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Sunday 3 September 2017

Cult Classic

Andrew Garesford, an acquaintance of the characters that lives in a college town, describes an unusual film he has heard is carried at a video store catering to serious cinephiles. The film, called “Christwhore,” is a blasphemous underground work filmed in grainy black-and-white film stock and is about an hour-and-a-half long.

The film chronicles the misadventures of a deformed being of indeterminate gender that wanders through a deserted wasteland populated by shanty towns of unhealthy-looking people. The creature is raped, abused and generally mistreated during a variety of repellent episodes scattered throughout the film. At one point, a miscreant prostitutes the creature to a horde of Commanchero-like bandits. The creature is eventually crucified and pelted with faeces by relatively normal people.

Garesford rents the film out for his friends to watch. The film is located in a dark corner of the store’s basement, which houses the bulk of its shelf space.

After everyone watches the film, Garesford casually mentions an employee at the store that spoke with him. The employee, who has an interest in the occult, seemed to take an interest in his choice of rental.

Garesford later disappears. A casual investigation of the store reveals that “Christwhore” is no longer on the shelf. The store has no record of having ever owned it.

Possibilities

1 “Christwhore” is actually a documentary produced in the future by a time traveller who wants to make a martyr of its “star” and build a religious faith around him. The filmmaker and his accomplices are covertly circulating the film in the present day to build an environment favouring their eventual plans. Regardless of the outcome of any investigation, the characters will lose all memory of the events (other than the disappearance of Garesford) as the result of covert meddling with the flow of time.

2 Garesford has entered an uncharted realm in the Dreamlands. The tape is something he accidentally brought back with him while it was in the form of a book. The viewing of the tape, which does not actually exist in the waking world, occurred in a dream inside the collective unconsciousness of Garesford and the characters.

3 Garesford has met foul play at the hands of a ‘cult’ (actually just a couple of deluded people) who has read a deeper meaning into the film and have stolen it. The film’s disappearance is the work of the odd employee at the store, who used his professional relationship with the store owner to acquire a copy of the rare film and then steal it. The film’s director, who is harmless, has since made it to mainstream Hollywood and directed a big screen thriller that flopped with critics and audiences.

© Brian Woodman

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