Sometimes you find yourself at home away from home.
When we showed up in Colorado Springs, we met the directors of Six Feet Under Horror Festival – a title that is all the more apt when you learn that these guys are forensic pathologists. Leon and Dan and his cool wife, Sarah, took us to dinner in Garden of the Gods (which itself feels like a hellish paradise, as if the sky gods dribbled red clay from their hands to make big mud castles on the earth below.) It’s really fun when you can sit at a table over dinner while talking about the human anatomy in ways that are surely not appetizing to many. But for horror filmmakers (and those who do autopsies for a living) it’s as easy as “please pass the butter.” So Dan and Leon made this a dinner to remember, and John and I found ourselves enchanted by these charismatic docs who, after spending their days scientifically exploring dead bodies, still have space in their hearts (and a healthy sense of humor) for the blood, guts, and wicked offerings of horror cinema. And when Leon, the county coroner, invited us to join him at the morgue on Monday, John and I were like, “Is it Monday yet?”
Not yet. First, the fest.
6 Feet Under invited us out to Colorado to present two of our horror features, The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender, plus our Yukon/Alaska short Ever and a short we act in, Miltown. Even before the projector sparked up, the CO Springs horror crowd welcomed us with wide open arms. It’s funny: with our first feature back in 2010, we set out to make a ghost story, and yet we weren’t quite ready to explore the darker corners of our imagination. But when we were? It felt like home. Not only within those shiny webbed narrative corners, but within the crowd that loves them. And now we’ve found another home 6 Feet Under, where the dirt cradles our heads, the beetles clean our bones, and …. where we hope to be invited back to screen Where the Devil Roams and Hell Hole with some new forever friends and genre comrades!
And cut to: EXT. County Morgue. Morning. Monday!
I’ve always been fascinated by human anatomy, and it’s been a dream to sit in on an autopsy. Having the chance to do so – legally! – was lucky and fascinating; a day that John and I will never forget.
The deceased at a county morgue are there because of a dubious death or a crime scene. The first surprise: it’s not a slow, dramatic process in a dark room under a tiny spotlight the way you might see in a TV show or movie. It’s more like a hive dance, several techs buzzing around, business-like, doing their precise jobs – and often using tools you’d find in your kitchen or garden shed. There was no easing into the dance here. In heavy stillness bodies waited; knives were sharpened ; exploration began. In full visceral glory.
I cannot quite grasp the intricacies of a human body – how all the pieces grow and culminate in a system of bones that move and blood that circulates and invisible signals that shoot from here to there to make bones move and blood flow and breath get breathed….. and the connection of organs that, like the techs, do their job again and again until they don’t. For instance, the brain. When I was homeschooling Zelda in 7th Grade, I had her use a cauliflower as a stand-in for a brain; painting its functional regions and cutting it open. And let me tell you, the curly paths of a cauliflower are not that different looking from the creamy, pale folds of a brain. And yet that organ is orchestrating everything from our attics – and it’s covered with the thinnest, hard paper-like covering (the dura mater – thanks, Dan!) and then bone, then skin, then hair if you’ve got it. That’s it. We are tough; we are vulnerable. We are complex, yet simple. We are animated, and then we are still.
After Leon made his first examination of the day and determined the cause of death, he then showed us the rest of the facility, which was equally fascinating. This included the Bones Room, where a tank filled with maggots and beetles cleans bones the good old-fashioned way. There’s an Evidence Room, which is a sad place. There is Toxicology…. It’s like biology class on steroids. It’s a big swig of Well, OK. It’s grim and honest; exciting and sobering; tremendously wild and there you go.
Grateful for the experience (and to the bodies themselves), we said our goodbyes, got in our car, shared a kiss (grateful to be this side of six feet under), gassed up, and, still wide-eyed and totally wowed, began driving north towards our big beautiful life-eater, Lulu. Oregon and bone-crushing hugs, here we come!