Video Palace: In Search of the Eyeless Man: Collected Stories

By Maynard Wills and Nick Braccia

A collection of chilling stories from the leading writers in horror and suspense, exploring elusive urban legends.

Join Michael Monelo, one of the creators of the Blair Witch Project, and TV writer/director veteran, Nick Braccia, on a journey through urban horror and suspense.

Explore the world of Maynard Wills, PhD, professor of folklore and fan of the podcast, Video Palace. The podcast followed a man named Mark Cambria, who along with his girlfriend Tamra Wulff, investigated the origins of a series of esoteric white video tapes. Cambria went missing in pursuit of these tapes, but not before hearing whispers of an ominous figure called the Eyeless Man.

Fascinated by the podcast and Cambria’s disappearance, Wills embarks on his own investigation into the origins of the tapes and the Eyeless Man, who he believes has lurked in the dark corners of media culture and urban legends for at least seventy-five years. As part of his study, he has invited popular writers of horror and gothic fiction to share their own Eyeless Man stories, whether heard around the campfire or experienced themselves.

Get swept away in this thrilling and terrifying horror anthology—which can be read on its own or as a companion to the hit Shudder podcast, Video Palace.

Short stories include:
-“Deep Focus” by Bob DeRosa
-“The Satanic Schoolgirls” by Meirav Devash and Eddie McNamara
-“Doorways of the Soul” by Owl Goingback
-“A Texas Teen Story” by Brea Grant
-“Two Unexplained Disappearances in South Brisbane, Recalled by an Innocent Bystander” by Merrin J. McCormick
-“Dreaming in Lilac on a Cool Evening” by Rebekah McKendry and David Ian McKendry
-“Ecstatica” by Ben Rock
-“The Inward Eye” by John Skipp
-“The Real Sharon Lockenby” by Graham Skipper
-“Ranger Ronin Presents…” by Gordon B. White

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982156497

Maynard Wills

Dr. Maynard Wills is Associate Professor of Folklore at The New School in New York City. He’s spent years studying and publishing urban legends, both domestically and globally. He consults in the entertainment industry and frequently gives talks on popular myths. He’s had a career-long fascination with the entity he believes to be the Eyeless Man and was inspired by Shudder’s Video Palace podcast to publish aspects of his work for a mass audience. At the time of publication, Dr. Wills is missing.

Book preview

DR. MAYNARD WILLS: THE SEED OF HORROR

I love horror movies. No surprise there, I’m sure. And this passion is sometimes to my detriment. What do I mean? Watch Dead Ringers on a first date and it’s unlikely there’ll be a second. I speak from experience.

Within the horror genre, I especially like monster movies and hauntings. And while I do enjoy Kaiju pictures (the original Gojira is definitely a horror movie) and Harryhausen’s many-limbed menageries, I’m more interested in the entities that inspire terror rather than the ones that induce wonder.

Why? I am fascinated by the seed of horror; the conception of the beast, the wraith or demon. Let the guys and gals in the psych department bicker over what made Dahmer tick. I want to trace the Wendigo back to birth and Bloody Mary to her very first mirror so I can determine why these legends arise at specific times and within (or across) particular cultures. A wise friend in the movie business once told me that horror is the result we get when we procrastinate an existential question. Are urban legends born when we do this as a collective? As a culture?

I had an itch for answers even as a young moviegoer. I longed to follow every silver screen vampire back to their crypt and Frankenstein’s monster to his birth, not in the laboratory but on that night near Lake Geneva, where Mary Shelley made her magic. And I saw every monstrosity the projectionist put up there. By the late forties and early fifties, Universal was near the end of their famous run and decided to introduce Abbott and Costello to their iconic monsters. That wasn’t my cup of tea, so my grandfather and I eschewed the first-run fare in favor of drive-in double features and revival houses where the best thirties and forties Frankenstein, Wolf Man and Dracula movies ran. And when I was a bit older—just before he died—we fell into a Saturday-night ritual: we’d stock up on candy, fill the icebox with sugary drinks, then tune in for local legend Eddie Driscoll, who hosted The Weird Show on Bangor’s WLBZ 2. God, how I miss Eddie’s Uncle Gory character introducing the segments; some groovy horror and sci-fi schlock. But I digress.

Anyhow, I’d bounce between the cinemas and that aforementioned university library, where I traced the origin of every legendary creature. The werewolf, for example, through German paganism, Norse mythology and clinical lycanthropy. And I’d quickly discover how immigrants in our New World imported their own stories, which would be borrowed and evolved by neighboring ethnic groups, sometimes in fascinating ways, other times in tragic ones. It’s not uncommon for xenophobes to absorb half-heard tales and distort them, applying a corrupted version of a folktale to the folks who told them. It’s a particularly virulent form of racism. Just because our myths evolve doesn’t mean they’re always for the better. Wonder what can happen when folklore and the fear of a people converge? Consider the European witch craze and, later, the one in our own country. Put yourself in the shoes of an epileptic woman in 1690s Salem and you’ll understand what happens when hysteria drowns out reason.

As we see with creepypasta today, myths still form freshly in America and around the world. And they can still be dangerous (Google Slender Man Stabbing if you’re incredulous). Some reside in niche subcultures within subcultures; others flourish and expand into the mainstream. I believe the Eyeless Man is a distinctly twentieth- and twenty-first-century myth and is on the verge of cross-cultural breakthrough. And while I have worked to uncover his mythic ancestry I’m (thus far!) largely unsuccessful; the only theme, the only string worth pulling, concerns media and, perhaps, behaviors around it. But which ones? I search for the signal and find only noise.

Let me provide a well-known example of the kind of connection I’ve longed to make. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the Japanese film Ringu and its excellent US remake, The Ring. Adapted from a novel by Koji Suzuki, Ringu is the story of a VHS tape that summons a vengeful spirit from a television seven days after it’s watched. While this is a mass media–age story, the iconography of a young girl with long, stringy black hair has origins in ancient Japanese folklore, particularly the Yurei.

Yurei are essentially ghosts, often depicted as women with long, disheveled black hair, white clothing and pale, lifeless hands. The term Yurei is a bit of a catch-all to describe ghosts in general, but there are subsets called Onryo and Funayurei, which influence the type of spirit we see in Ringu’s ghost, Sadako Yamamura. Onryo are vengeful spirits, whereas Funayurei are the spirits of those who died at sea and appear as scaly, fish-like humanoids. In the original Ringu, it is hinted that Sadako is the product of a union between a human and a sea god. Part Onryo, part Funayurei, she’s something of a mythological remix. My point is that we trace her DNA to the 1700s on scrolls and in records of Kabuki performance. The videotape is a nice contemporary wrinkle, and it did make me wonder if, maybe, the Eyeless Man is Sadako’s American cousin. Sadly, I believe the similarities are superficial. The White Tapes are an aspect of the Eyeless Man’s myth, but he—as the stories in this book suggest—contains a multitude of tools and, possibly, motives.

I suppose it’s possible that Koji Suzuki had heard about the Eyeless Man when he wrote his novel in 1991, but I doubt it. It’s more likely that cultures converged unknowingly.

Perhaps by virtue of procrastinating the same existential question.

THE REAL SHARON LOCKENBY

Graham Skipper

Professor Wills, thank you for reaching out. The following is the story I was telling you about via email. First, a little bit of back story for readers as to how I came to hear this in the first place. Also, if you are indeed able to track down Catrina (again, I’m sorry I don’t remember her last name), please do let me know. I would love the opportunity to reconnect and would like to know that she’s okay.

I’ve traveled to the UK frequently throughout my life, whether it be for film festivals, vacations with family (my mother has roots in Scotland) or on a few occasions to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I’ve performed there once and have gone a couple of times as a spectator, and it was on one of these trips where I met Catrina, a local actress. My wife and I met her waiting in line for a circus show and struck up a conversation, which eventually turned into meeting her and her castmates for drinks after their show. These things happen at the Edinburgh Fringe.

We became fast friends, and one night, as the sun was coming up, she asked if we wanted to hear a crazy story. Of course we said yes, because crazy stories are best told as the sun is coming up with about a dozen pints in you. This is the story she told me about her friend Sharon.

When she was finished, I asked if I could write it down, and she agreed. Sadly, after this night she seemed to withdraw a bit. I don’t really know what happened to Catrina—she’s not on Facebook or anything, so we haven’t kept up since that night. I hope she’s well. She certainly seemed shaken by just sharing this story with me, but I’m glad she did.

Also, just a quick note regarding what you’re doing, and this Eyeless Man project. I have to admit, when you first told me about the myth, I didn’t understand how it connected to my story. But thinking through it since our first correspondence, I’m pretty rattled. You’ve given me a lot to think about, Professor. Good luck with your research. I hope you find some answers.

—Graham Skipper

IT WAS THE summer of 2016 when a young woman by the name of Sharon Lockenby was at one of her monthly get-togethers with her group of friends. The ladies—all friends since elementary school—made it a point to get dinner on the last Saturday of every month, a tradition they’d kept for four years going. It was always a boisterous night out, with too much wine, a rotating series of stories they’d told one another thousands of times before and lots of

Reviews for Video Palace

[Johanne Lykke Jensen · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The framing of the excellent short stories falls very flat for me.