"Ellen..." "Wait..." "I dropped Pickman." "What?" "Bill, what's wrong?" "Hey look, this isn't the place to talk." "Come on, I'm going to take you home right now." "No." "Not the subway." "Here." "This will do instead." "I can't believe you dropped Pickman." "What about your book?" "I've had enough of occult art." "Someone else will have to write it." "So he finally got to you too." "Look Ellen, I am not like those rabbits at the gallery." "Richard Upton Pickman is one of the greatest artists of this century." "No one since Goya has been able to portray such torment... such hell... on a set of features with just a twist of expression." "Yeah, he's a genius alright, complete with the eccentricities." "Yes, you and I were the only ones who understood." "But neither of us really understood." "The only thing that I want to understand, is why you disappeared that night." "The evening was disastrous enough without you running out on me." "Yeah..." "It was a typical Pickman premier but more than paintings were unveiled." "It's disgusting." "Come on Dr. Reed, you must have seen some pretty disgusting scenes in the emergency room." "But I don't splatter them across a canvas and then display them as art." "Art isn't something you just look at passively." "Pickman forces you to confront the darker regions of your humanity, without paying the consequences." "But it leaves nothing to the imagination." "That's because most people no longer know how to exercise their imagination." "Pickman dredges up our darkest fantasies, the ancient terrors in our collected subconscious." "If there's any dredging to be done, it should be left to your psychiatrist and Mr. Pickman's." "I don't need it." "Excuse me... listen it's not worth fighting over." "I think Pickman's becoming unbalanced." "I think you're squeamish." "Haven't you ever seen a series of progressive paintings done by a schizophrenic?" "There's a pattern." "The paintings become more stylized and abstract, the contents less real and more fantastic." "Now you're exaggerating." "I happen to know something about pathology." "Even his physical appearance seems to be deteriorating recently." "But the man has vision!" "Not the sort of vision we care to encourage through our auspices." "Mr. Pickman has been ejected from the club... by unanimous decision of the board." "When?" "This afternoon." "Of course it was too late to cancel the showing." "Everything has to be just so for you, doesn't it Margaret?" "If it's different, something that might shock your snooty friends in the least, you don't want to have anything to do with it." "It doesn't matter to you if it's original or ingenious." "My snooty friends and I are also subsidizing you, Mr. Thurber." "It may come as a shock to you doctor, but a lot of us don't have it so easy in this world, and that unpleasant reality is expressed in art, real and horrible art like this." "Not in some nice picture of a pretty sunset or a country kitchen." "Calm down William." "Perhaps it will mollify the good doctor, if you do not include me in your book." "He won't." "If he expects to continue using the club's money." "It's my book and he belongs in it." "Your funding is immediately suspended, pending a review by the board." "The book will be finished Dr. Reed... with a new preface recounting the clubs provincial rejection of Occult art." "Well..." "I've done it now." "You certainly have." "Here, you'll freeze out here dressed like that." "They think because they have fifty times my bank account, they can also own my opinion." "They own a fortune in art, they can't begin to understand but I do." "It hurts them they can't buy judgment like mine." "Dr. Reed owns a bungalow on the river, doesn't she?" "Red brick, walnut paneled interior..." "a veranda overlooking the river." "I didn't think you'd ever been there." "No, I haven't." "She has a watercolor on display in the gallery." "She has a watercolor on display in the gallery." "It's a fair, but modern, composition." "The one with the crane sitting on a log in the river?" "Yeah, that's it." "Well when I, rub my hand over the painting, I can see her standing on the veranda..." "A cat at her feet keeps getting in the way, she kicks it... it always comes back." "I can see her irritation transferred into those harsh brush strokes." "We were talking about that cat just before you came." "How could you possibly guess?" "I don't guess." "Can anyone buy these visions, or do you have to have a prescription?" "Well now you sound just like them." "Well you're making them sound like ogres." "Ix' \ \\ \ \ I" "I'm normal," "I look at a painting and I see the picture." "I don't see anything else." "Well neither do I." "Not with Pickman's paintings." "But for the first time in my life, when I look at a painting, I get this strange feeling." "Like what?" "Well, that I should know the painting, that I've seen it before, but I can't remember what it means." "Like Deja Vu?" "No, no, not exactly, uh there's more an element of fear involved." "Like there's some danger I should remember, but can't." "I understand, the decay and horror of our modern world in his paintings." "But that's not it." "There's something more." "A warning, from one art lover to another," "remember there is a trick to being fascinated with the perverse, without becoming perverse yourself." "(laughter)" "(doorbell)" "So this is the long awaited manuscript." "Once that hits the press, they'll regret what they've done." "It matters little to me that I am considered unworthy of their further support." "However," "I am interested in what you have to say about my work." "It sounded intriguing when we spoke last night." "Please be seated," "I'll be right back." "I call it, Private Collection." "It's new." "I've studied macob art all my life." "I've never seen such daring precision." "These are some of my most recent sketches." "Study them and make yourself at home while I read your manuscript." "Very good." "Very insightful." "Well, your work has inspired those insights." "These are good, the best you've done." "You've detailed the interior of man that others fear to even look at." "I'm from an old Salem family, we dare many things." "Salem?" "Makes sense, you have roots in the past to cling to." "Not me." "I suspect you have some roots of your own, in an ancient past." "You are simply unaware of them." "Your analysis is excellent, but incomplete." "I am afraid I haven't been quite as open with you in our early interviews as I led you to believe." "Purely precautionary of course, my work has made me a wary man." "None of my important works are done in this house." "If one is to catch the overtones of the soul, one must work in a house that is aged..." "If one is to catch the overtones of the soul, one must work in a house that is aged... and given time to accumulate impressions." "Human ghosts..." "Beings intelligent enough to have looked upon hell and understood what they saw." "Some of these houses, have stood for two centuries and more." "What do you moderns know of life, and the forces behind it?" "You believe the Salem witchcraft was a delusion." "I'll wager my four times great-grandmother could have told you." "They hanged my great-grandmother on Gallow's Hill, with Cotton Mather looking on sanctimoniously." "I wish someone had laid a spell on him that night." "Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony." "I decided a long time ago that you have to thank terror, as well as beauty." "So I did some exploring in places where terror lives." "This must have been a first rate house." "People knew how to live then, how to enlarge the bounds of life in the old days." "How sorry things have become when a group of supposed artists get weak-kneed over anything that goes beyond a tea table painting." "I'm afraid today's society has lost that vitality that compelled men in the past." "The saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to look very closely at the past." "As you may have guessed, this house dates back to the seventeenth century." "That's why I work here." "It even has one of the old wells in the cellar." "Of course it's not really a well." "In those days occultists, witches, used them to travel to one another's houses, unseen." "I have some finished paintings... in here." "The faces" they're... so real." "I do my actual painting in the cellar, the atmosphere of past ages is thickest there." "Those damn rats." "Your scream must have roused the rats." "You stay up here." "You can't be too careful in these old places." "Those tunnels collect all through the city." "They're swarming with packs of rats and... they get nasty when they're hungry." "You can't run away from it Thurber." "It's part of you... too." "(laughter)" "(laughter)" "Where to buddy?" "Let me out." "Let me out!" "I haven't seen Pickman since then." "I have a good idea where he is." "Give me credit for having some brains." "You don't believe me." "Do you expect me to?" "Yes, I..." "I have the picture right here in my pocket." "It's the photograph of the monster that was tacked to the canvas itself." "I don't understand." "I had it right here in my pocket." "I think I'd better go." "Hey you!" "Dropped this." "You've got a sick sense of humor." "Oh, I wish it was a joke." "Don't Yo u gee?" "That's the creature in Pickman's paintings." "He used models." "That's a photograph from life." "They..." "They're plotting." "Ellen." "Just leave me alone." "No!" "Ellen wait!" "(screams)" "(laughter)" "(scream)"