Zombie Projectionists - 1. Chapter 1

‘Twenty-four hour cinema; that’s what we’ll give ‘em.’

You can imagine them at head office; those bastards who get fat on their expense account lunches and never set foot in a real cinema, and certainly never work weekends, or Bank Holidays or Christmas Day for God’s sake.

‘Great idea.’ Some little yes man or woman pipes up to endorse the idea.

‘Well, all the supermarkets are doing it these days. I’m thinking your average person; shift workers, students, insomniacs, all nipping in to catch a movie any time they want.’

I’m thinking of the non-average nutcase; the Travis Bickle wannabes, the psychos, drunks and wastrels who’ll come in, puke up and sleep while we have to carry on running eight different films for an audience who isn’t interested. But that’s how it is these days.

Phil is writing a book while we’re on shift. He won’t let me see me any of it, but while he’s off putting on the next set of shows, I take a look anyway.

Zombies lurch up from the dank earth, spitting out chunks of soil. Worms writhe in their putrid flesh. Their eyeballs are bulging and reddened. They will have their revenge!

Sounds like your average projectionist these days. We’re all earning great money of course, but what’s the point when you stagger home and fall into bed exhausted. On my days off I sleep. In a satin-lined coffin. Not really, of course. That was from Phil’s last epic. It was about a projectionist who became a vampire. Set in a cinema of course, but not one of these soulless multiplexes. Hey - that’s good. A soulless building as habitation for the undead. Maybe I should mention it to him but then he’ll guess I’ve been reading his stuff, and he’ll go into a sulk and slope off to the water tank room, where he sits in semi-darkness scribbling away.

Anyway, this story took place in one of the good old cinemas; a nineteen-thirties dream house that years of neglect and decay had turned into a nightmare. I remember them well. Like most of us, I joined the business in the seventies, during the decline, when everyone said it was dying and predicted its extinction within ten years. I started in an old Gaumont, a vast cavern of a place whose stalls seated over a thousand, and whose circle, abandoned to the rats, took about another eight hundred. It smelled damp. The once plush fabric on the seats had worn smooth. The carpet was black and sticky from years of spilled drinks. The projection equipment looked like something out of Frankenstein’s laboratory; mercury arc rectifiers whose trapped denizen danced in a violet pool. Big switches that sparked whenever the house lights dimmed. Ancient projectors with the streamlined styling of the nineteen-fifties. Valve amplifiers that heated the box up nicely, and which would respond to a poke with a broom handle when the sound faded away completely. I loved it. I was lost from the moment I first set foot in the place.

My family thought I was mad. Maybe I was, but it was a glorious madness. The chief projectionist was an old man who took a pride in his job, despite everything. When he'd gone into the box as a rewind boy, aged fourteen, things had been very different. Uniformed commissionaires put out the house full signs every night. Crowds of people queued round the block, in grainy black and white, all wearing hats. And in the box there were seven men, each with his own responsibility. The chief was God. The manager was higher than God. If you mis-timed a changeover you lost threepence from your wages; if you got a rack on screen, sixpence. And if you lost a show, the ultimate dishonour, you committed ritual suicide.

Even in the bad days of the seventies, Bill had not forgotten the old standards. No matter what happened, the show must go on.

‘Remember,’ he said. ‘If the punters ever notice we’re here, we’re doing something wrong.’

He taught me well. I never got a rack on screen; never lost a show. But all our best efforts couldn’t compete against the harsh realities of maintaining a building long past its sell-by date. The Gaumont closed in the autumn of nineteen-eighty.

Bill retired. I stayed on, moving to a triple ten miles away, and rose through the ranks faster than anyone would have done in his day. Five years later I was a chief. Coincidentally, nineteen eighty-five was the turnaround year; the year the Americans opened the first ever multiplex in Milton Keynes.

Initially, the other companies fought back, but they couldn’t compete. The old buildings were sub divided again and again, transformed into monstrosities with six screens, victims of experimental surgery that never quite worked. They were hellish to run, up and down all those stairs too. But they still retained a certain character. They still had the magic, even though the ornate plasterwork and antique light fittings might be concealed behind plasterboard panelling. In the box (especially the top box - the old, original projection box) you had a feeling of continuity with your predecessors. And because the soundproofing wasn’t all it should be, when you started a feature (full Fox opening, eight on the fader) you’d hear the audience cheer, clap and drum their feet on the boards. It was still cinema.

In nineteen-ninety, they built the new multiplex, and we moved over. At first it was great. Everything worked and it was clean, new and spacious. The box - or booth as the Americans call it - was a great long corridor with projectors and gleaming platters on either side. Film lay like giant Liquorice Allsorts on horizontal platters. Others were stacked against the walls in the manner of discarded tyres. The audiences came back in droves.

Then they started piling more and more work on to us. In one week we showed twenty four different films in our eight screens. It became like a production line; fast food cinema. Shovel the customers in with an overpriced tub of popcorn and a bucket of soft drink. Slap it on screen; they don’t know any different these days. And no time for the poor projectionist to give any flourishes to the presentation anyway. In our air-conditioned, soundproof room, there was no audience feedback anyway. They could all be dead and you’d not know it.

Where’s Phil got to, I wonder? Should have been back by now. Still, no alarms have gone off, so I assume he’s all right out there.

We’ve always opened at weekends, but now we have Saturday morning shows and late nighters. And whereas in the old days we never opened on Boxing Day, that crept in too. Firstly just for a couple of hours, then all day. And last year, they finally got a licence to open on Christmas Day itself. You ought to have seen the sad bastards who came out. Feuding families, Christmas haters, nutcases. And none of the head office prats took any less than their customary week off.

I’m sick of it. This isn’t the business I loved. It isn’t what cinema’s about. The world has changed, and I am stuck somewhere in the past. A vast auditorium; the shadowed ceiling lost above us, watching a horror movie in the closed circle with a gaggle of usherettes who peered from behind their fingers, and huddled closer as the rats scampered to and fro.

The phone rings. I can tell from the space invaders tone that it’s an internal call.

‘Stop the film in screen three.’ The manager sounds scared. Is it another bomb hoax, or some nutter saying he’s poisoned the popcorn?

‘What’s happened?’

‘Just stop it, now.’

I hurry to the projector. The air conditioning blows a cold draught down my back. I shut it down, muting the sound. Someone has thrown something on the screen. So that’s the reason. And where the hell is Phil? This is his screen, and he should be taking care of it.

The lights raise slowly. I see movement. I see people huddled together. I see the glistening wet stain on the white sheet, like an abstract painting. Damn it. That’ll take some cleaning.

Then as the lights reach their full intensity, I see him. He’s all covered with the same stuff. It’s on his face, his hands. He’s smiling, licking his lips as the remaining audience cower away. I realise three things at once. It’s Phil. It’s blood. It’s not his blood.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum.