The memory of Bootleg Meg rushed to the forefront of my mind when my sister came over with a box of old VHS tapes she'd dug out of storage. Each tape had a handwritten movie title scrawled on the label, and my spine tingled as I reached for the one she'd placed on top.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
We grew up poor, but my parents weren't about to let their kids miss out on their childhood. The convenience store around the corner sold bootleg VHS tapes for dirt cheap, and we prided ourselves on having the latest movies that hadn't even left cinemas yet.
Watching cartoons recorded in secret in a theater didn't faze us, and we even made a game out of counting the number of times the image would go out of focus, shake, zoom out, or be joined by coughs, laughs, or sporadic silhouettes crossing the bottom of the screen.
When Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame hit cinemas, our parents bought us the bootleg VHS that very week. My younger siblings and I came home to find a shiny tape sitting atop the kitchen table, and we did our homework in record time before we made some popcorn, grabbed a juice box each, and sat in front of our TV, wiggling in excitement.
The tilted angle, out of focus corners, and silhouettes did nothing to distract us from the movie's captivating score, characters, and unexpected serious tone. It was only during a quiet and emotional scene, after Quasimodo's dramatic rescue of Esmerelda, did we find ourselves drawn out of the movie as the image began zooming away.
The screen shrank until it was a tiny rectangle in the distance, and we could now tell that the camera was on the floor at the top of an aisle as the outline of chairs became visible. None of our other bootlegs had zoomed out this far, and the film was forgotten as my siblings and I took in this "authentic" movie-going experience.
A few silhouettes passed in front of the screen, and we counted them as per tradition, giggling. One silhouette began walking up the aisle towards the camera, and we laughed as we bet each other on how long it would take the person to find their seat.
Our laughter dwindled when we noticed the silhouette's slow and twitchy movements, its lanky shape, scraggly hair, and protruding joints backlit by the movie rolling in the distance.
As the eldest, my siblings turned to me, their uneasy expressions awaiting an explanation. I had nothing to say as I stared at the figure, my pulse agitated as I hoped it would just sit down.
It got larger and sharper with each step, the halo of light behind it revealing strange bumps and folds along its torso. They didn't flow like fabric or wobble like fat, they looked more like malformed bones or calcified tumors.
The figure had now completely blocked the little animated rectangle behind it, its head out of frame, but no one in the theater seemed to notice this monstrosity walking up the aisle, not even the person recording the video.
Judging by the music, the action had resumed in the movie, and that just made the entire situation more unnerving as my siblings and I inched closer together, the popcorn and juice forgotten as we hugged, our hearts thudding and our breaths held.
The figure kept ascending until the movie was visible between its crooked legs, and we sat in terrified anticipation as it began crouching, the creaking pop of its knees stomach-turning.
The short, uneven spikes protruding from its shoulders came into view as it hunched in front of the camera. A soft, raspy hiss fuzzed our speakers, and we gasped as the creature's wide, protruding eyes stood out against the silhouetted darkness, their iridescent gleam holding us captive.
As we stared, spellbound, the rest of the face lurched into view in startling three-dimensional detail, almost as if it'd breached the screen.
A lipless mouth grinned at us, its black tongue wiggling behind the small, domed, grey teeth poking through festering gums. The creature leaned closer, its long hair sticking to the gritty pus oozing from the cracks in its tight, dry skin, its entrancing eyes never blinking.
A fetid smell filled the room as we sat there, petrified, my ears ringing with a high-pitched hum and my skin crawling as though termites were burrowing beneath it. The creature flared its nostrils, as if inhaling our scent, and the erect hairs on my arms quivered towards the screen.
I didn't realize we were screaming until our parents rushed over, snapping us out of our nightmarish hypnosis as they turned off the TV. My siblings and I found ourselves cowering in a huddle, crying, our white-knuckled grips leaving bruises and nail marks on each other's flesh.
Our parents didn't notice anything frightening, and when they rewound the tape to see what we were talking about, my siblings and I ran to our room, not wanting to risk that sight again. Our parents called us over a few minutes later, claiming they saw nothing out of the ordinary other than an inconvenient zoom out that was corrected not soon after.
No amount of detail convinced them, and my siblings and I weren't about to subject ourselves to that type of possessive horror again by rewatching the movie to prove it. We buried The Hunchback of Notre Dame in a cardboard box beneath all our other bootleg tapes and threw them in storage, to never be watched again as we attempted to move on.
To cope, we took to calling the creature Bootleg Meg, named after our strict and ancient school principal whom we all hated. We made jokes and teased each other about the incident well into our twenties, even going so far as to pretending it never happened and accusing each other of being easily suggestible cowards.
But we all knew we slept with the lights on every day since. We all knew we jumped at shadows even in broad daylight. We all knew we avoided movies like the plague. We all knew we broke out in a cold sweat whenever we heard church bells or Gregorian chants. We all knew we refused to set foot in a theater, concert hall, stadium, or any place with aisles and darkness.
Now, the memory had returned full-force, and the tape trembled in my hand as I looked up at my sister. She said she had called our brothers and they were on their way over. She said she had come up empty after researching to find anyone who had bought the same bootleg or experienced a similar incident. She said it was time to unravel the mystery.
The End
~~~
(Read on for a Behind the Scenes)
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