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The Sound of a Jackknife

by K. Bosgra

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I only took the Tremaine gig because of Shepherd’s recommendation.

“This one won’t pay much,” Shepherd admitted over the phone. People chattered in the background along with an indistinct electronic beat. “But Tremaine’s someone you’ll want to know in a couple of years.”

In the film industry, everyone believed that they knew someone on the cusp of greatness, and most people thought that someone was themselves. I’d usually acknowledge those remarks with a polite nod and move on. However, Shepherd’s phone was full of Academy Award winners who he’d spotted years before they got their little golden idol, so I copied down Tremaine’s contact info.

“He’s not the usual auteur piece of shit.” Shepherd raised his voice over the party. “Even though he looks like he was sent over by Central Casting.”

So I took the meeting. Anthony Ivan Tremaine entered my workshop wearing a black turtleneck sweater, faux leather pants, and gold-rimmed spectacles. Even at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday, he looked like a glossy headshot brought to life. Compared to him, I felt trashy in my faded t-shirt. I expected Tremaine to speak with the affected accent of an American who spent a few too many weeks in Europe, but he actually seemed to be trying on a little Joe Pesci to see how it fit. “You the guy?”

“I’m the guy.”

He’d brought a thumb drive with a scene from his film. The footage played without audio. A long, chitinous limb emerged from the lake’s mirror-like surface, preceding a monster with a narrow snout.

The auteur had made a monster flick where the visual effects had been accomplished without CGI. It had an 80s vibe, as if Tremaine intended for his picture to play in a double feature with Carpenter’s The Thing.

“Who made the creature?” I asked, expecting to recognize whichever workshop crafted it.

“Did it myself.”

I’d known too many directors who took credit for all of their subordinate’s successes to trust him outright. If the monster looked like garbage, then I could have believed him right away. “You did that?”

Like it was the most natural thing in the world, he said, “No one else got it right.”

The limbs reminded me of a spider-crab. The snout evoked a shark, except its throat bulged like a bullfrog. A slathering of goo—probably petroleum jelly—added a slimy, organic sheen. It made me a bit nostalgic for the movies I bought as a teenager just to watch the behind-the-scenes features. Even with Shepherd’s warning about the money, I got excited.

“What you’re looking at is the Jackknife,” Tremaine said. “It’s my big problem, right? Anybody could foley the rest, but it all goes to shit if people don’t buy the Jackknife. Shepherd heard I was having trouble and mentioned you.”

He replayed the scene from the top. The creature’s snout looked a bit like a blade although probably not enough to warrant the title. Towards the end of the clip, the Jackknife’s mouth wobbled silently. Tremaine hit pause. “Tell me: what’s it sound like?”

“You could go guttural. Maybe sample a growling dog. Or you could go for a shriek.” I shrugged. “You could do lots of things.”

“Sure you could,” Tremaine said. “But what does it sound like to you?”

I scanned through the clip for the exact moment when the actress began to scream. The Jackknife’s audio would overlap with hers, and I didn’t want the sounds to meld too much. The right audio for the Jackknife wouldn’t muddy the soundscape.

“Something low,” I said. “Maybe a frog, maybe a pitch-shifted tortoise.” Gary Rydstrom had sampled mating tortoises for velociraptor audio in Jurassic Park, and the academy rewarded his ingenuity with a little golden idol.

“Show me,” Tremaine said. “Doesn’t have to be perfect. I just wanna see where you’d take it.”

Considering that he was the sort of director who built his own monster when everyone else failed to capture his vision, I expected him to hover over my shoulder like a hall monitor while I attempted his challenge. Instead, as soon as I got to work he wandered over to the foley pits where I recorded footsteps. He examined my equipment with his hands clasped behind his back, like a drill sergeant performing an inspection.

The tortoise idea felt like the right direction to me. Done before? Sure, but sometimes you can’t beat what a genius has already done. Call it an homage. I wasn’t going to haul a pair of randy tortoises into the workshop for a demo, so I downloaded a couple clips from an online sound-bank. I slowed down the tortoise cry and lowered the pitch. I layered a frog’s croak onto the end to further differentiate it from Rydstrom’s velociraptors. It still sounded a little hollow, so I added a cat’s purr. The crunch potato chips left over from my lunch became the crackling sound of the Jackknife’s joints.

The actress remained silent when I played the clip back for Tremaine. The limbs moved with a tetatet. Then the Jackknife’s head entered frame along with a low eeyh. The actress scrambled away, and the Jackknife opened its mouth with a full-throated he-yee-raohk.

Without audio, the creature was obviously just a puppet. Tremaine’s crew had done a good job hiding the rods and ropes they were using to articulate its limbs, but it was a puppet all the same. Sound—even my rushed first attempt—brought it to life.

“That’s it. That is it.” Tremaine pointed at the monitor with both index fingers. He seemed excited but not happy. “Shepherd probably mentioned that I’m not exactly swimming in cash, but we’ll figure something out.”

When he left me alone in the silence of my soundproofed workshop, I let myself imagine that Shepherd’s assessment of Tremaine had been correct. Tremaine could be the guy who brought me the accolades I’d dreamed about. If The Jackknife came out right, anything could happen next.

I never suspected that I had just had my only face-to-face meeting with Tremaine.

Foley work tends to be like grammar: when it’s working, the audience doesn’t even notice it. They fall into the movie’s hypnosis and never consider that the footsteps they’re hearing might not belong to those feet. The action hero reloads a gun to demonstrate his violent virility, and the audience is mesmerized by the badass. The foley artist huddled over a partially disassembled stapler, trying to create the perfect series of metallic clicks and slides, remains invisible.

Making the sounds for a monster provided the opportunity to create something iconic, like when Akira Ifukube created the roar that conjures Godzilla for fans all around the world. Even though the pay sucked, the challenge of The Jackknife grabbed me.

We worked out a deal where I’d handle all of the sound for the film except for the score. It was a broader slate of responsibilities than I usually undertook, but it cleared up enough room in Tremaine’s budget that he could almost afford my standard rates. A producer brought me a contract and the full rough-cut of the movie the next morning.

“How do you know Alex?” I asked the producer.

“Tremaine likes to work with friends.” Her serene smile wasn’t an expression I usually associated with producers, especially on projects where the budget was basically gone.

“You’ve known him for a long time?”

She made a happy noise that might have been mmhmm.

Once she was gone I called Shepherd for reassurance that I hadn’t just signed onto something being run by idiots and amateurs. “You have money in The Jackknife?”

“Not as much as I’d like.” He asked a waiter for a refill. Someone else in the restaurant laughed. Shepherd’s tone became conspiratorial. “You took the job?”

“Ink’s drying on the contract.”

“Good for you. I’m telling you, I’d have bought Tremaine outright if he’d let me.”

I hesitated. Talented or not, I only made a living in the industry because I’d learned some basics of diplomacy. People don’t organize fan campaigns to reinstate a fired foley artist.

“You still there?” Shepherd asked.

“The people he’s working with,” I said. “Tremaine’s producer… Have you–”

“His cult, you mean.” Shepherd’s bluntness was the conversational equivalent of buying a Rolex just to demonstrate that he could afford one. “Yeah, they’re weird. But I’m guessing you haven’t watched the movie yet. Watch it. Call me back if you’ve got any doubts.”

He hung up before I could ask him if he really meant they were a cult. He was always prone to hyperbole, but I didn’t like his tone. Even then there was an energy in his voice like barely-restrained panic. But he’d ended the call, so I hit play on The Jackknife.

The film begins with a family bringing their camping trailer to Camp Debra. Mom and Dad each have a child from a previous relationship. Mom’s son is the audience surrogate. Dad’s daughter is the same age as Son, and it’s unclear whether her mother is dead or simply divorced.

Tremaine’s camera lingers on the performers’ eyes. In one dialogue-free sequence the film’s conflict is made clear: Son distrusts Dad and Daughter, and Mom chooses to believe that Son just misses his dead biological father. Mom alternates between coddling her baby boy and ignoring his emotional needs, a binary that gives him whiplash. Daughter is quiet, possibly restraining some secret. Dad is obviously the antagonist. His characterization leans towards overeager, except around the parents of other families at Camp Debra, who take a deferential posture towards him.

“Do they know him?” Son asks Mom.

Mom tries to keep insects off their picnic lunch. Her pale shoulders are smeared with uneven layers of sunscreen, and her dark hair escapes her pony-tail to fall in her eyes. “Hm?”

Son gestures to where Dad holds court over five other fathers. He’s standing on a mound of dirt, as if he is delivering a sermon from a raised platform.

Mom says, “Maybe. He used to come here when he was your age.”

Even now, I think of The Jackknife in the present tense. That’s the magic of film, isn’t it? Paul Newman’s been dead for years, but Road to Perdition brings him back. Look in his eyes and tell me that you believe he’s gone. He’s so beautiful and so alive. Working with Tremaine reminded me that there’s a word for when a spirit lingers after death: haunting.

In the daytime sequences, Camp Debra is nostalgia made manifest. People dip in the water, shrieking at the cold and splashing each other. Somewhere on the lake a Jesus camp has children singing cheesy worship music. Son warms up around a girl in a cute puppy-love sequence. Even so, Son is troubled by Dad and a little kid who rides around the campground on a tricycle, evoking Danny Lloyd in The Shining. Everyone else ignores the tricyclist, as if only Son can hear the tyke’s whispers: “She wears red. The pirate needs his red shirt. She wears red like the pirate.”

The first act ends with Mom taking Son aside to have a conversation about his bad attitude. It’s cliche, but the performances are authentic. A critic could call Tremaine’s dialogue bland, and a fan could call it naturalistic.

“You have to give him a chance,” Mom says. The skin of her nose flakes away from a sunburn. Maybe it was added by a make-up artist, but it looks real.

Son notices the tricyclist watching from behind a nearby tree.

Mom squats in front of Son and says, “You have to give him a chance for me.”

When Son looks back to the tricyclist’s tree, the tricyclist is gone. A bit of red fabric drifts into frame. The scene culminates with Mom sending Son to bed early. He shrinks into the back corner of the camper on a tiny cot. Through a mosquito-netting window, he sees Dad leading a group of parents away. Except Dad isn’t actually in the lead. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, but a figure in a red robe is ahead of Dad.

None of the actors had ever appeared in so much as a commercial before. On one of our phone calls, I asked Tremaine where he found them, and he said that he used to do some work in live theater. After he disappeared, I tried to verify that, but I never found any mention of his stage work online. Shepherd claimed that he heard about Tremaine through someone connected to Broadway, but he never remembered who that person was.

The second act begins with Son sharing his fears with his puppy-love sweetheart. Sweetheart tells him a local legend about a monster that attacked the camp years before. It was called Camp Hill at the time, and the police always claimed that an alligator was responsible for the attacks. Witnesses described a creature with a dozen legs. The camp was shut down for a decade, and they changed the name upon reopening to create distance from the old monster story. That night the figure in red enters the chapel at the nearby Jesus camp.

I was tiptoeing through a basin of kitty-litter to create footsteps for Son and Sweetheart when my phone blinked with the silent notification of a call. Tremaine had a gift for contacting me when I had something on my mind.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I like that the monster doesn’t appear for a while. It’s that whole thing where your mind can come up with something scarier than whatever we see on screen.” As I spoke, I was scanning the workshop’s soundproofing. I knew that I was alone, but I didn’t feel alone.

“Don’t give me that bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“C’mon, you’re smarter than that.” There was never any background noise when he called, as if he was in a sound booth. “Don’t just say some bullshit because you’ve heard other people say it before. Have you ever, in your entire life, imagined some terrifying creature in a horror movie? Do you hit pause and picture something in your mind? No, you don’t. No one does. Your mind doesn’t come up with shit. That would be rational thinking, and fear lives outside the rational.

“Hiding the monster doesn’t give the audience time to come up with something more terrifying in their mind. It evokes– no, it summons a feeling.”

Calls like that made me realize that while I could work with Tremaine, I would probably never like him.

Three people die in The Jackknife before the monster makes its debut. While Son and Sweetheart try to uncover Dad’s secrets, two older teens recreate the opening of Jaws. The figure in red watches from the shore as the lovers are pulled under the lake’s surface. Bumbling cops explain that a kid from the Jesus camp has gone missing. They say he was a loner who wasn’t making friends, and they suspect he wandered off into the woods. The guests at Camp Debra promise to keep an eye open for him, but the audience knows that the figure in red already visited the Jesus camp. Sweetheart clutches Son’s hand, and says, “It’s happening again!” with the earnestness reserved for pre-teens.

“Mom?” Son asks. “Did you say that he came here when he was a kid?”

“When he was your age,” Mom says. “That’s why he wanted to bring us all here. He loved this place as a kid, and he thought you might too.”

Son shares a worried look with Sweetheart.

The first half of the movie floats by with a steady stream of footsteps, snapping branches, and off-screen wildlife. Nothing challenging for me. Then, exactly halfway through The Jackknife’s runtime, the monster appears.

I gathered supplies from the nearest grocery store. Frozen heads of romaine lettuce and carrots provided the crack of breaking bones. The sloppy crush of stomping on an apple became an indispensable part of the film’s soundscape. The carnage wasn’t complete, though. Late at night, alone in my workshop, I grabbed a jackknife that I kept in my desk for slicing into packages. I’d brought a pork shoulder back from the grocer. I flicked the knife open and closed underneath a microphone. Eyes shut, I pictured the monster’s jaw, the monster’s teeth rending flesh, the monster’s many-jointed limbs.

Then I drove the knife into the meat.

The blade punctured tissue with a wet sound. It was too soft. I hit harder and harder. Myoglobin splattered over the jackknife’s handle. It stuck to my fingers. I adjusted my grip on the knife and struck again and again. When I closed the knife, the sound of the joint had changed. The gunk that clogged the hinge softened the snap’s edges. I sighed. That sounded like Tremaine’s monster.

After a night of mangling the pork shoulder, I received a call. Smears of red stained my audio recording equipment. I’d never done anything so sloppy before. I couldn’t touch the phone without washing my hands first. In the workshop’s cramped bathroom, I caught a glimpse of my reflection. My white tank top was stained red. Myoglobin, I reminded myself. Not blood. Myoglobin. Except that wasn’t entirely true. At some point in the night, the knuckles on my right hand had torn open. I washed with soap and cold water. Scrubbing my tender flesh stung more than whatever had ripped my skin in the first place.

I’d missed a call from Shepherd. A wave of exhaustion overwhelmed me when I thought about calling him back, but I knew that would be best for my career.

“How’s it coming?” Shepherd asked. As always, there were people in the background. “Listen, you need to send me a copy of The Jackknife. I’ve got some people here. The right people. Send me what you’ve got so we can get a little buzz going, alright?”

“Have you talked to Tremaine about this?”

“You know his type.” Shepherd laughed. I’d never heard him sound desperate before. It didn’t suit him. “Perfectionists, auteurs, that whole thing. Knows how to make a movie, doesn’t have the first idea how to sell it. That’s where I come in, right? It doesn’t have to be perfect. These guys, they’ll get it, okay? So just send it on over, and Tremaine never has to know.”

Exhausted, my talent for diplomacy abandoned me. “Clear it with Tremaine.”

“Are you telling me no? C’mon, you know what I’ve done for you. What I can do for you. You wouldn’t have that job at all if it weren’t for me, so maybe you should think about this.”

I hid behind Tremaine: it was his movie, so he needed to approve whatever screening Shepherd had in mind. But really, I felt defensive of the project itself. No one would peek behind the curtain before it was ready.

Shepherd alternated between infuriated and desperate, like a bar’s patron after being cut off. I ended the phone call and collapsed on the floor of the workshop. The Jackknife appeared in my dreams, of course. It snarled and scuttled and clawed and bit. Its breathing mixed huffing gasps and whistling exhalations. All the while, the figure in red remained in the periphery, silent. I woke terrified but also exhilarated. I scrambled over to my computer with drool still drying on my face, desperate to capture that soundscape while it remained fresh in my mind. That breathing was vital, but I had nothing on hand with which to create it, so I grabbed a mic and performed it myself. It took hours of recording and fiddling and deleting, but eventually my own breath joined the symphony that brought the Jackknife to life.

The little investigators—Son and Sweetheart—find a trail into deeper woods, away from the lake. They’ve seen Dad lead the parents down that path, following the glimpse of the figure in red. Tricyclist confronts them, and in the process gains the distinction of naming the monster: “The Jackknife won’t be happy with you.”

“Go away,” Son says.

Tricyclist grins. “She wears red.”

“Who wears red?” Sweetheart asks.

“She wears red. The Jackknife won’t be happy at all.” Then he pedals away.

Son and Sweetheart share a glance, then proceed down the path.

The images of the woods strike a balance between ominous shadows and visibility. The composition is elegant without seeming overly posed. With the moon’s light, Son and Sweetheart follow the path to the abandoned buildings that used to be Camp Hill. They enter a decrepit rec center. Pictures on the walls show campers from decades before. Sweetheart points at a boy in the center of the final image: “That’s him, isn’t it?”

Son nods. It’s a younger version of Dad, and he looks like he could be Son’s brother.

Back at Camp Debra, Mom overhears Dad having a heated conversation with one of the other fathers. For the first time in the film, she seems suspicious of her new husband, and she sneaks behind him as Dad leads the other father down to the shore of the lake.

“You were supposed to keep him away. I would have done it myself, but that would have only made him more curious,” Dad says. The other father begs, but Dad shuts him up. “You should be honored that I found any use for you.”

The Jackknife emerges from the water, snarling and hissing. Mom, still hiding in the underbrush, clamps a hand over her mouth. Dad feeds the other father to the Jackknife.

On my initial viewing, I hit pause.

The Jackknife, frozen on screen, didn’t match the clip that Tremaine first brought me. I thought it was just a continuity error, but Tremaine struck me as the sort of perfectionist who didn’t make continuity errors. I scanned through the film. Between scenes the Jackknife gained and lost legs. Its fangs protrude over its lips in some sequences and disappear altogether in others. Sometimes it has a long, curling tail, and sometimes it is little more than a stub.

I dialed his number, and Tremaine picked up on the first ring, like he was expecting my call.

“The Jackknife changes between scenes, doesn’t it?”

He sounded pleased. “Good eye. I figured you for the sort of sound nerd who wouldn’t catch something like that.”

“Every scene?”

He paused. Maybe he needed to gather his thoughts, or maybe he took a second to invent an explanation for a creative choice that had felt cool while on set. “The Jackknife… it’s a nightmare creature. Doesn’t abide by natural laws. If it’s just a shark or an alligator or whatever with crab legs, the audience sees it, game over. Nightmares don’t abide by logic.”

Following his lead, I changed the sound composition for each of the Jackknife’s appearances. When it drags Dad’s first sacrifice into the water, its voice contains a muffled alligator. When the figure in red appears at the Jesus camp, initiating the most violent sequence in the film, the Jackknife echoes a yipping hyena. The bumbling cops return. One dies in a flash of motion punctuated with the combination of tortoise and toad, but the other cop retreats into the woods. He fires three shots at the Jackknife as it stalks towards him, purring like a happy kitty. All the while, Son and Sweetheart continue their research at the abandoned Camp Hill. They learn that all of the parents at Camp Debra were survivors from the Camp Hill disaster. Amateur-style videotapes tell the story of how this all happened before. The figure in red appeared, the Jackknife rose out of the lake, and it all centered around Dad.

In a different conversation with Tremaine, I asked, “Is it supposed to be clear how all of these parts are related?”

“I don’t follow.”

“The Jackknife, the figure in red, Dad. I get that they’re connected, but…” My first theory was that the figure in red was running the show and the Jackknife was a monstrous pet being tempted out of the water with meaty treats. Then I thought that the figure in red was some kind of high priest, providing sacrifices for a hungry god.

“I guess it’s open for interpretation, but the clues are all there.”

“Clues?”

He didn’t elaborate. At the time, I guessed that Tremaine was covering for his film’s weak ending. Of course, at the time I didn’t really understand Tremaine.

I never liked The Jackknife’s conclusion. For the first hour and a bit, Son is clearly the protagonist. Then Daughter, a minor character thus far, tricks Son and Sweetheart into a trap, and they lose all their agency. During a struggle to escape from the Jackknife, Mom is knocked out. By pure luck and coincidence, she ends up underneath an SUV and survives. In the morning, with a gash drooling blood into one of her brown eyes, she crawls out from under the vehicle.

The smoldering fire-pits are abandoned. A bloody limb is caught in the dirt. Something snaps behind her—in the world of the film, a branch; in my workshop, a stalk of celery—and she pivots, facing the lake. The sky is gray with fog or smoke or both, and the sound of singing hums across the water. A rowboat has been left for her. She crosses the lake to the Jesus camp, where the only building still standing is the chapel. She pushes open the door and finds Dad waiting behind the podium, naked from the waist up. His legs are clad in a red garment, knotted roughly around his middle. Illuminated by the shattered windows above and behind him, he looks like a statue at the end of a religious pilgrimage.

The rest of the characters fill the pews, facing him. There are other members of Dad’s cult scattered among wounded survivors. There are a few decaying corpses. They all face forward with similar blank expressions. The children who have survived this far sit around Dad’s feet, like he is preparing to teach Sunday school. Son, Daughter, and Sweetheart are near his legs.

“Let me tell you a story,” Dad says. “Stories are important, yes? Stories are how we connect to the past and to the future.”

Mom fights like Hell to reach the children. The cult tries to block her while Dad gives some unholy blessing. She can’t make it through until the Jackknife descends from the rafters, mouth opened in what I decided would be a screech. It was another sequence that haunted my nightmares. I tried dozens of configurations only to wake up one morning, practically shaking with the certainty that this too would need my own voice.

In the confusion that follows the Jackknife’s sudden appearance, Mom gathers the three children who matter and rushes them out the door. Somehow the door gets jammed behind her, and somehow a fire starts. She looks back once, hearing the mingled screams of the monster and the people trapped inside, but she herds the children onto the boat and pushes off.

The camera comes in close on her face as she looks over her shoulder. “I hate camping,” she mutters, and the film slams to black.

It always made me roll my eyes, but I wasn’t paid to be a critic.

As I was putting the finishing touches on the Jackknife’s screech, someone pounded on the door of my workshop. I yanked off my headphones. I couldn’t say how long I’d been working. My eyes burned from staring at the monitor, studying how the Jackknife attacked again and again. I needed to sleep more, but there would be time for sleeping after The Jackknife was finished. The pounding continued, and I forced myself out of my chair. My limbs felt heavy, and I couldn’t shake the image of Dad’s congregation: the living, the dead, all seated before him.

I unlocked the door, and Shepherd forced his way inside. “Where is it?”

“What?”

“How many times have I given you a job, huh? How many doors have I opened for you?” His voice trembled. “The movie. Show me the movie. Nothing official. Just… just show me what you’ve got, okay?”

I positioned myself between him and my computer. “You know I can’t–”

“He’s not here! You can do whatever you want. Don’t you want to help your old buddy, Shepherd? Huh?”

I had been so obsessed with The Jackknife that I hadn’t been keeping up with industry publications. It had dominated my mind from my initial viewing, and each day when I set up to record for a different scene its hold on me grew stronger. My workshop’s walls were black with soundproofing, and they’d become the dark canvas for images from Tremaine’s imagination. If I had been following the outside world, and if I had been reading between the lines, I would have discovered that Shepherd’s career soured around the time he met Tremaine. He’d embarrassed himself in restaurants and at a red-carpet event, and rumors whispered that his time as a power broker was coming to an end. I would learn all of that later, though, when I came up for air after finishing my job.

“Okay.” He held up his hands. “I don’t want to do this, but you’ve left me with no choice. Show me the movie, or I’ll make sure that you never work in Hollywood again. Okay?”

“Shepherd–”

“Don’t Shepherd me. Just show me the movie.” He rushed forward. I raised my hands to bar his way. I never meant to hit him. I’m just not coordinated, and after working on The Jackknife I was especially shaky.

It was an accident that my hand connected with his mouth. There’s a particular pop when someone’s jaw is forced shut. All of their teeth clack together at once. Shepherd jerked back, landing on his ass. He probed his nose, and his hand came back bloody. Then there were the accusations, the screams about calling the cops, and the next thing I knew I was forcing him out the workshop and locking the door.

The cops could arrive at any moment, which meant I had to finish The Jackknife. I didn’t leave my desk until I had a complete version on a hard drive. I packaged it up and shipped it off to an address Tremaine had given me. Once the movie was out of my custody, I collapsed again. I woke feeling hung over, but there were still no police.

“You nailed it,” Tremaine said in our final phone call. “Listen, I’m going to screen the movie for everyone who worked on it. You’re invited.”

Every good movie casts a spell over the audience. That spell is the culmination of the effort and imagination of everyone on the set. The actors, writers, directors, sure, but also the people who controlled the lighting to ensure that the forest was still visible at night, and the set designers who made the campsite look nostalgic and horrifying by turns, and the costume department who provide hints about characters just through their clothes, and everyone else. That collective willpower and imagination is a powerful thing. Even though I’d played a part in The Jackknife, contributing to the power that thrummed through it, I knew better than to attend Tremaine’s watch party. I was just beginning to sleep without being visited by the Jackknife and the figure in red. I declined in the most diplomatic terms possible.

He said, “It’s the ending, isn’t it? Be honest.”

“It’s not as strong as the rest of the movie.”

“Agreed.” After a deep breath, he said, “You sure I can’t tempt you out?”

I’d copied all of my files to the hard drive with the conviction that the police would be pounding on my door, and I hadn’t wanted there to be any evidence of what I’d been working on. It had seemed of the utmost importance then, although that felt like delusions brought on by exhaustion in hindsight. I did desperately want to watch the movie again, even though the ending felt lame and dishonest. The longer I was separated from it, the more I understood Shepherd. I thought it best to quit cold turkey, because sometimes I still felt like something was watching me in my workshop. Sometimes I thought I glimpsed a red robe.

“Well, then I guess I can tell you the surprise,” Tremaine said. “The ending sucks, but I know how to fix it. We’re getting the gang back together for some reshoots.” He sounded distracted for a moment, but maybe he was just acting. “That’s not how we leave the chapel… You don’t just walk out…”

“Tremaine? Who wore the red robe when you were shooting?” I wanted to ask if it had been him, but even thinking that felt like an accusation.

“Come to the screening and I’ll tell you,” he said.

“I guess you’re entitled to your secrets.” Those were the last words I ever spoke to him.

When the police finally did visit me, they didn’t mention Shepherd. They wanted to know why I was the last person Tremaine called before he disappeared. I later learned that when they investigated the venue for his screening party, they found a half-dozen corpses moldering in the chairs. Rumors claimed that the corpses all belonged to actors whose characters died in The Jackknife, but I used to have evidence proving that’s just an urban legend.

I handed that evidence over to the police before I left Hollywood, never to return. It was just a downloaded copy of a few emails, and the police didn’t seem terribly interested in what I had. As far as I know, I’m the only person Tremaine contacted after he departed for his reshoots. I deactivated the email account in order to stop his messages from coming. I couldn’t just log out of the account because eventually I would log back in. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.

After all, the videos attached to the emails had Tremaine’s style. In clips with the Jackknife, it breathes with that whistling sound that I first heard in my dreams. It sounds a lot like me.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod 942

October 11^th 2024

The Sound of a Jackknife by K Bosgra

Narrated by Tony Sarrecchia

Audio Production by Chelsea Davis

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart

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Hi everyone, welcome to PseudoPod, the weekly horror podcast. I’m Alasdair and this week’s story comes to us from K Bosgra. K. Bosgra writes horror and somehow pulls three copies of 0 – The Fool in every Tarot reading. Their twitter account is https://twitter.com/K_Bosgra.

 

Your narrator ths week is Tony Sarrecchia.

 

So without further ado, roll foley, because we have a story for you and we promise you it’s true.

 

I didn’t sleep too well earlier this week. Too hot, too cold, couldn’t quite shut down when I knew I needed to. It doesn’t happen often anymore but it does happen fairly regularly and I’ve got very good at understanding why it’s happening. Sometimes, like I say, it’s temperature. Sometimes it’s if I eat past a certain time and especially if I eat something rich past a certain time. I have sleep apnea, although that’s improving, so there’s always an element of that as well.

 

This time it was anxiety. Nothing singular but a lot of specifics: our new cat had his first vet trip (Rude health by the way), we had flu vaccinations scheduled and I’ve got a lot of work on at the moment. Nothing bad but there’s a sense I often fight of needing to DO MORE to focus MORE and the frustration of the last couple of weeks has been based in realizing I have a lot to do, enough time to do it and I’m not quite arranging it right.

 

The familiar monster of ‘Do more, harder, better, faster and for longer’ is one that stalks far too many of our halls. For me, it’s a common sight in the five industries I work across, a horseman of the new apocalypse. The myth of the impossible win, always just over the horizon, always just out of reach. The line going up just a little more because our backs are bent beneath it.

 

The real horror though is in the fact this? Is FUN. Gerard Butler was once described as working best with the taste of his blood in his mouth and that’s a sentiment I know too well. I remember reading about a well known, prolific writer who had a sign above their desk saying SLEEP IS THE ENEMY. When you do this, even when you aren’t being paid, it’s FUN. It’s the gag that makes you laugh that you know six other people on Earth will get. The character twist that makes you feel seen and you hope will make others feel the same. The subtly polished edge of the perfect sentence, the perfect lyric, the perfect sound effect. And sound folks, like cosplayers, are actual magic users as Chelsea’s incredible work shows, week in week out. The Dead Room, by Mark Gatiss is a great example of the sound effects and production craft too. It’s one of the Christmas Ghost Stories the BBC produce annually and the depiction of a horror radio show and the sound effects it uses is fascinating and very relevant to the chilling plot as the line between fiction and reality blurs.

 

That’s how our protagonist is corrupted here. Embracing the mercurial nature of the jackknife means that they embrace and step across the line between artist and work, creator and created. Their individualistic, brilliant work is subsumed into the movie and they go along with it. Survival is a team sport. But so, sometimes is corruption. They say if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life. But what if someone else loves what you do enough to turn it, and you, into a weapon?

 

Incredibly well done. Thanks to all.

 

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If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t-shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.

 

 

We’re back next week with Oneirophobia by Todd Keisling and narrated by Jon Bell. Scott’s your host, Chelsea’s your sound engineer and then as now it will be a production of the Escape Artists Foundation and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

We’ll see you next week, but before we go PseudoPod wants you to remember  You kill the word that’s killing you.

 

We’ll see you next week, folks. Until then, have fun!