Alvin J. Crow 10 (Finale)

The legend of Alvin J. Crow came out in comicbook and movie form. You know, how the kid lured his fellow students into the museum by means of a spurious field-trip, how he detached himself from the group and hid behind a curtain, disguised as an exhibit, then dimmed the lights to create confusion and began picking off the students one by one, his special forte being decapitation. The movie version maybe went a little overboard with the special effects, but all in an attempt to emphasise Alvin's utter corruption, his inner depravity all let loose to transform his body into ashen, ancient white, and yet as raw as a fresh wound, evil personified. What movie audiences need is unique but blatant personifications of evil.
You should check out the comicbook version too: Centre-pages of issue #5 showed Alvin gloating over his harvested trophies. The little, blank-walled exhibition room, filled with pile upon pile of severed heads, most stacked neatly upright, but several tumbled loosely together, haphazardly thrown upon the heap. They filled the room to the depth of about a metre. The artist, faced with depicting a crowd of dead faces, has fallen back on his ruthless formula, and has inked with unusual deliberation and exactness, resulting in a mordant, even amusing illustration.
Pink faces, so neatly delineated in faultless black ink! Corn-yellow hair, still flowing and neat, on women's heads, a handsome young lad, with clear, regular features, hair an appealing chestnut-brown! Their eyes shut or rolled back in their sockets, their mouths gaping. No respect given to status, gender, or social class. The handsome kids, the respectable girls, uptown bankers and small time salesmen. All the heads flung in together. Victims of the infamous serial killer, Mr. Alvin J. Crow. Total head-count: 57. Dozens of other persons missing and suspected killed. Mr. Crow seemed to kill without discrimination, purpose, or reason.
Now as a kind of final stroke, or denouement, to our tale, wouldn't it be amusing if a head uppermost on the pile, say that of a small-scale coffee house owner, were all at once to flick open its eyes.
You know how the heads of guillotine-victims, when held up to the crowd, were reputed sometimes to roll their eyes, futilely, in stupefaction and bemusement? His expression can be like that.
His lips move, his vocal chords tense, he begins to form words. "They say it was the gas that did it... leaking fumes... chloroform, distilled in concentrate form... faulty piping, lethal... carbon monoxide... has killed us... ain't life a gas... (his eyelids drooping)... next time I'll count the heads..."
For Alvin, his lips softly moving, had begun to carefully count his trophies, his finger moving through the air.
End of movie. I've often lurched up from my cinema seat, puzzled and disappointed, and made my way too fast toward the exit, forgetting, already, the details of the plot.