THE BLEED
Somebody watched one all the way through. That's all it takes, and it doesn't have to be you.
From that moment the film is being made. It already has an ending, printed on the front of the box, the way titles were in 1987 when a box had thirty seconds to sell you something and didn't waste them being clever. What it hasn't got is a cast, a location, or a reason for anybody to be standing there.
It gets those from the town you're in.
HOW IT SHOOTS
Every scene needs three things. Somewhere to shoot it. Somebody to be there. An ordinary reason for that person to be there — a shift, a lift home, a favour for a stranger.
It finds all three by watching what you do and who does it for you.
WHAT IT COSTS
Everybody who helps you ends up in it. The neighbour who lets you in. The deputy who looks the other way. You don't choose who gets cast. You cast them by involving them, and you find out afterwards, when their name is on the back of the box.
Asking is free. Somebody saying yes is not.
By the third session you'll be picking people nobody will miss. That's the game.
WHAT A CUT IS
When the film needs somebody gone, it cuts them, and the town closes over the gap.
Her mother has a son. The yearbook has a different face. The grave has a different name and the lichen agrees.
Nobody misses her. Nobody can. You were in the room when it was shot, so you're the only thing left holding a person who was never here.
WHAT YOU'VE GOT
Paper.
The film rewrites anything with a name on it. It can't rewrite arithmetic somebody wrote down before it happened.
A standing order for thirty-nine, and a week of delivery notes for forty. A church roof fund that took a hundred and eight dollars in raffle books, at nine dollars a man, from twelve men on a roster that now lists eleven.
Two documents in one drawer, both true, that can't both be right. That's the only evidence it can't take back off you, because it's made out of what the film did.
HOW YOU FIGHT IT
You don't. You starve it.
A scene needs a place, a body and a reason. Take one away and nothing gets shot that night, and the running time on the front of the box comes down.
Every way of doing that means asking somebody else for something.
SIX NIGHTS
Then the tape is finished, the town is whatever you left of it, and the number on the front is your score.
The film always finishes. What you decide is how much of the town is in it.