God.  Children really do know something they can’t tell.

When the wolf barks it sounds like a gunshot.  He barks all night.

The wake of the vampires.  Yes.  On first night.  We made puppets of all our worst tormentors.  Wolf and capra.  Dragon and corvian.  Rendered all however-many archons in wire and foam and dragged them through the cheering town and out into a field.  Torched them there in a ring with the snow rushing down.

That’s how we initiated it.  I remember everything about that night.  I was so drunk but never got sluggish or sleepy.  Possessed a weird lucidity like in a dream perfectly recalled.  There was music.  Everyone in Memphis turned their speakers out their windows.  There was music everywhere we wandered.  The ghosts of union soldiers roared marching songs up and down the streets.

That was also the night we used the Sharp sisters’ book to trap zodiacal demons in statues and force them to talk.  Just before sunrise.  They predicted the entire remainder of our lives and none of us have deviated from their plan one jot.

There is a moment in Archangel which many people miss.  A mysterious face.  It’s right before the scene with the hooded vampire. 

A nighttime exterior of the murder house half cloaked in trees.  The wind is violent.  The leaves strain the broad light from the house and create patterns of bright and dark.  A standard establishing shot.  But it just keeps going.

Benny’s detractors always hated him for his long shots.  Some go on for three four minutes.  Boring they cried.  But fans understood that it was to give you time to notice all of the things hidden in the frame.  Then watching Archangel was like looting a tomb.  There were prizes everywhere in the dark.  When these plain secrets were pointed out to them, dolts hated the movie even more.  Gimmick they cried.  But the film still never fails to reveal their impatience their obliviousness and their self-absorption.   

But you’re not a dolt so you watch closely.  You enjoy it when Benny’s savant eye lingers.  You trust him and know he’s keeping this tree and this house on the screen for a reason -if only for the shimmer of porch light filtered through the leaves which is quite beautiful in black and white.  You remember as well that Benny always intended for Archangel to be shown in cinemas on thirty foot screens.  You lean closer.  You watch the wind rattle the branches and wonder how there’s still been no cut.  It’s as if you’re a child again absorbed in a picture book.  And then you see the face in the tree.  Sometimes you gasp.

The accidental combination of leaves and the space between them: a grinning face whose mouth opens and closes with the wind.

“And then you see” is wrong though.  You actually noticed the face immediately but dismissed it because it seemed too obvious.  Too childish.  You remember seeing human faces in tree bark and plaster walls as a kid but you’re an adult now and have trained your eye not to see an object but its idea.  So you unsee the face and scan elsewhere: the porch swing, the line of walking stones, surely there’s something.  

Maybe someone has to confirm it for you.  The friend watching with you ventures aloud “is that a?”  And then you both admit relief at not being the only one.  

But once you admit it you can never unsee the face again.  It emerges from the leaves every single time.  

I didn’t work on that shot and never heard the story behind it but I bet it was an accident.  All the best shots in Archangel were accidents.  Benny probably did just need a visually interesting exterior and only noticed the eerie illusion later while reviewing the footage.  Tacked another couple of minutes onto the shot to be sure we all saw it too.

But I don’t know.  Maybe the Sharp sisters rigged up some apparatus to make the limbs bend just so.  Maybe there were hooks and pulleys hidden in the branches.  Many of Archangel’s answers died in the war. 

Was it better named dragon or leviathan?  Whatever it was.  Huge composite being.  Alien god.  Eyeless and crested.  Long enough to wrap around a mountain.  Long enough to wrap around the world.  

It is true that Julie was pillowcased and shot by a leftist murder squad.  

They went to the wrong house.  

I sing so much as I walk.  Slip into singing so easily.  Even now I’m singing.  Quiet but proud.  The same line again and again.  Sing even as I catch the red rooftops of Cynopolis between the branches.  I am a dead woman.  But still music comes with me.  Astonishing that it has followed me here.  Where does it come from I wonder?  Music.  What goodness should I thank?

That we should have music at all.  

That’s when I realized I would have to fight them.  In that moment.  Personally fight them.  Fight them and kill them and divide their bones.  It’s as if I could see a string held taut and aloft.  A string running from the telephone all the way to Elephant Rock.  No shirking no skedaddling would save me.  The contest lay before me like a stone.

I hung up on Morgan without a word.

Yes.  We would have to wrestle them down and break them.  We would have to club their skulls to be sure they were dead.  They were serpents.  Serpents in the bedroom.  Serpents in the crib.  

I had once believed certain things about talking and certain things about voting.  Believed or inherited.  But the moment I put those things to the question they dissolved like sugar.  Those angels never showed for Lincoln.  Did I somehow deserve better?       

No.  It came down to wolf rules.  For me as for everyone.  As it had every god damned time in every god damned age.  Of course the wolf would preside.  Of course he would tend the scales.

Resigned I took up the bat I would carry with me all that day.  I locked the door.  I won’t finish in a camp I told myself.  No one’s throwing me out of a helicopter.   

Benny shot Archangel in a particular way.  Who is this camera?  You wonder as you watch.

The camera winces.  It flees.  Peeks around corners.  Grows still and hopes not to be noticed.  And since it’s a movie you do all these things as well.  It’s you with your face in the corner trying hard not to see.  Who am I?  You eventually start to wonder.  The other characters will look into your eyes but will not speak of or to you.  

Most of all the camera avoids.  Pans right past the dog-masked vampires that preside over every scene.  Zooms to push them out of frame.  Shallows the depth of field until they diffuse into shadows.  The camera jerks away when they murder someone or cuts to something else like two mice circling a strawberry on a vine.  It focuses on random objects in a scene (wheelbarrows, trumpets) while violence rages in the periphery (a girl decapitated and her head abused).  Sometimes too though the camera gets fooled and takes a minute to realize it’s been gazing at a vampire the whole time.  When it finally notices the long face interrupting a line of books on a shelf, it moves.

It is an unnatural-looking film.  Incompetent even.  There’s an ignorance of basic movie grammar that at first seems baffling, then halfway clever, then at last much much too real.  Too close to life.  What could be so bad that the camera will not look?  You start to dread the question.  By the end you’ve still seen too much.        

A great horror film.  But for those of us who knew Benny and worked on Archangel it never was a movie about fear.  Despair was Benny’s subject.  Yet that traumatized camera persists and survives the entire ninety minutes.  It keeps trying -perhaps idiotically- to document anything else.  No matter how impossible that becomes.