… A Tale of Spine-Chilling Terror for Spooky Season.
My mother’s name is Rosemary, making me Rosemary’s Baby, so I’ve always felt a strong connection to horror movies. In fact, in the distant mists of time, when VHS tapes cast a dark shadow across the land and I toiled in the crypt of a cursed video production company called Videocraft, my colleague Shari and I even decorated our studio walls with vintage posters of classic Universal Studios monster movies, which became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Alas, back then in the days of 35mm film and magnetic tape, ‘getting things’ done could be complicated and frustrating, and Videocraft almost became an edge-of-your-seat thriller entitled Graveyard of My Career. Fortunately, we always managed to save the day and there were many sequels. I’m currently starring in the fifth film in the franchise, still thrusting a wooden stake through the hearts of Energy Vampires who suck the life out of my workflow.
But it’s not just the Energy Vampires who send a shudder up my spine. At least once a year, I encounter The Job That Returns From The Dead. You go to sleep at night believing this job is done and all its elements are archived in a vault six feet under. But no. The restless spirit of the job rises from the tomb when the moon is full and the client has decided, yet again, one last small change is required. Just another episode of America’s Most Haunted Approvals Process, that long-running reality show about executive producers encountering inexplicable phenomena in a cold, dark, corporate conference rooms.
Even scarier than The Job That Returns From The Dead are Frankenstein videos. Stock footage from many different shoots is stitched together to make it appear like a whole new shoot. For some reason, Frankenstein videos often seem they’ve been edited by a freelance chainsaw operator from Texas, and a Mad Organist is responsible for the sound design. Meanwhile, unemployed production crews armed with flaming torches are demonstrating outside. It’s tough out there these days.
Suffice it to say, both The Job That Returns From The Dead and Frankenstein videos often play on a double bill with The Invisible Budget, and both types of project risk turning into B-movie kitsch like The Blob if you’re not careful. And there’s no money for Steve McQueen as on-camera talent. Faced with such horror stories, many of us begin to feel like full-time Zombies, driven forward by the hypnotic bongo drum beat of our clients’ expectations. Especially when that client is the creative team of Jekyll and Hyde who never agree on anything, or the gang of Devil worshippers at Amityville Productions in LA, who always open a portal to Hell with their exhaustive list of formidable deliverables.
Ultimately, I guess my role is to prevent your laptop’s screen turning into the demonically possessed TV from Poltergeist. After all, I don’t want to witness my client’s head revolving 360 degrees and shrieking obscenities like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Consequently, I’m usually downloading holy water onto my desktop and yelling ‘The power of Christ compels you!’ at particularly difficult scenes featuring lots of Soylent greens, blood reds, midnight blues, and skin tones that are deathly pale.
So if you’re interested in working with Baldwin Colour this spooky season, please don’t hesitate to contact my personal clairvoyant, Elvira, via ouija board or ominous cackling crow.