Chapter 4 – Chap 4

I don’t know, guys. I feel like this has all been a big mistake. Like some part of me was trying to warn myself, and I just wouldn’t listen.

I watched the tapes. Like the first one, they were a mix of average material and… not-so-average. Weird. Unsettling, even. Especially Our Summer. I watched At the Hip first. It looked light hearted enough. And it was. There was no weird introduction, no woman staring at the camera and speaking backwards. In fact, I thought maybe that first video had been a fluke.

The story was about two guys who’d grown up together, and they’d always been best friends. But one of them, the more serious of the two, has dreams that conflict with life with his companion. He wants to get a salaried job and marry a sophisticated woman. He wants to be respected in his community. But his friend, with no ill intentions, always manages to screw it up. And no matter what the guy does, he can’t seem to shake him.

It played out so predictably for the first half hour that I honestly didn’t anticipate the sudden shift. I should have, given the initial film.

The serious friend and the affectionately troublesome one are sitting down with the serious guy’s girlfriend. They’re eating, and it’s clear serious guy wants goofy guy out of there. You can tell some wacky hijinks are about to occur. Goofy guy offers to bring out the pot of gumbo himself, and after a brief argument, the serious guy acquiesces. Goofy guy gets the pot and comically sways back and forth, trying to balance it. He approaches the table, and it’s pretty clear he’s going to trip and spoil the dinner.

However, he instead spills the hot gumbo all over the serious guy’s date, dousing her in boiling liquid. He drops the pot as she starts to scream, writhing on the floor. The soundtrack drops out, and there’s just screaming, so raw and visceral that you’d almost think it was real pain. Like they actually poured boiling liquid on this woman.

That goes one for another minute or two, then it cuts to black. After a moment, sappy music starts to play, and it shows the goofy friend sitting by himself on the couch. He looks like he’s been crying.

I kept waiting for something to happen, the scene to change, the serious guy to come back—anything. But for at least a half an hour, he just sits there, sighing now and then. I fast forwarded through it after a while, but I stopped when I saw a small flash in the image.

At one point, there’s a close up of the goofy guy’s face. It only lasts a second, but he’s clearly trying to say something. There’s no audio, though, and it immediately cuts back to him just sitting alone on his couch.

I almost missed the subtle change when I was fast forwarding, but right before it changes to the next scene, I can see the goofy guy isn’t sad anymore. He’s smiling. Only he doesn’t look happy. His expression is unsettling. After a moment, he slowly starts to tilt his head to the side and looks directly at the viewer. I swear, I almost turned it off and said screw it. Something about the way he was gazing at me. Not the camera. Me.

I don’t really remember much after that part. It was mostly innocuous. The girlfriend is never mentioned again. There’s a montage of the guys getting close again, and the film ends with the serious guy offering the goofy guy a chance to work with him on a new business idea, so that they can find a compromise between them.

It’s a cheerful ending, right up until the serious guy looks to the side and twists his face into a grimace. An expression of horror appears on his face, and he starts screaming, “No,” over and over in a primal, agonized voice.

Then the credits roll. The background is black, the music is happy, and I’m just left sitting there, trying to understand.

The thing is, I keep telling myself that I should stop, but I can’t. I have to see what else is on these tapes. They’re just so bizarre.

So, I continued.

Now, the second tape… That one didn’t even try to pretend to be something else. The cover wasn’t entirely a lie, but it was misleading enough.

The story opens with two kids—a boy and a girl—playing in the yard. There are some artistic shots and slow-motion angles of the two playing in the summer sun, sprinkler dancing overhead, bubbles drifting down. They’re laughing, but the sound is far away. As it continues, the laughter subtly shifts to the sound of crying. Though not the children, an adult female voice.

Suddenly the scene switches to inside the house, and a woman crumbled in the corner, holding random documents and photos. Her face is puffy from crying.

“What did you do?” she sobs, though it’s pretty clear it’s rhetorical. “What did you do?”

The shot turns to a ticking cuckoo clock, lingering there for a full three minutes until it strikes noon, and an old, worn cuckoo bird pops out. The sound of its chirp is warped from age, making it a little unsettling as it flicks in and out of its hidey hole twelve times.

There are two children now, different from the first two, and they’re playing in a bright, sunny cemetery. Maybe a little weird but honestly not that odd. Cemeteries can be very lovely sometimes. They’re meant to honor the dead, not creep you out, you know? But despite that, and despite how cheerful everything seems, I just had this bad feeling. It was like I didn’t want to know what came next, like I was dreading it.

And before you say, “Of course you were, the other two tapes were nightmares,” this was different. This felt like real danger. Like I was about to see something I could never unsee. Something that would change me.

Regardless, I kept watching, as the boy and girl laughed and chased each other. Suddenly, they stopped at the edge of the cemetery. There were four children standing there, all wearing crude animal masks. The children were well dressed, like they were going somewhere formal, but for the diseased, filthy masks they had on. They were the kind of masks that went all the way over the head, so you couldn’t see the children’s hair or anything. Just four misshapen heads on normal children’s bodies.

I could be wrong, but I think the masks were a fox, a mouse, a rabbit, and a pig. But honestly, whoever made them hadn’t worried over the details. Maybe they were supposed to have been made by the kids themselves.

For a long moment, no dialogue is spoken, as the shot moves back and forth between the two groups. Then the little boy starts to cry. He slinks back and shakes his head. The little girl doesn’t step back, but she looks terrified.

Suddenly, she grabs a large rock from the ground and runs toward the rabbit, bringing the rock down at full force on the child’s head.

Before it makes contact, the scene cuts to a woman chopping meat. She seems to be talking to someone in the room with her, but we never see her. It’s a one-sided conversation.

“I warned you, Susan,” the woman says, chopping bits of beef into small cubes. “I warned you. Don’t come to me now, when it isn’t going your way. There’s no closing that box once it’s open.”

There’s a long pause before the woman grips the knife tightly and stabs it into the meat. Her eyes go wild and she looks to her left, off-screen.

“Do you think I wanted this? I never wanted any of this! Let’s just end it now, Susan, because I’m about to—”

The scene cuts to more little masked children, holding hands in a circle. There are at least ten this time, and it’s hard to say if any are the same from before. The little boy and girl from the previous scene aren’t there, but after a moment, it appears as if the boy and girl from the opening are.

The two are facing each other, and each of them is holding a knife. A dull one, it looks like, like a butter knife. The masked children begin to clap.

Distantly, the crying from before is heard, but it’s mostly drowned out by the clapping, which grows louder and louder until it’s thunderous, like an audience of people, rather than a handful of children.

“I’m sorry!” a woman screams. “I’ll do whatever you want! Please!”

The shot cuts two three glasses of clear liquid on a table. Each one has something dropped into it, like food dye. Blue, purple, red. The colors swirl in slow motion, oddly mesmerizing. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It felt important somehow. I know that sounds weird, but it’s the only way I can describe it.

New scene. A strange looking little man stands at a pulpit, with a silent, faceless crowd sitting in pews before him.

“You need not be haunted by your crimes!” he says, holding up a stack of papers. “There’s nothing but forgiveness here. We welcome you. You’re home.”

He smiles, looking out over the audience. “That woman… She was probably dead on impact. Who would it have helped if you’d stopped. Would you living your years out in prison bring her back? Why destroy two lives?”

Someone raised their hands up, like they were shouting hallelujah in church.

“Do not weep for the little ones,” he continues. “Whatever your reasons, you should not feel shame for your actions. This world is yours. This world that doesn’t accept you. So you’ve carved out a place for yourself. Who can fault you for that?”

He stops in front of one person in the crowd and places a hand on his head. “They were but vessels to deliver you from your bondage. Their sacrifice was your freedom.”

The audience begins to clap, much like the children in masks, louder and louder until it sounds like water crashing down on rocks.

The next hour or so is really hard to describe. There’s no plot. Not that I can tell, at least. It’s just a series of weird, artsy images, like a close up of a dandelion blowing away, or a shot of feet in a river, toes wiggling as little fish nibble at them curiously. There’s no more dialogue in the entirety of the film, and it mostly consists of melancholy music and random, slow motion footage or oddly-angled shots.

It was weird as hell, but I kept watching. And the whole time, that feeling of dread never left. I just kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But even after the final scene, that sense didn’t leave me.

After a long stretch of random depictions of what I presume is the filmmaker’s view of summer, it cut back to the masked children circling the boy and girl.

The two are now inches apart, and as the shot closes in, they start frantically jabbing one another with their butter knives. This goes on for a while, as they try to hit each other in the eyes and other vulnerable areas, but eventually the boy manages to knock the girl down.

The girl jabs the boy with her butter knife over and over, but the boy sits on her chest and starts to rapidly saw into the girl’s throat. The strange music stops, and it’s just the girl screaming, and the crowd watching, silently. The scene is an agonizing fifteen minutes of this boy sawing open a girl’s throat with a butter knife.

I felt sick to my stomach, but I kept watching, even as blood began to spurt into the air, and screams turned into gurgles. The girl was still gurgling and twitching when the boy suddenly chucked the bloody knife into the distance, and all of the masked children pounced.

You can’t see what’s happening at this point, but you can guess. There are more gurgling sounds, and the sound of chewing. Wet, meaty sounds…

Right before the screen cuts to black, what looks to be an adult with a potato sack over his head, leads the other boy and girl to the circle.

There was no music during the credits. Just silence. Again, not a lot of names to begin with, and none of the actors are listed this time. Unlike the other two, though, I did notice an additional little message when it was done.

“Thank you to Susan. This film wouldn’t have been possible without your sacrifice.”

I spent the night feeling like I was going to puke. It wasn’t the blood or anything, just how deeply disturbing the film was. Something about the low amount of dialogue made it that much creepier. I guess I’d never considered that before.

My ultimate assessment after watching the tapes is that I should have stopped at one. Or maybe I shouldn’t have rented one at all. I feel like I made a mistake. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but something has changed. It’s like something shifted within me. A switch has been turned on.

But even as I tell myself I’m making a mistake, I’m going to the video rental place again. I can’t stay away more than a week or so. I just start to itch to go back. To see what else is there.

God, it’s been so quiet around here. I just need a distraction. It feels like it was all for nothing if I stop now.

I’ll try to update soon.