The Film

It all started . . . I was about to write "so innocently", but the truth is that it didn't start all that innocently. There was always an element of sin and fascination in the making of The Film.

To begin with, anyway, there were four of us: Vanessa, Kelly, Daisy and myself. I was separated from them in more than one way. I was the only guy, for a start. Then there was the fact that Kelly and Daisy were art students, and Vanessa was a film major, and I was a literature boy. But we shared common ground in that we all liked film and art and books, and there was also a certain will to hip, plus a dislike of rigid boundaries. So it was that, in the first two years of us knowing each other, I had a fling with both gamine, dark-haired Kelly and also hippyish, red-haired, cheerful Daisy, and each of them at various times also had a bit of a thing with curly-haired, earnest, round-faced, long-nosed Vanessa. I for my part was on the skinny side, with short-cropped dark brown hair, and I had a couple of piercings and a modest tattoo, as did we all.

So we were linked by more than just interests. We had some intimate knowledge of each other, if not all that much. If anything, Kelly marginally preferred boys while Daisy marginally preferred girls, while Vanessa was so determinedly intellectual that it was hard to tell what she was into. I was flattered by the friendship of these three very interesting young women. We liked to think of ourselves as a Group of like-minded people. We read the most interesting books, saw the best films, went to the coolest art shows and had the smartest opinions. None of which quite explains how we came to make The Film. The Film was, I guess, interesting, but it was also quite a bit more than that. It went somewhere very unusual.

It began when we were watching a bad Roger Corman movie one night. Vanessa noticed, as she tended to do, that the films followed a rigid pattern; there would be a point somewhere at which one or more of the women would get her clothes off and then there would be a more or less consensual sex scene. If there were monsters, chances are that one of them would molest one or more of the women. Vanessa used to find that kind of thing really irritating.

"How come there are never any movies where the men get molested!" she complained.

"Who wants to watch that?" I said.

"I would," she said.

"so would I," said Kelly, grinning.

"Oh god yeah," said Daisy.

"Really?" I said.

"To see a man being the object of desire?" said Vanessa. "Sure, why not?"

"Alex," said Kelly, 'do you know how many movies we watch in which the women are the ones who get fingered or stripped or ogled or raped? I'd love to watch a man in that position. To see him be that vulnerable."

"Nothing sexier than a vulnerable man," affirmed Daisy.

"What kind of thing do you mean?" I asked.

" . . . I dunno," said Kelly, "just . . . maybe if it was men being molested by a monster.

Yeah."

"Ohmigod," said Daisy fervently. 'so hot."

"Yeah," said Vanessa, "if it was men . . . I'd love to see that in a movie."

We all watched the actress writhing and squealing for a moment.

"Why don't we make a movie?" I said.

"What kind of movie?" said Kelly.

"The kind we're talking about," I said. "I think I could write that."

"Could you?" said Vanessa, looking intrigued.

"Sure," I said, shrugging.

"What would it be about?" she said, sitting up and putting the movie on Pause.

"I dunno," I said. "I'm sure we could think up a story. I could write it, you could direct it.

Kelly could do special effects. Daisy could do . . . other stuff."

"I could be the action hero!" said Daisy brightly.

"Brilliant!" exclaimed Vanessa. "Of course! You be the heroine, rescuing all the men from the monsters!"

"On condition that I don't get molested myself."

"Oh no."

"Cause I'm not doing that. I don't mind maybe having a hot sex scene with another girl,

but not being raped by a monster."

"Not gonna happen," said Vanessa. "Alex, take notes."

"What kind of monster?" said Kelly.

"A . . . a sex monster," said Vanessa.

"Well, duh."

"No. A, um . . . "

"A plant monster," I said. "Plenty of opportunity there for hentai stuff."

"Genius," said Vanessa.

"Right," said Kelly, thinking. "Yeah, that would work . . . some sort of tentacley planty

thing that could tie the men up."

"Got to have lots of scenes with guys being tied up," said Vanessa.

"Oh yes," said Daisy. 'so I can rescue them!"

"Absolutely," said Kelly.

"Tied up," said Vanessa, "and molested."

"Mmmmm, lots of naked men," said Kelly, grinning.

"Being molested."

"Nummy."

"Practical point," I said, raising a finger.

"What?" said Vanessa.

"Where are you gonna get all these men?"

"We'll cast them," said Vanessa.

"Problem there," I said, "is that you're not gonna get a lot of actors willing to play those characters."

"We will if they're gay!" said Daisy.

"But then," I went on, "you'll either have a lot of gay boys who just want to get sexy on camera or you'll get serious actors who happen to be gay and don't necessarily want to get typecast as sex puppets for the rapey plant monster."

"Good point," said Vanessa.

There was a silence. I looked at them all.

"There is a solution," I said. They looked at me.

"Don't have lots of men. Have just one guy, and have it all happen to him. That way you only have one guy actor you need to worry about. Cast the right guy and keep him happy and he'll do the job."

"Alex," said Vanessa, "I want you to write this."

"I will," I said.

"Now," she said.

"Okay," I said.

"Get your laptop."

And so we sat down, and by four a.m. in the morning we had a treatment.

***

The treatment evolved over the next week or so. It turned out that I had a rather baroque imagination for the kind of thing we were doing. Our hapless hero, who I called A for want of an actual surname, was a normal, okay-looking, relatively shy guy who for unknown reasons becomes irresistibly attractive to various kinds of sinister creatures with darkly perverse designs on his body. Over the course of the story he began by being attacked after a swim in the forest and messily raped by a plant monster; then he was raped in his own apartment by an invisible ghost; then he was stalked and chased by a mysterious froglike creature and finally molested and sexually assaulted; then he was kidnapped by a strange cabal of non-human creatures, placed on display and doused in gunge before becoming their sexual plaything; finally it was revealed that all of these attacks were being orchestrated by a demented and vengeful ex of his who had acquired magical powers and sought to punish him for leaving her. In each situation he was rescued by his plucky and gorgeous girlfriend. The climax of the story came when his girlfriend acquired the ex's magic book and turned the ex's powers against her, causing the ex to become a terrible victim of her own evil creatures, whereupon the heroine took her grateful boyfriend to bed and taught him who was boss. The catch was that the girlfriend wanted to top the boyfriend but he didn't want to, and it took the whole ordeal of the film to make him realise that he actually craved it.

When we had finished the treatment, Vanessa was delighted and I was pleased but a bit disturbed that I'd come up with this story. It worried me and excited me and when I thought about it, it tended to arouse me too. But at least I'm just the writer, I told myself, and it wasn't as though we were ever going to get to make the movie anyway.

That all changed when Vanessa's aunt died and left her €600,000.

***

Suddenly the film went from something that we were half-seriously toying with to a thing that was going to happen. Vanessa bought a new Power Mac, a lot of hard drive space, a very expensive digital video camera and a copy of Final Cut Pro, and Kelly started making monsters in her studio. Daisy was designing the costumes as well as starring as the plucky heroine, who we called Daisy for convenience's sake. Basically, we only needed two other actors: a guy to play A, and a woman to play the ex, who we called X. We managed to get in touch with a young and emerging actress called Fiona who seemed to happy to play X, in spite of the fact that much of X's final scene - her comeuppance - wasn't really written, and all we knew was that it would involve nudity on her part and be rather prolonged and messy and horrifying. Fiona had been nude on stage twice, so she claimed to be fine with all that, but we would have very little time to rehearse with her.

The real problem, though, was A. We asked every actor we knew, and nobody would touch the part with a ten-foot pole. Some actors professed to find the whole thing offensive. I could see their point. A was a rather passive character who spent most of his time being attacked, subdued and sexually assaulted, often in messy and humiliating ways. It wasn't exactly the kind of part that a young actor wanted on his CV.

It was one night after an especially unsuccessful casting session that we all went to the pub, Vanessa, Kelly, Daisy and I, and we got very drunk and wound up back at Vanessa's.

"Nobody wants to make our movie," Vanessa shouted at the ceiling, between swigs on a wine bottle.

"Can you blame them?" I said. "We've written a male lead character who gets raped up his arse four times and has to be covered in gunge and exposed to complete strangers. It's a nightmare for an actor. We'll have to change it."

"I'm not changing a thing!" she cried.

"Good," I said. "I don't want to either, but nobody's gonna do it."

'the reason nobody wants to do it," said Kelly, "is that nobody understands where the character is coming from."

"I do," said Vanessa.

'so do I," said Daisy.

'so do I," I said, "I fucking wrote him."

"But nobody we"ve seen has that basic understanding," Kelly lamented. 'there probably is someone out there, but our chances of finding him are zero. We don't have the money or the time. We start shooting the weekend after next."

"If we could just find a nice guy who looked good and who understands the character and who can be natural on camera," said Vanessa, "we'd be sorted."

"Well," I said, "good luck."

We were silent. I drank some more beer, and when I looked at the others I realised that they were all looking at me.

"What?" I said.

"Alex . . . " Vanessa said, smiling.

And suddenly I realised what they meant.

"Oh no," I said. "No no. No way."

"Oh but come on," said Vanessa. "You're the only one. It has to be you."

"No fucking way," I said. "If you think I'm gonna let myself be stripped naked and ass-raped for a film . . . no way. No. No way at all."

"But it'd be pretend!" Vanessa implored me.

'the rape might be," I said, "but I'd still have to take my clothes off."

"But you look great with your clothes off," said Kelly.

'does he?" said Vanessa.

"He has a beautiful arse," said Daisy.

"And a nice cock," Kelly added.

"You're perfect," said Vanessa, scrambling over the furniture towards me, her eyes shining. I shrank back, in real fear.

"No," I said. "Uh-uh. No way. Absolutely not. No fucking way. Not gonna happen."

"You're the only one," Vanessa breathed, climbing on top of me and staring down at me, her eyes shining with booze. I had never been so close to her before.

"No!" I said.

"Please," said Kelly, grinning and simpering at me.

"Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease!" Daisy begged me.

"No," I said.

This went on for some time, until they began to get genuinely impatient and even upset with me, until finally Vanessa had another swig of wine and held up her hands for silence.

"I'll tell you what," she said. "If you do it, I'll pay you a thousand quid."

"Vanessa," I told her, "even a thousand quid is not enough to make me take my kit off for you and this film and pretend to be raped by a plant. It's not gonna happen. End of story. Full stop. Okay?"

Which is how I ended up playing A.

***

We simplified things further by renaming A Alex. The more I read and reread the script, and saw Kelly's monsters come together, and rehearsed with Daisy and Vanessa, the more nervous I became, but paradoxically I also became more reassured; after all, it wasn't going to be real but a technical process. I would have to lose my clothes and my dignity, but the rest would be acting, and acting had its own dignity. I wouldn't really be being attacked by a plant monster, I'd be faking it for the camera. Kelly showed us the complex workings of the first plant monster, how it had various tentacles that did different things, some shooting out liquid, some designed to hold me, some designed to probe or caress me and one meant to look as though it was the one that would "penetrate" me, and the more our technical our conversation became, the more I was able to quell my doubts.

We rehearsed everything carefully, but fully clothed. Vanessa thought it would be easier on me that way. I soon acquired a healthy sense of the ridiculous when it came to lying on my stomach and pretending to be sexually assaulted by a vine, but of course I knew that on the location it would be different. Daisy was encouraging, and was having a ball as the plucky heroine, perfecting her looks of cool resolution and urgency.

We went on location trips and found the perfect spot in a distant corner of a wood near Vanessa's family's holiday home. There was a shallow pool for Daisy and I to swim in, and plenty of thick but not-too-thick undergrowth for me to be trapped in, and to give Kelly the cover she needed to operate the monster. We also dug a pit, to make the pit that I would fall into and which the monster would trap me in so that it could have its way with me.

We joked about it, all the time, but we were all nervous. We knew that we were basically making a semi-pornographic movie with no previous experience of that kind of thing. I felt the pressure but I kept up a calm, practical front.

Then the day dawned.

***

I awoke in darkness from uneasy dreams, showered, ate some breakfast and was ready on the pavement by 6 a.m. Kelly picked us all up in her car and we drove out to the location.

First we prepared the pit, lining it with plastic sheeting and then filling it with some kind of sticky, opalescent, pearly fluid which Kelly had devised. She called it 'monster juice" but it looked like nothing so much as semen, but stickier and thicker. It tasted quite pleasant and I was assured it was non-toxic.

Then we set up the location by the pool, setting out a picnic blanket and our fake picnic. Kelly prepared her monster. I noticed that it was connected by various tubes and hoses to a number of large bottles and pumps.

"What are they for?" I asked, nervously.

"Oh," she said casually, "just effects. We'll explain when we get to the bit."

"Is that to do with the messy aspect?"

"It might be," she said, smirking.

Daisy and I changed into our swimsuits and then we were ready to roll. The opening scene began with a simple sequence of us having a picnic and a swim in the pool. There was to be a scene before this, of us having unsatisfying sex the night before, but that would be shot later. First, we began by trying to establish the tone of a couple who were having some difficulties but who were trying to get through them. Daisy swam, then she beckoned me in but I said no, until she finally got exasperated and said she was going for a walk.

Then Daisy left the pool, wet and pink in her swimsuit, and I waited for her to go before going in myself and having a rather stiff paddle. Vanessa and the others laughed quietly at my portrayal of "Alex" as an uptight, rather virginal guy. Then it was time for the big first scene.

We broke for a light lunch. I didn't want to eat too much because I was too nervous. I was about to do a scene where my character got attacked, stripped and raped, and I was going to do in front of my three best friends, all of them girls, two of them one-time girlfriends of mine. It was embarrassing, to say the least. I only hoped that I'd manage to be reasonably convincing.

After lunch we had a short rest, and then Vanessa looked at us all and said, with a gleam in her eye, "Okay, girls and boy, let's do it."

She had carefully storyboarded the sequence, and for the next two hours we took painstaking close-up after painstaking close-up as my character emerged from the pool, his hair still dry, and then walked into the woods in search of his girlfriend Daisy - during which time branches and vines started to clutch at him, and he got scared and began to run. It took a long time and was rather boring, but it did at least relax me until we finally got to the beginning of the attack proper.

"Okay," Vanessa said, "now, we only have so many effects, and as much as possible I want to get this in one take, if that's okay?"

I nodded seriously, and so did Kelly and Daisy.

"So," Vanessa said, "Alex - you come up here, and then the vine trips you, and you fall into the pit. I'd like you to fall right in and get it on your face, okay?"

"Okay," I said.

"Then," she said, "when you're in there, do the whole shock and disgust thing, and then Daisy will be operating the vines that will, you know, pull your trunks off."

I was wearing only a pair of tight swimming trunks, which Daisy had carefully modified to be breakaway - a not very strong pull on them would make them tear in two and fall off me. I blushed.

"Then," she said, "we'll do some inserts of the vines trapping you, which Kelly's sorted out, and then all being well, I'd like to have a go at doing the actual rape in a single take. I think it'll be better that way."

"Okay," I said, nodding.

"What'll happen," Kelly said, "the vines will be holding you down, and if you just concentrate on keeping your head up, the flower will come down and go over your head, and then the, uh, phallus vine will go to like, actually rape you. The vines are linked up to the reservoirs so when we get to the climax they'll pump liquid out."

"What sort of liquid?" I asked.

"Oh, it's harmless. Mostly marshmallow and water. The flower will also pump stuff and that'll be more messy, so just be aware."

"And obviously," Vanessa said earnestly, "if you can play up the whole terror and arousal thing, terror mingled with arousal, that would be brilliant."

"I think I know what to do," I said. 'do you want me to have, like, an orgasm?"

"Well, if you can pretend, that would be great," said Vanessa, "but don't worry too much - just make it look like you're hating it and aroused by it at the same time."

"Shouldn't be too much of a challenge," I said.

"So, while the monster is still pumping," Kelly said, 'daisy turns up and kills it with the machete. We'll do that with inserts. Then she helps you up and cleans you."

"I know," I said.

"I know," said Kelly. "I, just. Okay."

'"So, are you ready, Alex?" asked Vanessa.

"As I'll ever be," I said, flushing pink. This was it, and they all knew it. They were about to do something completely outrageous to me and nobody was envying me at that moment.

It took us about forty minutes to get the trip shot right, with me tripping and continuously falling onto a conveniently placed inflatable bed, and then it was time for what Vanessa called the Money Shot - me falling into the pit.

I took my mark. Vanessa had the camera, and Daisy had a second camera that we'd rented for extra coverage. Kelly was crouched in the bushes, with the control panel for the monster.

"Camera!" called Vanessa.

"Speed!" called Daisy.

"Kelly!"

"Ready!"

"And . . . go Alex!"