyone said you couldn't make, because how could you do a sequel to the deconstruction of the American dream? But it is made, and it sucks. It's a clumsy teen romance that the director later apologizes for.

We loosely call the next film Part 6, but it was actually a reboot given the minimalist title "13." Its cardinal sin is attempting to re-tell too much in one movie, containing extensive prequel material of Jason's tortured childhood, his death, his mother's rampage, and the pathos of his body's discovery years later. There's so much in it that it never delivers on its individual elements, and it never settles on a tone or characterization. It was the Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom of camping movies.

It's a strange alternate universe, probably the same in which Transformers is a series of educational engineering videos, and Godzilla is about the contributions of Asians to establishing the fossil record. In that world, Friday the 13^th still isn't a particularly beloved series, but everyone agrees it's still go more merit than the Jungian snoozers of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Bathroom Monologue: Saturday the 13th

He slept in. His alarm clock didn't go off, and he didn't rise until the mosquitoes were particularly thick over his face. Even then, he left his eyes closed until the sounds of playful teenagers grew to an insufferable pitch. For an hour, he sat at his shadowy window, watching through a used sporting mask as they skinny-dipped and pranked each other. How he would have loved to snare one of those pranksters, crushing his windpipe and replacing him, so that at the moment his girlfriend expected a joke, she would instead receive a machete.

One hand twitched on learned reflex, raising for the row of tools on his shed's wall. His arm brushed the calendar, and it rustled, haunting him with the date. He had to reach out and stop his hand from clasping a pitchfork, for "close" wasn't good enough. It was Saturday the 13th, and that meant one particularly doleful weekend for the homestead.

True Stories of John: Friday the 13th

You don’t know me if you don’t know that I love Friday the 13^th. It is one of the few series in human history that is great without being good. It's marred by an undue reputation, for it's not a conservative vengeance trip. At its face-burning, bed-impaling best, it is the id eating itself, reveling in the things it punishes, and it stars the hardest working man in show business. I never imagined a hockey mask could so define Horror, and yet it has, doing for my generation what horns and a pitchfork did for the Medieval world.

So when Michael Bay said his Platinum Dunes would remake Friday the 13^th, I was excited. He couldn’t screw it up worse; it was already bombastic, prurient and downright dumb in every way his stuff was, only lacking the budget. He could just paste together the fun parts from a few of the movies and have a winner. Give me the hockey mask, machete and teens who should know better, and you’ll get this liberal pacifist’s money every time.

They set to release it on Friday the 13^th, 2009.  I looked forward to it throughout January, with such intensity that even friends who hated Horror were excited for me. Yet it was a rough period in my household, and the closer we got to that Friday, the less I thought I could justify the price of a ticket. As the sky grew orange and the shades of the trees around my house swelled, I resigned my dream. I’d just stay home and polish some short stories.

I was opening Microsoft Word when the power went out. My desk faced the windows; down the street and around the lake, every house had gone dark. My battery back-up beeped in protest as I stared outside. Dusk rushed in, turning the surrounding forest into a silhouette.

I saved everything on the computer, shut down and gathered candles. This was obnoxious, but hardly fate. I could sketch plots in my notebook and maybe finish reading the Poe’s Children anthology before bed. I was carrying the books down the stairs in search of a flashlight when I witnessed perhaps the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Light flickered through my front windows. I peered through the curtains and found headlights. Actually, I found a figure in those headlights. It was a large, stocky man in washed out coveralls, carrying an axe over his head. He was in the street, and I swear he was looking right at me.

It took me a few moments to realize it was a neighbor home from construction work. Ironically, I only realized this when he unpacked the chainsaw from his pickup truck.

But that was enough for me. I told God and Michael Bay that they had won, I told my family goodbye, and got in the damned car. I’d go to the stupid movie instead of sitting in the dark all night. I was laughing to myself when the radio buzzed on. The Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” was playing.

I drove very fast.