Void House
or
the sky still gets dark at night

Void House is the place where they shot the famous chase scenes for the end of BONE GRAFTERS II. If you look it up in Carmichaels Film Compendium you'll find it described as enoying "..a large and ill-deserved cult reputation". You'll read that the film is loved mainly by "critics with the eye, ear or stomach for unsavoury scenes". You'll hear that it is "..a sub-standard sex film with a half-baked thriller sub-plot". There are running times, some talk of genre patterns and the vaguest intimations of the scandals surrounding this movie on-screen and off but no detail, no real facts, no effort to do justice at all.

Standing in the stairwells of VOID HOUSE now its pretty hard to believe that once the likes of Carla Labia, Paunch Davies and George Van Genitals ran through them naked and smeared in gelignite. Hard to believe that director Ludger Von Braun (brother of the rocket scientist) stood in consultation with cameraman Buzz Aldrin as they considered the inovations that would earn them a place in the history of exploitation cinema. Hard to believe (as one glances at the endless off-green corridoors through the banal and nervous buzz of flourescent lights) that this is the actual place with such a firm grip on the collective unconscious of our age, that these walls are the very walls that run with blood in so many nightmares turning adults into weeping childeren, that these doors are the doors that open on every travesty of human pleasure imaginable, that the fifth floor landing is the place which has inspired more terror and dread in the human heart than any other location this side of the death camps. And yet it is true. All true. And if the ghosts cannot be seen or felt always they can at least be named.

Carla Labia was 24 when she took the role of Marnie in BONE GRAFTERS II - she'd just broke up with her agent-cum-boyfriend Wagner Lasten and he asked her not to do the movie, told her not to do the movie, begged her not to do the movie but she went ahead and did it anyway, with the consequences so clear to everyone now.

Paunch Davies was at the end of the line (or in fact at the end of many many lines, mainly of cocaine what were supplied to him by his personal trainer/doctor and confidante Gruel Hampshire). After some false starts to his come-back career (a cameo in some TV shit and a sidekick role in the movie DOCTOR UNDER THE INFLUENCE) Davies was rolling back into the almost public arena with a series of unexpected porno flicks produced by Alfonso Verbatim - BONE GRAFTERS II was supposed to be just the latest of these, shot back to back with another project called UNDER THE SKIN. In the end, as shooting on BONE GRAFTERS took its almost inevitable turn towards extermity and excess Davies was sacked from his other male lead in less than happy circumstances.

The rumour papers rumoured and the scandal papers scandaled, the Studio (VOSTOCK/RKO) made no comment and producer Verbatim merely said he was sorry to have to let such a good actor go. Those who knew would not speak on the record. But in private they whispered that the marks on Davies' back, the wounds, rope burns and other scars incurred making BONE GRAFTERS II were creating irrevocable havoc for the make-up people on the parrallel film. After a time, those that knew him said, it was more or less impossible to keep track of the damage let alone disguise it or check its progress on his body. Of the escalation of this process and its disastorous results we need say little here - it belongs rather later in our story.

Get a copy of BONE GRAFTERS II if you can. You'll see the deep dark stairwells of VOID HOUSE in the end credits sequence and the service tunnels and elevator shafts in its closing moments. As the end-titles roll watch out for the name of Marriane Pubis - she went on to great things later altho its only a cameo role for her. Her credit is as GIRL IN BAR but that's not really an adequate description of the look she gives Ludger Shat in the opening scene.

Anyhow. You should also check out the name of Quentin Collins when it goes by on the credits - he's listed a script editor but everyone knows he was just a boyfriend of the other male lead Andrej Kropotkin. And look out for Fillomena Petersen too - she was the continuity girl who had an on-set affair with the camera-man Buzz Aldrin. Petersen really had an eye for detail and her conscientiousness was legend on a set already steeped in that word.

Think about Petersen. If you stand in room 637 of VOID HOUSE you can still see some of the daubs of blood she placed high up on the ceilng - a spiral of spots and smearing fingerprints that had to be replaced seventeen times as the scene got re-shot in ever more complex and 'realistic' ways. Aldrin used to joke about Petersen, saying in some strangely affectionate way, that she was really working for god - maintaining order, continuity and cohesion in a world that tended otherwise to flux and the incomprehensible. Its fun to think of her maintaining order on the set of BONE GRAFTERS II. Dragging Sven Horblad out of the bathrooms with the needle still stuck in his arm, trying to organise transport for the wounded extras, trying to find booze for Paunch Davies at 4am when all the bars were closed, or even, as Aldrin described her, rearragning his appartment, removing every sign of her presence, removing her lipstick, her discarded underwear, the traces of ash from her ciggarettes, making it seem for all the world like she never had been there. A continuity girl.

When they first released BONE GRAFTERS II there were scandals aplenty of course. Its true that the protests in Bible Belt Scotland, the riots in Sydney and the injuries on the West Bank could easily have been orchestrated by a decadent and cynical publicity department eager for press and attention. But not even Michael Verbige would have courted the deaths, the sixteen fatal heart attacks in less than six public previews of the film, or the attempt by George Van Genitals to take his name off the credits, or the suicide of so many minor role-players. Not even Verbige would have dared to contrive the tragic detainment (under the 1963 Mental Health Act, Section 23) of the cheif script writer Helena Tereshkova, or, indeed, the wider, broader effects of the movie on our collective unconscious to this day.

Given the events of March 1984 its hard to be sure how much of the script Tereshkova really wrote. Her other work is uncontestably mediocre - a string of adult comedy capers, standard loss-of-love-and-innocence movies and porno-chillers often set in the unremarkable town of Paris (Endland) where she grew up. If she did script it fully BONE GRAFTERS II is really something of a U-turn, a creative breakthrough whose next logical step we can only suppose, was the breakdown that claimed the life of her daughter (Joely, aged 5) in such regrettable circumstances and which cost Tereshkova her freedom, and ultimaltey, her mind.

If only one thing is certain now it is that Tereshkova herself will shed no light on the matter of the script. You can see her in the documentary BLINDED BY THE LIGHT (Vostock 1998) - a skinny bird like creature in a secure wing of Rampton run by Virgin/Securicour, her eyes dull with medication, her attention permanently scrambled by the steady stream of ECT that has been the mainstay of her treatment in thirteen unlucky years, wrists scarred with the ploughed skin of so very many suicide attempts.

Those with a taste for literary analysis tend to put the script down to a three way combination - Tereshkova as the story framework and then Wilson and Callaghan as the real architects of the devil in the detail. The other writers credited - O'Neil, Evangelista O'Casey, and Moss - generaly dont get much of a look in on the scholarly attribtution of lines and in any case its well known that with actors like Panuch Davies and Ludger Shat on set the chances of anyone sticking to the script were pretty remote.

People who've seen the facsimile working script of director Ludger Von Braun (now lodged at the British Library) say that its covered in blue-biro additions in the characterisitc scrawl of Wilson. Its in Wilsons handwriting that the key lines for Marnie are written, in Wilsons handwriting that the scene people call the 'seventh circle of hell' has been written, in Wilsons handwriting that the sentence: no way out, no way out, no way out, no way out, no way out is written repeatedly as the closing lines of the film.

Of the few persons who worked on the film still alive, still fewer are working in film anymore. For most VOID HOUSE was the final station of their own particular cross.

Paunch Davies died about three weeks before the first screening - a death caused by the build up of wounds inflicted during the filming itself. Copies of the autopsy are on the Internet pretty well everywhere. Check it out. The doctor says there's a limit to the amount of tissue a human body can regenerate - that Davies was well beyond acting, as well as well beyond reason in the final months of his life.

Von Braun never directed again and everyone knows what happened to Sven Horblad and Gruel Hampshire.

Take the stairs to the top of VOID HOUSE and take a look at the view. To the west you can see ashphalt, the acres of scorched concrete, deserted houses, the teams clearing radioactove waste, a few remaining burned out cars. You can hear the birds singing, you can see the storm clouds gather and disperse. There are those that find it hard to reconcile the place and the story of it - the facts and the fiction - the layerings of each. They say a film can cause bad dreams for an aeon, pulling the rug from under steady feet, sending shivers down so very many spines. It can send a culture into fear. But in the end it is only celluloid, so many column inches in so many indusrty rags. And when the fan club visitis are over, when the photocalls and exorcisms are done, when the flowers on the little shrines are faded VOID HOUSE is just a building after all.

That's what people say sometimes but it isnt true.

If you walk to the East facing edge of the buiding and duck under the security fencing you can get to the place from which Carla Labia jumped and ended here short life the day after the premiere of the film in her home town of Bradford, Endland (sic). She was wearing the costume she wears at the start of BONE GRAFTERS II - the little red cocktail dress that the press agency people still seem to love so much. There wasn't a note. Just a list of the people she loved. And of her favourite places. And of here favourite journeys. And of her favourite books. There were rumours that she was several months pregnant - with a child conceived during filming itself. Take a look at her first big sex scene wth Ludger Shat. People say that in its climactic moments there's a flash of recognition in her eyes as he comes deep inside her - that that's the moment when the child was conceived, a conception captured on celluloid, perhaps the only one in the whole history of cinema. Its possible, of course, like so many of these things but none of it provable.

This spot on the roof facing East beyond the security grilles is really something of a pilgrimage place - a suicide spot (for young lovers and lone girls) so notorious now that it had round-the-clock security until recent cut-backs in local government spending. The pavement below has seen the final movements, murmurings and ecstasies of some several hundered people - most of them teenagers, many of them Japanese.

"The sky still gets dark at night..."

Those are Marnie's last words in BONE GRAFTERS II and those who found Carla's crumpled form on the ground below VOID HOUSE say she was whispering them then too.

"The sky still gets dark at night, the stars still shine, the earth still spins.... these are the certainties we cling to, these are the certainties we cling to...."

On your way out take the elevator to the fifth floor landing and wait for the chilling so-familliar drone as it slows. Just close one eye and wait. As the door shudders open you can just about replicate the shot used by cameraman Aldrin to show the carnage in the second reel. Recall the bodies. The silence. The writing on the walls.

Its here on the fifth floor landing where those end words of Wilson's are still meant to appear on certain occaisions and anniveraires, in certain light conditions, to certain people, written in shimmering blood. A tv crew from Serbia came west one year and camped out outside the big dark building that is VOID HOUSE They filmed the wall up there every day for a year and they never saw anything - going home to Sarajevo out of luck and over-budget, director destined for retirement. A scientist they hired took samples from the wall - he said he found traces of human blood and it was still fresh, much fresher than it should have been so many years after the event.

Ludger Shat said there was a feeling in the place, right from the very first day of the shoot, He said the air was cold. He said the silence was inhuman. He said you could't even dream safely in a place like that, let alone make fiction in it.

He makes a pilgrimage to the building every year or so. He leaves flowers on the paving slabs, says hello to some of the aging extras who still live nearby and then gets back on the train to Glasgow with a bottle of whiskey and a packet of tranquilisers. Ludger Shat still wears the promotional t-shirt he sported when making the film. It asks a simple question, made irony by history:

BONE GRAFTERS II: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SEX & DEATH GET CONFUSED?

And Ludger knows, if anyone does, but he's taking his secret to the grave.