Now, I’m going to tell you this one straight through, and I’m going to tell you at the front that there’s a dead boy in it. I’d rather you hear it from me sitting here than come around some corner in the middle of the night and find him standing there in his socks. That’s no way to meet anybody.

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The house sat out on Persimmon Street, which was not a street so much as a stretch of gravel that the county had promised to pave back when Carter was president. It was a low brick ranch with an aluminum awning over the porch, and a concrete slab out front with a crack running down the middle of it. Four men lived in that house. The state paid for it. And for thirty-one years, one woman had held the keys.

Her name was Thelma Hargis, and on the afternoon, we’re talking about she was sitting in the green plastic chair on the left side of that slab, watching the woman who was going to replace her settle into the red one on the right.

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The girl’s name was Kayla. Twenty-three, maybe. She had that youthful energy about her, the energy young people have before they turn fifty. She sat forward with her elbows on her knees, bored out of her mind.

“I have exactly nineteen days left in this house,” Thelma said. “And then the keys are yours. We’re going to make sure you know every corner of it before I walk out.”

“I’m ready,” Kayla said.

“Let’s start with Cecil,” Thelma said. “Cecil is a creature of routine. Every afternoon he comes out here and pulls monkey grass. One blade at a time, right along the edge of the clay. But before he got religion about the landscaping, it was the television. He believed the Friday night wrestling matches were taking place directly in the front yard. He’d get up on that screen with his cane, hollering at the referee to watch his blind side.”

Kayla laughed out loud. “No way. Did he really?”

“He did. Gave us the full play-by-play while we were trying to pass meds.”

And I’ll tell you what, I’d have paid money for that. There’s a man for you, ninety pounds of him, defending the honor of a wrestler who was almost certainly in on it. Cecil never did believe it was fake. Cecil believed in things. That was more or less his whole trouble.

“But these days it’s the grass,” Thelma said, “When he comes out, let him sit on that top step. But don’t let him stay more than forty-five minutes. His knees swell up like melons, and then we have to log it.”

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“Why not just bring him in before then?”

“Because he’ll try and knock the shit out of you.”

“Well,” Kayla said, gentle about it, “if it keeps him happy and it’s safe, I don’t see the harm. Seems like a peaceful way to spend an afternoon.”

Kayla pointed at Thelma’s wrist. “That doesn’t look comfortable.”

There was a pale band of skin there where the coiled plastic key bracelet had worn itself a groove down into the flesh over thirty-one years.

Thelma pulled her sleeve down over it. “You get used to it. After a while it feels worse to take it off. Like you’re missing a limb.”

The screen door groaned on its rusty spring, and out came Cecil himself, propping the frame with the rubber tip of his cane. Small fellow, folded in on himself, thin white hair lit up by the afternoon. He didn’t look at either one of them. He sat down slow on the top step, bent over, took a blade of monkey grass between his thumb and finger, and pulled. The root came up with a soft tearing sound, and he laid the blade neat beside his thigh.

“See,” Thelma said.

“He’s precise,” Kayla said.

“He is. So is Burt. Burt’s our collector. Four hundred and eleven die-cast cars in his bedroom, sorted by year and by maker. Point at any one of them, he’ll tell you what year it rolled off the line. He won’t tell you his own birthday. But he knows every General Motors vehicle built between 1955 and 1975.”

“That’s amazing. I’d love to see them.”

“He’ll show you,” Thelma said, “It might take him three hours, but he’ll show you”.

The front door opened, and Burt came out. Tall, thin, head tipped down, fingers running along the outside molding of the doorframe. In his left fist he had two cars squeezed so hard his knuckles had gone white, a dark green ‘67 Impala and a yellow ‘70 Barracuda.

Thelma started to get up, but her knees wouldn’t let her at first. But Kayla was already gone out of that red chair, down on the concrete on her knees, talking with Burt.

“Hey, Burt,” she said. “Are those the ones that don’t belong? You want to show me where they go on the counter?”

Burt looked down at her. His fingers loosened a little, and he smiled. He held the cars out.

“Shoot, that Barracuda’s beautiful,” Kayla said. “Let’s go find its spot.”

She caught the screen door before it could slam and followed him into the cool darkness of the house.

I want you to notice that, because I’ve been telling you Thelma was the one who knew that the residents of the house. But that girl was a natural. First afternoon there, and she already knew how to relate. There ain’t a school on this earth that can teach a person to kneel on hot concrete and ask a man about his Barracuda.

Thelma sat out there by herself. The cicadas went on with their business. She pulled her black purse into her lap — the one held together at the strap with a safety pin. Her fingers found the soft edge of a Kroger receipt.

She didn’t take it out. She just touched it, feeling the place where twenty years back, she’d pressed down on it with a ballpoint pen so hard that she could still read what she’d written with nothing but her fingertips.

And thinking of that receipt got her thinking about Nadine. Todd’s mother. Every other Sunday, sitting in that living room with her hands folded over her pocketbook, looking at Thelma like she was the best thing the Lord ever put in a state-funded ranch house.

I don’t know what we’d do without you, Miss Thelma.

She said that a lot. Over and over. For years.

Thelma zipped the purse shut with a click and pushed Nadine’s voice back down where she kept it. But you push one thing down, something else comes up. That’s just the physics of it.

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What came up was her own house, three miles away. The quiet rooms. The door at the end of the hall to Lonnie’s room, unopened since the day his work shirts were hung in the closet—and those shirts were still hanging there.

And if she let herself, she could see the curve on Highway 53 where the cruiser had sat in the weeds the night they came to tell her.

She had built her whole life on preserving things. Locking doors. Leaving rooms exactly the way somebody had left them.

That’s a thing about Thelma you need to hold onto.

A sedan rounded the curve, tires crunching on the gravel. It was Darlene Pruitt’s.

Darlene got out with a pink cake box. Neat little woman, compact, silver in her hair held up in a clean clip, wearing the crisp navy slacks of a manager who has not personally cleaned up after a resident in eleven years. She came up the concrete path, but she did not step onto that slab. I noticed that. Thelma noticed it too.

“Thelma. I was in the neighborhood.”

“Darlene.” Thelma stayed in her chair. “You didn’t have to drive all the way out here.”

“I wanted to see how the transition’s going.” Darlene set the cake box on the windowsill. “Cecil, honey, why don’t you go in and see if Kayla’s got a juice box for you? I need Thelma a second.”

Cecil didn’t look up. But after a while he pushed himself up on the cane and shuffled on past her.

Darlene leaned against the awning post. Watched a car go by out on the old rural road. Then came back to Thelma.

“The state’s digitizing the old archives,” she said. “Everything in the carport storage. Every paper chart going back thirty years. Scanned and put in a searchable database. Next month.”

Thelma’s spine went straight against the plastic slats. She kept her hands flat on her purse.

“That’s a lot of files.”

“It is.” And here Darlene’s voice dropped and lost that professional shine. “They’re making it all searchable. You know what that means. People who weren’t here. People who don’t know how things were done back then. They’re going to see things, Thelma. They’re going to have questions about the old records.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Half a step closer. “Thelma. Do you ever think about Todd?”

Well.

The question hit that humid air like a slap, and everything Thelma had spent twenty years shoving down came rushing back up: the Dolly Parton poster on the west wall of that back bedroom. The hum of a Walkman. Green construction-paper birthday cards, the letters growing too big toward the end because he’d run out of room and refused to start over. White socks with Todd written inside the band in black marker.

She held her face perfectly still. She looked at Darlene’s shoulder, at the crease ironed into that white blouse.

“No,” Thelma lied. “I don’t think about him.”

Darlene studied her for a long moment. Then she reached down and tapped the box. “I brought you a lemon cake. Your favorite.”

“Thank you.”

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Darlene walked back to her car, drove off without looking back, and left behind the smell of exhaust and hot asphalt—which, if you ask me, was the smell that woman ought to have been issued at birth

By nine that night the heat had collapsed into the wet kind of dark we got down here. The hall smelled of pine cleaner and fried oil, with old floor wax underneath.

Kayla was staying to shadow the overnight. Notebook open on the kitchen table. Burt was in his room with his cars quiet on their shelves; Cecil was asleep with his cane leaned against the nightstand.

“Let me show you the med room,” Thelma said.

The med room was a linen closet somebody had converted into the med room. It wasn’t much of a room, because it was just a closet. A gray steel double-lock box on the counter.

Thelma pulled the coiled bracelet off her left hand and held the key up.

“This one opens the outer lock. The second key, the brass one, stays on the ring in the drawer. You never leave this key unattended, Kayla. If you go to the bathroom, it’s on your wrist. If you go to the kitchen, it’s on your wrist.”

She opened the box and pulled out the thick black binder.

“This is the MAR. Every pill, every dose, gets recorded. You initial the box the second the resident swallows it, and not before. You make an error, you don’t use white-out. One line through it, write error, initial it. Darlene checks every Friday. If the count’s off by one aspirin, the state hears about it.”

Kayla stood shoulder to shoulder with her in that closet, looking at the grid of little initials. “Seems like a lot of paperwork for four people.”

“It’s what keeps them safe,” Thelma said, and her voice went down low. “And it’s what keeps us out of court. Remember that.”

She locked the box, slid the bracelet back over her wrist, and cut off the light.

Now. Here’s where I quit joking for a spell.

At midnight, the house was quiet except for the refrigerator.

Then, from the hall bathroom next to the closed door of the back bedroom, the toilet flushed.

It was a deep metal rattle all the way up through the copper. It stopped. It filled. It flushed again. Stopped. Filled.

Flushed a third time.

Kayla’s pen came up off the paper. “Is that normal?”

Thelma didn’t look up from her knitting. She was working a little baby blanket, cheap pink acrylic squeaking on the metal needles. “The plumbing’s original to the house. Valve sticks sometimes.”

“It flushed three times.”

“It does that. Nothing to be concerned about. Old house.”

At one o’clock the pipes went again. Once. Pause. Twice. Pause.

Three.

Kayla sat up. “Are you sure nobody’s up? Maybe Cecil’s having trouble.”

“Cecil’s asleep.” The needles went faster. Knit, purl, knit, purl. “I checked him twenty minutes ago. Don’t go down there, Kayla. You’ll just wake everybody.”

“But the water—”

“I said leave it.” Sharper than she meant. She heard it and pulled it back and put a dry little smile on it. “We’ve had a plumber out here three times this year. Old houses have their quirks. You’ll learn to tune it out.”

Kayla looked back down at her log. Her shoulders did not come down.

At two o’clock it came again, and this time the pipes groaned behind the drywall like something heavy being dragged through the wall.

Kayla stood up. “I have to check. That sounds like it’s going to overflow. I’m not cleaning a flooded hallway on my first night.”

And she went, before Thelma could stop her. Thelma sat there with her hands frozen over the yarn and her heart going like a bird in a box.

She heard the footsteps stop. Heard the bathroom door creak.

“It’s completely dry,” Kayla called back, and her voice came muffled and strange. “The bowl’s not even full. But — shoot, it’s freezing down here. Did somebody leave a window open?”

“No,” Thelma called, tight. “Get back in the kitchen. Leave the door shut.”

Kayla came back with her arms crossed over her chest, shivering. “That hall is an icebox. Are you sure the furnace works?”

“It works.”

She did not look up. Her fingers had gone numb, but she kept those needles going, counting stitches in her head to have something to put in the silence.

At three o’clock it flushed again, three times, and each rattle in the pipes sounded like a man choking, like wet air trapped in old metal.

And then at fourteen minutes past three, the house went quiet, but it was a spooky quiet. Something wasn’t right about it.

It wasn’t the quiet of people sleeping. It was heavy. Suffocating. The refrigerator’s hum died away to nothing. The air went thick and smelled faintly of damp wool and old cedar.

Thelma stood up. Her joints popped loud as a gunshot. She walked down that carpeted hall past the locked med room door.

And she stopped.

The door to the back bedroom, the door that had been locked and empty for better than twenty years, was standing wide open.

Pale watery light came spilling out of it across the linoleum.

Todd was standing in the doorway.

Todd stood in a pool of stagnant creek water that hadn’t been there a moment before. His skin was the gray of meat kept too long, translucent in patches, sloughed away in others, showing bone that gleamed like river rock.

He wore the shirt he’d died in. Through the soaked white socks, the letters T-O-D-D bled dark, the ink running as though something under the skin were pushing it out.

He hadn’t opened his mouth. But you could see the blackness behind his teeth, and the way his left eye sat lower than the right, the socket losing its hold on the wet orb that stared and would not blink.

He took one small step forward.

His sock left a dark print on the wooden threshold. He stopped there and tipped his head slightly to one side. Then he fixed those dull, dark eyes on Thelma’s face and stood perfectly still, without making a sound.

He was waiting for her to say his name.

Thelma went back flat against the opposite wall with her fingers dug into the plaster till her nails hurt. Her throat locked up dry as ash.

And she pressed her lips together, and she would not say it.

She would not say it.

Todd waited, the water running off his chin, that one wet footprint going dark on the floor between them.

This was a week of finishing things instead of starting them, which is rarer than I’d like to admit. Sorry the post is a little rough but I had to publish it from my phone.

Here’s what actually got done, what I’m changing, and why.

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The vertical drama pitch deck is done.

Nine Vertical Drama Pitch Deck Is Done

If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve spent months building a portfolio of vertical drama scripts across horror, thriller, crime, romance, and Christian genres. Now they’re packaged: title slide, bio, genre sections, loglines, and storyboard panels for each property.

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The point of the deck isn’t only to sell these particular scripts. It’s to prove I can write in this format so I get hired to write vertical projects. That’s a different pitch, and it changes how the deck reads.

Now Comes The Producer List

A finished deck without a target list is just a nice-looking PDF.

So I’ve started building the list of producers and companies I’m pitching. Not a mass email blast. A real list, with names, with reasons each one belongs on it.

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I’ll report back honestly on this. Everybody in this space says demand for vertical writers is exploding. I’d like to find out whether that’s true or whether it’s noise, and either way you’ll hear the actual numbers.

Two films, one attorney, and the paperwork nobody posts about

I checked in this week with my entertainment attorney on both film projects.

The One-Eyed Monster is the independent horror film I plan to direct once it’s funded. The Great American Werewolf Story is the studio-level screenplay, a much bigger swing.

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She’s been tracking recent changes in the law and drafting contracts. That’s the part of filmmaking that never makes it into anybody’s behind-the-scenes post, because it isn’t cinematic. But if you’re an independent filmmaker reading this, hear me: the legal groundwork is not a formality you handle after the money shows up. Investors ask about it first.

A new strategy for Films and Fiction

I’ve built a new strategy for this newsletter based on the reader data I’ve been collecting.

I’m not laying it all out yet, because I want to have it fully in place before I describe it. But the short version is that the data told me something clear about what you actually read here versus what I assumed you read, and I’d rather follow the numbers than my own guesses.

You’ll be hearing about it soon.

Why I’m stepping back from TikTok

I’m putting TikTok on hold until I have print books to offer.

It isn’t that the platform doesn’t work. It’s that I don’t yet have the thing a TikTok viewer would go buy. Until there’s a physical book at the end of that road, the time is better spent elsewhere.

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That elsewhere is Substack posts and Notes. Substack rewards you for using what’s already inside the platform. Notes, restacks, comments on other writers’ work: that’s where the growth has come from, and it’s come faster than anything I’ve done off-platform. When I’ve got books in hand, TikTok goes back on the table.

A mailing list built only for fiction readers

The last piece I’m working on is a separate mailing list for readers who want my fiction and not much else.

That’s a real distinction. Some of you are here for the film essays and the behind-the-scenes reporting and have no particular interest in my horror novels. Some of you want the books and would rather not get everything else. Sending both groups the same thing serves neither one well.

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So the fiction list will be its own thing. If you want the inside track on the novels, you’ll be able to opt in, and if you’d rather stay here for the film side, nothing changes for you.

What’s next

• Final polish and pictures on the pitch deck

• Producer outreach begins

• Contracts moving forward on both films

• New Substack structure rolling out

• Fiction mailing list going live

I’ll keep you updated on all of it, including the parts that don’t work. That’s the whole point of doing this in public.

If you’re building something similar, a portfolio, a film, an audience from scratch, subscribe and follow along. I’ll show you the real numbers as I get them.

I was in fifth grade when I wrote a story called Blood Face.

He kind of looked like the Universal Frankenstein monster, heavy brow and all, except he had blood all down his face. He lived alone in a castle outside of town, and the castle looked like a Universal castle too, because in fourth grade I had never seen a castle in my life. The castles from the Universal monster movies and fairy tales were what I thought all castles looked like.

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He wasn’t actually a monster. That was the point of the story. The town decided what he was before anybody bothered to find out. He died at the end. I don’t remember how anymore, only that it was a tragic death, like The Hunchback of Notre Dame or King Kong.

My media diet during childhood consisted of slasher movies, teen movies, Spielberg and Lucas movies.

And the orange books.

I will get to those later.

My Diana Ross Was My Fourth-Grade Schoolteacher

The year before, my fourth-grade teacher noticed I could write.

She’s the first person who ever did. And she didn’t just put something nice in the margin and hand the paper back. She arranged for me to walk down the hall to the younger classes and read my monster story out loud to them.

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It was an intimate setting, just me reading to a few kids sitting in a circle. They enjoyed the monster story I had come up with.

I’d bet a good many of you have a version of that story. A teacher. An aunt. A librarian. Somebody who read what you wrote and looked at you a little differently afterward. If you’ve got one, put it in the comments. Those people deserve to be named out loud more often than they are.

The Other Thing That Happened in Fourth Grade

That same year, I learned exactly what it feels like to be an outsider.

Two boys in that class made a project out of me. They told the other kids to hate me and, for reasons I still don’t understand, the other kids listened. I thought those two kids were assholes. Everybody else apparently thought they weren’t. When Valentine’s Day came around, they told the class not to give me a card, and nobody did.

Then one kid noticed he and I owned the same brand of shoes and announced he’d have to get rid of his. He didn’t want to be caught wearing the same shoes as me.

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Forty-some years later, I can still hear it. I’m not writing it down to settle up with anybody. I just want you to know how stories are sometimes formed in the minds of writers. I bring it up because of what came next.

I got held back that year.

Those two boys were the only ones from my old class who came back to visit me, not because they liked me, but so they could laugh about it afterward. I heard them laughing in the hallway.

At the time, it felt like the worst thing that could happen to a kid. Looking back, it may have saved me. I was still shy, still the odd one in the room. But in that new class, nobody was an asshole like those two guys were. There’s a real difference between feeling like an outsider and having a group decide to make you one.

The Crestwood House Monsters Series (the Orange Books)

Our school library had a shelf of orange monster books, and in fourth grade I went through them one after another.

Frankenstein. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. King Kong. The Phantom of the Opera. The Wolf Man.

Look at that list. Not one of them is a villain, not really. Every one is a tragedy wearing a monster costume. The creature is lonely. Quasimodo is good, and nobody can see it. Kong falls. The Phantom loses her. Larry Talbot suffers from being bitten by a werewolf.

And almost none of them get rescued. Those books were not telling me, Don’t worry, eventually everyone will see how wonderful you are. They were telling me something harder. Sometimes the crowd never understands the outsider until it’s too late.

There were other books on that shelf. Adventure, sports, mysteries. Those aren’t the ones I kept checking out. I was drawn to the orange books for a reason.

I thought I was just reading scary stories. Underneath, I was learning what monsters could represent.

The Scarecrow Killer, Unfinished

That repeated year, in the new class, I wrote another story: The Scarecrow Killer. And one of the boys in that class and I decided to film it on my 8mm camera.

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We were serious about it. We both wrote stories, and we were going to film them both. We talked it through. We wrote them out. We got the prettiest girls in class interested in being in them, which felt like a major production milestone at eleven years old.

And then we never shot a frame.

I don’t remember why. Something else came along, or summer did.

I’ve thought about that a lot lately because, in many ways, I’m still doing the exact same thing. Different camera. Same woods behind my house. Same feeling of talking a movie into existence with someone and hoping that this time, it actually gets made.

Which Brings Me to Valentine, Be Mine!

Years later, I was up one night in a mood, thinking about school, and a story showed up almost whole.

Valentine, Be Mine! comes out of the same place Blood Face did. Same feeling, different decade, a mixture of everything that raised me. Slasher movies, ninja movies, and John Hughes. There’s a class reunion. There’s a ninja named Destiny Crane. There’s a principal who could have walked straight out of detention in 1985. And there’s a bully named Corky who grew up into a failed juggler in clown makeup, which I would love to tell you I made up.

I didn’t.

One of the boys who made fourth grade miserable for me really did juggle in a clown suit in a school play.

Sometimes your subconscious hands you the symbolism for free.

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The Valentine scene works because it comes from real life. I’ve found that when stories are inspired by real events, those moments tend to connect with audiences best. They’re real, not just story or genre beats. That’s where a writer’s voice comes from: the parts of a story only you can write because they came from you.

The situation may be familiar, but something feels a little different.

That difference is voice.

Horror is good at symbolism and psychological pain. Shame becomes a deformity. Rejection becomes a curse. A community’s fear of one person becomes an actual mob with torches. And then a writer gets to do the thing fourth grade would never let me do, which is turn the camera around like a mirror and show that the monster is the mob, not the outsider.

I won’t tell you how Valentine, Be Mine! ends. I’ll say the ending isn’t set off by the thing you’d expect.

It goes back to a shy kid, a shelf of orange books, and a teacher who walked him down the hall to share his stories with others.

My report card read: F in every subject. A+ in creative writing.

My writer’s voice developed in a school library, with a lonely kid pulling those orange monster books off the shelf one after another, thinking he was just reading scary stories.

Meanwhile, somewhere underneath, a writer was learning what monsters were for.

How did your voice develop as a writer? When was your voice born? And as a reader, why do you connect with some voices and not others?

Note for producers: I originally wrote Valentine, Be Mine! as a slasher feature. I now think it works better as a vertical. If you’d like to see the sample, get in touch. The pitch deck is finished—eight vertical samples across horror, thriller, and faith, plus one complete sixty-episode series. I start pitching this week or next, and I’ll report back here with real numbers on whether the demand for vertical writers is real or hype.

So, here’s a list of horror movies set in Tennessee or filmed in Tennessee. Some of them are free right now, and one of them you can’t watch at all, which I will explain.

I live in Tennessee; horror isn’t a category to me. It’s the road I drive to work.

The Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987): The Cabin Was in Morristown, Tennessee

Most people don’t know this one. The original Evil Dead was shot in a real hunting cabin on Inman Bend Road outside Morristown, Tennessee. Sam Raimi was twenty-one years old. There was no location scout. The cast and crew went out and found the place themselves, then thirteen of them lived in it during the shoot, with no plumbing and no easy way to get a medic out there if somebody got hurt. Which somebody did, repeatedly.

The plot is the one everybody has absorbed by osmosis: five college kids go to a remote cabin, find a book bound in human flesh and a tape recorder in the cellar, play the recording out loud, and wake up something that starts taking them one at a time. Ash is the last one standing.

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The cabin burned down about a year after the movie came out. Trespassers threw a party out there. All that’s left now is part of the stone fireplace, and the land is private property with no-trespassing signs all over it, so admire it from your couch.

Evil Dead II was not filmed in Tennessee. Dino De Laurentiis funded that one, so it shot in Wadesboro, North Carolina, near his Wilmington offices. But it’s still set in Tennessee — there’s a sign on Jake’s tow truck in that movie that reads Fairview, Tennessee.

As of this writing, Evil Dead II is free on ad-supported services and the first one isn’t. Both of them drift on and off the free tiers constantly, so check before you buy. And to be clear, I mean the originals, not the newer entries in the franchise. Raimi has a strange sense of humor that you either get, or you don’t. The first film plays it mostly straight. The second one is a Three Stooges short with a chainsaw.

An American Haunting (2005): The Bell Witch, Dressed Up for Hollywood

If the Bell Witch is your thing — and if you grew up in Middle Tennessee, it was somebody’s thing at every sleepover you ever went to — An American Haunting is the polished version of that story.

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It’s set in Red River, Adams, Tennessee, starting in 1817, and it follows John Bell and his daughter Betsy as an unseen force starts tormenting the family, focusing most of its attention on the girl. Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek play the parents, which is a lot more star power than a Robertson County ghost story usually gets.

Fair warning: it was actually filmed in Romania, not Tennessee, so the woods won’t look like your woods. But it’s old-fashioned haunted-house horror, more dread than gore, and it’s the most family-table-friendly ghost movie on this list. It’s usually a rental, though it surfaces on the free ad-supported services often enough that it’s worth a search before you pay.

Dolly (2025): The Nastiest Tennessee Horror Movie in Years

If you miss the video nasties, this is your movie.

Dolly was directed by Rod Blackhurst, shot on Super 16mm over nineteen days in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and set in the Tennessee mountains. A woman named Macy gets abducted while hiking by a masked figure who doesn’t want to kill her, exactly. It wants to raise her. Being treated as its child, fed, sung to sleep, and kept by the creature makes all of it far more disturbing than a knife ever could.

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I’m warning you up front. Audiences raised on watered-down PG-13 horror have a hard time with this one. It’s grimy, it’s mean, and it wallows in rot and filth in a way that recalls The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on purpose.

But if your inner voice is saying that what the world really needs is more movies like Mother’s Day (1980) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, or if watching Buffalo Bill dance in The Silence of the Lambs puts a tear in your eye for the good old days, then Dolly was made specifically for you. It premiered at Fantastic Fest, hit theaters in March, and landed on Shudder in April. Not free, but not hard to find.

Ernest Scared Stupid (1991): The Safest One on the List

If you want something the whole family can watch, or you just don’t want anything brutal in the house tonight, this is your pick. Ernest accidentally releases a troll named Trantor, and the fate of an entire town’s children lands on the shoulders of a man who built a career out of a milk commercial.

Jim Varney was a genuinely great comic actor, and he brought a pile of film work to Tennessee. He lived here. He died here, in White House, in 2000.

Which brings me to the next movie.

Blood, Friends and Money (1997): The Tennessee Horror Movie You Probably Can’t Watch

I’ve never seen this film. I’m not sure anybody has.

It was written and produced by Tim Ormond, directed by Armanda Costanza, and filmed around Nashville with local talent. Jim Varney plays a character called The Old Mariner, telling a story to the rest of the cast. It’s a cabin-in-the-woods slasher, and it screened for about a week in 1997 before the distributor sat on it. Somebody tried to sell the rights on eBay in 2015 for ninety thousand dollars. As far as I can tell, it went nowhere.

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Tim Ormond’s father was Ron Ormond, who made exploitation pictures and then, after surviving a plane crash, turned around and made some of the most fever-dream religious films ever produced in Nashville. That lineage is about as Southern Gothic as it gets, and I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time.

Here’s why this movie matters to me. When Tim was making it, I was a kid who wanted to make movies, and he was kind enough to write me letters and answer my questions. This was before email, or when email was so new that most people didn’t know what to do with it. He offered to let me come watch and help him edit.

I never went.

I was too scared to drive on the interstate. That’s the whole reason I didn’t go. I’ve written elsewhere about my shyness and my fears, and this is the sharpest example I’ve got of what they cost me. I also remember wanting Armanda Costanza to shoot my film someday, if I ever got one made. I was already casting a movie that didn’t exist while turning down an invitation to a real one.

What finally cured me of the interstate was driving to Nashville to see the women at The Classic Cat. That’s a different article, and I’ll write it eventually.

Deathwoods (2026): The New Tennessee Slasher, Streaming September 1

Fast forward. In 2024, the planets lined up, and I finally shot something — not a feature, but a proof-of-concept short in Nashville called The One-Eyed Monster. Someone dropped out at the last minute, and Scott Conner stepped in to help. While we were filming, Scott talked about a movie he was making called Deathwoods.

It’s out. Or it’s about to be. Deathwoods streams exclusively on Screambox starting September 1, with rental and purchase on Prime Video, after Cineverse picked it up.

It’s a throwback eighties slasher set in the woods around Old Hickory, Tennessee. Twenty years back, the Wallace family lived deep in those woods, and after a murder-suicide the rumors curdled into a legend about something malformed still out there. Present day, a group of friends goes camping to cheer up a buddy after a breakup. It does not cheer him up. Felissa Rose from Sleepaway Camp is in it, and the whole thing was shot in fourteen days.

Fourteen days. Remember that number the next time you tell yourself you can’t afford to make anything.

The Thread Running Through All of This

Here’s what I keep noticing. Sam Raimi shot a proof-of-concept short called Within the Woods in 1978 to raise money, and that short became The Evil Dead, made in a Tennessee cabin by people who had no business pulling it off. Scott made his in fourteen days. I made mine at fifty, twenty-some years after I was too afraid to drive to Nashville to watch a man edit his.

Everything connects if you stay in it long enough. That’s the actual lesson of this list, more than any of the movies on it.

Start with Evil Dead II if you want free and funny. Dolly if you want to feel bad about yourself. Ernest Scared Stupid if the kids are up.

And on September 1, get Deathwoods. Somebody from around here made it, and that’s reason enough.

If you’ve got a Tennessee horror movie I missed, tell me in the comments.

The 1980s were really two decades wearing one pair of parachute pants. The first half was about partying, prosperity, cocaine, and how great America was. The second half was about fear—fear of AIDS, fear of nuclear war, fear that the party had a bill coming due. And nowhere did that split personality show up more clearly than in the movies Hollywood made about teenagers.

Buy Me A Coffee

Walk into a video store in 1985, and you could rent two films sitting a few shelves apart that told you completely opposite things about the same kids. In the teen comedy, sexual conquest was the finish line of adolescence, the thing that turned a boy into a man. In the slasher, sex and drugs were a death sentence. Sneak off to the cabin with your girlfriend and a machete would find you before the credits rolled.

Same teenagers. Same parties. Same decade. Two completely different verdicts.

An Invitation and a Warning

I don’t think most of these filmmakers set out to deliver a message. They were responding to the culture around them and using what worked as story tools. But the culture they were responding to was genuinely confused about sex, and the movies inherited that confusion.

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The sexual revolution had loosened the old rules about premarital sex, contraception, and open talk about desire. But the older Christian and Puritan moral imagination never actually left the building. By the 1980s, America was effectively saying two things at once: you should be sexually liberated, and sex outside the accepted boundaries is dangerous, shameful, and possibly fatal.

The teen comedy embodied the invitation. The slasher embodied the warning.

Look at the two genres side by side, and the mirror image is almost too perfect. In the comedy, adults exist to prevent pleasure; in the slasher, adults were the boundaries that should have been there. In the comedy, sex marks maturity; in the slasher, sex makes you vulnerable. Breaking rules brings freedom in one and consequences in the other. The night is an adventure in one and a hunting ground in the other.

Here’s the thing, though—the two genres weren’t actually opposites. They agreed on the fundamental picture: teenagers are obsessed with sex. They only disagreed about what happened next. In Porky’s, sexual pursuit produces comedy, friendship, and masculine status. In Friday the 13th, it produces isolation and a spear through the bunk bed. One genre laughed at adolescence. The other punished it.

The Machete Was a Screenwriting Tool First

It’s tempting to read every slasher as a Puritan sermon, but a lot of the “sex equals death” pattern started as pure storytelling efficiency. Sex scenes conveniently separate characters from the group. Teenagers wander off to bedrooms, barns, tents, and parked cars—places where they can be attacked without witnesses. Drugs and alcohol served the same purpose, giving characters a believable reason not to notice the shadow at the window. Desire leads the character away from safety. That’s a horror mechanism, not a theology.

But repeat a mechanism enough times, and it starts carrying a moral message whether you intended one or not.

Even then, the “slasher morality” idea gets overstated. Everybody says Jason kills teenagers because they have sex, but Friday the 13th is more complicated than its reputation. Pamela Voorhees blames irresponsible counselors, kids who were off having sex instead of watching her son when he drowned. Her violence grows out of grief and vengeance. And once Jason takes over the franchise, he kills nearly everyone: virgins, kids, responsible people, innocent bystanders. The films never operate by a consistent moral code. The more accurate pattern is that sex doesn’t cause death; it distracts you from noticing the killer.

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The moral reading came from the imagery. The sexually active characters die naked and exposed, while the watchful “final girl” survives. And the final girl is her own fascinating contradiction. You can read her conservatively—the good girl lives. But you can also read her as unexpectedly feminist: the ordinary young woman who turns out to be the most observant, capable person in the movie, who confronts male violence and saves herself after every traditional authority figure fails. Slashers punished female sexuality while simultaneously creating some of the most powerful female protagonists of the decade. That contradiction is very American and very 1980s.

Meanwhile, over in the comedies, the girls weren’t faring much better. Movies like Porky’s treated sex as a scoreboard for young men, and they were so completely aligned with the boys’ point of view that voyeurism and coercion could pass as harmless mischief. The girl’s humiliation mattered less than the boy’s achievement. Those films weren’t announcing that consent didn’t matter; they belonged to a culture that failed to take it seriously enough to recognize the ugliness of its own jokes.

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That’s the strangest part of the pairing: the same act—spying through a window, sneaking into a bedroom, pursuing a girl who said no—plays as comedy in one genre and terror in the other. Comedy identifies with the pursuer. Horror identifies with the person being watched. Genre decides whose experience matters.

The Movies That Broke the Mold

The most interesting films of the decade refused to pick a side.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) may be the most important example. It delivers the sex and comedy the genre promised, but it doesn’t pretend sex is harmless. Stacy’s storyline runs through disappointment, abandonment, pregnancy, and abortion. The movie treats sex as neither a mortal sin nor the solution to adolescence. It says teenagers have sex, the consequences are real, and girls usually carry those consequences alone.

The Last American Virgin (1982) pulls off the decade’s cruelest bait-and-switch. For most of its running time it looks like another crude sex comedy, and then the ending walks in and burns the genre’s comforting assumptions to the ground. The sensitive boy doesn’t get the girl as a reward for being kind. The film exposes the entitlement hiding inside the “nice guy” fantasy—and then refuses to hand the audience the ending it came for. I’ll admit a personal stake here: that movie is one of the films that inspired my serial The Invisible Simp, along with 70s and 80s slashers, and the films The Karate Kid and Revenge of the Nerds. Once you see how the nice-guy myth and the slasher’s punishment machinery are built from the same parts, you can’t stop finding stories in the wreckage.

Buy Me A Pizza

Say Anything (1989) went the other direction and treated teenagers as emotionally complicated people rather than sex-crazed cartoons or bodies waiting on a killer. Lloyd holding that boombox outside Diane’s window was pure romance in 1989. Today it can look like the opening scene of a restraining-order documentary. But context matters; he’s not threatening her or demanding she come outside. It’s an extravagant expression of hurt from a different cultural moment, and the culture’s later suspicion of gestures like that tells its own story about where we were headed.

And then there’s Heathers (1989), which is practically a ‘90s movie wearing 1980s clothes. It takes the bright hallways and popular cliques of the John Hughes universe and reveals the nihilism underneath. J.D. shows up as the mysterious rebel boyfriend, the romantic fantasy every teen movie had been selling—and the film slowly exposes what that fantasy can conceal: manipulation, control, and violence. By the end of the decade, the teen romance had become the horror story.

The Fly in the Ointment

If you want to see the decade’s sexual anxiety evolve in real time, watch The Fly (1986). Cronenberg has said he conceived it as a story about disease, aging, and mortality in general, and it works as all of those. But no 1986 audience could fully separate it from AIDS. Seth Brundle starts out healthy, confident, sexually alive. The condition begins after intimacy. His body deteriorates in visible, terrifying stages. Veronica loves him but fears what contact could mean, then discovers she’s pregnant and terrified of what she might be carrying. Medicine offers nothing. The man she loves slowly disappears inside the disease.

What makes The Fly more mature than any “sex equals death” slasher is its compassion. Seth isn’t being punished for having sex. His tragedy is that bodies fail, disease is unfair, and love can’t always rescue someone from physical destruction. And it marks a profound shift in the decade’s horror: in the early slashers, sex was followed by a killer entering the room. In The Fly, the danger was already inside the body. You could escape Jason. Brundle’s enemy could not be separated from Brundle.

One Country, Arguing With Itself

So which genre told the truth about 1980s teenagers? Both did, because they were never really two separate Americas. They were two halves of the same American mind—one fantasizing about liberation, the other fearing what liberation might unleash. Even their endings betray them: the “rebellious” comedies close by affirming romance, masculinity, and social order, while the slashers let audiences enjoy the sex, drugs, and nudity before piously punishing all of it. Both genres sold sexual freedom at the box office and retreated to conventional morality by the last reel.

Or to put it plainer: teen comedies showed what teenagers wanted to do when the adults left. Slasher movies showed what adults feared would happen when they did.

The early ‘80s asked what teenagers would do if nobody was in control. The late ‘80s asked what those freedoms might cost. The ‘90s would spend a whole decade asking whether any of it had made them happy. But that’s another article.

The Vertical Portfolio Is Finished

This week I’m proud to say I finished my nine vertical samples — including one that’s a complete 60-episode series. If you’ve been following along, you know this has been the mountain I’ve been climbing for weeks: nine distinct properties spanning home invasion, hospital thrillers, faith-based romance, Cold War adventure, crime and grace, and a horror-comedy I still can’t believe I got away with writing.

There’s still work to do before anything goes out the door. The samples need one more polish pass, and I have to swap out a few pictures in the pitch deck that aren’t pulling their weight. A pitch deck lives or dies on first impressions, and a handful of images in mine are working against the material instead of for it. Once those two things are handled, I start pitching to producers and companies.

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Here’s the part I’m most curious about, and the part I’ll be reporting back to you on honestly: everyone in this space keeps saying that demand for vertical writers is higher than the supply. That the platforms are desperate for scripts and can’t find enough people who understand the format. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s just hype — the kind of gold-rush talk that surrounds every new corner of the industry. I’m about to find out firsthand, and whatever I learn, good or bad, I’ll share it here. That’s the whole point of this publication.

TikTok Is Actually Working (Quietly)

The other thing I’ve been doing this week is playing around with TikTok, and I think it’s starting to pay off. Readers appear to be funneling through TikTok and landing on my Substack as subscribers. They’re free subscribers, not paid — I want to be clear about that — but they’re real, and they’re exactly the audience I’m trying to reach.

What surprises me most is how little effort the posts require. They’re simple to make. I’m not chasing trends, learning dances, or trying to become a viral sensation. I have zero interest in being TikTok famous. What I’m trying to do is connect with my true fans — the readers who actually want what I make. If a thirty-second post introduces even a handful of the right people to my work each week, that’s a win, and it’s a sustainable one.

My longer-term theory is that once I focus on getting my books onto Kindle Unlimited, the flow of readers will steady out. TikTok brings them in the door; the books give them somewhere to stay. That’s the idea, anyway. We’ll see if reality cooperates.

Turning American Eden Into a No-Budget Film

I’ve also started thinking seriously about how to turn American Eden into a no-budget film instead of a microbudget one.

The difference matters more than it sounds. A microbudget film still requires raising money, and raising money means waiting, pitching, and depending on other people’s timelines. A no-budget film requires nothing but my own time and effort. If I can figure out how to make American Eden for essentially nothing, then there are no more excuses. The thing simply gets made.

The catch — and it’s a big one — is doing it with quality. Anyone can shoot a no-budget movie. Shooting one that doesn’t look like a no-budget movie is the actual problem, and it’s the one I’m chewing on now.

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But here’s what I love about this kind of experiment: the stakes are almost nonexistent. If the film turns out the way I hope, that would be wonderful. If it doesn’t, I never have to show it to anyone, and I’ve lost very little. That’s a freedom I don’t have with The One-Eyed Monster and The Great American Werewolf Story — both of those are still with my entertainment attorney, moving through a process where other people’s opinions and timelines matter a great deal. American Eden can be my sandbox.

A Perk I Didn’t Know I Had

This week I attended my first Amy Suto meeting through Sutoscience. It turns out this is a perk of being a founding member — one I didn’t even know I had until recently, which tells you something about how many benefits sit unused in the memberships we already pay for.

If you’re serious about succeeding on Substack, you should check her out. Amy is genuinely successful on this platform, and there’s a real difference between advice from people who theorize about Substack and advice from people who have actually built something here. She’s in the second category.

Joining Marketing by Shelby

Along the same lines, I’ve become a member of Marketing by Shelby. Shelby’s expertise is helping creators connect with their 1,000 true fans without feeling like they have to live on social media — which, if you’ve read anything I’ve written about my approach to platforms, you’ll know is exactly the philosophy I’m trying to build my career around.

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I haven’t done a deep dive into her materials yet or attended one of her meetings, but it’s on the calendar, and it’s something I’m genuinely excited about. If TikTok is teaching me anything, it’s that reaching the right hundred people beats reaching the wrong hundred thousand. I’m hoping Shelby’s work sharpens that instinct into a strategy.

Your Turn

That’s my week: nine samples finished, a pitch deck almost ready, a quiet TikTok funnel, a no-budget experiment taking shape, and two new resources in my corner.

Now I want to hear from you. How has your week been with your creative projects? What are you building, finishing, or wrestling with? And if you enjoy what I do here, tell me what you’d like to see more of — the behind-the-scenes industry posts, the craft breakdowns, the film essays, or something else entirely. Your answers genuinely shape what I write next.

Thanks for reading.

I’m reassessing everything I publish here, and I need two minutes of your time to shape what comes next.

I offer a lot on the menu: film essays, fiction, behind-the-scenes stuff, interviews, videos — and I know that can get confusing. If there’s something you’re less interested in, I want you to see less of it so you can see more of what you actually came here for. Horror writing and filmmaking are what I’m most passionate about, but I want this space to serve you.

Take the survey here.

And here’s the thing: even if you’ve never commented before, especially if you never commented before, I want to hear from you. Lurkers, this is your moment.

Here’s what the data tells me so far, and what I want to know from you.

Film Essays and Roundups

According to my numbers, these rank higher than anything else. That could be because the SEO-friendly titles are what people are searching for, or it could be that this is genuinely what you enjoy reading most. I’m talking about articles like Seven Films Worth Your Time Streaming on Tubi and Watching Sinners as a White Man: Horror, Culture and the Battle for America’s Soul. I’ve also done some deeper dives behind the paywall, like The First Cut Is the Deepest: Why Jaws Still Terrifies Us.

Quick question that would help me a lot: did you find me through a Google search, or are you here for the long haul? Knowing the difference tells me whether these essays are bringing in readers or just clicks.

Fiction Stories

Some of you are here for the fiction — stories like The Invisible Simp and Terror Train. Thank you, because this is what I love writing most.

What I really want to know is how you prefer to read fiction:

• Serialized on a site like this, or on Ream?

• Purchased as a complete book on Amazon or Apple Books?

• Through your Kindle Unlimited membership?

Tell me how you like to read your fiction, and how you’d like to read mine. This one directly shapes where my next books land.

Behind-the-Scenes Stuff

Some of you enjoy the behind-the-curtain posts — like when I shot the short version of The One-Eyed Monster, my talk about vertical dramas, or updates on projects like American Eden. If you want more of that, say so. I’ve got plenty more where it came from.

The Mystical Stuff

This one came in right behind the behind-the-scenes content, and honestly, it surprised me a little. Some of you are drawn to my posts about real spiritual experiences — pieces like My Spiritual Backrooms: 3 TRUE Encounters That Changed My Reality. These aren’t traditional ghost stories. They’re the strange encounters, visions, and moments from my own life that don’t fit neatly into any category the stuff that enters into my fiction, whether I plan it or not. If the mystical side of what I do is part of why you’re here, tell me in the survey, because I’ve got more of these experiences than I’ve ever written down.

Everything Else

I also do the Hot Chicks and Horror Flicks interviews, YouTube videos, and posts about using AI in creative work. Those didn’t score as high in the data, but data isn’t everything. If those are the reason you’re here, speak up now, because I’d hate to cut something you love based on silence.

The Bottom Line

Based on what I’m seeing, you can expect more film essays, deep dives, more fiction, more behind-the-scenes content, more mystical stuff, and less of the rest for now. But the survey can change that. This is your chance to vote.

Take the survey here.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being here.

Kevin Frasure, Horror Writer

Can I Have Two Minutes of Your Time?

Ruthie cried till she couldn’t cry anymore. I held her on the bottom stair with her ruined fingers wrapped in dish towels, and I told her lies. I told her morning was coming, and morning fixes things. Gray light crawled up the wallpaper while I said it. A light shined on Ruthie’s face, creating an angelic glow. Why couldn’t more people be like Ruthie? She’s slow but innocent.

Bobby Jo pushed himself up from the floor, where he had spent the night braced against the door. He straightened his coat, swept his hair back with both hands, then drew my grandfather’s bolt and stepped outside.

Lana lay on the threshold stone.

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She had crossed the yard in the dark on whatever strength remained and made it back to our door. Both hands clung to the sill, her fingers stretched toward the iron bolt her own husband had slid into place. The men from town had used her all night against the mill wall. They had beaten her until she looked more like butchered meat than Lana. Her chipped coral fingernails rested inches from the bolt.

The door had held.

My door held.

“Get up, girl.” Bobby Jo nudged her arm with the toe of his shoe. “Day’s burning.”

She did not get up.

He bent over her and stepped over her body like she was nothing but horseshit. His mouth tightened for a moment, then his face went blank again.

That blank look did something to me.

I grabbed the shotgun from my mantel and came back with the muzzle pressed against his powder-blue lapel.

“Walk to the county seat, preacher. If God is anything I ever believed, don’t let me see you again this side of the judgment.”

He walked down my lane with his coat draped over one arm, dust rising around his shoes. He never looked back at Lana.

The last I heard of Bobby Jo Cole came from an Alabama newspaper that October. There he stood beneath a revival tent, flashing his gold tooth before a packed crowd.

Martyrdom draws people in.

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I carried Lana inside and laid her on Ruthie’s bed. Ruthie washed her face, wrung out the rag, and washed it again. She kept going long after the blood and dirt were gone. Lana began to look almost like a woman again. Almost…

Then I rolled up my sleeves and walked to town.

They stood on the feed store porch in the morning sun, a dozen of them, coffee steaming, and the talk died off porch to porch ahead of me like I was weather coming. Vess had his thumbs in his belt. I stopped in the street where the whole square could hear.

“Look at me. Every man of you, look at me. Dale Tillman. Wesley. Roby Prater. Amos Suggs, you were baptized twice, you old fool; you told me the water didn’t take the first time. I fed you, men from my table, and I buried your mothers, and last night I heard your voices in my yard, and there is a girl dead in my daughter’s bed this morning, and her hands—” My voice went. I stood in the street and made it come back. “Her hands were on my doorsill. She got that far. Twenty-three years old. Now which of you is coming with me to Sheriff Prater, and which of you is putting on a necktie for the trial, because shame’s already sitting on this town like buzzards on a dead mule, and the only question left is whether the law gets here before the Lord does.”

Boots shifted. Not one eye held mine. Roby studied the street. Old Suggs looked down at his coffee mug.

Vess came down one step.

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“Terrible thing come into this town, brother. Come in with them strangers. I felt a check in my spirit. Something just wasn’t right with them folks.” He drew out his billfold and counted money without hurrying. “Church’ll stand the burial. Closed casket, quiet, and done. That’s what’s Christian, and that’s what’s offered.”

He held out the bills as the sun caught the keys.

I looked at the money for a long time, and I understood, standing in that street, that there was no law in Carthan County and never had been, only Judd Vess’s keys, and the last door in this town had already done all its holding.

I let the bills fall in the dust and walked home.

I will tell you what I did then, because I swore to tell it all, and because I have quit knowing whether it was prophecy or murder of the dead, and a man ought to say the things he has quit knowing.

I took Lana to the smokehouse. I laid her out on clean butcher paper on the cutting bench where I have dressed hogs for forty years, and I took down the hacksaw, and I did to that child what the men of Gibbs Creek had already done, only slower, and sober, and weeping. The saw bound up in bone, and I backed it out and set it again. I worked from the joints the way you work any carcass, and my hands did it steady while the rest of me stood off in the corner of the smokehouse hollering at them to stop, and I numbered every cut out loud so it would be counted, so it would be a sign and not a butchering, and twelve times I said her name, which was the only whole name of hers I ever learned. Twelve bundles wrapped in butcher paper and tied with mill twine.

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I looked down at my hands. I had plowed forty years with them, but some days I no longer knew whose they were.

On each bundle I wrote the same words in carpenter’s pencil: CONSIDER WHAT WAS DONE. TAKE COUNSEL. SPEAK.

At dusk I drove the truck up the gap and set the twelve of them at the Garden’s gate, stacked like a cord of stove wood, and I rang the bell they keep there, and I drove home and did not stay to watch them opened. I have quit knowing, but I knew what I was ringing. You do not ring a bell like that to bring peace. I rang it anyway. God forgive me, I rang it, and my hands were steady on the wheel the whole way down.

That night the loudspeaker came on across the hollow.

Sound carries down off Jubal Ridge of an evening, always has, and Prophet Reynold Frank’s voice came over my dark fields soft as a bedtime story.

“Children. Children, I have preached you peace. Two years I preached it, and I’d have preached it till the last day. But the Book my mama read says there’s a time for peace and a time for war, and children, this ain’t no hootenanny. This is a battle. You’ve seen what come to the gate. You’ve seen what the valley does to a stranger, to a sister. That town has called itself Christian while it rotted, and the season’s turned, and the harvest don’t ask the corn’s permission. It is time for that corrupt town to pay the price.”

A sound went up after, from sixty throats, and it was not a hymn, and it was not a war cry. It was both. That was the worst of it. It was both, and it was glad.

They came down the gap past midnight with their headlights off.

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I stood at my dark window and watched the trucks roll under the moon, quiet, patient, the way Vess’s trucks had rolled into my yard, and I held Ruthie against my chest with her towel-wrapped hands between us, and I did not walk out my open door, and I did not ring any bell for Gibbs Creek. Let God weigh that with the rest.

It came to us across the fields in pieces. Glass somewhere. A shout cut short. The church bell started up wild and crooked, rung by hands that didn’t know bells, and quit. Gunfire then, not a volley, just one and one and one, spread out, unhurried, moving up Church Street like a man going door to door on some errand. I heard dogs barking and screen doors being ripped apart. A woman’s voice carried the whole valley for one breath. The young people from the Garden were moving through Gibeah, dragging the old from their beds and killing them in their own yards. The same flower children who had preached peace now worked with knives, axes, and farm tools. They showed the town the same patience the town had shown Lana. It was a horrible sight to see, and I only saw part of it. The hippies now acted like animals, looking for blood and who they could cancel.

By three in the morning, the sky above the square had turned orange.

The steeple stood black against the flames until the roof beneath it gave way. Fire spread from the church to the parsonage, then crossed the street to the feed store. Windows burst. Telephone wires burned loose and fell into the road.

Nobody rang the bell again.

The Petty pasture between us glowed like a lamp all night. No rain came. No rain ever came.

I went in at first light with the truck, for whatever hands might need pulling out, and I will not write the most of what I saw, because it looked like my yard had looked, multiplied by a town, and the ones done unto had deserved it precisely as much as Lana had, which is a sentence I have set down and cannot make sense of, and there is the whole sickness of that summer in one line. In the feed store ashes I found Vess’s key ring, all his keys fused into one lump of iron. Every lock in Gibbs Creek, melted into one, opening nothing.

That winter, they tried some of the Garden men over at the county seat. Frank turned his own trial into a sermon. I read about that in the paper, too.

Lana lies in the Odom plot beside Ellen, under her one name and the only date of hers I knew. No church would pray over her, there being no church left standing and none that deserved to, so I prayed it myself, and Ruthie set the flowers, and her hands healed into their scars around the stems.

First cool evening of September, I walked down to the hives.

The bees hung at their doors and fanned. I stood before them with my hat off, and I told it all, start to finish, the whole summer, nothing left in my pocket, the strangers, the keys, the bolt, the smokehouse, the fire, because untold bees will swarm and quit you, and everything else had. I told them I had quit knowing right from wrong. That I looked for the righteous side of that summer through every window of my house and it was not there, not on the porch, not on the ridge, not in the smokehouse, not in this county, and nothing seems right anymore, and I said Lana’s name last, so they would stay.

The hum held steady in the boxes. They stayed.

In the dusk at the fence line, Ruthie pursed her lips and made the whip-poor-will call, the first voice out of my girl since June, and the birds answered her from three directions, and I stood amongst my bees and wept.

These days, we leave the front door open in the evening. The lamp stays lit, and two chairs sit on the porch facing the road, ready for whoever might come walking out of the dark.

Judges 21:25 In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

Can I Have Two Minutes Of Your Time?

Three years ago I wrote a screenplay called The One-Eyed Monster. Some weeks I feel like I haven’t moved an inch since I typed FADE OUT. Then I look back at where I started, and I’m honestly amazed at how far I’ve come.

If you follow this publication, you know the direction I’m taking it: behind the curtain. Not the highlight reel, the real ledger. What I finished, what I avoided, what it cost me, and what the numbers actually look like for a guy making a movie and building a writing career around a full-time job. This is the first of those reports. Let’s start with how I got here.

The First Monster I Had to Fight Was Me

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The bolt slammed into place, and the lamp flickered as the door shook. Behind me, the house went still. Ruthie stood halfway up the stairs, gripping the railing so hard her knuckles had turned white. Lana stood at the bottom of the stairs in Ruthie's borrowed nightgown, barefoot on my floor. She wasn't shaking. That was what scared me most. She looked like she already knew what was coming.

Bobby Jo came out of the front room with his suit coat on. Buttoned.

The high beams threw the window sashes across the wallpaper in long crosses. Boots spread out along the porch. More down in the yard. A truck door slammed, and another, and somebody laughed low, and the laugh was worse than shouting.

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I put my mouth to the seam of my grandfather’s door.

“Judd Vess. These folks ate at my table and slept under my roof. They’re mine to protect till sunup. You know the law I mean. It’s older than the county.”

The porch went quiet.

I felt it. I swear before God I felt it, for one long breath. Half those men had fathers who taught them to open the door, set another plate on the table, and help a stranger. For just a moment, I thought they remembered. But they didn’t… They were mean as serpents they was.

“Times has changed, Odom.” Vess’s voice came level through two inches of white oak. “Sunup’s a long ways off.”

Somebody laughed by the well. The moment passed. Whatever manners their fathers had taught them, these men had forgotten it. The crowd closed in again, and any chance of stopping them was gone.

I did the next foolish thing. I called them out by name.

“Roby Prater, I hear you out there. I helped bury your mother. Tillman boys — Dale, Wesley — I pulled your hay two Augusts running when your daddy’s hip went. Amos Suggs, you old fool, you’re seventy-one years old.”

“You don’t say my name.” Roby’s voice cracked up. “You don’t get to say my name, old man, harboring what you’re harboring.”

The rock crashed through the front window and slammed into the piano. Every string rang at once, filling the house with a terrible sound. The notes kept echoing as the last pieces of glass fell from the window. Behind me, Ruthie cried out. It was her mother's piano. Ellen had taught her to play by ear, guiding her hands over the keys.

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Bobby Jo straightened his lapels and walked to the broken window.

“Boys, I know you. Dale Tillman, I baptized you in Petty’s pond when you was nine years old. You cried and held to my arm. Wesley, your mama stood in my daddy’s tent and sang Just As I Am with her hands lifted—”

“Sing it now, preacher.”

They hit the Cadillac. Eight or ten of them put their shoulders under the frame and lifted, grunting together like men raising a barn, and the car went over on its side. Glass burst. The horn stuck on a single flat note and moaned. Bobby Jo tried to speak, but the words died in his throat. Nobody out there cared what he had to say, anyway.

“Get the coal oil out of Wesley’s truck.”

I pulled Bobby Jo back by the collar and got the curtain across the empty frame, for whatever a curtain was worth, and went for the phone in the hall. Lifted the earpiece. Held the hook down, let it up. Nothing. The switchboard in the county seat closed at nine, and it was gone eleven, and the town line had been down for repair since spring anyhow, and every soul who could have fixed it was standing in my yard.

Ruthie came off the stairs and took my sleeve. She kept her voice under the horn’s moan.

“The kitchen door, Daddy. I run the creek path in the dark all my life. I can be at the Petty place in twenty minutes.”

“Ruthie”

“I run it faster than any of them. You know I do.”

She was already turned for the kitchen when the match flared. Out past the window over the sink, down by the well, a little bloom of fire rose to a cigarette and hung there. The man didn’t hide it. He wanted it seen. He’d been standing at my well before the first knock, before the trucks, posted in the dark while we washed the supper dishes.

Every door out of that night had been shut before the night started.

Ruthie stared at the glowing cigarette for a long moment. Then she walked back to Lana, took her hand, and Lana held on.

Fists slammed against the door. Not knocking. Pounding. Then something heavy hit the oak—a two-by-four from my own woodpile—beating out a slow rhythm. Boots stomped across the porch in time with it. Someone started singing a hymn, low and twisted, while the others laughed.

“Brother Odom.” Vess stopped hitting the window. “Here’s the deal. Open the door, or we’ll come through the glass. And if we come through the glass, it won’t just be the strangers who get hurt tonight.”

The lamp flame stood up straight in the still air.

I pressed my forehead against my grandfather’s door. The oak was cool. He hung it in nineteen and six, and it had opened to every knock for seventy years, and I stood against it and heard my own voice come out of me like a stranger’s.

“I’ve got money. Not much, but it’s cash, it’s in the coffee tin, it’s yours. The truck. Take the truck, Judd, the title’s in the drawer, I’ll sign it on the porch rail.”

The men just laughed.

“I’ve got…”

I knew what I was about to say, and I couldn't stop the words any more than I could have stopped those trucks. My mind went back to a hospital in Nashville. I remembered the hallway that smelled of bleach, the young doctor with gentle hands telling us to sign the papers, and Ellen looking over the blanket wrapped around our little girl. I held on to that memory, but it couldn't stop what came out of my mouth. Nothing could. I said it.

“I’ve got my daughter.”

The house went silent behind me. That was the loudest thing yet.

“She’s a good girl, she’s, take me, then. Whip me in my own yard, drag me to the square, I’m offering, God as my witness, only leave these…”

My voice was still going when I understood what I had laid on the porch rail alongside the truck title, and I turned my head, and Ruthie stood at the foot of the stairs looking at me. Not crying. Looking. The lamp put her shadow up the stairwell wall, and I watched my daughter hear her own daddy, the one man in the county who never once…

The porch roared. Laughter in it, but under the laughter something meaner than laughter, disgust maybe, and that was the cut that went bone deep: they would not even have her, and they let me hear that they would not, and Vess’s voice came through the oak flat loud and wicked.

“Keep your girl, Odom. Send out the preacher’s woman.”

It wasn't about desire. I understood that too late, with my forehead against the door. If that had been what they wanted, they would have taken the money. They came for the stranger because she was the stranger. Nothing I had could change their minds. I had offered the one thing God had trusted me to protect, and they laughed at me for it.

“Lord God.” I got my hands flat on the oak. I prayed against it out loud, no verse, no order to it. “Lord God, stand on my porch. Stand between. You stood between once; stand”

Behind me, floorboards. Soft. A man walking in stocking feet.

I prayed. Ruthie held Lana’s hand at the foot of the stairs, both their knuckles white, and I heard Lana whisper something to her, quick and low, I never learned what, and I prayed with my eyes shut, and the two-by-four kept its slow time, and under all of it came a sound I knew better than my own heartbeat and could not place for the half second that mattered.

Then I heard it. The bolt. My grandfather's old iron bolt sliding back, soft and quiet.

I turned into the cold air of the open door. Bobby Jo had her by the arm above the elbow, his soft hand all the way around it, and he threw Lana out onto the porch. Her hand tore from Ruthie’s, their fingers dragging to the last knuckle. The matchbooks spilled from wherever she’d kept them and went fluttering down the steps into the high-beam light, forty little towns scattering in the dust. She looked back once. Not at Bobby Jo.

At Ruthie.

The door slammed shut just before I could reach it. Bobby Jo threw the bolt, leaned against the oak door, then slowly slid to the floor. He buried his face in his hands. God forgive him, wherever he is tonight, but he didn’t look like a man overcome with grief. He looked like a man who had done something he believed had to be done.

I could hear the men raping Lana outside the oak door. Beating the poor woman like a pack of wolves. Each one took his turn, ripping her up from her insides. I heard one man yell, “Git them panties off!” Then they each took their turn. By the time they were done, she didn’t even look human anymore. And to make things worse, my child was standing beside me, and she heard it all. Even though she was special, she knew her daddy had offered her up for the same thing to happen to her, but they rejected her. Thank God, they rejected her. I had never been so happy that my girl was special in all my life.

I grabbed the bolt, but Bobby Jo’s weight held the door shut. Beside me, Ruthie pounded on the oak with both fists. Outside, the engines started, one, then another, then a third. Their headlights swept across the wallpaper before turning away. The trucks rolled slowly through the gate and down the lane toward the old mill, never in a hurry. The wrecked Cadillac’s horn still moaned its single, endless note. The sound of voices drifted after the trucks, and one of them was singing.

Then the lane sat empty. The dust settled through the yard light.

And the silence came up out of the ground like well water, a silence with my whole county in it, and my girl clawed at my grandfather’s door, tearing her fingers on the oak, clawing where the bolt sat shot, and she never made one sound while she did it, and that door had opened to every knock for seventy years, and I stood in my own house with my hands over my mouth and let it stay shut.

The chains weighed eleven pounds. Griffin knew because he’d asked the transport officer on the ride over, and the man had answered without looking at him. Eleven pounds of steel around his ankles, and yet Griffin had never walked lighter in his life.

The gymnasium smelled like floor, popcorn, and teenagers. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Somewhere behind the retracted basketball goals, a banner sagged: WELCOME RIVERTON STATE. Griffin stood at the center of the rolling stage, a portable pulpit for a portable prisoner, and let the microphone hang at his side while he looked out at all those faces.

Faces looking back at him.

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It has been one of those weeks. Doctor appointments, car appointments, and a handful of other appointments I won’t bore you with the details. But I still carved out time for this article, and later this week I’m putting a bow on something I’ve been looking forward to telling you: the conclusion of The Invisible Simp.

Can you believe it? I’m finally at the end. Writing this one has been a pure joy, some of the most fun I’ve had at the keyboard in years, and I’ll admit I’m a little sad to close the door on it. I don’t have a firm date yet, but a print version and a Kindle version are both coming down the road, each with bonus material and polished, cleaned-up chapters. If that’s something you’d want on your shelf or loaded on your device, send me a DM, and I’ll make sure you’re first in line when it’s ready.

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Now, on to the good stuff.

Southern Gothic horror is its own animal. It isn’t just horror that happens to be set below the Mason-Dixon line. It’s a mood, a slow, humid dread built out of old-time religion, family secrets, guilt that won’t wash off, and the sense that something is deeply wrong underneath all that front-porch politeness. The best of these films understand that the scariest monster isn’t the thing in the woods. It’s the man at the pulpit, the father at the head of the table, the neighbor who quotes scripture while he sharpens the knife. If you grew up in or around the South, you already know that particular chill. Here are five films that bottle it, and where to stream each one.

Frailty (2001)

I’ve written about Frailty many times, and there’s a simple reason for that: the film is just that good.

Bill Paxton’s directorial debut is a small, lean, deceptively simple picture about a Texas father (Paxton himself, quietly terrifying) who wakes his two young boys one night to tell them God has chosen their family to destroy demons walking the earth in human skin. What follows is a slow-tightening vise of a movie, framed by a grown Fenton (Matthew McConaughey) confessing the whole ugly history to an FBI agent. Paxton directs with patience most first-timers don’t have the nerve for.

What makes it land is the way it captures the texture of Southern religion. The unquestioning obedience. The idea that a loving father might do monstrous things because he’s certain, bone-certain, that he’s carrying out God’s will. If you were raised anywhere near that world, there will be moments here that hit uncomfortably close, no matter how far you’ve traveled since. And that ending? I won’t spoil it for the newcomers, but I’ll say this: it’s one of the finest final turns in modern horror, and it’s the reason I keep coming back.

Where to stream: Free on Tubi.

Sinners (2025)

Sinners was a surprise hit, and it went on to become one of the most celebrated films of its year. Released in 2025, it stormed the following spring’s Academy Awards, taking home four Oscars at the March 2026 ceremony, including Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan’s astonishing dual turn as twin brothers Smoke and Stack. It’s also one of my most popular pieces on this Substack; if you haven’t read my take yet, you can find it here.

Ryan Coogler set his story in 1932 Mississippi, where the twins come home with big-city money and a dream of opening a juke joint for their community, only for the night to curdle into something ancient and bloody when a smiling Irish vampire named Remmick comes calling. What Coogler pulls off here is rare: a genuine genre film that’s also about something, weaving the blues, Hoodoo, and the weight of history into the horror until you can’t separate the scares from the sorrow. The music doesn’t just score the film; it summons things. It’s Southern Gothic on an operatic scale, and it earns every frame.

Where to stream: HBO Max.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

If Frailty and Sinners owe a debt to anything, it’s this one. Charles Laughton, the great actor, directing for the only time in his life, made a film so strange and beautiful that audiences didn’t know what to do with it in 1955. They do now. The Night of the Hunter is a foundational text for everything we’re talking about.

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Robert Mitchum gives one of the all-time great villain performances as Harry Powell, a self-appointed preacher with LOVE tattooed across one set of knuckles and HATE across the other, stalking two children who know where their dead father hid a fortune. Mitchum plays him as pure charm laid over pure rot, a man who can croon a hymn while hunting kids through the moonlight. That love-and-hate monologue became one of the most quoted moments in film history; you’ll recognize its DNA years later in Radio Raheem’s brass-knuckle speech in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Laughton shoots the whole thing like a dark fairy tale, all shadow and silhouette, and the result is as unsettling today as it was seventy years ago.

Where to stream: Free on Tubi.

Cape Fear (1991)

Robert De Niro gives his own chilling performance in Cape Fear, and there’s a nice bit of history baked into it: Robert Mitchum played Max Cady in the 1962 original, and here he turns up in a supporting role while De Niro takes over the part. Two men, a generation apart, both masters of playing the kind of character who makes your skin crawl before he’s said a word.

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De Niro’s Cady is a tattooed, scripture-spouting ex-con who descends on the family of the lawyer he blames for his imprisonment, and he wears his backwoods menace like a second skin. I’ve always thought this film, much like Silence, is an overlooked gem in Martin Scorsese’s filmography; it doesn’t get talked about the way The Departed or Taxi Driver do, but if you want a genuinely unsettling Southern Gothic thriller, this one is hard to beat. It was also the breakout role for Juliette Lewis, and the moment you watch her big-bad-wolf scene, Cady circling her like a predator who’s already decided how the night ends, you’ll understand exactly why it made her a star. It’s a queasy, brilliant piece of acting from the both of them.

Where to stream: Free on Fawesome (and free on Tubi as well).

1922 (2017)

Based on a Stephen King novella, 1922 is the quietest film on this list and, in some ways, the most relentless. It’s set in Nebraska rather than the Deep South, so call it heartland Gothic if you like, but the bones are the same: rural isolation, a proud man, and a sin that refuses to stay buried.

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Thomas Jane disappears into the role of Wilfred James, a farmer who murders his wife with his teenage son’s reluctant help rather than lose his land, then spends the rest of the picture watching his life rot from the inside out. Director Zak Hilditch resists every temptation to go big; the horror here is guilt made physical, creeping in with the rats and the ruined crops and the slow ruin of a family. King himself has called it one of the adaptations that stuck with him most, and it’s easy to see why.

Where to stream: Netflix.

That’s the list. Five films, five different flavors of that Southern dread: the preacher, the father, the ex-con, the guilty man, and the devil dressed up in Sunday clothes.

So now I want to hear from you: what’s your favorite Southern Gothic film, and what is it about that one that gets under your skin? Drop it in the comments; I read every one.

And keep an eye out later this week for the finale of The Invisible Simp. It’s been a wild ride, and I can’t wait for you to see how it ends.

Buy Me A Coffee

If these deep dives into Southern Gothic horror are your kind of thing and you’d like to help keep the lights on around here, consider buying me a coffee. Every cup goes straight back into the writing, the movies, and the next haunted little corner of the South I get to show you. Thank you for reading; it means more than you know.

The padlock hung open on the chain, just as it had for twenty years. Caleb had never locked the ministry. He pushed the door open. The old hinges groaned, a sound that once meant the service was about to begin. Then he stepped into the dark.

Dust rode the light from the high broken windows. Forty rows of folding chairs faced a plywood stage, every seat empty, every seat still angled toward the pulpit like a congregation of ghosts waiting on a word.

The quiet had weight. It pressed against his eardrums.

He walked the center aisle. His shoes scuffed the concrete where a thousand knees had hit that same floor over the years, addicts, runaways, men fresh off a bus from prison with everything they owned in a paper sack. He’d anointed foreheads right there, third row, with olive oil from a Kroger bottle because the ministry couldn’t afford the fancy kind, and God had never once seemed to mind.

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Every screenwriter I know has a theory about what’s wrong with vertical dramas. Fewer of them have actually written one.

I have. Several, in fact, a contained thriller called Red Doors that runs sixty episodes, plus a growing stack of spec samples in the genre. And here’s the confession I didn’t expect to make: writing one-minute episodes for an audience that watches with their thumb hovering over the screen has made me a sharper horror writer.

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If you’re not familiar with the format, vertical dramas are short-form serialized shows shot for phones, portrait orientation, episodes running sixty to ninety seconds, released in runs of fifty to a hundred installments. Platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox have turned them into a legitimate industry seemingly overnight, and production companies are actively hunting for writers who understand the form. It’s easy to dismiss them as disposable. It’s harder to dismiss them once you’ve tried to write one.

The Tyranny of the Thumb

Here’s the brutal math of a vertical: you have roughly sixty seconds to hook a viewer, escalate a situation, and end on a moment so sharp they can’t help but tap into the next episode. And you have to do it again. And again. Sixty, eighty, a hundred times in a row.

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There is no room for fluff. None. A line of dialogue that doesn’t move the story forward isn’t just dead weight, it’s the exact second a viewer’s thumb flicks to something else. In a feature, you can afford a scene that breathes. In a vertical, every scene has to earn its existence twice: once as story, once as a reason to keep watching.

That constraint rewired my brain. When I went back to my horror story The Invisible Simp after months of vertical work, I started reading my chapters differently. I’d finish a scene and hear a voice asking, Would a thumb keep scrolling here? Suddenly I was cutting throat-clearing dialogue I would have defended a year earlier. I was ending chapters mid-breath instead of at tidy resting points. My cliffhangers stopped being decorative and started being structural, load-bearing walls instead of trim.

A Completely Different Mindset

Writing a vertical takes a fundamentally different mindset than writing a script meant to be produced for twenty million dollars or more. When I wrote The Great American Werewolf Story, a big-budget feature currently being shopped, I was building a cathedral, long arcs, patient character work, set pieces designed to fill a theater screen. The pacing question was measured in acts.

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A vertical measures pacing in seconds. It also works differently than a story like The Invisible Simp, where a chapter can run a few thousand words and readers expect texture, interiority, and mood. Prose lets you live inside a character’s head. Verticals barely let a character finish a sentence.

But here’s what surprised me: that limitation is also the format’s superpower. Verticals let you swing between ridiculous highs and lows in a way a feature never could. A betrayal, a resurrection, a hidden identity revealed, a slap across the face, all in the span of three episodes, and the audience doesn’t just tolerate it, they crave it. Something about flipping through episodes with your thumb makes the melodrama okay. The format gives you permission to be operatic. For a horror writer, that’s a gift. Horror has always lived on escalation, and verticals are escalation distilled to its purest form.

What Verticals Can’t Do And Why That’s Fine

I won’t pretend the format is without weaknesses. You’re not going to get the beautiful, patient cinematography of a feature. Nobody is shooting a slow dolly through a fog-drenched Tennessee holler for a screen the size of a playing card. You’re probably never going to write a long monologue scene, the kind of simmering, five-minute confession that makes an actor’s career. The format simply doesn’t have room for it.

And that’s fine, because that’s not the job. The job is momentum. Learning to write for a format that punishes indulgence taught me to recognize indulgence everywhere, including in work where I’d convinced myself it was atmosphere.

Another Lane During the Drought

There’s a practical argument here too, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t matter. We’re in lean times for screenwriters. Features are harder to set up, television development has contracted, and a lot of talented people are staring at closed doors. Verticals are fast, fun, and hot right now, and they’re another available lane during times of drought.

The turnaround is quick. The appetite for material is enormous. Production companies and platforms need writers who can deliver fifty-plus episodes of relentless, hook-driven story, and most traditionally trained screenwriters haven’t developed that muscle yet. If you’re a genre writer especially, horror, thriller, suspense, you already think in dread and payoff. You’re closer to this format than you realize.

The Craft Carries Over

The best writing advice I ever absorbed came from constraint, not freedom. Sonnets taught poets compression. Radio drama taught screenwriters dialogue. And vertical dramas, for all their soapy reputation, are teaching a generation of writers the oldest lesson in storytelling: never give the audience a reason to look away.

Every episode I write for a vertical makes my prose leaner. Every cliffhanger I engineer for a thumb-scrolling audience makes my horror chapters land harder. The formats feed each other, and I’ve stopped thinking of vertical work as a detour from my “real” writing. It’s training. Paid training, ideally, but training either way.

So if you’re a screenwriter or novelist looking down your nose at one-minute episodes, I’d gently suggest trying to write one first. Write ten. Write sixty. Then go back to your feature or your novel and see what your eye catches now.

Mine catches everything that doesn’t move. And then I cut it.

Kevin writes Southern Gothic horror set in the hills of Middle Tennessee, along with essays on craft, screenwriting, and the strange places where faith and fear meet. You can read his serialized fiction and behind-the-scenes work on Substack.

The sirens had stopped. That was the strangest part.

Caleb sat on the edge of the stage with his feet hanging over the barricade rail, the same spot where six hours ago a security guard had stood with his arms crossed, watching for crowd surfers. The guard was gone now. Most everything was gone now.

Yellow tarps dotted the seating bowl like fallen leaves. Caleb had stopped counting them at forty. Past the tarps, up in section 214 where the first blast hit, a scorched black flower spread across twenty rows of seats, petals of melted plastic and twisted rail. A folding chair hung from the mezzanine railing by one leg. It swayed when the HVAC kicked on. Nobody took it down.

His hands wouldn’t stop moving. He watched them as if they belonged to a stranger, rubbing against each other in his lap, working at a stain on his left palm that had already come off on a paramedic’s wipe two hours ago. The blood was gone. His hands kept washing anyway.

Down on the floor, a girl in a Righteous Squad hoodie rocked back and forth in a folding chair while another girl held both her hands and whispered to her. A boy walked the aisles alone, holding his phone above his head, turning in slow circles.

“Larry? Larry!”

Nobody answered him. He kept walking. He’d been walking for an hour.

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Trigger Warning

This is your warning.

If you are looking for a gentle ghost story or a tale where evil is easily overcome, this is your opportunity to turn back.

The account you are about to read is dark.

It tells the story of Lana, a runaway, and Ruthie Odom, two women who would endure horrors no human being should ever face. Though their names belong to fiction, the evil they encounter is as old as humanity itself. Across every generation, countless people have walked through similar darkness.

What happened on that dreadful night would become one of the strangest and most disturbing crimes ever whispered about in the American South, a tragedy whose roots reach back thousands of years to the ancient horrors found in Judges, Chapter 19.

Proceed only if you wish to know what happened.

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I was at the hives when the strangers came down out of the gap, telling the bees the news the way my grandmother taught me, so they wouldn’t swarm and quit us. That evening the news was short. No rain. No rain since the first week of May, and the creek gone to cracked mud, and the whole of Carthan County the color of a burned biscuit. The bees hung at the mouths of their boxes and fanned themselves and listened. I have told those bees every birth and burial in my family for forty years. It took me until September to tell them about that summer, and I am telling you now the same way I finally told them. Start to finish. Nothing left in my pocket.

The sun had dropped behind Jubal Ridge and left the sky the color of a peach gone soft. I saw them on the state road, two figures walking down out of the gap where the blacktop bends past the old Sinclair station. A man in a pale suit. A woman behind him with a cardboard suitcase, changing hands with it every few steps.

Nobody walked that road. Not since the mill shut. I stood at the fence with the smoker still in my hand and watched them come the whole mile down, and behind them, one by one, the lights of Gibbs Creek went out.

I needed feed anyway. That is what I told myself. I put the smoker on the post and walked into town.

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They reached the square as Deel’s Rexall went dark. The man stopped under the dead traffic light; it had blinked yellow for two years and turned a slow circle, taking in the papered-up storefronts, the shirt mill squatting at the end of Main with its windows knocked out. Up close his suit was powder blue and sweated through at the back. Black hair laid down with pomade. A gold tooth caught what light was left when he smiled at me.

“Friend.” He put out a soft hand. “Bobby Jo Cole. You’d know my daddy, I expect. Brother Big Jim Cole. Preached the tent right yonder in that mill lot, summer of fifty-one.”

“I recollect the tent.” I shook the hand. It had never held a plow.

“Well, amen.” He looked past me at the dark square. “Our automobile gave out at the top of the gap. Fan belt. I don’t suppose there’s a garageman about? And you know how Tennessee can be: the summers are hot as the devil’s cock and the winters as cold as a witch’s titty.

“That’s the truth. That’s the truth. Curtis closed at five. Curtis closes at four, here lately.”

The woman set her suitcase down on the curb and stood beside it. Young. Dishwater hair, coral polish chipped on her nails, a dime-store locket she kept moving with her thumb. She held a little deck of matchbooks bound with a rubber band, and she cut it one-handed, over and over. Her eyes went to every dark window on the square. She stood half turned toward the road they’d come in on.

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The feed store porch board creaked behind me.

“We don’t board drifters in Gibbs Creek, Odom.” Judd Vess filled his doorway with his thumbs hooked in his belt, the key ring hanging off his hip. Keys to the church, the feed store, the mill’s dead padlocks, half the mortgaged houses in town. You heard Judd Vess before you ever saw him. “Man wants a room, the county seat’s eleven miles east. Nice evening for walking.”

“This is Big Jim Cole’s boy, Judd.”

“I know whose boy it is.” Vess looked Bobby Jo down, suit to shoes, and then he looked at the woman a long moment, and something crossed his face that I did not have a name for yet. “Circuit’s dead, preacher. Died with your daddy. Take your woman on east.”

The woman’s thumb stopped on the locket.

“I heard my own voice before I’d made up my mind to use it. ‘They’ll take supper at my place, and I’ll drive them into town come morning. That suits you, Judd?’”

Vess held still. Out of the alley by the Rexall, the Suggs boy broke and ran up Church Street, bare feet slapping, and I marked which house he ran to. The parsonage. Then the Tillman place.

“You always did keep strange company, Odom.” Vess stepped back inside and turned the key, and it rattled against the doorframe before he added, “Lock up like a Christian.”

The walk out to my place took the last of the light. Bobby Jo talked the whole mile. I carried the suitcase. The woman, Lana, he called her, just the one name, walked between us and said nothing at all, and every so often she looked back at the ridge, where the Garden’s cookfires showed through the trees like sparks caught in a screen.

Ruthie had supper ready when we came in. Beans, cornbread, and the last of the tomatoes from the garden. She was standing at the stove with her mother’s braid pinned up. Every morning she takes her time fixing that braid, making sure it looks just right. When she saw we had company, she counted the places at the table out loud, touching each plate as she went.

Buy Me A Pizza

“One for Daddy. One for me. Two for company.”

She set the good glasses in front of the woman. I noticed Lana smiling at the good glasses. It was the kind of smile that told me no one had made her feel important in a long time.

Bobby Jo said grace for four minutes. When he came up out of it he looked across the table at my girl and spoke to her slow and loud, like she was standing in a far field. Asked did she like her schooling.

Ruthie passed him the beans. “School’s been out since May.”

Lana laughed into her glass. Bobby Jo went back to his plate, and then he ate like a man half his size and told us the whole sorry road that had brought them, and he told it the way his daddy used to preach, in threes, with the volume rising.

“Five days, brother Odom. Five days at her daddy’s table over in Deene County. Every morning I’d say, Amos, we are burning daylight, and every morning it was one more plate, one more hand of checkers, one more night. That old man would’ve kept us till Judgment.” He mopped his plate with cornbread. “We left past four. Past four! And then the belt lets go at the top of your gap, right at the gate of that hippie place, and don’t you know they come down to the fence. Long-haired fellow, girl in a bedsheet. Offering us beds, if you please. Beds and supper amongst the heathen.”

“They offered.” Lana’s voice came out low. First words she’d spoken in my house. “That’s all. They just offered.”

“And I declined.” The pulpit went out of him, and his voice came down flat and cold, and the change in it ran a finger up my back. “I’ll not bed down with heathens when my own people are a mile on. My daddy preached this town. These are covenant folks.”

Lana looked at her plate. Her thumb found the locket.

Ruthie carried the dishes and turned the radio on low, the one Nashville station riding in and out of static, and a Loretta Lynn number came through, and Lana lifted her head. She started to hum. Then, quiet, she sang a line, a third above the melody, laid right on top of it clean as rain, and Ruthie stood at the sink with the dishrag stopped in her hand.

“Do it again.” Ruthie’s grin went ear to ear. “Do the high part again.”

“Hon, I’ll do the high part all night if you keep drying.” Lana laughed, and the laugh took five years off her face. “I know every song this radio’s got. Every one. I wrote the Opry a letter one time. Asked how a girl gets to be a backup singer.”

“What’d they write back?”

“They didn’t.” She sang the next line anyway.

She never once talked to my girl the way town folks do, slow and loud like across a field. She patted the chair beside her and split the song between them, and the two of them carried it through the static, and I stood in my own kitchen and listened to something Gibbs Creek had never given my daughter once in eighteen years.

Bobby Jo took his legal pad out to the porch to work on what he called his message, and through the window I watched him write by lamplight with the radio ads. Where there’s life, there’s the Lord. That was the kind of thing he wrote down.

Ruthie followed me out to the well when I went to draw the night water.

“Daddy.” She kept her voice under the pump handle’s squeak. “The Suggs boy run somewhere?”

“He run somewhere.”

She looked toward town. Eighteen, my girl, with her mother’s braid pinned up and her mother’s way of looking straight through me. “Miss Lana’s scared, Daddy. She watched the door all through supper.”

“Get her settled in your room. You’ll take the cot.”

“I know it.” She hauled the bucket off the hook. At the porch step, she stopped. “You did right, Daddy.”

I stayed outside after the house went quiet. I walked down to the beehives with no news I could bear to tell.

Two promises had shaped my life.

The first I made in Nashville, the day after Ruthie was born, in a hallway that smelled of bleach. A doctor young enough to be my son told us the kind thing was to sign the papers, send her to Clover Bottom, and tell the neighbors the baby had died. Ellen held our girl against her chest and looked at that doctor like he was a snake in the henhouse. On the drive home, she made me promise.

Ruthie would live in her own home, among her own people, all her days. No state home. No papers.

The last week Ellen could still talk, she took both my hands and made me promise again. I did.

The second promise I have made to God every day since I was a boy. My grandmother taught me that the stranger who comes to your door in the evening is the Lord’s errand. You feed them. You give them a bed. You send them on their way with a blessing.

For forty years, those two promises had always pulled together, like a good team.

I stood beside the beehives and listened to the low hum inside.

“I don’t know,” I said. “First time in my life, I don’t know which one I’d break.”

The bees kept humming, offering no answer.

I was latching the yard gate when the light came. Not one set of headlamps. Three. One up the farm road, one swinging in from the Petty lane, one easing along the fence line from town with its lights cutting across my hives, my well, my daughter’s window. They rolled into the yard and stopped in a horseshoe with the house at the open end, and there they sat, engines idling, high beams on my door. Dust hung in the light.

Doors opened. Boots came down on gravel, more than I could count by sound. Nobody spoke. Behind me in the house, the radio clicked off, and I heard Ruthie on the stairs. I made the porch in six steps and got my back to the door.

Boots crossed my porch boards, taking their time. I knew the man before he ever opened his mouth. Knew him by the sound riding on his hip with every step.

Keys.

“Evening, brother.” Judd Vess stood easy at the edge of the lamplight, hat on, hands loose, twenty men in the dark behind him. “Send out the preacher and his woman. The men of this town aim to know them.”

I stepped inside and shut my grandfather’s bolt lock.

The stadium lights went black.

For three full seconds, nothing existed but the roar of fifty thousand teenagers screaming into the dark. Pastor Caleb had heard that sound a hundred times. It had always felt like worship.

Tonight it sounded like prey.

He shook the thought off, nerves, exhaustion, too many nights checking locks that were already locked, and then the bass hit, deep and violent, rolling up through the concrete and into his teeth. White strobes detonated across the stage. Smoke cannons fired. Columns of flame punched at the rafters in synchronized bursts, and the LED screens wrapping the arena flashed two words in letters forty feet tall:

EXIT ONLY

THE RIGHTEOUS SQUAD had returned.

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The other night, I found myself sitting on the couch, scrolling through Tubi, not expecting much. That’s the thing about free streaming: you go in with low expectations, and sometimes a movie reaches out of the screen and grabs you by the collar. That night, it was Cohen and Tate, a 1988 thriller I had either forgotten or never seen, and it held me the whole way through. Lean, mean, and perfectly paced. When the credits rolled, I started thinking about what else might be hiding on Tubi, films that the algorithm isn’t exactly pushing to the top of the pile, films that have been waiting patiently for the right viewer to find them.

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What follows is a short list of those films. Some I love. Some I have a personal connection with; one or two I saw as a kid, rented on a whim, and never forgot. All of them are worth your time, and all of them are on Tubi right now, though for how long, I can’t say. If something here sounds like your kind of movie, don’t wait on it.

Cohen and Tate (1988)

Let me start with the film that sent me down this rabbit hole. Cohen and Tate was written and directed by Eric Red, the same man who wrote the screenplays for The Hitcher and Near Dark, two of the best American genre films of the 1980s. For his directorial debut, Red stripped everything down to its bones: two professional hitmen, Cohen (Roy Scheider) and Tate (Adam Baldwin), kidnap nine-year-old Travis Knight after he witnesses a mob murder and spend the rest of the film driving him from Oklahoma to Houston to deliver him to their employers.

That’s the whole movie. One car. Three characters. One very long night.

What makes it work is the tension between the men themselves. Cohen is calm and controlled, old-school, focused entirely on fulfilling the contract. Tate is the opposite, young, unhinged, wearing a leather jacket and carrying a shotgun and talking openly about his enjoyment of running down small animals. They hate each other. And the kid, who is smarter than either of them wants to admit, figures that out fast.

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Scheider is wonderful as the world-weary killer, and this may be his last truly great performance, a welcome return to the morally dubious characters he played early in his career before Jaws made him a household name. Roy Scheider, with a pair of black rubber gloves and quiet patience, is more frightening than most monsters I’ve seen on screen.

This is the kind of superior B-movie Hollywood used to make all the time and mostly doesn’t anymore. Eighty-six minutes, no wasted scenes, a climax that earns its weight. If you missed it the first time around, Tubi is giving you a second chance.

The Loved and Lost (2024)

I’ll be upfront about something: I’m not a neutral party here. I took an online filmmaking course through the school connected to the people behind this film, and I’ve followed their work. So, take my enthusiasm with that in mind. But then again, maybe that kind of context is exactly what a recommendation is supposed to include.

The Loved and Lost follows Becca, a former designer struggling with her identity as a homemaker, and her husband, Cal, a carpenter facing financial ruin. As they each try to regain control of their circumstances, their children begin to slip through the cracks. It’s a domestic drama, quiet and close to the bone.

The film opens in a quick-cut, free-flowing style that pulls you swiftly into the family’s world, efficiently establishing the characters and their tensions. By the third act, the stakes intensify, and The Loved and Lost truly hits its stride, delivering an impactful portrayal of resilience, connection, and hope.

What I admire most is that director Anna Thalman and her team made a genuine first feature, not a proof-of-concept, not a calling card, but an actual film with real emotional stakes and real performances. That’s harder than it sounds. Independent filmmakers talk all the time about making their first feature. These folks did it, and did it well enough to land on Tubi.

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Give it a chance. You might be surprised what a small film with something honest to say can do to you on a quiet evening.

The Boys Next Door (1985)

I caught this one late at night on HBO when I was a teenager, way past when I was supposed to be awake. It stuck with me for thirty years, which tells you something about what it does to you.

The Boys Next Door was directed by Penelope Spheeris and stars Maxwell Caulfield and Charlie Sheen as two sociopathic teenagers who leave their small town on the day of their high school graduation and embark on a murder spree. That description sounds like exploitation, and the film was marketed like exploitation, but it plays more like a sociological horror show. It’s an unflinching and uncomfortable film to watch.

People remember Charlie Sheen from Platoon, from Major League, from Wall Street. This came before all of that, and here he actually plays the more restrained of the two leads. It’s Maxwell Caulfield who gives a performance of coldly seething rage that drives the film, and there is never any explanation given for his actions; at most, we get Sheen’s character railing against his nowhere future. That refusal to explain is part of what makes the film disturbing. These boys aren’t monsters from another world. They’re from ours.

Spheeris would go on to direct Wayne’s World, which is a strange and funny footnote. But this is her more important work.

Blue Steel (1990)

Kathryn Bigelow would eventually win two Academy Awards for The Hurt Locker. Before that, she was making movies like Near Dark and Blue Steel, tighter, meaner films that announced her talent to anyone paying attention.

In Blue Steel, Jamie Lee Curtis plays Megan Turner, a rookie New York cop who shoots and kills a stickup man on her first day on the job. As the man falls dead in a supermarket, his gun is picked up and pocketed by Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), a commodities broker who was present during the shooting. Hunt, already a deeply troubled man, becomes obsessed with Turner and begins carving her name into bullets.

What I remember most about this film is the pacing. Bigelow never lets you settle. The suspense doesn’t come from jump scares or cheap tricks; it comes from the slow, sick realization that Megan’s situation keeps getting worse no matter what she does. Her superiors don’t believe her. The evidence vanishes. And the man who is hunting her is charming enough to pass as a love interest.

Roger Ebert compared it to John Carpenter’s original Halloween, a sophisticated update with intriguing characters and a few angry ideas. That framing holds up. If you ever wondered what Halloween might look like with a female cop instead of a babysitter, Blue Steel is your answer.

Miracle Mile (1988)

I rented this one as a kid because Anthony Edwards was in it, the guy from Revenge of the Nerds, and the cover looked exciting. I had no idea what I was walking into.

Miracle Mile opens with Harry Washello (Edwards) and Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) meeting at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, falling immediately and completely in love. They arrange a date, but a freak power failure causes Harry to oversleep. He races to the all-night diner where Julie works, but she’s already gone home. That’s when a pay phone rings. Harry answers it and hears what sounds like a panicked soldier warning that nuclear missiles have been launched and Los Angeles has about an hour.

What happens next is one of the stranger pieces of filmmaking from that decade. The movie shifts gears so completely that British critic Charlie Brooker once called it the film with the biggest lurch of tone he had ever seen. He meant it as a compliment.

Roger Ebert praised it for its “diabolical effectiveness” and a sense of real terror. I’d put it differently. Miracle Mile is the only film I can think of that is simultaneously a sweet romantic comedy and a genuine apocalyptic nightmare, and it earns both halves. The script had been circulating since 1983, and every studio wanted it, but they all wanted director Steve De Jarnatt to change the ending. He refused and eventually optioned the script himself. Knowing that makes the movie feel even more like an act of stubbornness and love. Watch it. Don’t read anything about it first.

Dangerously Close (1986)

Not every film on this list is a hidden masterpiece. Some of them are just a good time, and Dangerously Close falls squarely in that second category.

A group of elite high school students calling themselves The Sentinels begin as a kind of campus security patrol, painting over graffiti and maintaining order, until they evolve into something closer to a vigilante death squad, targeting classmates they deem undesirable. The school newspaper editor starts asking questions. Things escalate.

Director Albert Pyun was a Cannon Films workhorse who made a lot of movies fast and cheap. This one has all the hallmarks: a soundtrack featuring Depeche Mode, The Smithereens, and TSOL, students who look like they’re in their late twenties, and a visual MTV style. Roger Ebert famously torched it. Gene Siskel gave it zero stars. I’m here to tell you they weren’t wrong, but they also weren’t entirely right.

There’s something genuinely creepy about the film’s premise: a group of handsome, popular kids organized around the idea of removing people they find unworthy. Dangerously Close is the kind of movie made for a late Friday night, a few friends, and a bowl of popcorn.

Untamed Heart (1993)

I saw this one in the theater when it came out, and I enjoyed every minute of it. That’s the whole review, honestly, but let me say a little more.

Untamed Heart tells the story of Caroline (Marisa Tomei), a waitress in Minneapolis who can’t seem to keep a man, and Adam (Christian Slater), the silent, mysterious busboy at the same diner who has nursed a secret devotion to her for years. One night he rescues her from an attack, and their unlikely romance begins, complicated by Adam’s heart condition and a fairy tale the orphanage nuns told him about having the heart of a great ape.

Yes, the baboon heart thing is in there. Yes, it’s a little goofy. You’ll go along with it.

What carries the film is what carried a lot of films in that era: two young movie stars at the height of their powers, committed to something sentimental and willing to be vulnerable on screen. Tomei had just come off My Cousin Vinny and won an Oscar. Slater was one of the most watchable actors in Hollywood. Slater projects the right note of mystery and doomed romance, while Tomei is winning and warm in a role that could have easily tipped into cliché.

Neither of their careers went in quite the direction you’d have expected in 1993. The films they made together got overshadowed by bigger things, and Untamed Heart mostly disappeared from the conversation. Finding it on Tubi felt like running into an old friend you hadn’t seen in years and realizing you’d forgotten just how much you enjoyed their company.

These films won’t all be on Tubi forever. Licensing agreements shift, catalogs turn over, and the algorithm will never spotlight most of them. If any of this sound like your kind of evening, the time to watch is now.

The best things on free streaming are usually the ones nobody’s talking about.

What hidden gems have you found on Tubi? Drop them in the comments. I’m always looking for the next late-night discovery

If you enjoyed this piece, I write about horror, film craft, and the art of storytelling over at my Substack. I also have a couple of resources you might find useful.

The 10 Most Horrifying Scenes in Horror Movies is a 50-page PDF course breaking down exactly what makes the scariest scenes in cinema history work — and how you can apply those techniques to your own writing and filmmaking. It’s $29.

If you’re interested in the deeper side of storytelling structure, The New Myths Course explores the archetypes and narrative frameworks that are replacing the old formulas — built for writers who feel like their stories don’t quite fit the traditional mold.

And if you have a book inside you but not the time to write it, I offer an AI-assisted ghostwriting service that gets you from idea to finished manuscript in two to four weeks.

Thanks for reading. Now go find something on Tubi.

The black Charger came out of nowhere.

Luke clocked it before Mark did, turning the road into a blur. He grabbed the radar gun off the dash. The numbers climbed past sixty before the device could settle.

“Follow that son of a bitch.”

Mark already had his hand on the wheel. He dropped the cruiser into drive, hit the lights, and punched the gas. The siren wailed. The Charger didn’t slow.

“Nobody speeds like that in this town.” Mark’s knuckles went pale on the wheel.

“Son.” Luke kept his eyes on the retreating taillights. “That’s not just somebody speeding.” The Charger swerved wide around a curve, and the morning sun caught the contour of the rear quarter panel. “That’s my car.”

Mark glanced at him.

“Eyes on the road.”

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The screaming stopped before Frank reached the passenger car.

He ran the length of the train with Emil’s notebook pressed against his chest, cutting through the passageway between cars, the empty second coach, and the dining car where Calvin’s table sat deserted, the chair pushed back at an angle. At the door to the front passenger car, he stopped, flattened himself against the frame, and listened.

Nothing. The wheel percussion. The engine. The silence of a space that had recently held human noise and no longer did.

He pushed through.

Three passengers.

Out of eleven, only three remained: a middle-aged woman gripping a rosary, an older man in a feed company cap, and a boy of maybe ten curled into the front row footwell beneath a coat.

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The woman’s eyes held a strange calm, as though fear had exhausted itself and left nothing behind. The man in the cap stared at the locked connecting door, terrified at what might be on the other side.

The other eight were gone. The luggage Frank had wedged against the door lay scattered. The lock was intact.

Frank didn’t ask what happened. He looked at the three of them and made a calculation.

“Come with me.” He moved to the front of the car. “Come with me, NOW!”

The locomotive cab was the only space on the train that the creature had not entered.

Frank put them inside, the woman, the man, the boy still wrapped in his coat, and bolted the door, then stood for a moment with his forehead against the cold metal, letting himself feel the full weight of the night.

Then he sat in Roy’s seat and opened Emil’s notebook.

He studied the notebook page by page in the glow of the instrument panel. The Hungarian might as well have been stone, dense paragraphs, cramped marginal notes, not a word he could penetrate. But Emil had been a careful man, a man who believed knowledge should survive its owner. The diagrams spoke clearly enough.

Page eleven: the crate, the soil, a cross drawn through both. Destroy it.

Page nineteen: a sunrise. A figure caught in it, arms raised, dissolving from the feet up. Sunlight.

Page twenty-three: a train. An arrow pointing forward along the track. And at the end of the arrow, rising behind a flat horizon line, a sun drawn in three careful strokes.

Frank sat with that page for a long time.

The speedometer read 61 mph. Roy’s watch on the console shelf, Frank checked it, and read 4:48 AM. He pulled the shade on the cab’s side window and looked east. The sky was the blue-black of an hour before first light, the darkness thinning at the horizon without yet committing to color.

Fifty-five minutes to sunrise.

He pulled out his route map from the conductor’s compartment shelf. The next scheduled stop, Millard Junction, was forty minutes out. After that, the route ran straight into the Chicago terminal.

If the train reached Chicago, the creature walked off it into a city of three million people, and that was the end of the story.

Frank set the map down.

He looked at the emergency brake cable housing diagram mounted above the instrument panel, the faded laminated card that every conductor memorized and hoped never to use: manual brake trigger, exterior access, cargo car coupling. A spike hammer would do it.

Roy’s toolkit was on the floor beside the seat.

He picked it up.

The choice he’d been circling all night, whether to break the procedure, abandon the protocol, do the thing that couldn’t be undone, wasn’t a choice anymore. He couldn’t save the passengers. That window had closed somewhere around 2 AM when he’d chosen containment over alarm. He couldn’t fight the creature. Emil had tried with fifty years of preparation and a crucifix worn smooth with use, and it had bought them four seconds.

He could stop the train.

He looked at the three passengers. The woman had her rosary wrapped around both hands now, not moving through it, just holding it. The boy had come out from under the coat. He was watching Frank. He wanted Frank to let him know everything would be okay, but Frank’s eyes told a different story.

“Stay in this room.” He picked up the spike hammer and unbolted the cab door. “Don’t open this door until the train has fully stopped and it’s light outside. You understand me?”

The boy nodded.

Frank stepped out.

The train was dark and still. The passenger car lights had gone out sometime in the last hour, leaving only the amber running lights to illuminate empty seats and the forgotten traces of the forty-six passengers who had boarded in Omaha, never imagining they would leave so much behind.

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Calvin was in the dining car.

Same table. Same chair.

But upright now, alert, watching the doorway as Frank came through as though he’d been waiting for him.

“Frank.”

Calvin’s voice carried that same strange quality, present and distant at once, like a radio drifting between stations.

“We’re going to lose, aren’t we?”

Frank stopped.

Calvin looked down at his hands.

“We’ve fought things before.” He swallowed. “But this...” He shook his head. “We’ve never been up against something like this.”

His eyes lifted to Frank’s.

“This is a different kind of creature, isn’t it?”

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Frank looked at the worn copy of A Rumor of War tucked into Calvin’s jacket pocket; its spine creased from use. He wondered how far Calvin had gotten before all of this began. Then he looked at the marks on Calvin’s throat.

At the fear Calvin was trying very hard not to show.

Frank thought about Linda’s voice on the payphone.

I’ll leave coffee.

He thought about Roy’s three bars of Hank Williams drifting through a wall.

About Gerald Foss laid out with his hands folded neatly across his chest by something that wasn’t Gerald Foss anymore.

About Emil pressing the notebook into his hands in the dark, spending his last clear minutes making sure the knowledge didn’t die with him.

And he thought about the boy in the locomotive cab.

Frank looked back at Calvin.

“I don’t know,” he said.

It was the closest thing to the truth he had left.

Frank walked past him, through the cargo car, and into the dark.

He destroyed the soil with his hands.

He scattered it across the full length of the cargo car floor, kicking it into the walls, grinding it under his boots, mixing it with the oil and rust and grime that had accumulated in the seams of the car over years of use. He found a rusted water pipe fitting loose in the corner and used it to wet a section of the floor, working the soil into a dark slime. His hands were black with it. It was under his fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles. He kept going, moving back and forth across the car, until the soil of Transylvania was indistinguishable from the floor of an American freight car in 1975.

Whether it was enough, he didn’t know.

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He found the emergency brake cable housing on the exterior wall, identified the manual trigger point from the diagram in his memory, and swung the spike hammer.

The first strike dented the housing.

The second cracked it.

The third hit the trigger cable directly, and the train screamed.

The train came to a halt and stopped on the tracks.

Frank stayed on one knee. His hands were black. His knee was wet from the soil. Through a crack in the cargo car’s exterior wall siding, a split in the old timber, three inches long, a line of gray light fell across the floor. Pre-dawn. The sky was committing now, the black thinning to blue, the blue thinning toward the pale edge of something brighter.

He watched the light on the floor.

He reached into his breast pocket and took out the notebook. The cover was soft from use.

Frank thought of the boy in the locomotive car. Something about him reminded Frank of his cousin before the war, before the draft, before the telegram, before whatever happened in those distant fields took the boy he had been and sent someone else home. What remained in the photographs was a face like the boy’s, still carrying the last traces of innocence.

The creature entered. Frank didn’t hear it.

One moment, a thin line of gray light stretched across the floor through the crack in the wall. The next, it was gone.

Something stood between him and the dawn.

He didn’t look up.

He remained on one knee in the scattered soil of a country he’d never seen, a birdwatching notebook in his hand, listening to the vast silence beyond the train.

For a moment, fear pressed against him.

Then another thought arrived.

I stopped the train.

Whatever happened now, whether he lived another minute or another year, the train had stopped.

The thing standing over him could not change that.

Beyond the wall, the darkness was thinning.

The light was coming.

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At 6:14 AM, a maintenance crew out of Joliet found Train 419 stationary at mile marker 214 and called it in. An hour later, when no response came from the crew channel, they boarded.

The train reached Chicago Terminal at 9:40 AM, towed in by a maintenance locomotive, and was diverted to a maintenance track on the south side of the yard. The terminal crew on duty that morning would later describe the arrival as unremarkable, just another tow-in.

The platform crew who opened the doors would not describe it that way.

Every car was drenched. The seats, the walls, the floors, the luggage in the overhead racks, soaked through, a smell of iron so thick the first responders who arrived seven minutes later pulled back and called for ventilation before entering. In the sleeper car, in the dining car, in both passenger coaches, the same scene: passengers in their seats or in the aisles, drained, arranged with that precise and patient care, hands folded, faces upward.

In the first passenger coach, on the wall above the front row, written in something dark and deliberate, a single word.

VIETNAM.

Seven letters. Three feet high. Applied with a finger, slowly, by something that had time and wanted the word to be seen.

The three passengers from the locomotive cab were found alive, unharmed, locked inside. The boy still had the coat around his shoulders. The woman’s rosary was wound so tight around her hands that the responding officer had to work it loose. Her hands were scarred and bleeding. They would never be the same.

The investigating officer’s report, filed four days later, noted the absence of the conductor, the engineer, the porter, and thirty-nine passengers. It noted the cargo manifest, Estate of D. Harker, Carfax Import Co., and the destroyed crate in the rear car. The soil spread across the cargo car floor, and a birdwatching notebook was found in the soil with a name written inside the cover in neat block letters: F. MARSH, CONDUCTOR.

The case was stamped unsolved.

THE END