Crampton


 Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz, "Crampton" a script of an unproduced episode of "The X Files," 1998. 

This feels exactly like the script you’d expect if you asked Thomas Ligotti to write an X-Files episode! It includes a strange town, stage magic, clowns, mannikins, a psychic hotline, ventriloquist dummies, and plenty of philosophical pessimism. The script is terrifying, but, at the same time, the humorous banter between Scully and Mulder is spot on. Specific scenes masterfully inform the abstract themes of the episode. Illusion becomes reality when the FBI concocts a fake cover story that spins out of control. The themes of solipsistic idealism—that nothing exists except what is currently conscious—are reiterated when a restaurant eerily shuts its lights off and closes once Scully and Mulder leave the parking lot. At one point a costume is stripped away, revealing no one underneath. There is a telling dialogue where a retired FBI agent, who used to work fraud cases, fondly remembers “[b]eing able to point my finger and say, with all the authority of the Justice Department behind me, ‘Look, this is all a fake, none of this is real, it’s all a con.’” With those words, that agent is more right than perhaps he intends!


Comments

Post a Comment

What did you think about this story?

Popular posts from this blog

Children of the Night

Image
Stephen Graham Jones, "Children of the Night" in  Screams From the Dark , ed. Ellen Datlow (Tor Publishing Group: 2022). This is a story involving the literal collision of subculturesă…ˇbigfoot hunters, truckers, and monsters.  Tol's theories and speculations about monsters are wonderfully absurd, but the truth is stranger and even more ridiculous. When monster kinds cooperate with one another, we don't have a chance against them.
Read more

You Have What I Need

Image
  Ian Rogers, "You Have What I Need" in Screams From the Dark , ed. Ellen Datlow (Tor Publishing Group: 2022). The hospital is a strange place. Apart from a war zone, you are unlikely to be physically closer to horror than when sitting in the ER waiting room of a hospital. There is nasty shit going on all around you—from blood, viscera, and death to injustice, psychological trauma, and financial ruin. It is a place where strange things happen, a place where both lives are saved and tragedies occur.  But people (and monsters, disease, and contagion) show up at the hospital thinking they are going there because it has what they need . It can feel like the last hope; the hospital can fix it. Most of the time, what you think will happen differs from what really happens. It is a place that often frustrates expectations and sometimes delivers pleasant surprises.  “You Have What I Need” takes up this weirdness of the hospital from the perspective of those who work there, those who v
Read more

The Smell of Waiting

Image
Kaaron Warren, "The Smell of Waiting" in  Screams From the Dark , ed. Ellen Datlow (Tor Publishing Group: 2022). This story has a different take on returning the dead to life. Life isn't something to be restored, but rather, death is a thing or a presence that can be taken away. Of course, once you've taken it away, you've got to store it somewhere! What did you think about the role that Andrea played in the process as opposed to the role that the dog played in the process?
Read more