Candela Obscura Live - The Circle of the Silver Screen (2024)

"Candela Obscura Live - The Circle of the Silver Screen" (CO5x01) is a special one-shot episode of Candela Obscura, recorded live at The United Theater on Broadway in Los Angeles on 25 May 2024. When a vile phenomenon emerges on set, the cameras roll on the Circle of the Silver Screen - Assignment #29 -1128, "Stagecraft".

Synopsis[]

Introduction[]

Tonight, we gather together in this temple to cinema where stories are captured with alchemical grace, where they are spun through a ritual of gear and lever and summoned by a magick lantern of lens and mirror to dance and cast their shadows for the audience's delight. Forget the play. In our new age, the picture's the thing. But in this new art form, spectacle is what sells and a film must succeed to pay for the next. How far would one go to dazzle an audience and baffle their peers, to make the crowd gasp and wonder, "How did they do that?" How indeed. To investigate such mysteries, we turn to an eclectic group of investigators. Tonight, we humbly present The Circle of the Silver Screen. Assignment #29-1128: Stagecraft.

Episode introduction[]

In a silent movie clip, there is a slate showing this is a scene from the movie "The House on Barker Hill". A woman is tied to a pillar with a knife-wielding man approaching, saying, "I should have known you never loved me." He stabs her in the throat and she dies horribly, bleeding. The man looks up and is snatched out of frame, slammed to the ceiling and back down. The camera is knocked over and there are feet running and bodies dropping.

Part I[]

The four members of the Circle of the Silver Screen are gathered onstage in the United Theater in Newfaire for a talkback session following screening of a new movie, "Mr. Terrible". The moderator, Rudy Ginsmith, introduces the group: wartime documentarian turned experimental filmmaker Jackie Renoux, character actor Chey Tanii, famous actress Evelyn White, and special consultant (and detective) Lester Shaw. The audience poses several questions to the group before they move offstage, meeting their Lightkeeper Greta DeClaire who takes them to a screening room and tells Lester one of his contacts at EONS reached out: Jonathan Sky, Vice President of the Meridian Film Studios. She shows them the footage described in Spenser's introduction. They recognize the woman as Idella Montaigne, an actress, and August Glance, an up-and-coming heartthrob actor. The picture is being billed as the most realistic horror film ever, and Candela is concerned it's a little too real. Jonathan has invited them to visit the set and figure out what occurred. Chey senses Bleed from the film itself and notices a slight shadow pass over August's leg just before he is yanked upward.

The group travels to the shooting location, a now-dilapidated house converted to a hotel where the film was shot. Chey recognizes it as the location of several murders by Daryl Barker that he helped investigate and that changed him forever, and he briefly remembers being in a hotel room and Daryl entering. They are welcomed to the hotel by Jonathan Sky, and inside are met with the smell of death, familiar to Lester as a former Periphery officer, and notice blood in the cracks of the floor and forming a path down the staircase toward the living room. Jackie uses a special camera to scan for anything unusual and notices a hint of shadow, while Chey runs a hand along a wall. He senses that whatever happened here permeated the whole house, and is no longer here but has left Bleed behind. He tells the others that his mother is not here but something is.

The group enters the living room, where they find the bodies of the crew torn open and one partially melted into the wall itself. Moving on to the ballroom, they see the broken body of August Glance next to that of Idella Montaigne. Her throat is cut and her chest has caved in, and Evelyn notices it's as if she breathed fully out and never inhaled, exhaling as hard as possible. Lester notices blood was cleaned from the set wherever it might be on-camera, as if it was there before they started filming. Chey tastes the blood and Bleed courses through his entire body, filling the right, damaged side of his face and elongating his right arm until it reaches the floor and his fingernails are two feet long. Calling it his mother's arm, he hides it in his clothing but the others tell him he doesn't have to, with them. He confirms the blood is real.

Chey opens the door and they see another room holding a projector and a woman melded with a chair, eyes wide open. Jackie looks at the reel the woman was working on and sees the same footage as described in the introduction. Since Evelyn originally read for the part the dead Idella got, she remembers that the movie was about the murders of Daryl Barker, who died mysteriously. The party moves further down the hallway to the basem*nt stairs, and as they talk, we learn that Chey killed Barker in this very house years earlier. Chey taps on the walls, but nothing responds. Feeling relatively safe, they turn on the basem*nt light and descend, find there three bodies of Idella Montaigne, dead, gagged, and throat slit. Evelyn touches one, taking Bleed damage but learning they feel real.

Jackie tells Chey that everything here, including the camera, appears to be using technology for filmmaking that she and Chey developed together, and that Smithe Crow, the director, was her "friend". However, she feels no bleed from the film itself. The group speculates that the filmmakers achieved realism by creating duplicates and actually killing the leading lady for each take. Just then, they hear thumping from inside a crate. Lester checks it for bleed and finds none, so he lifts the lid. Inside is Idella Montaigne.

Part II[]

Idella is bound and gagged within the crate, but alive, and they notice there are many other crates of similar size scattered around the basem*nt. Lester finds a male body with its throat slit, and in another crate is that same man, alive, but eyes closed, and wearing a 10-year-old suit. Chey senses bleed everywhere, and has another memory of the night Daryl Barker confronted him. Above Daryl, in the ceiling, Chey saw something swirling that touched him and made the right side of his body come alive. He saw a woman there, and his body did as she asked. She received Daryl like a child, and Chey watched him breath his last.

Chey uses his nails to break the bound Idella's ropes and she leaps up, grabbing his neck. Evelyn punches her and Idella grabs her face. Chey tells Idella to look at him and she does, throwing Evelyn to the ground but choking Chey. Evelyn attacks with a dagger, wounding Idella, who is becoming more and more inhuman. Lester attempts to shoot, in the process having his chest badly gashed before "Idella" stumbles back from the gunshot. Jackie pulls off its gag and it exhales a black form that moves through her, inflicting five body. She collapses, scarred and unconscious. They notice the creature avoids electricity, so Evelyn jams her dagger into an electric outlet, and the creature, frightened, moves through a wall and disappears.

The others turn to Jackie, who reveals she and Chey were working to develop camera technology that could capture the soul. However, it was confiscated by the OUPS. They notice a name on the crate where Idella was held: Professor Douglas Schultz, Briarbank College, which is connected to EONS (the Dean is prominent in the organization), which has close ties to Meridian Studios. Jackie is convinced they stole what Chey and she were working on and reversed it to inject souls into bodies rather than pulling them out. Lester reveals that while he was working with OUPS he was investigating Jackie's work but they apparently got what they needed elsewhere. However, Chey realizes Lester knows more about their project than he is admitting and was involved in some way with the loss of what Chey and Jackie built. He threatens Lester, who offers to find out what he can.

The group heads to Briarbank College where Lester talks to the brother of a co-worker in the Periphery, Darryl Schmeit, an archivist in the University Library, learning where Professor Schultz can likely be found. Meanwhile Evelyn runs into a student fan, who tells her the University recently screened her latest picture using a newfangled projector. The group decides to talk to the professor first, who also turns out to be a fan of Evelyn. Spotting a business opportunity, he shares he's been working recently with Idella, and they gradually work around to hinting about a demonstration. He invites them into the side annex to view his process., although he no longer has access to the current model (which is in Idella's home).

Professor Schultz leads them to a tiled room with a large tub and various equipment. He explains that the subject lies in the tub and it is filled with water, in effect drowning them so that "other things" can be put inside. A new body then shows up in a well in Groundswell, containing the subject's soul and mind. Idella has done that multiple times. Just then, the phone rings in his office and Jackie beats him to answer it. She hears a frantic Idella say, "Doug, please help!" before static overwhelms the line. Chey speculates the thing they released earlier went to Idella.

Taking the professor with them, they head quickly to Idella's mansion, where they find the house completely torn apart and a lot of bleed coming from upstairs. The professor leads the way to the room where his mechanism was installed, but as he enters, he is plucked from his feet leaving his legs behind, ripped to shreds. This is the entity Chey calls his mother, which permanently altered him when he encountered it. Meanwhile, Lester cuts the cord on an electric lamp and holds the sparking cord ready. In the room the professor was killed in is a machine similar to the one back at Briarbank, but with a Faraday cage in one corner. Idella is sheltering inside the cage and something is writhing on the ceiling gnawing a bone. Whatever is here, came back for her and for a home. But Chey realizes that the equipment is workable, and that free entities can be trapped in a willing vessel.

Evelyn climbs into the tub but the others protest, and Jackie hands her the camera to distract her. The tub is filling. Eventually, Chey picks up Evelyn (still filming) and throws her out of the room, then grabs the creature with his elongated, altered arm. It pulls itself down his arm, wanting to devour him, as the water reaches Chey's head. He begins ripping at his own face, dislocating his jaw, then takes a breath of water. The spirit dives into him and disappears inside him, and Chey vanishes. He finds himself in a dark room in a bed, with Daryl Barker sitting next to him. Daryl greets him, saying he's been waiting for him, but Chey tells him to shut up. He finds himself suddenly in Groundswell, staring up from the bottom of a well, alive, still with his changed arm and mangled face.

Back at Idella's house, the others see thrashing in the tub, and the creature is screaming. Lester takes the plugged-in, sparking cord and runs towards it, helped by Jackie and Evelyn, and throws the cord into the water while using his tie to gag Chey's lifeless body so the creature cannot enter as it dies. The discarded camera is still filming, capturing Chey's electrocution, his body filling with darkness and then its release. The phone rings. It is their lightkeeper Greta. The final scene is of Chey being pulled from the well, alive and in his terribly altered form.

Post-Game[]

Friends, colleagues, precious audience, they say that art is as close to immortality as most could ever hope to achieve. Therefore, it is always coveted by the powerful and it is precious beyond measure to the creators who would see their visions realized. Tonight, our Circle of the Silver Screen have reminded us of a vicious truth: Art demands sacrifice, and all that raw material has to come from somewhere.

Featured characters[]

Circle of the Silver Screen[]

• Jackie Renoux
• Lester Shaw
• Chey Tanii
• Evelyn White

New[]

• Daryl Barker, a murderer whom Chey killed years ago
• Smithe Crow, director, now deceased
• Greta DeClaire, lightkeeper of the Circle
• Rudy Ginsmith, moderator of the Q&A session
• August Glance, an actor, now deceased
• Idella Montaigne, an actress, now deceased
• Darryl Schmeit, an archivist in the Briarbank College library
• Douglas Schultz, professor at Briarbank College
• Jonathan Sky, vice-president of Meridian Studios

Quotations[]

• Evelyn: Oh, Idella is just um... I mean, she's an actress, I suppose.
• Jackie: Well, that seems a bit in poor taste. I kind of like it.
• Lester: (tossing gloves to the group) Word of advice. Put these on.
  Evelyn: Oh, but... (sighs)
  Lester: Trust me. You'd make a beautiful defendant.
• Spenser: (to Chey) What does Bleed feel like for you?
  Chey: It feels seductive. It feels painful, but painful in the way that you're doing something strenuous that pays off in pain.
• Spenser: What are you trying to discern?
  Evelyn: Oh. I'm trying to discern... Did all of her blood get sucked out? Where did the blood go? Was she still alive after her head got cut off? I don't know.
  Spenser: As you approach the body, you see this person that you have been rivals with for some time--
  Evelyn: That's one of my best friends.
  Spenser: You see them with their neck slit wide open, and also their chest cavity is collapsed right in front of you. Take a point of brain for me as you grapple with this scene.
  Evelyn: I feel... bad.
  Jackie: You know, thank god for writers' rooms, that's all I have to say. They should honestly get paid more, but what do I know?
• Spenser: What vision overcomes you when you feel bleed emanating throughout your entire body? Where does your body take you to escape the pain?
  Chey: I don't escape the pain. I live in it, and I let what happens, happen.
• Jackie: (after finding multiple Idella bodies) I don't know. It feels like it just further cements the idea that actors are expendable. The allegory's not lost on me.
• Jackie: (to Evelyn) Will you be happy or sad if Idella pops out of that box?
  Evelyn: (unconvincingly) Um...Oh, happy!
• Spenser: You see your friend Chey, the one who dances with the devil, born again.

Trivia[]

• Liam O'Brien makes a cameo appearance as Cosmo Grimm as the episode opens, in a wheelchair pushed by Rowan Hall (co-writer and co-developer of Candela Obscura), claiming to be looking for Cordelia Glask much to the exasperation of Taliesin Jaffe who was trying to open the show^[1]: he was apparently interacting with the audience in the lobby before the show as well.

References[]

Art: