Fiction
JUST ANOTHER FRIDAY by Stefanie K. Yang
When Gary died, nobody mourned—not even his siblings. Everyone agreed he lived like a ghost, practically invisible and emerging only when absolutely necessary. He had no children and accomplished very little. He wouldn’t be missed. Like many before him, Gary simply ceased to exist while time and the universe continued on.Yet, for a brief moment, Gary mattered. Gary was murdered. He was killed in his own home in his own bathtub on a Thursday evening between nine- and ten-o’-clock. The most conspicuous evidence was his severed leg. The killer left it in his bathtub in a shallow pool of water which hadn’t properly drained. Gary’s bronze leg lay in the center of the white basin, knee softly bent and brown hairs floating like drifting seaweed.The rest of his body was discarded in a heavy duty trash bag, which was securely fastened and propped against an overflowing bin beside his mailbox. Friday was trash day. So it was a young trash collector named Manuel who would end up discovering Gary the next morning.
***
At approximately 7:15AM, just as Manuel was emptying bins and a couple of school children were boarding a yellow bus, the trash bag containing Gary split open and all of its contents spilled out, mortifying Manuel when a naked body tumbled out onto his right foot. The children stared with hands pressed against the windows. Stanley the bus driver, who was oblivious to what was happening outside his bus, pulled the lever that closes the door, pressed his foot on the accelerator, and shouted for the kids in the back to sit down. He could not hear over his own voice the sound of Manuel frantically calling for his colleagues on the garbage truck to come and help. Trash collectors were just as invisible as bus drivers. That’s why Stanley always had to shout to be heard. As the bus drove away, the children settled down and started lamenting about the upcoming tests of the week. Most of them hadn’t studied.That Friday was indeed a rough day. The traffic was long, the tests were hard, Gary was dead, and Manuel ended up quitting his job. The discovery of the corpse was the straw that broke Manuel’s back. He never wanted to be a trash collector. It paid better than one would think, which was why he took the job, but the pay was not worth the perception that his work belonged on the bottom rungs of society, somewhere between burger flipper and high school janitor. He would later explain to friends and family that he needed to quit; that they, too, would have done so if they, too, spent day after day driving down the same routes collecting what everyone else wanted to discard. How would they feel, he asked, if the dead occupant of 143 Blattodean Road landed on their feet? Would they tolerate the nauseating scent of decay, of blackened banana peels and moldy coffee grounds, while staring in shock at Gary’s sad state? They’d be ‘grossed’ and ‘freaked out’ and ‘fed up,’ too. No, he decided. Life was too short. Gary would have agreed—when the universe surprises you with an earth-shattering moment, you have to act! You need to take what you can and run, or die without having done anything.Those were the thoughts that crossed Manuel’s mind that morning. After cleaning up the contents of Gary’s trash bag, he climbed back onto the garbage truck and proceeded onwards to house number 141 with plans of submitting his resignation as soon as his shift was over.***
141 Blattodean Road is the dilapidated bungalow of Mr. and Mrs. Withers. The couple lived in the same house for over a quarter of a century. It was where Mr. and Mrs. Withers once raised their children, but those children eventually grew up and moved away. With their human babies gone, they now devoted their resources to a Miniature Schnauzer, two Persians, and some chickens.Gary hated chickens, cats, and dogs, and the Withers probably hated Gary. It seemed inevitable that they’d be contentious neighbors, but because Gary often kept to himself and never once tried to cross paths with them, they were able to coexist without incident.On the night of Gary’s murder, the Withers were walking past his property with their Mini Schnauz named Percy. All evening, Percy had been pacing—wound up and restless, like he knew something extraordinary was about to happen. He needed a walk. So although the Withers didn’t usually stroll during hours they considered unsafe, the stars were out, the moon was full, and dinner had been indulgent. The rustling leaves outside beckoned them, so they walked their dog. And it was mostly nice. That is, until Percy started barking just steps away from returning home.Mr. Withers hissed, ‘Percy! For Chrissake, quit yer yappin’!’ to which Mrs. Withers asked whatever was the matter with him. ‘The hell I know!’ Mr. Withers replied, ‘He’s your damn dog!’ In times like these, Percy was never Mr. Withers’s dog.Poor Percy. If only he could speak human. If only the two most important people in his world stopped to listen sometimes. They might’ve understood him.‘Someone inside that house is screaming,’ Percy barked. ‘I hear screaming! Someone is screaming! We need to find out what’s causing that screaming!’‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with him these days,’ Mrs. Withers sighed as she watched her husband tug at Percy’s leash. ‘Maybe he’s getting senile.’Mr. Withers grumbled. He was hating the incessant barking, but he hated the idea of their dog developing dementia even more. Then as if remembering—‘What day is it today?’ And as if his wife could read his mind—‘Did you take the trash out? Tomorrow’s trash day.’Mr. Withers scowled. When he wasn’t able to calm Percy, he reached down, scooped the dog into his arm, and marched the rest of the way home. His wife followed suit, stopping briefly at her front porch to glance at the shadowy movements behind her neighbor’s drawn curtains. The wind rustled the leaves. Mrs. Withers hugged her arms for warmth, then went inside. She needed to make sure her husband hadn’t forgotten the trash again.***
For the rest of that night, Blattodean Road was quiet. The Withers got their dog under control and the killer proceeded to kill Gary, emerging two hours later with a trash bag containing his stiffened corpse. The bag would sit all night against the curbside in wait for an unassuming trash collector named Manuel, who couldn’t have imagined that in just a few short moments, he would be shaken to his core at what would land on his shoe.But in the grand scheme of things, none of it would matter. Gary dies. Nobody cares. It’s just another Friday.And the woman who killed him with a broom slept through most of it on Gary’s bed, hungover from a night of wine and phone calls about what she had totally—like, ewww—done, and dreaming about a tussle in the tub and striking something over and over again. August 6, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
CHRISTOPHER ZEISCHEGG’S ‘THE MAGICIAN’ reviewed by Chloe Pingeon
There is a nightmarish quality to Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician. I read the book twice, the first time through the haze of an all nighter—sleep deprivation and sleep paralysis hastening my descent into the blur of self destruction and bodily decay that the narrative presents. “Just a thing inside your body that won’t listen to your head,” a malignant acquaintance tells the narrator early in the novel, as a prescription of sorts for the root of all his problems. At dawn, this rings true. This distance between body and self, judgment and subconscious, good and evil, is perhaps the root of all that is hellish.The Magician was originally published in 2020 by indie press Amphetamine Sulphate but had, until recently, fallen out of circulation. The edition of The Magician that I read is a reissue, recently published by Apocalypse Party Press in November 2024 with an added introduction by author and artist Chris Kelso, and a new cover by Christopher Norris. Zeischegg intended for the novel to be consumed as a triptych, accompanied by a short film and an art book, but these are unavailable to me, and so the novel stands alone, a highly corporeal narrative speaking for itself without visual supplement. In The Magician, Christopher Zeischegg, a fictional protagonist who shares the author's name, lurches through California in a hallucinatory descent into horror, gore, torture, and the occult. Christopher, in his early thirties, is a former porn star (he shares the author’s former adult film alias of Danny Wylde) who has left the industry after abusing performance drugs, and is now embroiled in an unsalvageable relationship with his drug addicted and deeply suicidal girlfriend Andrea. The novel opens with Andrea’s latest suicide attempt, the first line of the novel echoing text on the back cover, seemingly intent on provoking the reader into intrigue and/or horror for what is in store—“Andrea’s gore was dark red, nearly brown, and smelled of meat and piss. She must have wet herself on account of the drugs…”There is little value in a book that seeks only to shock, and in its self identification, The Magician seems to dare the reader to draw this immediate conclusion. Zeischegg is a former porn star, the novel is auto fiction and body horror and it places itself in Los Angeles, in the porn industry, in a land of devil worship and torture and addiction. The reissue of the novel comes only four years after the original publication, but those four years have been formative for the collective understanding of autofiction, for the Literary Thrill-Seeking Industrial Complex, for Bret Easton Ellis and his imitators, for the contrarian, the provocateur, for autofiction often that is now a*tofiction because this author is ironic, this author realizes that our absorption with ourselves is becoming a bit obscene. There is admitted sensationalism in the very names of those championing Zeischegg’s work: “Amphetamine Sulphate” and “Apocalypse Party Press”, the latter of which comes with some warnings of its own: “Anyone with an open mind is welcome to join the party” “Once the void swallows you whole, you'll never be the same.”Still, beyond those first few pages, it becomes clear that The Magician is more than just a challenge for the daring. At what Christopher refers to as an Alcoholics-Lovers Anonymous (AL-Anon) meeting, he runs into Jayla, another porn star who he filmed with in the past. She attacks him with pepper spray and harvests his blood for Satanic supernatural purposes. This, of course, sets off a downward spiral of torture, violence that remains Christopher’s seemingly only consistent tether to reality, and a throughline for the novel. The Magician contrasts searing physical pain with a dissociated gaze and occasional poignant descriptions of the mountains on the horizon of the Los Angeles night sky. We follow Christopher pining for Andrea, gasping for air in a body bag by the LA River, and then desperate to expel the demons that are destroying himself and his family whilst seeking refuge in his deeply religious mother’s home. As his problems scale towards the cosmic and the supernatural, the seemingly sensational opening lines become points of almost absurdist inconsequentiality. Suicide and addiction, as it turns out, are luxury problems amidst a reckoning with the occult. Autofiction can bore in its needlessly self referential nature, but The Magician deals more in the realm of the alter ego. Noir can falter in a didactic rendering of good and evil, but there is a banality to the way the narrative swallows and stomachs the ever-worsening horror of the world it exists within, which lends itself almost to absurdity. Zeischegg has described the novel as a parallel to the years following his own departure from the porn industry, and yet The Magician does not deal heavily in metaphor. Christopher, for all his drifting, disassociated, tendencies, is a reliable narrator. One never suspects that his hallucinatory recollections are, in actuality, hallucinations. One never suspects that the demon clawing at his stomach is a stand-in for something more abstract. The gashes on his stomach are real, as is his mother’s graying skin and progressing illness in the company of Christopher and his demon; as is the instant resurrection of order when—with the help of a full moon, hen’s blood and the wood from a cypress tree—he is able to expel the demon. There are moments of body horror throughout the novel that make me reflexively gag, but for the most part, reading The Magician is a steady experience. The banality of evil is established, enforced, and then reinforced again and again and again. You have entered into some realm of darkness. The rules are different here. Christopher, intuitively, seems to grasp this immediately. He does what he can to survive. His suffering, at least, serves as a reminder that he is real. The novel begins with Christopher insistent on his normalcy. At an AL-Anon meeting he tunes into another young man’s speech because “he was young and vibrant and I could imagine us being friends” He does not identify with the freaks, and strikingly, he does nothing very wrong to become one. The narrative, while cohesive, is driven by whim and bad luck. Christopher becomes who he is because he is chosen as a host for this demon. The rest of it, and even this circumstance in and of itself, is left up to chance. The Magician ends not too far from how it began. After ridding himself of his demon, Christopher is normal, gaining weight, aging, still in his mother’s home and now, a bit discontent. “I used to be a porn star,” he tells a young woman after she refers to him as a “fat fuck”. Finally free from his own demon, he has attended a party with a local magician who he hopes might teach him his ways. It happens that this magician got here mostly by a stroke of desperate luck—he stumbled upon a Magick book in the woods after shooting himself in the head. And as it turns out, after escaping torture of the supernatural scale, Christopher is now bored.“I was someone who had bent the world to my will,” Christopher insists in the novel’s final pages. This identification with self autonomy is in sharp contrast to the passivity that defines him throughout the book, and yet he speaks with sincerity. He has mistaken adjacency to a power that beheld him with agency over a power he could never really harness. The Magician moralizes nothing. There are no clear conclusions as to where the novel’s dreamscape intersects with auto-fictional reality. Still, if there is a conclusion outside of the vacuum world into which The Magician sucks readers, it lies here. From dust to dust, and from mundane to mundane. Zeischegg speaks to the alter egos which we craft, suffer with, and live in along the way.
August 5, 2025
Creative Nonfiction
BIG STEVE HID WATER BOTTLES OF PISS BENEATH HIS BED by Matti Ben-Lev
He was used to being homeless. He was used to sleeping in his car in Philly parking lots. Once, he picked up a Tinder date, drove her 3 hours from Baltimore to Philly, rode around looking for his ex-girlfriend, didn’t find her, and only told his date the truth about his ex and why they drove to Philly on the car ride back. I don’t remember how she responded, but I think they went out a few more times.Big Steve unrolled cigarettes, made a bong out of a water bottle and a pen, hit tobacco out the window of the rehab we were in together. Our rehab used the ‘confrontational model,’ which is just as bad as it sounds—the whip-you-into-shape model—and held super-groups where we verbally hammered someone when they were fucking up. Big Steve always roasted people a little harder than everyone else did. He always hugged the victim extra-tight afterwards. We called Big Steve Big Steve because he was big (300 lbs, 6 foot 4), and we had 3 Steves in rehab. When I hugged him, I thought he might absorb me. One time I took a run at him and he didn't budge, as if fixed to the concrete curb outside that shitty rehab. We called middle Steve Average Steve and he asked us to stop because he'd been called average his whole life and of course we didn't stop and the whole community got super-grouped for that one. Little Steve was the littlest, but he’s not really relevant. When we switched to outpatient, I came out to Big Steve as bi, one of first people I told, and he took a large slurp from his water bottle and said, Who isn’t a little gay, told me he fucked his bestfriend, Slush, and their friendship wasn’t the same after that. His eyes started watering and he tilted his head back into the ash-stained seat of his beat-to-shit pickup truck and lifted his left shoe to show me the name SLUSH written across his heel in layers and layers of black Sharpie, and he started crying harder, moans fogging up his blotchy November windows, and he told me he got Slush hooked on dope, that he gave Slush the hit that killed him, that he was nodded out beside Slush, that he woke up in a slick of chunky yellow bile and Slush was no longer breathing.Big Steve got super-grouped for hiding piss under his bed. Big Steve got super-grouped for carving ANAL into the brand new couch cushions in our rehab’s group room. Eventually, he got booted out of treatment. It's a shame he never got super-grouped for showing back up to treatment high. Before we got the chance, he left rehab against medical advice and shot dope and overdosed and up and died and I’m ashamed to say I still think about how much fun we all would have had roasting him and I’m ashamed to say I still think about his piss when I hear an empty Aquafina water bottle crinkle.
August 4, 2025
Micros
CAUSE AND EFFECT by Claire Hanlon
When the birds burst up and out from the sidewalk grass in front of my car as I’m driving home from the store on Mother’s Day, and I think: how beautiful! as the unexpected blue of their wings flash before me, and then: oh no! did I hit them?—it’s a near thing, a miracle: I miss them, just. Because the birds live, when I arrive home and honk to let my family know I’m back, let’s go, and my husband emerges, he does not stare perplexedly at the bumper of our newly-purchased SUV. And, because the birds are both still winging through the clear May sky, I do not slide out of the driver’s seat and find a dead bluebird resting like a macabre figurehead just above my Texas license plate. I do not marvel at its tiny twisted legs. One splayed skyward. Reaching. My son doesn’t nudge it with a stick so it falls glittering to the concrete of our driveway, a jewel torn from the crown of heaven. Let’s keep it, I don’t say, so my husband doesn’t have to shoot me that look both disgusted and affectionate like: you’re such a weirdo and I love you, but absolutely not, no way, dead songbird in the freezer is where I draw the line. The bird is still alive so I can't take a picture and post it, like an omen, on Instagram. So, because I don’t kill this bird on Mother’s Day, the universe does not decide, a month later, that four and a half weeks of pregnancy is all I get. No, the bird flies free and this baby—the one I don’t know I want until I see the pink parallel lines and feel a yes so deep it rings like a bell? This baby lives.
July 31, 2025
Fiction
PRAYER BREAKFAST by Emma Ensley
I knew that downloading music was illegal, but my dad was the one who showed me how to do it, so I didn’t worry too much. I still prayed at night for God to forgive me, just in case.
***
The Australian's username was koala_rocks47 and he was thirty-two, though I didn't know that yet.I was eleven and three-quarters. I'd found the John Mayer fan forum through a Google search after Drew read the lyrics to "Why Georgia" in Literature class, during our poetry unit."am I living it right?" over and over again, while his hands shook.I wasn't living at all, not really. Not until I heard that song.***
koala_rocks47: hey Why_GeorgiaGurl! saw ur post about wanting the Melbourne bootleg. I've got the whole show, soundboard quality. want me to upload it for you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: omg yes please!!! I only have the first 4 songs from limewire and they keep cutting outkoala_rocks47: no worries, mate. us hardcore fans gotta stick together. btw love your username - georgia's my favorite track too. how old are you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: 16***
On Wednesday mornings, Pastor Jim drove the Presbyterian middle schoolers to Bojangles on Cleveland Highway. We called it Prayer Breakfast. At Bojangles I would order a cinnamon biscuit, a buttered biscuit, and a Mr. Pibb. I’d watch Drew across the restaurant while Jim asked us about our “faith journeys.” “Anyone want to share what God's been doing in their lives this week?”I could’ve shared that I'd stayed up until 3 AM downloading bootlegs with someone named koala_rocks47, who thinks I am in high school. Instead, I said nothing and watched Drew's headphones settle around his neck, wondering what holy music played through them.Last week on the bus, his batteries died and he asked to share mine. We listened to a live John Mayer show from Melbourne together. During “Comfortable” our arms touched and stayed touching for three whole songs.“Where do you find all these?” he asked.“The internet,” I said.***
The next Wednesday his batteries worked but he asked to share headphones anyway. This time he played me Damien Rice and said "this will make you cry" and I pretended it did even though I was mostly thinking about how to make our arms touch again.***
On the forum, I tell people I've been to twelve John Mayer concerts. I say my favorite was Atlanta because that's the closest city people would recognize. I talk about the acoustics at the Fox Theatre even though I've only seen pictures online. koala_rocks47: which was your favorite show of all the ones you've been to?Why_GeorgiaGurl: probably the one at eddie's attic. he played this unreleased song called “in your atmosphere” and everyone was dead silentI downloaded another bootleg. Hartford, 2002. The crowd noise sounded like prayers or waves or static between radio stations.***
I burned Drew a mix CD and almost called it “Songs for Bojangles” but at the last second I wrote “Songs for Wednesday Mornings”. I included the Melbourne "Why Georgia," some Damien Rice, and other songs I thought sounded appropriately deep and romantic. Songs about longing and roads and being older than we were.***
koala_rocks47: what's winter like there?In Georgia, winter meant maybe putting on a fleece. Maybe frost on car windows that melted by 9 AM. In Brisbane it was summer. Upside-down seasons.Why_GeorgiaGurl: cold sometimesI opened a new browser and googled the distance between Brisbane and Atlanta which was 9,272 miles.***
Drew's mix CD got scratched. The Damien Rice track skipped on “still a little bit” over and over.“Still a little bit still a little bit still a little…”***
That night I prayed. “Dear God, forgive me for lying about my age. And for downloading. And for the way I feel when Drew's arm touches mine during 'Comfortable.’”***
Some girls hang out in Pastor Jim's office after school, taking photos on flip phones and listening to emo music that almost sounds like worship songs. I don't go because I don't get asked but also because when I mentioned it to my mom she furrowed her brow and said "I don't know about that."I rolled my eyes and told her it was perfectly fine and she said that it didn’t matter. That it was a bad look. I mentioned this to Drew, like can you believe this, and he kind of shrugged. He said, “I mean yeah, he never has the guys in his office.”***
I asked koala_rox47 if he believed in God and he typed for a really long time before just saying “no”.***
At Prayer Breakfast, Pastor Jim always sat next to whoever was newest. This week it was Anna from sixth grade. He asked her about her "walk with Christ" while his hand rested on her back.My Mr. Pibb tasted flat. I couldn’t finish my second biscuit. When Drew played me an unreleased Damien Rice song on the bus, I could barely pay attention to the words. I stared out the window watching the cars fly past us on Cleveland Highway and letting my mind go blank.***
My mom asked me again about Pastor Jim and I said I hadn’t noticed anything. She stared at me for a long time. I added this to my list of lies needing forgiveness.***
koala_rocks47 messaged me less and less. Or was it me who was messaging him less and less?***
I started praying with just the beginnings. Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God. July 30, 2025
Fiction
HAUNT ATTACK: DENNIS COOPER AND ZAC FARLEY ON ‘ROOM TEMPERATURE’ by Jack Skelley
Room Temperature is the latest film collaboration by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. It focuses on a family-run, amateur haunted house and was shot on location in Southern California. The film recently screened at San Francisco’s Frameline film festival, and before that at Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It will soon show in Europe. Although the concept of co-directing a film is unusual, the rapport between Cooper and Farley is natural… as evidenced by how they often finish each other’s thoughts in this QA with Jack Skelley. And this reflects in the quietly supernatural vibe of Room Temperature, which is spare and cool, but with deep emotional undercurrents. Jack: Can you describe the division of labor between the two of you? Dennis, one would assume that you’re responsible for the script and Zac is more responsible for directing camera angles, blocking, and those kinds of things. Is that true?Dennis: I’m not completely responsible for the text. I do the vast majority of that work, but everything is in consultation with Zac. He has lots of ideas that I can’t implement textually because I’m not as visually inclined as he is. But we talk about everything. And we’re so in sync about what we want that I trust him. Occasionally, I do question some visual decisions, but on the set, Zac is directing and I’m mostly there working with the actors and conferring with Zac. But as it’s being written, I’m basically the guy at the computer.Zac: The films are complete collaborations. We decide what we want to do and how to do it together. Neither Dennis nor I are classically trained filmmakers, so I guess neither one of us really knows how other directors make their films, but our collaborations feel both more complex and fluid than one does words and the other makes images. But yes, Dennis is a writer, a really great one, so I know better than to mess with his intuitions on that front. But we make all the decisions together. We do the casting together, for example.Dennis: And decisions about choosing locations are all completely mutual. But he is stronger in that area. So it divides up a little bit, but it’s always a back-and-forth.Jack: How often do these decisions happen on the set, in real time?Dennis: Oh, quite a lot.Zac: The goal on set is to be really attuned and responsive to what’s going on. We plan meticulously ahead of time so that we can feel free to react to a change in circumstances outside our control and to embrace happy accidents. There’s nothing more thrilling than something unexpected happening on set that supersedes our expectations, and to a certain extent we bet on and hope for happy accidents as part of the process. Both Dennis and I are particularly excited with working with the performers. Because we’re working mostly with non-professional actors, we cast people for what they can bring to the projects and welcome their own senses of intuition and insights into their characters. The film is really the result of a collaboration with the cast and crew that participated in bringing it to life. Dennis: When we’re shooting, it’s very common that a line we thought would work isn’t working. So we’ll cut the line or change the words. The same is true with the visuals: Yes, the films are storyboarded. But on set, we’ll realize a scene will be better if we change the POV.Jack: It was very interesting to compare the screenplay with the final product. A lot of dialog was cut. Now, having two directors is fairly unusual, right? Are there any models for this sort of dual relationship?Dennis: Well, there are the Coen brothers, Straub-Huillet, the Wachowskis … It’s not completely unprecedented. There’s never any confusion about that: We know what the other is capable of, and often one of us will back off and let the other person do what they need to do.Jack: Both of you are based in Paris, while Room Temperature was filmed in Southern California. It seems like a lot of effort to pick-up and relocate from your home base to California to do this.Dennis: We just set up camp at my Los Angeles apartment. We have the advantage of knowing a lot of people in Los Angeles. All kinds of friends to lean on. Our casting director Erin Cassidy and our main on-the-ground producer Luka Fisher for example, were based there. Zac: We made our two previous films in France, which was wonderful in that we could finance them in part with public grants. But to be eligible the films have to be shot in majority in the French language. Early on, we tried making Room Temperature in France, but it quickly became clear that this had to be shot in the United States and in English. Home-haunts unfortunately don’t yet exist in France, and while we had always envisioned Permanent Green Light (our previous film) as a French film, we wrote this one in a way where translating it into French would have done real damage. It was a challenge to shoot the film in the United States, but it was absolutely the right thing to do and we got to collaborate with some incredibly talented people. Jack: The collaboration between you is unusual and often feels seamless: The dialog is lean and punctuated by pregnant pauses. So is the visual framing with its own kinds of pauses. There are long, wide shots and slow pans. In this way, the film says more by saying less. Thoughts?Dennis: We have a really strong sense of the rhythm we want the film to have and how that will work. The dialogue is spare, but it has a lot of weight on its shoulders and the visuals are as important as the dialogue. Some of our favorite filmmakers such as James Benning make films with almost no dialogue to provide breathing room. Our films are poetic and formally surprising, but they provide time for the audience to settle-in to the pacing and commune with the characters.Zac: In a way, the rhythm and the pacing act as the glue that allows us to have sometimes wildly divergent tones coexist in the film. In a weird way while the film can feel somewhat slow at times, it’s actually incredibly dense.Dennis: This approach worked well with our Southern California desert location. It’s shot in the middle of nowhere with a family who is very isolated. They don’t have cameras or cell phones or computers, as far as we know. Not even a car. They live in a very closed-off world. So having all that space and silence reinforces the emptiness of the world they live in.Jack: Let’s talk about the differences between writing on the page and screenwriting: Writing on the page depends on the reader to provide some interpretation of the text’s dialog and imagery, while film, being more concrete and visual, presents the image more straightforwardly and the viewer is a less “active” participant in the experience as a work of art. Do you agree with how I pose this?Dennis: Yes, that’s obviously the way I think about writing. The novels don’t create such a solid world that the readers feel like they’re just an observer, right? They participate. And what’s interesting about film is it’s the exact opposite. Because the film is very solid, it does take all the responsibility. We try to open that up, so that the film is obviously a carefully made object, but at the same time it feels very translucent. It’s not so locked down that the audience is casually observing. They have to pay a lot of attention. We just saw the new Wes Anderson film. I love his films, but they are the most extremely fascistically visualized films. There’s no way our films are so completely locked up. But I feel a certain kinship with what he does. We do angle for images and shots that are very highly composed. So it’s weird.Jack: What is the origin of Room Temperature’s setting of a family-made haunted house? Dennis, knowing your obsession with neighborhood haunted houses, it must come from you. You even make Halloween pilgrimages to Southern California to visit many haunted houses.Dennis: Both of us are massive fans of them, and we think of it as an art form. On the surface level it’s just a family having fun and trying to do something cool and make their haunted house better than the neighbors’. But they put so much effort into something that is always a failure on some level… because they don’t have enough funds or because it’s just them and their kids playing with the concept of a haunted house. I love the amateurism of that. All of our films so far have been about people who can’t achieve what they want to achieve. We tried to capture that in this case using the setting of a haunted house whose aspirations are higher than the family’s imaginations and budget can realize.Zac: Yeah. It’s a shared fantasy that the characters have. But it’s also the individual fantasy of each family member. One kid will be really into the acting and theatrical part of it, while another member of the family will be into the architecture and fog machines. In terms of narrative structure, home-haunts are daring and experimental by default. You enter the first room and there’s a pretty classic introduction video explaining the premise of the haunt, but then you go walk into the second room and somebody was obviously just really obsessed with the animatronic ghoul they saw at the Halloween store, so they bought five and decided to operate them out of synch, and it doesn’t really fit with the surface logic of the haunted house, but the conflagration of the two is really generative. The visitor going through this haunted house can project narrative meaning onto something that wasn’t necessarily built to accommodate it, at least not in any literal way, and that creates the kind of openness that we’re seeking to have in our films. Haunted houses are like films in that they use acting, writing, music, architecture... In Room Temperature the house is a setting and a character, but it’s also a kind of analog for the film. Jack: In fact, there’s much discussion among the characters about whether the haunted house is succeeding. One of the first lines in the film is an outside character asking, “What’s wrong with your house!”Dennis: Then he says, “I’m not against it.”Jack This seems like a statement on not just the artistic abilities of the families. It’s an observation that can extend to the father character, who is like the creative director. And there’s definitely something very “wrong” with him. Now, in addition to haunted houses, you two share an obsession with theme parks. Symbolically, thematically, what connects these two art forms?Dennis: In a dark ride, the experience is out of your control. The car is devising your pace and each passenger sees exactly the same thing. Whereas in a haunted house you can hang around or go look at details that intrigue you. It’s not like everybody’s constantly being propelled forward, but there is a unifying quality that makes it a haunted house. You know, the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland in California is not completely dissimilar. In an earlier version of our script there was a point where people got in a little car and experienced a section of the house that way. It was impractical and overly expensive to realize, but we were very excited by that concept.Zac: There used to be a haunted house called Mystic Motel that had a ride-through component. It was created by a 14- or 15-year-old kid who was obviously very ambitious and excited about the mechanics of dark rides. He used one of those electrified shopping carts designed for disabled people to navigate giant grocery stores. He had it follow a track in his basement and built a remote-control system so he could decide when it would stop and go, controlling your rhythm. Dennis: Some of the big cities in Europe, such as London or Amsterdam, have the London Dungeon or the Amsterdam Dungeon. That’s kind of a combo because you walk through it, and it’s obviously much more professional than a family haunted house. For instance, in the Amsterdam Dungeon, at the end you get on a roller coaster that takes you through the final section of experience.Jack: Dennis, you are familiar with Sabrina Tarasoff’s concept for her “Beyond Baroque” walk-through haunted house – in the “Made in L.A. 2020” biennial at the Huntington Museum in Los Angeles. It focused on your writing and mine and others from 1980s Los Angeles. And originally it was to be a dark ride. Sabrina wanted something close to what you were saying, Zac, where you get in a little car that follows a track. And later, she and I wrote a piece for your blog, Dennis, about theme parks where we discuss Disney’s invention of the Omnimover: a shell-like, encased ride vehicle that directs your experience. This is unlike, say, dark rides such as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride where you can look all around. The Omnimover points and targets your vision and experience.Dennis: The Haunted Mansion uses those, right?Jack: Yes. They are named Doom Buggies. Now Disney and other theme parks have more sophisticated versions of this. I don’t know where I’m going with this question: I just want to use the word “Omnimover!”Zac: It’s a really good word.Jack: So, what are your feelings in retrospect about making Room Temperature?Dennis: It was an absolute and utter joy to make. Yes, it was exhausting. Sometimes on the set you were going until 5 o’clock in the morning. And it was often freezing cold. But we’re both very happy with the film. It’s not unlike what we hoped it would be when we wrote it. And the editing was a joy.Zac: Every time Dennis and I start a project, we set the level of ambition to a high point which we may or may not be able to achieve. This was much more ambitious than our previous films. And it was harder to produce for those reasons. But I think we managed to do what we set out to do.Jack: Another exciting yet subdued component of Room Temperature is the music. It is even more spare than the dialog. It appears only in very rare scenes. Who is the composer?Dennis: The music is by Puce Mary. In fact, the only pieces of music in Room Temperature are the sounds of the haunted house, created by Puce Mary, plus one song the character Andre (played by Charlie Nelson Jacobs) sings as part of the action. There is no music in the film other than that one song, the haunted house soundscapes by Puce Mary, and the end credits music.Zac: Dennis and I have been huge fans and admirers of Puce Mary forever. We have seen her perform live several times. She was our first collaborator on this film. She started drafting pieces of music – including the ghost sounds – maybe six years before we shot a single image. The song performed by Andre in the middle of the film is written and composed by Chris Olsen, who plays Paul the janitor. And the end credits music is a piece titled “Angel Shaving (L.A.S.E.R.)” by 7038634357, a really brilliant musician. Dennis: It’s important to our films that we don’t use music unless the characters hear the music as part of the action. That’s why there’s not a lot of music in them. It’s not because we don’t like music. We just believe scores are often manipulative. We are not going to dress-up the experience to make it more dramatic or sad or weird than it actually is for the characters.Jack: This certainly fits the vibe of the film. What’s next? Is there another collaboration in the works?Dennis: We are writing our next film right now. We have a meeting about it tomorrow. Jack: Yeah?Dennis: Yeah, and it’s good!
July 29, 2025
by Mike Topp
$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″
Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.
–Sparrow
