Enter me, sir. I always did it. And her mom already bought her a new and better phone anyway.
But nevermind all that. Something’s fishy here, isn’t it? It’s the Red Herring in the slasher movie. The origin of this is how when you’re running from dogs that are trailing you by smell you can put a dead fish on your trail and that like blows the dogs’ noses up pretty much. For Agatha Christie the Red Herring was the person all signs and clues SAID was doing all that killing, but really that’s just Mrs. Christie being a magician and shaking this hand so you don’t watch the other one.
Wes Craven does the same magic trick in A Nightmare on Elm Street, where Rod is the obvious killer to all the cops and parents. At least until Freddy kills him, which is usually the way it goes for stinky fish on the trail. And what’s weird is that for the 1st time in slasher history ever probably, in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, which is part V, meaning “5,” halfway to “X,” Jason Voorhees HIMSELF is kind of the Red Herring. Everyone thinks the killer is him, when surprise, it’s far less exciting. Even Randy in Scream SAYS he himself is the obvious right suspect for Casey Becker and Steve, his tastes all being in the horror aisle of the video store, but this is AFTER Billy and Stu have already fake set Billy up into Red Herringhood.
What to notice here is the magic trick happening before your eyes, sir. Agatha or Wes are just shaking this hand around to distract your nose if you were a dog, but it’s all so this real and actual blood soaked party can creep past into non-suspicionhood. And while sometimes the way they be fair is to say “LOOK, he’s doing all of this, can’t you see?” we’ve been burned so many times by exactly this that we know that can’t be true, so we keep on looking the other way.
What the slasher does I mean is turn us ALL into the cops and parents who 100
percent know it’s Rod who killed his girlfriend Tina, who KNOW it’s Jason in V, and that’s when it has us right where it wants us, since cops and parents are less than useless in the slasher.
So are we, I mean, except as carving dummies, which isn’t like carving a turkey, except for the end result, I guess.
Enjoy your meal, Mr. Holmes.
STAGE FRIGHT
It’s four in the morning and Jade’s standing half-in, half-out of the front door of her father’s house, not sure if she should take that next step or not. On the couch and in the chair are her father and Rexall, in the same places they were for what she guesses she should be calling The Night of the Carrot—her dad’s joke about her orange hair. They’re already passed out this time, though. Passed out and slobbering, snoring, twitching, Rexall hugging a pillow.
Jade gives her foot some weight, praying for no creak, and for once her prayer is answered. If they didn’t wake from her hauling the door open, though, then that means they’re really and truly conked, right?
Surely.
Where she’s coming in from is the staging area. She sat there with Shooting Glasses until the next Terra Nova shift started to sift in. He’d cracked his can open for a morning dip then opened his door, nodded bye to Jade.
“Won’t you be tired?” Jade asked him.
“Sleep when I’m dead,” he said around his first gush of spit, spinning around on his heel to shoot her with imaginary sixguns. “Sam Elliott, Road House, 1988.”
“1989,” Jade didn’t have the heart to tell him, just launched her fingers off her forehead in goodbye, sloped home with her hands deep in the pockets of her coveralls, her shoulders up by her ears, a sort-of smile on her face. The whole night, her and Shooting Glasses had just talked about nothing, not one single real thing. It was stupid, would be a boring art house film were it on-screen, two kids mumbling in the afterglow of a killing because they’re both too shy to hold hands, but it had been pretty perfect too.
Its opposite, pretty much, is her dad groaning on the couch now, and scratching himself, doing that kind of shifting and flopping that means he’s about to crack an eye open. Jade stops breathing, doesn’t know whether she’s hitting the floor to be below his blurry line of sight or if she’s stepping cleanly back out the door she just walked through. But no way will she be making eye contact with him when his hands are down the front of his pants.
He snorts, nuzzles his face deeper into the couch cushion, and drops back into what she hopes is a falling dream, so she can watch his clothes flatten out when he hits bottom. When that doesn’t happen and then doesn’t happen again, she finally allows herself to breathe, and imagine what if… what if she were the slasher here? What if she had been raised by Ezekiel, attended all his black masses, learned all his lessons before she was swapped for a baby in Proofrock? If she were that slasher, then she would know to straighten a coat hanger out, creep up to both of these rejects, and drive that sharp point into their ear all at once, then wait around to dab up any blood that dribbled back out. Hardy probably wouldn’t even have any autopsies run, as this would be good riddance to shitty rubbish.