I had promised myself
to never send a producer an idea again
.
Just a finished script: which he approved or rejected ipso facto.
But luck, so elusive in fulfilling our desires, is ubiquitous in avoiding our promises.
At that vernissage, while I was telling the draft of the plot to a friend, another of the members of the group introduced himself as a producer.
Strictly speaking, I had once heard of him, he lived in Miami, he was passing through Buenos Aires on a wine business.
He told me, to my surprise, that they would contact me shortly.
I didn't take it seriously.
However, a few days later I received a call: the general content manager of the producer in question summoned me to his farm, in a privileged backwater of the Buenos Aires plain, to participate in a “brainstorming” around my project.
The manager, a screenwriter with a thin mustache, and Ña Chacha, the landlady, who served us mate, ice water, and high-class salami, were part of the party.
They started by asking me to tell my story.
"It's a horror movie," I explained.
From some esoteric reading, from some profane text, it is deduced that one ominous night
the murdered will rise from their graves and will be allowed to take revenge
.
They have only one life that night, and they can lose it in action.
The option lasts twelve hours.
Then they will return to dust in any case.
The murderers find out about the coven in different ways and to different degrees, and the vast majority are afraid.
Among those killed, there are also evil ones, of course.
And it could happen that among those revived from the underworld, they would kill each other for the right to kill their common murderer.
Broadly speaking, that is the idea.
For everything else, you have to think, write.
I paused and added:
- Work.
The screenwriter looked at me skeptically.
For some reason, in that expression
the mustache highlighted his condescension
.
The producer asked:
- And why are they resurrected?
The question stumped me.
I told the truth:
- Just because.
Just like we die.
"I don't understand," the producer insisted.
"I mean," I insisted in turn, "that no one explains to us why we die."
Likewise, in the film, a profane, apocryphal or demonic text, or the spell of a miracle worker, announces the redemption of the murdered.
In fact, this thing about the resurrected is a little more explained than our deaths in general.
- What he wants to ask you - the scriptwriter translated unnecessarily, brushing aside my explanation like a fly with a gesture of his hand - is the practical reason why they are resurrected.
A nuclear accident, a toxic rain, a seismic effect?
I pretended to think about it and repeated:
- No, nothing like that.
They resurrect because yes
.
There are some movies, I can barely remember a hundred, but there are thousands, with zombies.
I don't know if you heard them named.
Zombies appear, just because.
Nobody explains anything.
It's not because of something they ate.
Nor because of climate change.
They are simply zombies.
I remember an episode of The Twilight Zone in which two frauds made the inhabitants of different towns in the American Midwest believe that they were capable of resurrecting the dead.
Relatives paid to have them officiate the prodigy.
But when they were told that the dead had really arrived, most of the mourners, as in Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw, preferred that the deceased remain in their graves.
Then the swindlers fled with the proceeds, like the tailors of the emperor's clothes.
Until in one town the dead got fed up with the lie and really came back to life.
And they put an end to the scammers, if I remember correctly.
Great chapter.
What I'm getting at is that
when the dead actually rise from the dead, they do so out of exhaustion
, not because of some kind of scientific explanation.
Not at least a realistic scientific explanation.
Then we have the case of the movie
The Fly
, where there is some type of scientific explanation, but nothing really serious.
I don't think
Jeff Goldblum
could apply for the Nobel Prize in that area.
It's more for the Oscar.
Anyway:
in my film the murdered dead are resurrected just because
, for a single night, to take revenge on the murderers.
You could also ask me: and why, instead of taking revenge, don't they talk to the murderers?
Why don't they propose life imprisonment instead of an eye for an eye?
But that would be another movie: perhaps a black comedy.
This is more of a horror movie like those North American ones where during one night you can legally go out and kill.
Quite similar to any night in the Buenos Aires suburbs, not far from here, on the other hand.
The producer and the scriptwriter observed me, turning their heads at the same time in a negative wave - themselves like zombies -, light, subtle... and definitive.
Ña Chacha served me a glass of lemonade with ginger, as if she knew me.
An exquisiteness.
And while I was tasting the elixir, he suddenly spoke:
- God would not allow it.
I replied:
- That is a valid objection.
That is why the prophecy appears in a pagan text: a power from beyond the grave, but not divine.
Ña Chacha considered it as if she approved of my answer.
- We are in the 21st century - the screenwriter informed me -.
"And it's three in the afternoon," I added, pointing to the wall clock.
The producer stood up to see me off.
The scriptwriter clasped his hands over his chest like an executioner.
- We are in contact - the producer told me -.
Ña Chacha took me in a sulky to the gate, where the truck was waiting for me.
"My dead come to see me several times a year," Ña Chacha confessed, as if she were talking about the weather.
There is one that I am afraid of.
She did not die as is known.
I pray to God that you haven't given him ideas.
He left me at the exit without fury, but with apprehension.
As I watched her drive away through the car window, I felt that that trip had been worth it.