Christian is into really violent gore horror movies and posts his reviews on a finsta. The account gets little to no traction until one day a stranger, a seemingly normal looking girl who could be living next door DMs him. The two quickly bond over these disturbing movies until one day she asks him if he would come to a screening of one such movies at an underground cinema. Will Christian find the girl and make it back home alive?
I believe my fascination of gore films stemmed from seeing my pet cat being ran over when I was ten years old. I couldn’t get all the blood out of mind, so for some twisted psychological reason, I coped by seeking out more blood. At least fictional ones that came with almost no real life consequence.
I don’t think I could stomach anything real, but zombie movies where they rip out people’s arms and eat them? That sounds enjoyable. That is until recently, I realised perhaps some of these movies weren’t so fictional after all. And that perhaps, there was more to them aside from just being movies.
See, to channel my interest, I started an anonymous instagram account, a finsta where I did nothing but review quite extreme gore horror films. Of course I wasn’t getting anything out of it beyond satisfying my own personal curiosities, but one day… a girl DM-ed me. A pretty girl! And right off the bat, we connected.
Yes, that’s right, I couldn’t believe it myself! I mean… finding someone who’s into the same thing I am is hard enough, but finding a GIRL that’s also into it… I thought I had won the lottery.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to be stupid about it, I checked her profile and saw that Anna was mostly your run off-the-mill high school girl, just like I was your run-off-the-mill high school boy, but boy, was she hot! And she was really into all these crazy gore horror movies!
We spent the next few weeks bonding, talking about all sorts of crazy films, and then those conversations made way for just how crazy life was. And then, as if it all wasn’t crazy enough… after a month of talking, we both realised that actually we lived in the same city. Anna Boyle went to East High while I went to West High. What a coincidence!
To be honest, I was already thinking about gathering the courage to ask her for a night out. A movie downtown would be nice. And like classic Anna that always seemed to be reading my mind, she invited me to a screening of… a gore horror movie! I didn’t know we had those around!
Anna told me it was underground cinema, a monthly screening ran by group of passionate archivists who found a rare restored copy of Hamster 2. I was definitely not going to turn down that offer. Hamster 2 is a rare gem!
The day of the screening came and I found myself staring out at an abandoned Victorian Home, an old haunted house attraction, the apparent site of the upcoming screening.
The main entrance was padlocked shut, but I tried it anyway. As expected, it didn’t budge. Guess I must’ve been early…
“Hey! Chris!” I heard a girl’s voice call out, it had to be Anna, she was calling me from… somewhere?
“Down here!” I saw her now all too-familiar pretty face peeked out from the basement window.
“Anna!”she smiled and explained that the entrance was out back, down a cellar door, then straight down the corridor. Fair enough.
In hindsight, I couldn’t understand how I could be so stupid. Walked right into a trap because of what? To sum it up, it was basically a pretty girl.
The cellar was actually pretty clean and well lit, which is why I didn’t suspect anything. It looked like your typical back entrance, until I got inside and everything went dark.
I woke up feeling a sharp tingling pain on the back of my head, and then…I realised I was tied up to a chair. Hands and feet bound tightly by chained cuffs.
In front of me was a camera, and all around me were monitors, showing a live view of me squirming in my chair. Mirror images of me scared shitless stared back in horror.
Anna stood in front of me with a whirring chainsaw.
“Anna!?” I asked in a panic, “What? What? What’s all this?”
“Well we’re watching a movie,” said an unknown man’s voice behind me.
“I mean I told you we’re watching a restored version I of Hamster 2, this is exactly it,” Anna said with a big smile plastered across her face.
And suddenly, a round of applause from behind me. A whole crowd was seated back there, I could feel them,I could hear them laughing and jeering, they were enjoying themselves as they watched me about to get cut up, both live and onscreen. I was the afternoon showing.
“But why? Anna? You’re doing this for a movie?” I asked her out of nowhere, I thought that if I was going to die, I deserved to at least know why. Why was I being punished for my own morbid curiosity? There were other gore movie fans out there, and they didn’t get invited to this… what is this? Some kind of satanic cult that loves gore movies? I’d like to at least know that my otherwise boring sixteen years of existence actually meant something at the end. That I won’t end up as nothing but a pile of blood and guts like my cat, basically nothing but useless matter. Trash. Decaying rotting flesh trash.
“Because Christian… we like movies, and like you said so yourself, no one else likes movies like we do, so we’re here to offer you a deal.”
“A deal?”
“Yes, you see we, worship the Movie, an entity that exists beyond the constraints of celluloid and camera lenses, greater than all space and time and all universes, but one whose glimpses of we catch, only through the garish depiction of blood and guts projected on screen.”
“Huh?” I thought they must be joking, but no, the people behind me were cheering and clapping. And Anna continued her piece.
“So today, if you choose, can be your initiation day into our little movie club, all you have to do is give up a limb, a finger, a thumb, an arm, the bigger the appendage, the more respect you will get, and should you choose not to join the movie club, then we’ll finish you here, chop you up bit by bit to appease the Movie, so we can get another glimpse of Her and hopefully have Her bestow Her presence upon us.”
The crowd hollered, I looked at Anna helplessly and knew that I only had one way out of this situation.
“Chop off my penis, I don’t need it anymore, it’s only brought me trouble so far.”
And the crowd went wild.
I went home that night content with the fact that although I will remain forever a virgin, at least I had suddenly gained a whole group of people who were into extreme gore films. A whole room full of people who were into my interests that met up every full moon… to watch movies. The whole film God thing, I’m not sure how serious they were about that. But on my third meeting with them, when someone did choose to get chopped up for The Movie… I could have sworn that in between the recorded blood and guts…I saw a menacing eye.
Bigger than me.
Bigger than life itself.
Bigger than the whole universe. Carefully watching us and our cruelties for some unknown cause.
