Maitland Ward Crempie Access

Maitland smiled at the last one. Then she put the phone away, because Jules was calling “places,” and the crempie was about to rise again.

Maitland took a slow breath. Then she uncapped a silver Sharpie, signed the poster with a flourish, and wrote underneath: Be the crempie. maitland ward crempie

“Crempie,” she said aloud, testing the word like a new flavor on her tongue. It was the title of the project she’d been circling for months—a dark, absurdist comedy-horror short film about a pastry chef whose signature dessert brings the dead back to life, but only for seven minutes, and only if they answer one truthful question about why they left. The script had arrived via a producer she’d met at a horror convention, where she’d signed glossy 8x10s next to a guy who played a zombie in The Walking Dead and a woman who’d been murdered in three different CSI episodes. Maitland smiled at the last one

The young woman laughed. Maitland meant it. Then she uncapped a silver Sharpie, signed the

Crempie was the next logical step. Not because she wanted to leave adult behind—she didn’t—but because she wanted to remind everyone that she could do more than one thing. Horror had always loved her, and she had always loved horror. The grotesque, the campy, the genuinely unsettling. It was a more honest genre than drama, she thought. In horror, the monster always reveals itself.

On the first day of shooting, she arrived early, found the key grip untangling a C-stand, and helped him without being asked. She ran lines with the sound guy between takes. When the prosthetic “crempie” (a pulsating, custard-filled tart with an animatronic cherry that blinked) malfunctioned in the middle of a climactic scene, Maitland improvised a line about “dead man’s pudding” that made the entire crew laugh so hard Jules kept it in the final cut.