Hollywood Lied

Chapter 2: Harvey Gilmore

I met the director of the remake of Monsters in the Closet Harvey Gilmore and I was immediately distrusting of him. I have severe unchecked issues with trusting strangers. I only accepted Gilbert as my casting agent after he promised that he would not screw me over.

“Well, well, well! If it isn’t Cody Heller!” he shouted at the top of his lungs as if I were the second coming of Jesus Christ. It was beyond embarrassing.

“That’s me,” I said through gritted teeth. I was hungover, and felt like downing more Jager to numb the pain.

“How are you?” he asked as he patted my back. I just met the guy and he was already getting touchy?

Weirdo.

“Honestly? Really f*****g hungover,” I said before realizing that there were children in the casting room.

“Better watch your language,” he jabbed me with his pointer finger. It hurt like hell.

“I apologize,” I mumbled.

“What was that?” he asked me even though he heard me just fine.

“I apologize for the use of profanity, Mr. Gilmore,” I spoke, half-tempted to toss him into the nearest dumpster outside the studio. I held back. It was for the best.

“I appreciate it. Now, let’s get your first scene as Jody Keller’s father!” he said a little too excitedly. He was clearly on cocaine or amphetamines, because he shook the entire time like an autumn leaf.

“You okay?” I asked, concerned. It was ironic. An addict asking another potential addict if they were alright.

“Sure, just nervous,” he lied through his teeth unconvincingly.

“Want a drink?” I offered him one.

“No, thank you for the offer!” he said, shaking some more.

“Let’s shoot the scene already!” the child who was cast to be Jody squeaked out.

“He’s right. Let’s shoot the scene already,” he shook his head at the wasted time.

He grabbed the camera and began shooting my scene. I was supposed to yell at Jody for believing his closet was haunted. I felt awful for it, but then I remembered how Hollywood f****d my life up. That brought out true rage in me.

“Jody, there is nobody in the closet! Get some sleep. You have school tomorrow,” I ragefully performed my lines.

“Woah!” Gilmore said in terror, backing away from me. He really thought I’d beat him up or some crap.

“Pretty good, eh?” I stammered.

“A little too good,” he chuckled nervously.

“I’m sorry. I just haven’t performed anything since 1995. This is a bit overwhelming for me.

“I understand that feeling,” he lied through his teeth. I wanted to call him a liar, but didn’t wish to argue with the director. God knows how many actors have gotten into fights over mundane crap like that. So instead, I thanked him for being supportive.

Jody’s final scene from the original film was where his parents begin hearing Georgie in the closet. They go to check out the noise and he emerges from the shadows and slashes his parent’s throats. Just like that. He didn’t even know them. He reminded me so much of Richard Chase that it hurt. Both were vampires. That’s right, Georgie was one of those extra devious serial killers. At least, he left Jody alive, I suppose. He leaves the house and pleads with his neighbors to call the police. They do just that and then, the police come at long last. But here’s the part that makes no goddamn sense, You see he was picked up by a police truck, but when he arrives truck arrives he is nowhere to be found,

  The remake changed the vanishing entirely. Harvey Gilmore said it was to “modernize the mythology,” but the truth was simpler: he wanted something bigger. Flashier. Something that could get audiences theorizing on Reddit threads at three in the morning. The original disappearance—Jody stepping into a police truck and never stepping out—wasn’t enough for him. Too understated, too subtle, too easy to miss.

  Harvey wanted spectacle.   Harvey wanted answers.   Or at least, the illusion of them.

  In the original, Georgie was just a man. A murderer with a taste for shadows, not some paranormal entity who could melt into mist. He wasn’t a ghost, or a demon, or anything you could stamp with a genre label. He was human. Disturbingly human. And that made the vanishing feel intentional—like the filmmakers wanted the audience to decide whether Jody escaped, or was taken, or simply broke under the trauma and fled before anyone could ask questions.

  But Harvey didn’t trust audiences to think for themselves.   So he rewrote the entire sequence.

  In the remake, Jody doesn’t just vanish between the house and the station. No, Harvey made sure to stretch that moment into something operatic. Something with thunder and rain and an overdue sense of doom. He moves the scene out of the police truck entirely. No more quiet, no more ambiguity. Instead, the police take Jody to a temporary command post set up on the street—a flood of lights, uniforms, radios crackling with static. It’s meant to feel safer, more grounded, more real.

  Because Harvey believed safety was the best setup for terror.

  “You see,” he explained during the first table read, “modern audiences crave logic. They want breadcrumbs. They want a trail.”

  He was shaking when he said it—whether from nerves or stimulants, I couldn’t tell.

  “So we’re giving them a trail. And then—right at the moment they think they understand—we pull the rug out.”

  I wanted to roll my eyes, but Gilbert shot me a warning look from across the room.

  In Harvey’s version, Jody is wrapped in a thermal blanket, trembling under the harsh glare of floodlights. Officers swarm around him, asking him questions:What did you see? Did he speak? Did he hurt you? How did you get out?

  Jody doesn’t answer. He just stares at the closet door of his childhood home, now blocked by yellow tape and bustling detectives. The camera stays tight on his face, catching every twitch, every darting movement in his eyes.

  Then the radios start hissing.

  It’s faint at first—a soft distortion, like someone dragging their thumb along the speaker. Then a voice bleeds through the static. A man’s voice.Breathing.   Slow. Wet.   Rhythmic.

  Harvey was very proud of that detail.

  “It’s not Georgie speaking,” he said. “It’s the sound of him listening.”

  The officers freeze, confused. The breathing on the radios grows heavier, more deliberate, until one of the radios cuts out entirely with an ugly pop. A few seconds later, another shuts off. Then another.

  Lights begin flickering. Cameras glitch. Harvey’s script describes it as a “controlled electrical collapse,” though anyone with filmmaking experience would recognize it as the textbook setup for a horror reveal.

  This is where the remake truly diverges from the original.

  In the 1995 version, Georgie is never supernatural. He doesn’t break the rules of physics. He doesn’t appear and vanish with theatrical flair. He is a man in a closet with a knife. That’s what made him terrifying.

  But Harvey wanted a mythos.   A legacy serial killer, he called it.

  So in the remake, the breathing from the radios suddenly cuts off—and for a long, sickening moment, the set falls silent. Officers glance at one another. Detectives step closer to Jody. A paramedic kneels beside him.

  And then the floodlights explode.

  Not literally—Harvey didn’t want actual pyrotechnics—but the effect is the same: blinding white, a violent pop, a wash of darkness. When the backup lights kick in, Jody is gone.

  Just gone.

  But unlike the original, the remake gives you something to latch onto. Every camera in the area glitches at the same frame: a shape standing behind Jody for exactly one second before the blackout. A tall figure. A man. Head tilted slightly, as if listening to something only he can hear.

  The audience isn’t sure what they saw, but they know they saw something.

  Harvey called it a “visual breadcrumb.”

  To me, it felt like cheap insurance.

  After the blackout, officers swarm the scene. They scream Jody’s name, search the perimeter, check every vehicle. Nothing. They pull security footage from nearby houses, but every file is corrupted between the moment Jody vanishes and the moment the lights return.

  In the 1995 version, the disappearance is a question mark.   In Harvey’s remake, it’s an exclamation point.

  He even insisted on a final shot to close out the sequence: the camera panning back to the Keller house. Up the stairs. Down the hallway. Stopping at the open closet door—its darkness humming like a living thing.

  Then the door slams.

  Harvey thought it was brilliant.   I thought it was bullshit.

  But I wasn’t the writer.   And I wasn’t the director.

  I was the washed-up has-been playing Jody’s father, trying to claw my way back into the industry that ruined me. So when Harvey asked me what I thought, I lied.

  “It’s intense,” I said through clenched teeth.   “We’re really elevating the material.”

  Gilbert shot me a grateful look. Harvey beamed like he’d just reinvented cinema.

  But later that night, when I got back to my apartment and stared at my own closet in the dim light, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the original got it right.

  Because reality doesn’t need theatrics to be terrifying.   People vanish every day without thunder or flickering floodlights.   Sometimes trauma swallows them whole. Sometimes life chews them up.   Sometimes they simply walk away because staying hurts too much.

  The original vanishing wasn’t supernatural.   It was sad.   Human.   Honest.

  And Harvey was stripping all of that away, replacing it with spectacle.

  But I didn’t say any of that on set. I just showed up, hit my marks, delivered my lines, and prayed that this remake—this second chance—wouldn’t evaporate the way Jody did.

  Because unlike him, I didn’t have anywhere left to vanish to.