George Barry on Death Bed: The Bed That Eats

It was a real bombastic suprise when after the announcing of Kunigunda films programme we have received an e-mail from one of the directors. George Barry, the director of "Death Bed", filmed in 1977, sent us a message and after we replied, he tells the whole weird story himself - about the making, loose and re-discovery of this moving picture - one of the strangest horror films ever made... You can see it on Sunday afternoon at club "Bix".

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"Death Bed: The Bed That Eats" is a low budget horror film I began filming in and around Detroit in 1972 and finally was able to complete in 1977. This feature about a malevolent bed that consumes people was not sold at the time and two decades passed before I discovered that along the way "Death Bed" had been pirated, released in England on video, and had taken on a life of its own.

For me, the film has become the story of a note in a bottle. It's as if, late last night, I'm walking down, along the water's edge, a deserted beach. The water is dark and endless. The night sky is illuminated by a nearly full moon. The incoming tide washes up a bottle on to the sand at my feet and I pick it up. Inside the tightly corked bottle, I see a rolled up paper with writing on it. I uncork the bottle, fish the paper out, unroll and begin to read it. I'm more than a little surprised to find it's a note written by myself over twenty years before. This note is not a plea for help (too late now, anyway) or a proselytizing rant, but just a story I wrote, put into a bottle, tossed into a great lake, and forgot. I'm even more amazed to discover someone else has added on to the story. At the end, I find comments and questions in another's hand.

All this happened to me, it's all true, except for: It was not last night, but the end of September 2001. I was not on a deserted beach, but online at 3 in the morning. The dark, endless water was the internet and the note in the bottle was a posting in a movie forum I came across by some quirk of outrageous fortune.

I was working online and not getting anything done. Overwhelmed by the drudgery of donkey database entry, I quit working, but stayed online to browse myself to sleep. I embarked upon a movie trivia quest of vast importance to me at the moment. Earlier in the evening, I had caught on Turner Classic Movies a few minutes of "Inflation", an American World War II propaganda short starring Edward Arnold as the Devil. An actress in the background seemed familiar. To find her name and later something of her history, I started at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), journeyed through the search engine, Google, and arrived at a Scarlet Street message board posting. The little used actress was Vicky Lane. Had I really remembered her? Had her face sparked a distant childhood Shock Theater memory? The only other movie I'm sure I saw her in was "Jungle Captive", the third and last of the mid 40's Universal Ape Woman movies, where she replaced Acquanetta as "Paula Dupree", the Ape Woman. Just another one of life's mysteries best left unanswered.

I had read the magazine, Scarlet Street, but had never browsed their internet site before. As long as I was here, I might as well check it out. Now keep in mind, I had been at the screen too long and was somewhat dazed. My children were asleep upstairs; I would be driving them to school in a few hours. Though I was under no time constraint, in all likelihood I would be getting offline in 15 to 30 minutes. The Scarlet Street message board has over 40 different forums covering various topics from Sherlock Holmes to Villains to Monsters. These forums cumulatively contain thousands of posts. Yet a couple of hours later, when I checked the thread in my computer's history (wondering how I got where I got), I found I made only three clicks to go directly from the post which brought me into the Scarlet Street message board to the discovery of my film's release.

This was where my life began to imitate the plot of a cable trash movie. Some benevolent spirit within the computer, possibly having dropped by from ghosting about on the net, began to guide my hand on what I suppose became the mouse of destiny. I'm at the Vicky Lane post in the Universal Horror forum.

I click once on the Scarlet Street forums to get to the forum menu. I look over the forum subject headings and click a second time on Poverty Row Horrors. My third click was on WHO SAW THIS MOVIE???, a recent post, at or near the top of the page. A person, posting as Fantomas, is asking about a movie they had seen on video some years before at a friend's house in London. "One of the strangest horror films ever made"..."possibly American, or perhaps Canadian, I'm unable to give any information on cast and crew - as none of them are on the print."

Providing a link to a review of the film at www.lightsfade.com, Fantomas then adds, "The title was Death Bed: The Bed That Eats." There it is, right in front of my eyes, Death Bed, my unreleased or at least unsold feature film, a project which for many years I had given little thought. Clicking on the Lightsfade link, the path continued wondrously strange. Here was this warm, enthusiastic, incredibly generous review of my movie.

"This wins hands down as the most criminally ignored film that I've ever seen and I've seen the lot.... nothing has ever been made like this before. On occasion it defies rational belief... This fascinating film doesn't compare with anything else in exploitation."

Later, a friend after reading this review, asked me how much I paid the reviewer to write it. Five hundred dollars I unhesitatingly answered and, for a moment, he took me at my word. But where to send the money? Who is this person? This poor, insane person who likes my movie so much. I thought, for awhile, it must be Fantomas who did the post back at Scarlet Street. It wasn't, it turned out Fantomas is Jean-Claude Michel, French writer and fantastical film historian. Daniel Craddock is the fellow who wrote the review and I later did an interview with him for Lightsfade.

However bizarre this all seemed, and however numb and befuddled my mind was, I should say at no point did I think I was hallucinating or imagining what I was reading, even though it was difficult for me to ingest and process the information. I went back and forth a number of times from the Scarlet Street post to the Lightsfade review, re-reading their texts and trying to figure out what had happened with my movie. Both asked for information to help identify the makers of the film and both mentioned that the only name on the film was George Barry appearing at the copyright notice.

Mistakenly thinking, Fantomas and Lightsfade were one and the same, I e-mailed Fantomas at Lightsfade, saying if further info about "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats" was desired, I could supply it since I wrote and directed the movie. By this time I was so hazy I had begun to lose English as my first language with no second language to fall back on.

Somehow they were able to decipher my ramblings and got back to me. A modest but highly enjoyable course of events had begun, ultimately leading to Death Bed securing a DVD release.

I should supply some background on Death Bed. As mentioned before, "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats" was filmed in the metropolitan Detroit area. It was a stop and go 16 mm color production, with principal photography shot in 1972. We would scrape up a little cash, do what we could do, then halt until we could scrape up some more money. It certainly was not an efficient way of working in regard to either time or budget.

The cast and crew were primarily local though a few people came from Toronto, Canada. I was in my twenties, as were the majority of the cast and crew. When the 16 mm answer print was finished in 1977, I had no success in finding a distributor who would take on the 35 mm blow up cost. Death Bed is not a straight horror film, nor is it an out & out comedy. If you don't find some humor in the movie you probably won't like it, yet if you're hoping for continuous laughs, you're not likely to care for it either.

The reception in the threadbare offices of the small film distributors I visited was tepid to say the least. On the occasion there was interest, that's all there was, interest, but no money or certainly not enough money to blow up the film for a theatrical release.

In the early 1980's, there were a few approaches concerning a video release of Death Bed, but nothing was realized. Its during this time, the film appears to have been pirated. Unbeknownst to me, a surreptitious video transfer from the 16mm answer print ended up as a Portland Films Ltd. offering in England. That's why there are no credits on the Portland print, since the answer print had only a title along with my name on a copyright notice.

This bootleg also ended up in Australia and New Zealand. Later, I've been told, the pirate was pirated, dubbed into Spanish and released in Spain. I have been unable to find a copy of this Spanish version, though I'm still looking. The Portland Death Bed video box, delightfully featuring the two bleeding soles of a victim's feet at the center of its artwork, has a self imposed 18 only age warning on its cover. Daniel at Lightsfade told me this is representative of a later day British pre-cert* and thinks Death Bed came out in England around 1983.

To my knowledge, no pirate ever popped up in the US. Early in 2002, after my interview with Lightsfade went online, Stephen Thrower, editor of Eyeball: The European Sex and Horror Review, e-mailed me. Even though he had seen the English pirate many years before, was he looking to petition me for recompense to cover suffering and damages caused by mental anguish? Thankfully no, and this was the start of a long and very congenial correspondence between the two of us.

Towards the end of 2002, Steve put me in touch with Cult Epics and a DVD release was arranged, for which he wrote the liner notes. My daughter, born after Death Bed had faded from my mind, produced my introduction to the DVD. The film had it's long belated World theatrical premiere at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, IndieFest, February 15th 2003, where I am told, the overall audience response was favorable.

Now, I'm sure, some thought it was God awful and others liked it because they thought it was so bad, it was good (and as long as people enjoy the movie, that's OK with me), but, apparently from the responses I have read, there were at least a few demented souls who liked the movie, taking it for what it is, whatever that may be.

I never thought we were telling that strange a story. Yet if, I had gazed into a reliable crystal ball before filming Death Bed and saw over 25 years would elapse before the film secured an authorized release, would I have approached the film differently? Most certainly yes. I would have employed more standard story telling disciplines with slow walks down long dark corridors, stumbling into spooky rooms cluttered with bare breasted hijinks, heavily dosed with artificial blood. It might have turned out to be a better film.

However, if the crystal ball containing that same vision, arrived in the mail after Death Bed was shot, but before it was edited, what might have been the result? Almost certainly a shorter film, since during post production, we stretched the running time to reach 80 minutes, what we considered to be the minimum length for a feature film. Now the film might have really gotten strange.

Concerns for narrative conventions? It's going to be a quarter of a century before it's released, we don't need any stinking concerns for narrative conventions. Shorter and stranger, this too might have been a better film, but it was done the way it was done.

Well Children, what have I learned from all this? What should I make of this B (at best) movie plot, a computer talking to and guiding me in the middle of the night, impressing itself upon my life? Should I journey up and/or down Synchronicity River, water way of meaningful coincidence, to find my answer in a jumble of Jungian fun stuff? Perhaps, but maybe I'll just sit here on the river bank and enjoy the view. Life is crazy, isn't it? And when life is crazy good, rather than crazy bad, I'm grateful.

It's all been and continues to be great fun. I've received far more positive response to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats than I could have ever possibly imagined years ago when we made the film. I've met, primarily online, a lot of Cool Kids along the way: Jean-Claude Michel whose post at Scarlet Street resulted in my discovery of Death Bed's overseas existence, Daniel and Shahid

at Lightsfade, Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown, who as Cyclobe, provided additional music for the DVD, Nico B. whose company Cult Epics is releasing the DVD, and Suzanne and Mikael at Succubus Press, who asked me to contribute to their book.

I would like to thank all of the above for their encouragement and support, along with all of the cast and crew of Death Bed, in particular:

Jock Brandis who not only was the gaffer, but engineered all of the special effects on a budget which may not have exceeded $1.29, Patrick Spence-Thomas who not only made available his sound studio and mixed the soundtrack, but voiced the film's narration, Maureen Petrucci who not only was the art director and the set designer, but took on the task of co-producing the film during production and Ron Medico who not only edited the film, but had to suffer me in close quarters during the long, intermittent post-production. I would also like to thank any Good Kid who has taken the time and trouble to read this.

George Barry

 

* - In 1984, the Video Recordings Act, granted censorship control of all home video release in England to the British Board of Film Censors, shortly to be renamed the British Board of Film Classification. Videos now would have to be submitted to the BBFC for certification, before the public would be permitted to view them. The term pre-cert refers to an English home video release predating the installation of that rather malodorous certification process.

George Barry biography: George Barry currently owns and operates an online bookstore: George Barry, Books. He is the father of two. Sean, his son, is an angel. Darcy, his daughter, takes after him.