Stephen Romano’s KINGDOM: Dead Babies!

Stephen Romano |

Aug 24, 2015

“Walking in through the front door, you see that every surface in the place—even the ceilings and the furniture—are covered in an endless free-form mural of magazine clippings, collage art, old buttons, scraps of paper with dirty limericks written on them, pages from comic books filled with glorious gore and two-fisted heroes, poems pasted and stapled together from the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski, painted faces and scribbled emotions, all train-wrecked together in an explosion of scrapbook photos that trace all the people who ever lived here and the magic they brought with them, labels from booze bottles, Mardi Gras beads and film festival badges, plastic Hawaiian flower leis and rubber snakes and strings of glittering Christmas-tree lights, purple velvet pouches with lacy yellow trim that used to be filled with bottles of Crown Royal, a button that says damn i’m good and a sign that says no foul language in this room please, crayon art scrawled by lazy, crazy people in the midnight hour, cartoons scissored from the Sunday papers and pasted in layers to make a new joke, an ad for Skyy Vodka that shows Ben Stiller as Zoolander making a martini, James Bond looking cool with his Walther 9 mm, drawing down through a gun barrel oozing with blood, video covers and love letters and cashed check stubs kept as souvenirs . . . and movie posters. Lots and lots of movie posters. It’s a superhighway of information and history. Pam Grier and Luke Skywalker and Tyler Durden are your hosts.”

Hi, Kids! It’s Stephen Romano, back again with some swell new STUFF for ya. The above passages are contained in the opening of my new novel, entitled “METRO,” coming in September as an exclusive Ebook from Simon and Schuster. (It’s also a STEAL at just two American dollars, so get your ass to Amazon and pre-order a copy now.) It’s full of really wet and red stuff for the horror crowd—a true geek-noir suspense thriller full of movie nerds, comic books, drug lords and psycho killers that asks the loaded question: Are your friends really who you think they are? The hard answers come with a heavy body count in “METRO,” and a fast-paced, anything-goes thriller plot that will keep you guessing until the last page! The book is set in a geeky alterno-scene of hard partying blogger types, and partially takes place in the crazy house described above, which actually existed many years ago.

But don’t take my word for it.

Take a LOOK!

Over the next few weeks, as we count down the days leading up the “METRO” street date (that’s September 14, kids!), please join me here periodically, for some awesome imagery from that crazy house, along with some swell stories and some exclusive news about upcoming projects. Phantasm director Don Coscarelli once said of my former home: “It’s like something you’d find in the movie Se7en!” I say it was even cooler than that!

But, again, don’t take MY word for it.

After all, seeing is believing . . .

That first picture ABOVE was the entrance to the main living room, where you can see just part of the collage art that dominated the whole place. Eagle eyed followers of my work may recognize this bizarre landscape partially from its appearance in my illustrated exploitation tribute book “Shock Festival.” (If you look really, really hard you can see a certain famous superhero riding a three foot rubber dong!)

ABOVE is the Kingdom Dining Room, guarded by a hideous apparition we liked to call BABY TETUSO, which was created by Citizen Jack and left behind as a warning to all who set foot in the door. You can see that the entire room behind Tetsuso, including the ceiling was encased in the collages described in my book. The collage was indeed created by the many citizens who lived in that house. If you lived there for even a while—and many people did—you were asked to contribute something to the Dining Room Ceiling.

This gives you a close-up on some of the imagery. (If you look hard enough you can see the Zoolander vodka ad in there.) We were big horror geeks at The Kingdom and you could spot everything on our walls, from John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness to Camille Paglia. There were thousands and thousands of pieces in that one room alone.

Weird, huh?

This was the Dining Room Main Wall, which often doubled as my office, filled with the scrapbook stuff. Look hard enough and you’ll see thee full page newspaper ads I ran in the Austin Chronicle for my Lucio Fulci Halloween Horror Festivals, in which we showed pristine film prints of classics like The Beyond, Zombie and The Gates Of Hell to screaming-mad sellout crowds at the world-famous Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. (This was “back in the day,” before the Alamo was a big franchise and movie distribution outfit—they only had ONE location and it was a real punk rock operation.) Also in this image, you can see artwork from my old Fulci comics, which I am currently in the process of resurrecting for an official new release! You heard it here first, kids! BE VERY AFRAID.

If you look hard enough at this section of the ceiling, you can actually see Jim Carey humping George Bush Senior. That was an inspired bit pasted in by Citizen Jimmy, when the collage first went up.

This is a corner where a lot of important STUFF was stashed, including a piece of original pencil artwork by Geoff Darrow from his legendary comic series with Frank Miller “Hardboiled.” It’s a drawing of a robot lady squeezing a guy’s nuts into jelly. (Geoff signed to to me: “To Stephen, I hope this never happens to YOU.”) And see that dead baby skeleton? It’s a genuine artifact from the set of Masters of Horror, circa 2005—specifically the very first episode, directed by Don Coscarelli, which I wrote.

Near the end of the MOH shoot, when we filmed the final battle between Moonface and Ellen, the legendary Howard Berger of KNB and his awesome crew prepared TWO props to create the effect of a dead baby being slammed into the face of the villain, Moonface, and shattered into a million dusty, desiccated pieces. (What was the skeleton filled with to simulate the dust? What else? BABY POWDER!) On the first take, Bree Turner grabbed the baby from the carriage and the legs instantly ripped away from the torso, leaving the top half still in the basket. This spoiled the shot (and made for one hell of an outtake), and we went to plan B, with the second prop pressed into service. It had better fucking well work this time, I thought; we only have ONE dead baby left! (Yeah, these are the kinds of thoughts a grown man ought to have at his place of employment, right?) Well, there was no need to worry. The KNB guys were on the motherfucker. This time, all went as planned, and the baby shattered on cue. Two takes. Cut and print.

And in case you happen to be wondering, John DeSantis, who played Moonface, did all his own stunts, including taking that particular hit. It was a fairly lightweight prop, but not THAT lightweight. I mean, you sure wouldn’t wanna be hit in the face with that goddamn thing. But John is a real trooper, and almost seven feet tall, so it was impossible to really double him with any credibility on-camera. He not only ate that dead baby, but went through a window, fell from two stories, and got the shit kicked out of him by a woman two thirds smaller than he was! John was awesome.

So was Howard Berger. That was a really tough shoot, and Howard was truly the man, full of sauce, ingenuity and good humor. When we wrapped the last shot on the dead baby, I asked him if I could have a few pieces of the shattered skull. And Howard, without missing a beat, grabbed the full intact upper torso from the aborted first take, handed it over and said, “Don’t say I never gave ya nothing.” (Incidentally, I DID sweep up a few of the shattered skull pieces anyway and still have them to this day.) Because the prop was so light, designed to shatter against a giant’s head, I actually had to carry it with me on the plane home to ensure its safe arrival at The Kingdom. Picture that for a second. Horror writer carries dead baby on commercial airliner for 15 hours. And that wasn’t the strangest thing that happened on my way home from Masters of Horror.

But that, as they say, is another goddamn story.

I’ll be back with more stories and pictures next week, plus an exclusive preview image from my upcoming Lucio Fulci comics!

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