Living Fiction was a P.R.O.B.E. webcast released as a download by BBV Productions on their new website in 2021. It made heavy use of footage from the notorious public-domain film Nosferatu to craft a metafictional narrative of fiction coming to life.

Publisher's summary[]

A mysterious film-reel is analysed by PROBE, proving to be very complex & deadly.

Plot[]

As Giles later records in a video diary, P.R.O.B.E. discover that during the "Ecto-Space incident", some "pink goo" leaking through from Ecto-Space infected a film reel from a private collection. Fusing with the fictional character at the centre of the film, a "clichéd vampire archetype", the extradimensional entity becomes able to project its life force, becoming real and physical as a piece of what Giles and Maxie decide to term Living Fiction.

After being responsible for numerous deaths, the "haunted" film reel is seized by local authorities and forwarded to P.R.O.B.E. for analysis. Giles has a confrontation with the fictional vampire in a controlled setting, with the entity remaining on the other side of a sheet of reinforced glass protecting Giles from physical attacks — but he remains haunted by the image of the being, and imagery from the film at large, in his nightmares in the following night. Though the reel appears indestructible, they eventually decide to try and expose it to sunlight, a well-known weakness both of vampires and of old film reels. This succeeds, with the monster losing Orlok's appearance to appear as an insectoid entity, before vanishing altogether.

Giles and Maxie then dispose of the once-again mundane film reel, just to be sure, and Giles is left to speculate as to what horrors might have been unleashed if the pink slime had fused with a movie about some gigantic monster instead of the relatively manageable vampire.

Cast[]

• Giles - Bill Baggs
• "Count Orlok"/The Living Fiction - Max Schreck
• Ellen Hutter - Greta Schröder
• Thomas Hutter - Gustav von Wangenheim
• Unnamed sailor - Wolfgang Heinz

Characters[]

• Maxie Masters

Crew[]

• Written by - Warren Lewis
• PROBE theme by - Mark Ayres
• Script editor - James Hornby
• Editing and post-production - Callum Brown, Bill Baggs
• Special thanks to - F.W. Murnau, Max Schreck & James Wylder

Worldbuilding[]

• Giles notes that it's lucky the Living Fiction imprinted on a relatively easily-defeated movie monster like the vampire, as opposed to some gigantic kaiju.

Story notes[]

• In addition to Nosferatu, a few frames from the 1965 film Gamera, the Giant Monster are used in the short to illustrate Giles's wry observation about how lucky they were that the Living Fiction patterned itself after Nosferatu instead of a kaiju film.

Continuity[]

• The film reel became tinted by the "pink goo" following the "Ecto-Space incident". (HOMEVID: Goo!)

External links[]

• Official Living Fiction page at bbvproductions.co.uk