Ready to sin?
The house sat unoccupied for what seemed like an eternity, and rumors swirled around it like spectral mist. It was a ranch home built in the seventies, all brown and beige and shag carpet. The occupants had vacated on November first leaving a Beistle black cat decoration, its back perpetually arched on the inside picture window. A Jack O' Lantern sat on the front porch with a jaunty smile. One brave soul had looked inside a week after the family left and found a black candle burned down to the nub. As the pumpkin moldered, its grin transforming into a rictus of agony, the stories multiplied like flies on roadkill. Some said a cult had filmed Satanic sacrifices in the attic on a Super 8 camera, gruesome violence committed by hooded figures that had been sold to the highest bidder. Others spoke in hushed tones of a beloved family man driven mad by guttural voices that threatened and cajoled in a long dead language. The Norman Rockwell ideal torn apart when he took a chainsaw to his children, leaving only red slurry where they had once lain sleeping in their beds. The wife survived because her husband had turned the saw on himself in a moment of clarity. Someone who knew someone said the police report detailed how she had smelled the burning bone and steaming blood as her husband sawed through his own ribs. There are those who entertained that the spirits of the victims lingered, pulling aside the rotting blinds to looking down at cracked front stoop, waiting for the right soul to possess.
So you knew you had to see and you had to know and that is what brought you across the threshold of the front door. Past the eyes of the Beistle cat arching its back. Was it in fear or imminent violence? You weren't sure which. Your curiosity is what lead you to the living room where a brown paneled tube TV sat atop a milk crate. Atop that tube TV was a VCR and atop that VCR was a dusty VHS tape. Written in black sharpie on the label was the word SINEMA. It had been smudged by carelessness but you could see that the "I" was stylized to look like an inverted cross and that the "A" had been turned into a grinning skull by crude artistry. You pushed it into the VCR and listened to the whirring as the sacrifice was accepted. The benign blue void of CHANNEL 3 became static and then that static became a violent world. It was all there: The chainsaw turning life into pale meat. The figures in black cowls worshipping before a pentagram drawn in white chalk. But then there was more: Bikers borne of sin and built for sleaze, ghouls with an insatiable lust for viscera. It went on and on and it was wrong and it felt so damn good. Behind this phantasmagoria was one figure. Borne of Jackal and a six pack, raised by werewolves on wheels. Yours truly, Dr. Benny Graves. I'd ask if you are are still hungry, but I already know the answer. I'll be your guide along the way, making sure you never stray too far from the left hand path. Welcome to the Sinema.
-Dr. Benny Graves
