I rather enjoyed the section of my last post in which I listed out moments from film and television which could be ripe for magical effects, and I’ve mentioned one TV show before.
What’s fabulous about The Lost Room as an inspiration for magic is that the core premise is that ordinary looking objects are imbued with strange properties, not the people who wield them, so it sidesteps the whole ego problem of wanting to seem special.
But also the people who end up owning objects from the titular lost room are all weird little freaks, which if you recall is what I want more magicians to lean into.
Room 101
The Lost Room is a serialised TV show made by the SciFi channel in 2006. Over three episodes the main protagonist, Joe Miller, comes into possession of a key which can open any door with a standard lock. When it opens a door however what he finds on the other side is always the same room, room 10 of the Sunshine Motel in Gallup New Mexico, a room apparently frozen in time. Anything left in the room when the door closes that wasn’t already in there vanishes as the room resets to it’s original state. The exception is other objects which belong in the room, many of which have been taken from the room and are being passed around as magical curios because they each have a special power.
Joe Miller hunts down the people who own these objects because the door to the room closed with his daughter inside it and he hopes one of the collectors will know a way to get her back.
The Inventory
Each of the three episodes is named after the two main objects that Joe seeks in said episode. Episode one is the Key and the Clock, episode 2 is the Comb and the Box and episode 3 is the Eye and the Prime Object.
They don’t say what the prime object is in the episode name because that is one hell of a twist. Speaking of which, huge spoilers for The Lost Room from this point onwards. You should go watch it¹.
The Key
I’ve already mentioned the key, but it has other properties related to it’s use. Out protagonist spends a lot of time in the room the key leads to as it’s the one place he knows for a fact no one can get to. Doors opened by the key on one side cannot be opened from the other side while the open side leads to the room. At one point someone builds their own free standing door in order to use the key in it.
On exiting the room the key holder can go to any door they have seen, even if they’ve only seen it in a photograph.
The Pen
The pen is a clicky retractable ballpoint pen which, when extended, can basically shoot lightning into anyone or anything the writing tip touches. It is a formidable weapon and also the first thing we see fail to work inside the room. (Because inside the room the objects don’t work and can also be broken)²
The Nail File
If you look at the nail file when the light glints off it, you pass out for a couple of minutes.
The Pencil
One of my favorite objects, the pencil is never seen in the show but described in great detail. A standard wooden graphite pencil, when tapped on a surface a penny is miraculously created. The last guy who had the pencil has supposedly gone insane at the prospect of infinite money but forced through such a narrow channel that sitting and tapping becomes a tedious and not even particularly lucrative full time job.
The Umbrella
Also never seen but described at the same time as the pencil, carrying the umbrella makes people think they know you. Personally I think this is an incredibly useful thing to have but the show insists it is sort of pointless.
The Bus Ticket
Wrapped in tape at one end in order to allow the owner to hold it and not be affected by it, the bus ticket is a big old style coach ticket, which if it touches a person instantly teleports them to a road just outside Gallup, New Mexico. This is of course the location listed on the bus ticket and also the nearest bus stop to the actual Sunshine Motel³.
The Watch
If you place a raw egg into the strap of the wristwatch, it will be instantly hard boiled. Nothing else is affected by the watch. Only eggs. It is also mentioned that if you have the watch and the knife together, they produce “a kind of telepathy”. One character is shown using the watch to make breakfast and opens the egg with a knife which could in fact be the knife, but since he never reads anyone’s mind with it (and there are a few scenes where he really should have) it probably isn’t.
The Radio
An old style dial-tuned radio, when tuned to the right station, the radio makes the listener 3 inches taller. This description is all the info on the radio given by the show.
The Coat
Though no special properties are ever revealed, the coat still has the one feature all the objects have: It is indestructible. This makes it a lightweight full length bullet proof vest. With sleeves!
The Comb
A cheap plastic comb but if you run it through your hair, time around you is frozen for approximately 20 seconds. The implication is that all time is stopped for that period so for all intents and purposes you are infinitely accelerated. Unlike many superhero interpretations of this kind of superspeed however, comb users affect anything in this state. Everything is frozen in place. Also, best to be standing still when time starts up again, as the deceleration can be quite jarring.
The Eye
The Eye is a prosthetic glass eye. In order to use it the owner must remove their own eye and substitute it with this one. The Eye grants its wearer the ability to “destroy or repair all flesh” making it much sought both as a weapon and a tool.
The Toothbrush
The Drinking Glass
The Shoelace
We never learn what these do but they are listed on a screen at one point. I draw attention to them only because I use two of these objects in my own magic, which is a topic we will be getting back to.
The Glasses
A pair of spectacles which inhibit combustion. If you wear them nothing you look at can catch fire, no matter how flammable. They are first introduced in the possession of a mechanic who is confused why his car won’t start while he’s wearing them. We also see a revolver full of bullets fail to fire point blank against the forehead of someone wearing the glasses.
The Watch Box
Within a certain radius of the watch box, when it is open, entropy is reduced. This means things do not decay as fast. Presumably this also counts for things inside the box, implying that maybe inside the box things do not decay at all. The ultimate Tupperware.
The Coin
The coin is one of the weirder objects. Anyone who swallows the coin can manifest any person from their memory. Eventually they will poop the coin out and must swallow it again to make further use of it.
The Deck of Cards
A regular deck of cards but if you hold it to someone’s eyes they will be hit with sudden terrifying hallucinations. It’s implied that you shouldn’t even look at it from any distance, but in the show it is held infront of people’s faces to force them to see it. The hallucinations are troubling but seem to connect to actual events in the show. I like to think if they had made another season and kept the plot going, they would have found that the deck had to be put in a correct order to tell a complete story in hallucination form.
Like Sam The Bellhop.
The Mirror
The mirror is stuck to the wall of the room and as such is never removed but it has such a wonderful plot point built into it, as there is a fingerprint on the mirror which is always present when the room resets. This is the first hint that someone may have been in the room before the event that unstuck it from time. There have been a number of glass and mirrored gimmicks through the years which reveal things when fogged up and I feel like these concepts are kind of linked somehow.
The Polaroid
A Polaroid instamatic photograph which is completely black… Unless you take it to the Sunshine Motel in Gallup New Mexico, where beside room 9 there is an empty space where room 10 would have been, and if you stand in this space and look at the polaroid it is like looking through a window into the room. Unlike actually visiting the room however, through the polaroid you can see the room with all the objects in their correct places at the time of the event (when the room became lost).
The Scissors
The scissors rotate things. Point them at something, turn them in your hand and whatever you’re pointing at also rotates. Pretty simple.
The Flask
A metal hipflask. When the flask is opened people in range can no longer breathe. It is implied that it only has this suffocating effect if you try to breathe, as the person who uses it holds his breath and is fine. Perhaps it actually makes you drown? Part of the beauty of this show is that a lot of things go unexplained if the visual representation is enough.
The Cufflink
This one may have just been a joke but, when worn, the cufflink slightly lowers a person’s blood pressure. It is implied it may even be a placebo effect.
The Clock
The clock is a fold out travel alarm clock which, when wound up, sublimates any brass infront of the clock face. There is presumably a maximum range.⁵
The Prime Object
Yeah I’m not going to tell you what the prime object is. It isn’t really relevant to thid post and it’s a huge spoiler. If you want to know, watch the show. But it’s a big deal and it really does kind of control the other objects.
The Wonder Room
Long time readers of another magic blog may recognise the term Wonder Room, meaning a place in your home where you keep a selection of objects which contain within them a performance. Anything from a stacked deck to an arm chopper, but unlike a shelf full of magic tricks, each one acts as it’s own story, premise and hook to build a performance around. An item in your wonder room may be a scientific curio, a family heirloom, a cursed or haunted amulet. Anything really. Wonder room objects don’t even have to be trick objects themselves. They could simply be a hook for a routine done with no specialist props whatsoever. Read the Jerx if you want to know more about it, this post is about The Lost Room. My suggestion is that you make a single object a wonder room. A wonder object. A key focus of interest around which other effects occur or revolve.
The Collectors
In a previous post I mentioned the danger of carrying a lot of strange props, but given my recent research into adopting unlikeable characters, it makes perfect sense. Every single object hunter or holder in The Lost Room is unpleasant, untrustworthy or kind of insane. That’s the sort of energy which can make a solidly unlikeable performance. All you have to do is make up your objects.
The objects above are from the television show, but since most people have never even heard of it, there is no reason to stick to those objects or even the rules and origin story. The key to having an enchated or cursed item is that it should:
- Appear normal
- Have a single unusual property
- Be able to repeatedly demonstrate it
I have spoken at length about my object of choice, which is a shoelace I keep in a purse. The most obvious secret property I might imbue on a shoelace through careful scripting is that it can pass through things, since this would explain a rope through arm/leg/finger, a vanishing knot, a false tie, a ring on string, or even the bachelors needle. As you may know however I do not use explain it in this way. My opening trick with a shoelace is a 3 phase batchelors needle which sets up a premise of time out of order. As such it’s easy enough to reframe the other effects as the shoelace returning things to their previous state whenever it is pulled tight. This would account for vanishing knots, rope through any given body part and both the on and off portions of the ring on string routine.
Since the final phase of most ring on string routines is a vanish of the ring, sending the ring back in time to the place the string used to live (in a little purse) makes about as much sense as antthing else.
But I don’t use my string in this way. I could, but it’s very rare for me to do the entire string routine. I actually have a much better suggestion for a cursed item.
A Case Study
When you perform rope tricks, they are typically, obviously rope tricks. However, band through pen is a rubberband trick, pencil through quarter is a coin trick, wand through silk is a silk trick and misled is a pencil trick.
Except when you think about it… They’re all pencil tricks. If you had a pencil which can pass through things, wouldn’t it make sense that it could pass through a note, a coin, a silk, a rubber band, or any other number of things which have pen/pencil/wand penetration effects associated with them. Admittedly, to merge these with misled you would need to be able to surreptitiously get the gimmick on and off, but there are plenty of opportunities in the motion of the other props, as well as effects where the pencil itself is held by the spectator, like Pen Through Finger⁶.
The only narrative piece of premise you need to focus on is “If the pencil can pass through anything, why can you even hold it? Obviously you need to do something to ‘activate it’. Just like you have to touch a person’s skin with the bus ticket, run the comb in your hair, or wind up the clock, maybe the pencil only passes through things when you make a certain noise. Maybe whistling an exact pitch resonates with it. Perhaps you have a second object, a whistle or bell which makes the right pitch. The idea is you build the fiction around it. This also has a garden path effect where you put so much focus on the bells and whistles that everyone assumes you’re distracting from the pencil. So when they can finally examine the pencil at the end, and it just looks like a normal pencil, they’re stumped.
One of Many
Craig Petty used to often talk about having a 45 minute act on his keyring beause alongside his one genuine house key he has about5 different gimmicked keys and a couple of gimmicked fobs which can form the backbone of a key based magic routine. This is not an unusual circumstance amongst magicians. If we have a lot of gimmicked cards we make a card routine, if we have a lot of gimmicked coins we make a coin routine. A Lost Room Object routine turns this idea inside out. The one item which is used in every effect is an ungimmicked object (or an object which can have the gimmick removed and added at will) which happens to interact with a bunch of other gimmicked objects.
Approaching routining in this way frees you up to make the focal object as interesting or dull as you want. My string routine uses a shoelace bit it could use a leather cord and work exactly the same. It could probably be done with a piece of paracord or a strawberry liqourice lace or christmas tinsel⁷.
So look at all the routines you know and ask yourself: Which ones use the same incidental prop alongside the main event? Could that prop become the main focus leaving all these odd impossibilities in its wake?
Could you become the new holder of The Key?
¹ This is a link to the show on Daily Motion. I have no reason to believe it either is or is not a legitimate copy. That said you can also “buy” it on Amazon video for just over a fiver, if you prefer.
² Objects outside the room are indestructible. Inside the room the objects can be broken but when the room is reset with an object inside it, it is restored and can be found in it’s proper position in the room.
³ The Sunshine Motel is a real place in the show but is closed down and only ever had 9 rooms. The Key is of course for room 10.
⁴ There is another TV show called Eerie Indiana featuring an episode where a family sleep in giant Tupperware containers to stay young forever. High concept sci-fi is great.
⁵ Sublimation is the state change from solid into gas without passing through a liquid state. Sort of like dry ice does. A cynical part of me thinks they chose sublimation specifically because in the world of sfx, smoke machines are cheaper than low melting point metals.
⁶ I pointed to this specific effect while leaving the others without links not because of any loyalty to it, but rather because I think all those others are easy to find, whereas this one I had a specific trick with a very vague name.
⁷ Full disclosure I have tried some of these effects with some of these objects and the chain/tinsel aren’t so good for false knots because the weird angles on chain links and straggly bits of tinsel fringe get tangled in knots.