CAUGHT ON TAPE

BLACK-EYED KIDS

The parking garage in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, looked safe enough when David Jenkins pulled downtown on a winter’s day in 2008. Jenkins drove forty minutes from his home in nearby York, Pennsylvania, into this city of about 500,000 people to meet a friend he hadn’t seen in a year. He didn’t know evil would greet him when the sun went down.

Jenkins wound his way through the crowded garage and found a parking spot on the third floor. Then he walked to his friend’s apartment building. “We hung out and played PS2, bullshitted over old times, had a few beers,” Jenkins said. “I left at about 12:30 a.m. and went back to the garage for my car.”

Jenkins walked through the cold, now-deserted garage, climbed into his car and started the engine, letting it warm before he started home. As he leaned down to slip an “old school hip-hop” CD into the stereo, he discovered he wasn’t alone.

“A tapping on my window scared the shit out of me,” he said. Jenkins snapped his head toward the window and saw two people staring at him through the glass. “They seemingly came out of nowhere.”

Jenkins immediately turned up the volume. “I know this sounds stupid, but I thought maybe if these were thugs they’d think when they heard that music that I was hard, or something, and maybe be more apprehensive about mugging me, if that was the intent,” he said.

Instead of anyone threatening, he found two pale boys about twelve years old standing in the cold, staring at him through the glass. One boy was taller than the other, and both were skinny. They looked out of place. “The first thing that struck me as odd was their attire,” Jenkins said. “It was ‘80s clothing, only it looked brand new.”

One boy wore a new Montreal Expos baseball cap with a logo the team used between 1969 and 1991. The Expos haven’t existed since 2004. The Vision Street Wear skater hoodies they wore were popular in the 1980s. “What they were wearing just didn’t seem to fit with the time period,” Jenkins said.

The fear of the boys drawing a gun rushed through Jenkins mind. His door was unlocked. Hoping the boys didn’t notice, he rolled his window down a crack, and simply said, “yeah?”

The shorter boy Jenkins dubbed The Ringleader spoke first. “Excuse me,” he said in a voice much older and mature than what should have come out of that mouth. “We’ve had a slight mishap, and I was hoping you could help us out.”

The request froze Jenkins in his seat. “Those were the exact words too,” he said. “‘Slight mishap.’” Jenkins knew a twelve-year-old boy in a parking garage in Pennsylvania after midnight would have never said that. “I was nervous as hell,” he said.

The boy said their ride left them and they were now stuck in that part of town, and needed a lift home. “It seemed an innocent enough request,” Jenkins said. “But my BS alarm was going off. Something just felt really eerie about the whole thing. I mean two kids that young in a parking garage at that hour? It just wasn’t right.”

The fact the boys were in the garage also frightened Jenkins. He hadn’t seen the boys when he walked to his car, and when he got in suddenly they were there. The Ringleader’s request also made him nervous. “It just seemed shady,” Jenkins said. “I asked where exactly they lived, and that I was heading back to York. That ‘other end’ of Lancaster was in the opposite direction.”

Jenkins told the boys no. The Ringleader didn’t like that. “He said he’d give me gas money, and pulled out his wallet and took out a crisp $20 bill and held it up,” Jenkins said. “It was an old style one. An old style $20 should not be that crisp, looking fresh from the bank.”

As the strangeness of the encounter grew more in Jenkins’ mind, he started to ask questions. “Everything about this just felt very wrong,” he said. “I asked where exactly they lived.”

The Ringleader again said, “on the other side of town.”

“I asked where, specifically, on the other side of town,” Jenkins said. “I wanted the name of the township, the name of the school district, the name of the street. An exact address.”

The Ringleader balked; the other boy began to look nervous. “They couldn’t give me an answer,” Jenkins said. “This really creeped me out because it was now apparent that they really had no intention of getting a ride anywhere. They just wanted to get into my car.”

Then Jenkins saw something that kept him awake for the next two days. “I noticed something else – completely jet black eyes,” he said. The sight terrified him. Jenkins looked away from the children, trying to keep them from seeing the fear on his face.

The second child spoke to him. “Please,” he said. “Can we please get in the car? It’s really cold out here. I’ll tell you where to go once we get in.”

Panic consumed Jenkins.

“Please,” the smaller boy demanded.

“At this point it was fight or flight,” Jenkins said. “And I certainly wasn’t getting out of the car.”

He put the car in gear and told the kids “no” through the crack in the window. “Please, don’t go,” the Ringleader said, desperation creeping into his voice. “We’ll be stuck out here.”

“Sorry,” Jenkins said and started to pull away from these black-eyed children.

The tenor of the Ringleader’s voice changed. “Now, perhaps realizing their fate was sealed, they no longer held back,” Jenkins said. “The talkative shorter one’s voice changed now. No longer like that of a desperate little boy, it had a nasty snarl to it.”

The Ringleader started cursing at Jenkins as the car pulled away from them. Before Jenkins drove onto the ramp down to the lower level, he chanced a look in the rearview mirror. Terror stabbed at him anew, but it had nothing to do with the strange eyes of the boys. His fear came from something more human. “There was no trace of them,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘oh wow, they vanished,’ I was thinking, ‘shit, they’re gonna try to head me off at the next level down.’”

Worried the boys might run in front of his car at every turn, he hurried to the ground floor and shot onto the street. The black-eyed boys weren’t there. Three blocks away, his heart pounding in his chest, he stopped for a red light. “I kept looking back, scanning for them,” Jenkins said, but the strange boys weren’t behind him.

He sat in his car, still shivering from fear; the light stayed red. “It seemed like it was taking an unnaturally long time to change,” he said. “In fact I think now that those intersections are even supposed to be flashing red and yellow lights at that time of night.”

The minutes crawled by, and the light refused to change. Then he saw the black-eyed boys standing on a street corner he’d looked at not ten seconds before. “Sure enough, there they are,” Jenkins said. “I’d been looking around everywhere the entire time and didn’t see them coming. There’s just no way they could’ve gotten right on top of me without me seeing them coming.”

The Ringleader made eye contact with Jenkins and snarled. The second boy looked apprehensive “Even apologetic,” Jenkins said. “Like a good cop/bad cop routine or something.”

The boys started walking toward Jenkins’ car, and the panic again rose in his chest. The light still shown red. “There was nothing coming the other way and I just gunned it through the red light. I was hoping to God there’d be a cop.”

He didn’t encounter one police car on his fear-fueled drive home, running every red stoplight on his way. Once he reached the highway, he began to relax, but nothing went back to normal. “I didn’t sleep for like 48 hours after that, and didn’t sleep without a night light on for quite some time after,” Jenkins said. “When I finally did sleep they were in my dreams. I kept thinking that maybe my mind was just playing tricks on me that night, but after seeing other accounts, there are just too many similarities to write off. These things are very real.”

Source: Jason Offutt.

TRI-STATE CREMATORY

The Tri-State Crematory was founded by Tommy Marsh in the 1970s. Located in northwest Georgia, near the city of LaFayette, it provided cremation services for a number of funeral homes in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. When Tommy Marsh's health deteriorated in the mid-1990s, his son, Ray Brent Marsh, took over operation of the business.

In 2001, a propane delivery truck driver named Gerald Cook contacted the Walker County Sheriff's Department and reported having seen dead bodies strewn about outdoors on the Marsh property. A deputy sheriff responded to the call but didn't find anything out of the ordinary.

Frustrated by the lack of results, Cook told his aunt what he had seen - that human remains were not being disposed of properly at the Crematory. His aunt, who worked for the FBI as a secretary, contacted the US Environmental Protection Agency field office in Atlanta with the information. EPA agents were sent to investigate the property and discovered a human skull and bones on the premises.

On Feb. 15, 2002, investigators returned and a more thorough search was conducted. They found piles of rotting human bodies in a storage shed, in vaults and scattered throughout the property. The search ultimately recovered 339 bodies in various states of decay.

A federal disaster team was brought into the area along with a portable morgue shipped from Maryland. The team began trying to identify the remains, a process made difficult because many of the corpses were in advanced stages of decomposition. Some were little more than skeletons. Of the 339 bodies that were discovered, 226 were identified.

At some point after Ray Brent Marsh took over the business, he claimed that the cremation oven, or "retort," was broken and that was why the 339 bodies had been buried, stacked in the storage shed or left in the woods instead of being cremated. Families had received concrete dust instead of the cremated remains of their loved ones. Later, the oven was tested and found to be in working order.

Ray Brent Marsh was arrested on over 300 criminal violations and was ultimately charged by the State of Georgia with 787 counts, including theft by deception, abusing a corpse, burial service related fraud and giving false statements. Marsh pled guilty and is currently serving a twelve year sentence.

Wiki.

WHAT A CONCEPT

I didn't catch Texas Chainsaw 3D when it was in theaters. Based on the surprising success it enjoyed at the box office, I guess I'm one of the few who opted to stay home and...watch something better. The promise of seeing a Chainsaw film directed by the guy who made Takers, produced by the guys who made multiple Saws, and starring a rapper named Trey Songz didn't exactly lure me into theater lobbies to slap my hard earned cash down on the counter.

Look, I can sit here and pretend to be better and above it all, but I know I'll be checking it out when it hits Redbox, so I'll stow my pompousness for the time being.

Strictly by happenstance I stumbled across this very cool concept art by artist Jerad Marantz (I Am Legend, Rise of the Planet of the Apes). Because I haven't seen the film, I have no idea in what context these images might have been used, but I find the idea of an older, grayer Leatherface intriguing: 

Source.

Jerad's Other Stuff.

REVIEW: THE CARETAKER

"The fruit and the feather fall at the same rate.

One is crushed, and one is tickled by its fate."

The world of fiction is currently saturated with vampires. I know it and you know it. And we can blame all that Twilight nonsense, which took our undead, blood-sucking creatures of the night and made them play baseball and willingly go to high school for some reason, even though they're technically corpses and can't do much with a diploma. 

So when someone goes out and makes a low budget vampire movie, I groan. How can I not groan? How can I maintain enthusiasm when someone thinks they can bring something new to the formula? How about you just go make a spoof version of Paranormal Activity with a really punchliney title? I'll wait here. 

But The Caretaker proves there's still blood to be sucked out of the old sub-genre yet. It is a clever, bleak, and even thoughtful film about the ties that bind us - and how we're better off trusting a mortal enemy than our own neighbor.

It is the very beginning of a sudden outbreak of vampirism occurring across Australia. What's believed to be the flu turns out to be something much more vicious and deadly. Soon, a group of strangers find themselves fleeing to the countryside in an effort to leave the madness of the city behind. At an isolated house in a distant rural area, a wine salesman, his ailing mother, and her doctor are already hunkering down, trying to make sense of what they are hearing about the outbreak. Our fleeing humans are surprised to find out, however, that the good doctor is actually inflicted with the vampire disease. Though the humans don't have much of a choice, the agreement is forged: the doctor will protect the humans from other vampires by night, if they will protect him from revenge-seeking humans by day.

You should have known it was all going to end very badly. 

The Caretaker effectively presents what George A. Romero has been saying in his zombie films for years: us humans are worse. Because we are selfish, and greedy, and willing to do anything to survive. At first all seems as well as it could be. Certain characters are dicks and bitches, but besides being irritating, no one seems up to anything nefarious. But that doesn't last. 

For a low budget, the ensemble cast are frighteningly good. Special mention must be made of Lee Mason, who I swear I've seen in something else, but whose filmography says otherwise. This doppelganger of C. Thomas Howell proves himself to be a domineering and strong figure - he assumes the role of leader without even trying. 

The direction by Tom Conyers is also confident. His handling of the powers vampires possess are unnatural enough to be unsettling, but never becomes cartoonish as they would have in a multi-million dollar film. The make-up effects are basic, but effective - again, just what's required is utilized. The most striking aspect of The Caretaker is Conyers' insistence that the concept be taken seriously. This is a surprisingly introspective film, filled with characters struggling with their own mortality, and with their own ruminations on what kind of life they lived leading up to this moment in time. An especially nice scene in which one of these characters unhappy with the person they have become plays a simple melody on the piano, and as each character hears her playing, they are all connected - however briefly. Perhaps because its a singular moment of peace in otherwise non-stop chaos, where people aren't to be trusted, and new bonds destroy and replace old ones.

Unfortunately, the musical score can be intrusive and even exhausting at times, as there doesn't seem to be one frame without a theme or a sting. And it doesn't help that the mournful strings you're hearing are clearly the result of a synthesizer, either. It does the film a disservice at times, reminding the viewer just how cheaply made it was. I'm always of the mind that if you're making a low budget feature, use music sparingly, unless you have access to a musician with a wealth of resources and willing to work cheap as a favor. I should stress that the score itself isn't bad...there's just too much of it, and after a while, you can't help but hear the flaws.

I also have to point my finger at its ending. Without giving anything away, let's just say it more than liberally borrows from the ending of another vampire film with a gimmick from the last decade. But, a good ending is a good ending, so I'll allow it.

Overall, I dug this undead flick. Similar thematically to Jim Mickle's Stakeland (but not nearly the same scope), it is an interesting character piece - a realistic observational experiment on what would happen in such an event, and how humanity would react. Sadly (and depressingly), The Caretaker might just be spot on.

Once again, my jaded and cynical self has been proven wrong by a film from which I expected little to nothing. It's so easy to look at a shoddy poster or video artwork and make a snap judgment, and if you did that in the case of The Caretaker, you'd be missing out like I almost did.

THIS AIN'T NO BUS STOP

Watch probably every cheap "sudden bus hit" scene ever filmed.

IN CHAINS

"Spirits surround us on every side... they have driven me from hearth and home, from wife and child."

Image source.