MAG 136: The Puppeteer

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Statement of Alison Killala, regarding her time as friend and carer to special effects artist Neil Lagorio.

## Pre-Statement

Melanie asks John if Daisy can stay with him because she has somewhere she needs to be. John asks her where she is going, and accidentally uses his beholding powers to prompt her. Melanie responds by telling him that she is going to therapy. John tries to apologise, but Melanie just says it is fine. Daisy comes in, telling John that he is not babysitting her, she just does not like being on her own if she can help it.

## Statement

Alison Killala loved Neil Lagorio or might have been in love with him, but it is difficult to say. One of her earliest memories is watching one of his movies, *Labyrinth of the Minotaur*. She has always had two passions: engineering and special effects. This led her towards working on animatronics. Nobody had made the animatronics move as well as Neil did in his 1975 movie, *Agents of Orion*. She hunted the movie down and watched the scene with an animatronic robot over and over again. She was already obsessed with Neil's work by then, mostly with his sci-fi work from the late 70's— *Beyond Time*, *Under New York*, *The Crawling Ones*.

She had a fondness for his earlier works, but his animation and stop-motion work never grabbed her like his animatronics did. The way Neil tells it, he split from his partner Gabe in 1972, and stop-motion did not really have the same charm after that. He always told her that "he was a puppeteer at heart". Alison could never figure out what performance school he went to, but he would twist his fingers into all sorts of intricate shapes until she could see strings flowing all over them.

Growing up as an 80s cinephile and a devotee to his art, Alison had to learn to love horror. It was common knowledge that Neil was deliberately seeking out darker and more grotesque works. *Dead Sky*, *The Nightmare Children*, and *Forty Winks* all led to the culmination with *Toy Shop*. While it is considered a cult classic now, it was often deemed the end of Neil Lagorio's career and was referred to as a video nasty.

Alison's own relationship with Neil Lagorio started in 1992, on the set of *Jewel of the Amazon*. The movie was a low-budget, rushed production that made Neil seem miserable. She and Neil became friends. She is not really sure how to describe Neil Lagorio: In many ways, he was his work, but she will say that there was no warmth to him. He was not unpleasant or cruel, but he might as well have been talking to an animatronic. Neil would invite people Alison was sure he hated to screenings of the original cuts of his movies. Alison was quite jealous of this, but she now thinks it was for the best. Those invited never looked the same afterward.

She and Neil stayed in touch and even worked together on *The Wire Runner*. He even kept in contact when she left to have her baby. It was not planned, and after finding childcare arrangements, she found herself unwelcome in the industry. It was not that people did not want to hire her, she was just not able to take part in the culture of drinking and networking alongside parenting. She only really heard about Neil's work from what she told him. He was disappointed by the animatronics in *Eagle Falls* but was satisfied with his animatronics in *The Harvestmen*. It was around that time he was starting to experience symptoms. He later told her that his biggest regret was not being able to finish a movie titled *Dancer*.

Alison worked for Neil as a caretaker. Alison is certain that Neil did not have Parkinson's Disease. It was simply that over the years, he stopped being able to move on his own accord. The doctors were only able to name it as Parkinson's, but she knows that they are wrong. Neil started throwing himself into a new project. He had devised a series of frames and pulleys to puppeteer him around his house. Alison protested, but Neil insisted that this was what he wanted, so Alison obliged. The routine of her puppeteering him through a parody of domestic life continued. She barely even noticed when a harness was unnecessary to move him, and that the loops to move him were directly embedded into his body.

It was almost six months ago when the woman came to Neil's door. Alison thought she was a film student at first, so she asked her to wait while she asked Neil what he would like her to do, but then the woman turned her head to reveal a mass of white thread all over the side of her temple. The woman told Alison to sit down, and she obliged. There was the sound of levers and pullies, indicating Neil being walked down to the front door. She could not see his reaction, but she heard him call the woman Annabelle without any tone of fear or despair. Annabelle sent Alison to the screening room, and the last thing she saw of Neil was him dancing and weeping with tears of joy.

Alison does not know how long she was watching the films for. According to her daughter, she had been missing for five months. When Annabelle let her out, Alison saw Neil dead, wrapped in a white cocoon of thread. Annabelle gave Alison Neil's original cuts and told her to deliver them to the Magnus Institute. Alison tried to resist, but she is done now. Annabelle won and Alison just wants to go home.

## Post-Statement

John asks Daisy if she thinks the movies are in artefact storage and she tells him not to have a movie night. John is disappointed. The two have a bit of a heart to heart, and John reveals he does not know much of what happened during the coma; only that he made a choice. Daisy reveals she broke into Elias's old office to sign an employment contract, and since then has not seen John in any of her dreams. She invites him out for drinks with Basira, and he agrees.

At Melanie's therapy appointment, her therapist asks if she can record the session on cassette. Melanie vehemently refuses, and the tape is turned off.

## Continuity

* **Related Entity:** The Web
* Neil Lagorio is the special effects artist who the director claimed to be working with for the spider movie in MAG 110.
	+ The film's crew discovered he had never actually been involved (due to him being bedridden with the condition revealed here) when news broke of his death.
* The woman who visits Neil at his home is Annabelle Cane (first seen in MAG 69)
	+ The previous time John mentions her sending people to the Institute was MAG 123.
* Neil used to work with a partner named Gabe for stop-motion animation; this may be Gabriel, "The-Worker-Of-Clay".

* Laverne, Melanie's therapist, returns in the Act III Finale Trailer and MAG 190.