3
" What the old man had seen next—what they had all seen next—was nothing more, and nothing less, than a fly emerge from Catrin Amour’s left nostril. An optical illusion, a speck of dust on the print, a flaw in the film, Heinrich thought. And then the camera, a camera he had been operating, moved in for a tight shot—a shot he had never taken. And in this new shot, a second fly emerged from Catrin’s nostril. It took flight and landed on the scar Udo Heldt had carved into her cheek. A third fly followed. Another. And then another. She might have been a mannequin, the woman on the screen was so still. Then her mouth bulged grotesquely, as though she were going to vomit, and flies boiled forth from within her. She spewed them out in handfuls, in clots, in seething mouthfuls; she spewed them out by the hundreds. They massed on her neck and chin, launching themselves intermittently into the cloud that swirled around her. And still they came, streaming out of her mouth and nostrils in swarms. And Catrin Amour—the Catrin Amour on the screen—remained utterly unmoved. "
― Ellen Datlow , Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
4
" What she was doing was watching TCM and eating tiny slivers of metal. If her health plan paid for more or better imaging, maybe the jig would have been up, and it all could have been an accident, bad luck, one failing kitchen appliance trying to kill her, her husband unwittingly involved. As it was, she just kept getting chewed up from the inside. And nobody suspected anything, least of all Sheila. Her mom was the right age for her body to be failing in unexpected ways, wasn’t she? It was a tragedy, it was sad, but it wasn’t any kind of real surprise. It’s what we all have waiting for us, surely. Only, it didn’t have to be. Not for my mother-in-law. Did she know right at the end, too? Did she finally see a glittering shard in her corn or peas and look up to her husband, watching her spoon this in? At that point, coughing up blood, blood in the toilet, her stomach and intestines in revolt, all failing, did she just guide that next bite in anyway and turn back to her classic movie? I don’t know. She was from that long-suffering generation, though. The one that would rather hide a thing like this than involve her own daughter. The one that would rather her daughter keep a father she could believe in. "
― Ellen Datlow , Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
5
" More like I dreamed it. More like I zoned out in the movie as a form of self-defense, and in that zoned-out state I worked up this grand story for how your father, he killed your mother, Sheel, really, serious, I solved the case. Also, there is a case. As proof, of course, I could take a can from the pantry, it doesn’t matter what, and mess with its angle in the can opener until it leaves sharp little slivers of metal behind. At "
― Ellen Datlow , Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
6
" Can that happen, at the end of your life? Can you become a killer in your dotage, in your golden years? Can you want control of the remote enough that murder’s your best option? Nobody will suspect you. There’s no motivation anybody can claim, there’s no first attempt, there’s no bad history, there’s no evidence anybody can find. Just, one day you saw a bright, curled piece of silver in some sliced pears you’d just opened, and you looked up from them to the horrible old movie filling the living room, and you nodded maybe. Maybe. It can happen, I think. It did happen. "
― Ellen Datlow , Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
10
" We tried a few times, but Roger said Maria didn’t have it in her to be a leading lady. Too much grit in her lopsided grin, too much nose to her raw-boned face. Killer as the foil to the sweetheart, sure, but too saw-toothed for a happy ending. He casts her as the femme fatale, the big bad, and it works: Maria’s expressions were a broken heart caulked with bitter pride, vulnerable and crystalline. If you ask me, we didn’t need the girl. Maria could have done it, played the wounded thing come home to a country full of someone else’s ghosts. "
― Ellen Datlow , Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
11
" Jennifer began to change. Her clothes fell from her body in rotten tatters, like the wrappings of a mummy. The skin shifted on her body, turning a pallid gray, covered with black patches of mold. It glistened with some kind of interior light—a luminous rot. She seemed taller, stronger, more beautiful. She was naked, but her body was androgynous: gorgeous, magnetic, dead. Through her failing flesh he saw an equine skull bearing too many pale, sightless eyes. She was at once regal and putrid, her body wavering between her own elderly form and the holy beauty of the Corpse, as though seen beneath rippling water. "
― Ellen Datlow , Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
14
" Roger’s eyes metronomed over the girl, restless, lingering longest on the spade of her crotch, nearly visible under her cheap black robes. The girl was thin. Chopstick thin without the barest netting of fat. I remember thinking, with some kind of sororal regret, that she’d shrivel in a few years. Just like I had. Not that it mattered. Not that this mattered. When we wrapped up this project, I was gone. Back to New York and its skyscrapers and its smiling, shining, successful, dead-eyed hopefuls. "
― Ellen Datlow , Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
17
" The girl—what the fuck was her name? May, Madeline, Maggie, it all blends together, their names like someone else’s pleasure—made a noise, and I glanced over to her. Smoke bled from her nostrils, the hinge of her parted lips. There was dust floating from her mouth, motes of silver in the filthy air. Her eyes had a rim of frost. Like cataracts. Like she was going blind. She blinked at me once, slow, and soaked in the backwash of Emil’s lighting, she didn’t seem completely real. "
― Ellen Datlow , Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
19
" She descended into the hole, and he trailed behind her. The stuttering, decayed light from her body illuminated the walls in brief flashes. It was a nest, walled in human faces, scores of them peering out from battlements of melded flesh, their mouths blackly gaping, their eyes cataractous and blind. It was like walking through an abandoned wasps’ nest. Once, it rang with screams and hosannas. Their silence now was obscene. The demon was dead, but this woman still lived. She was still sweetly beautiful, she still yearned to fill her heart’s need. “Is it too late?” she asked. She started to dance, a gorgeous rotted thing, undulating in the way she had done so long ago. Tears spilled down Alan’s face. He fixed the camera on her, recording it all using her own spoiled light. He was making terrible sounds. They echoed in the nest and soon it seemed the faces joined his effort, like a choir in a cathedral "
― Ellen Datlow , Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
