The Nightmare Machine
Reading Notes
7-9 Minute Read | Laptop or Tablet Recommended
Topics and Themes
A behind the scenes look at the making of the ultimate horror-film foley device: The Nightmare Machine.
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I would describe my Uncle Ambo (not his real name, “uncle” is an honorific title) as simultaneously the most intimidating and most loving person I've ever met in my life.
Ambo strikes a figure. He has a long Gandolf-style beard that reaches clear down past his chest. His yard is full of garden beds and BBQ equipment. I've never met anyone with so many tools. Routers, drills, presses, planers, joiners, you name it, he's got it. And he’s prepared for the end of the world. If there’s a zombie apocalypse, I’m going to Ambo’s house, first thing.
I've known Ambo for many years. We met because we ran in the same circle of people. At first, I thought he was the biggest dick. He was incredibly rude and brash to me the first time we met. I kept my distance for a good three years. Of course, I was friendly, but still, I gave him a wide berth.
As it turns out, Ambo only respects people who challenge him. It wasn't until I seriously dug into him, made fun of, and got really in his face in an incredibly aggressive way that he opened up. Not too much longer after that would I come to discover how deeply he cared about everyone and their well-being. If he saw someone about to get hurt, I have little doubt that he would step in and do the right thing, even if it messed him up. There’s stories there, but you’ll have to ask him about it.
Nonetheless, I mean it when I say it: Uncle Ambo is simultaneously the most intimidating and most loving person I've ever met.
I was blessed to live close to Uncle Ambo during the pandemic. Although the pandemic made things incredibly tough in so many ways, I was able to convince Ambo to hang out. He smoked a pipe. I smoked a cigar. We didn’t cough in each other’s faces. It worked.
The conversations always flowed. Ambo is probably the smartest man I've ever met. The amount of knowledge he has about building, construction, carpentry, woodworking, cooking, and lyrics to random b-sides from the 1940-1990 absolutely infuriates me. It’s annoying as shit!
But I do know about guitars. Naturally, Ambo and I bonded over them. We would share interesting videos of weird guitars we’d find. He recently sent me a guitar of Pat Methany's that made my back hurt just looking at it. It had about 50 strings, and looked about as many pounds of weight. Sometimes I’d find weird instruments and send them to him. We’d talk about pickups, the style of guitar body and the sound. We’d send interesting amplifier ideas back and forth. At one point, I believe that Ambo was the one who found the Apprehension Engine.
I can't imagine anything more frightening in a film than for there to be silence, and all of a sudden a single sound from the Apprehension Engine, at just the right moment. That video impressed both of us. After weeks of conversations, I think I finally got the courage to ask him if he might be interested in creating one for me. I told him he could have creative autonomy if he wanted it. I told him it just had to be scary as fuck. He agreed. We ended up calling it The Nightmare Machine.
Neither of us had no idea what we was getting into.
Protoyping the Nightmare Machine
Ambo loves to build prototypes of everything he wants to create more of. He calls them “jigs.” He did this with his cigar box guitars, of which he's created damned near three dozen of by this point. It wasn’t a stretch to make a prototype Nightmare Machine out of a cigar box. This is what he created.
I used this prototype Nightmare Machine on the soundtrack for Fetch, an indie short horror film directed by Heather Halstead. I dare say it sounded vicious and intense:
The Nightmare Machine Build, In Photos
As time marched on and the pandemic ended, we could all resume our lives without anymore interruptions. It took another couple of years before Ambo decided to try to build the actual Nightmare Machine. We were smoking on his back porch with his two rottweilers barking away, and he said, "It's time for me to built it."
Now we’re talking!
Ambo agreed to send me as many photos as he could remember to send. I received this one from him, showing the skeleton of the machine:
He added some more parts to the machine, including some grill metal he found for super cheap:
He began spraypainting the Nightmare Machine a dark, blood red, for obvious reasons:
Because Ambo has more than a decade of experience working with cigar box guitars, he began to create the circuitry and wiring for the machine in the metal grills. The switches look great with the red circles:
Here he is adding the guitar neck (further away) and the hurdy gurdy neck (closer). Notice how beefy the hurdy gurdy neck is:
I have no idea why Ambo signed up for this. I mean, looking at the wiring in the back of the engine gave me an headache. How the hell does he keep this shit in his head? As time marched on, more and more switches, plates, and finishing details went on the machine:
He even found three tiny music boxes and installed them on the top of the machine. I gotta say, that sounds as creepy as all get-out:
The spring reverb is powered by an analog spring driver by Bulinski Effect Pedals. I have to say that after trying out dozens and dozen of spring reverbs on well-known amplifier brands, none of them could come even close to the beautiful sound of the spring reverb Jim installed and this Bulinski spring driver:
Ambo added rulers to the front of the Nightmare Machine. Pressing them down creates an intensely creepy sound:
More wiring. More mind-blowing:
As time marched on, Ambo began to work on the most intense part of the machine, the Hurdy Gurdy wheel. We learned that we needed to adequately coat the hurdy gurdy wheel with rosin, cover the string in cotton, and only use cello strings to make the hurdy gurgy come alive. This was our first test:
Finished Build: The Bumper Warranty
Eventually, with the finishing touches done, Ambo said, "Take this fucking thing home. I'm tired of working on it. BTW, you have a bumper warranty."
"What's that?"
"Once I no longer see your bumper, your warranty is up."
I gingerly put the Nightmare Machine in my car, closed the trunk, and waved goodbye.
Right before leaving he said, "Be careful, there's people out there."
"There's always people out there."
Set up in my living room, this thing looked like a honking piece of gnarly intensity:
When I finally plugged it in, I couldn’t believe it. It sounded exactly as I imagined it would:
Conclusion
It thrills me that I had the balls, years ago, to aggressively make fun of Ambo to his face. Had I not given him that push, I don’t think we would have ever become close enough to collaborate on this machine.
It surprises me to this day exactly how full the world is of creative characters like him. I barely scratched the surface of his immense creativity in so many areas of life. His willingness to help build this Nightmare Machine, and allow me to tag along to document it, has boggled me. I obviously owe him a lot of coin for doing this. And hilariously enough, he doesn't mind that I owe him (for now). After all, he said, "I'd rather have you owe me than for you to cheat me out of it later."