Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

During the day, Pete’s is a different place, the patrons older, mostly there for its hamburgers, which are regarded by those in the know as the best in town. A few regulars station themselves at the bar, solitary figures there to consume their daily ration of alcohol and possibly pass a few words with the bartender. Between lunch and dinner, the place is relatively quiet. You can bring your legal pad and pen and sit and write for a couple of hours, and as long as you’re a good tipper, the waitress will keep warming your cup of decaf. The bartender has the music low, so you can have a conversation if you need to.

This particular afternoon, I’m at Pete’s to talk to Sarah Fiore. To be honest, it’s not my first choice for an interview, but it was the one location on which we could agree, so here I am, seated in a booth at the back of the restaurant. The upper half of the rear wall is an unbroken line of windows that curves inward at the top, for a greenhouse effect. I’m guessing it was intended to give a view out over the town, but the buildings that went up behind the bar frustrated that design. Still, they provide plenty of natural light, which must save on the electric bill.

It’s Halloween, which seems almost too on the nose for the interview I’m here to conduct. Already, small children dressed as characters from comic books, movies, and video games wander the sidewalks, accompanied by parents whose costumes are the same ones they wear every day. I see Gothams of Batmen, companies of Storm Troopers, palaces of Disney princesses, and MITs worth of video game characters. There are few monsters, which saddens me, but I’m a traditionalist. In a couple of hours, the town will host its annual Halloween parade, for which they’ll close the lower part of Main Street. It’s quite a sight. Hundreds of costumed participants will assemble in front of the library—just up the street from Pete’s—and process down towards the Svartkill River, which forms the town’s western boundary. Once there, they’ll turn into the parking lot of the police station, where they’ll be served cider and donuts by members of the police and fire departments, accompanied by the mayor and other local officials. I find it quite sweet.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should add here, while we’re still waiting for Sarah Fiore to arrive, that she and I know one another. Specifically, she was my student twenty-one years ago, in the first section of Freshman Composition I taught at SUNY Huguenot. She was in her mid-twenties, settling down to pursue a degree after several years of working odd jobs and traveling. She was a big fan of horror movies, wrote several essays about films like Nosferatu (the original), the Badham Dracula , and Near Dark . We spent fifteen minutes of one class arguing the merits of The Lost Boys , much to the amusement of her fellow students. After the semester was over, I occasionally bumped into Sarah in the hallways of one building or another, which was how I learned that she was transferring to NYU for their film program. I told her she would have to make a horror movie.

Eleven years later, when Lost in the Dark was released, I remembered our exchange. I hadn’t seen Sarah since that afternoon in the Humanities building, had no idea how to get in touch with her to offer my congratulations for her good reviews. “A smarter Blair Witch Project” that’s the one that sticks in my mind; although the only thing Sarah’s film shares with Eduardo Sànchez and Daniel Myrick’s is its reliance on hand-held cameras for the faux-documentary effect. Otherwise, Lost in the Dark has a much more developed narrative, both in terms of the Bad Agatha backstory and the Isabelle Price main story. The sequels did a lot to perpetuate the brand, and helped to add Bad Agatha to the pantheon of contemporary horror villains. Sarah’s involvement with these films was limited, but she pushed for J. T. Petty to direct the second, and she reached out to Sean Mickles to bring him in for the third. As a result, you have a trilogy of horror movies by three different directors that work unusually well together. Sarah’s sets up the story, Petty’s explores the history, and Mickles’s does its weird meta-thing about the films. While her name is on the fourth and fifth movies as producer, that had more to do with the details of the contract her agent worked out for her. Recently, there’s been talk of a Lost in the Dark television series. AMC is interested, as is Showtime. There have been a couple of tie-in novels, and a four–issue comic book published by IDW.

Truth to tell, I think a good part of the continuing success of the Lost in the Dark franchise has to do with its Halloween connections. It didn’t hurt the original film to be released Halloween weekend, and whoever thought up giving away Bad Agatha masks to the first dozen ticket buyers, was a promotional genius. Plastic shells with a rubber band strap, they were hardly sophisticated, but there was a crude energy to their design, all flat planes and sharp angles. An approximation of the movie’s makeup, the masks captured the menace of the character. It’s the eyes that do it, especially that missing left one. The bit of black fabric glued behind the opening gives the appearance of depth, as if you’re seeing right into the center of Bad Agatha’s skull and the darkness therein. The last I checked, one of the original masks was going for four hundred dollars on eBay. The versions that have been released with each subsequent Lost in the Dark installment have varied in execution (though a colleague said that the mask she received was the best thing about the fourth movie), but they’ve become part of the phenomenon.

Throughout this time, Sarah Fiore has kept herself busy with other projects. She wrote and directed two films, Hideous Road (2009) and Bubblegum Confession (2011), and was director for Apple Core (2012). She wrote and directed the 2014 Shirley Jackson documentary for PBS’s American Masters , which was nominated for an Emmy. With Phil Gelatt, she co-wrote an adaptation of Laird Barron’s “Hallucigenia” that John Carpenter was rumored to be considering. Yet none of these movies or scripts has attached to her name the way the Lost in the Dark series has. For the most part, she’s borne this with good grace, expressing in numerous interviews her gratitude for the films’ success.

While not inevitable, it’s hardly surprising that, in today’s short-term-memory culture, any work of art with staying power is going to be milked for all it’s worth. In the case of the original Lost in the Dark , this means a celebration of the movie’s ten-year anniversary. There’s a special-edition Blu-ray with an added disk full of bonus features, screenings of the film in select theaters, and a new batch of Bad Agatha masks. Plus, the announcement that Takashi Shimizu has signed on to direct the sixth Lost in the Dark movie, which is supposed to herald a bold new direction for the franchise. None of this is especially remarkable; much lesser films receive much grander treatment.

What is of note lies buried within the fifteen hours of new footage on the Blu-ray’s bonus disk. There’s a forty-minute group interview during which Sarah, and Kristi Nightingale, who was her director of photography, and Ben Formosa, who played Ben Rios, sit around a table with Edie Amos of Rue Morgue discussing the origins and shooting of the movie. It’s the kind of thing film geeks love: behind the scenes of their favorite film. There’s a pitcher of water on the table, a glass in front of each participant. Sarah sits with her elbows on the table, her hands clasped. She’s wearing a black linen blouse, her long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Kristi leans back in her chair, the mass of her curly brown hair springing from underneath an unmarked blue baseball cap. A black and white Billy Idol, circa Rebel Yell , sneers from the front of her white sweatshirt. Ben has shaved his head, which, combined with noticeable weight loss, gives him the appearance of having aged more than his former companions. The red dress shirt he’s wearing practically glows with money, an emblem of the success he’s enjoyed in his recent roles. Edie sits with a tablet in front of her. Her oversized round glasses magnify her eyes ever-so-slightly.