Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  7 In 1971 this was the “Ludovico Treatment,” so-named because of the Ludovico Institute in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the American version of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange. The eventual premise is that you can brainwash people into good citizens.

  8 A hallucination from The Lost Weekend (1945). Not to be confused with the “daydreams” in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947).

  9 Kim Basinger’s famous masturbation scene from Zalman King’s Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986).

  10 Or, as Scream (1996) would have it, “that werewolf movie with E.T.’s mom in it.” (see n 63C) There’s seven of them anyway, from Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) to Clive Turner’s The Howling VII: New Moon Rising (1995), with the first three based on novels by Gary Brandner. Werewolves.

  11 “exterior.”

  12 Actually, a latex Captain Kirk/William Shatner mask released by Don Post Studios in 1975, then spray-painted white. Michael Myers is the slasher† in 1978’s Halloween, in which John Carpenter reintroduced terror via the handheld‡ camera.

  13 A specific and abrupt change of locale.

  14 FBI Special Agents Fox “Spooky” Mulder and Dana Scully from Chris Carter’s The X-Files (1993–2002). The poster over Fox’s desk since the pilot episode reads “I Want to Believe.” His last lines of the series would start “I want to believe that the dead are not lost to us … ”

  15 “offscreen.”

  16 Matching the final subject of one scene to the initial subject of the next.

  17 The 1939 Judy Garland film, adapted from Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. “After a tornado transplants her to the land of Oz, Dorothy must seek out the great wizard in order to return to Kansas.”

  18 The speaker is more than just not in the shot—that would be o.s.—but isn’t in the scene at all, is essentially narrating.

  19 Improvised speech or verbal “patter” to convey the impression of reality.

  20 To “overcrank” a shot is to shoot it at a frame rate higher than the standard 24fps, so that, when played back at normal speed, the effect will be some very “dramatic” slow motion. Think the signature shots from The Right Stuff (1983), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Tombstone (1993). Or, if focused on a single character instead of a walking cast, Nicolas Cage putting his Elvis sunglasses on by the airplane in Face/Off (1997). It all started with Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in 1954, though.

  21 An item “spliced” into the flow of things. Like subliminal advertising would look, were the reel advanced just a few frames at a time.

  22 Nurse Ratched was played by Louise Fletcher in Milos Forman’s 1975 film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  23 i.e., Brunhilda, Richard Wagner’s warrior-maiden who disobeys her father (Wotan) in his (Wagner’s) Ring of the Nibelung opera cycle. Wotan punishes her by making her mortal.

  24 While “base flood elevation’ is the term often used by civil engineers in the context of coastal construction, the military term coopted into American and British slang, “bum fuck, Egypt” (“a distant, remote, inconvenient place,” bumfuck itself just a corruption of bumblefuck†) has proven more popular, and is often used now without the “geographic” comma, as “bumfuck Egypt” or “butt-fuck-” or “butt-fucking Egypt,” as if Egypt were the noun, the rest adjectival (the -ing adding emphasis, of course, as in BFD, “big fucking deal”). Of note here is that, while the military term wasn’t originally degrading to Egyptians, its later manifestation seems to be.

  25“background.”

  26 From Yes’s “Leave It,” off their comeback album 90125 (1983), not to be confused with 1986’s 5150, the first Van Halen album to feature red rocker Sammy Hagar on lead vocals.

  27 James Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard is the first on-screen character John Wayne called “pilgrim.” The movie was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Fourteen years later in The Shootist, however, where Stewart and Wayne were paired up again, Wayne merely calls him “Doc.”

  28 “foreground.”

  29 In Shirley Jackson’s 1959 urtext† The Haunting of Hill House,‡ Eleanor’s first thought after turning “her car onto the last stretch of straight drive” and encountering Hill House “face to face” is that the house is vile. Her second thought is “get away from here at once.”

  30 Stuart Rosenberg’s 1979 The Amityville Horror, based on Jay Anson’s book and best remembered by the promotional shot of the front of the house, twin windows set in it like eyes.

  31 Garry Marshall’s 1982 send-up of hospital soap operas.

  32 Thom Eberhardt’s 1989 hospital soap opera.

  33 As Madeleine Stowe explains in Terry Gilliam’s 1995 12 Monkeys (adapted by David and Janet Peoples from Chris Marker’s 1962 black and white twenty-eight minute La Jetée), the Cassandra complex stems from the Greek figure Cassandra, cursed to have both knowledge of the future† and the inability to change that future.

  34 Where Halloween and Christmas come together in Tim Burton’s animated world. 1993.

  35 The footprints in Carnival of Souls (1962) trail off similarly.

  36 As Ford Fairlane asked in 1990, “What the fuck is ‘mano a mano’?” Or, as here, the corruption, “mano to mano.” The answer: it’s Spanish for “hand to hand” (not “man to man”).

  37 A brief moment free of dialogue. Think heartbeat.

  38 As immortalized in Disney’s animated version of Robin Hood (1973).

  39 Steven Spielberg’s 1982 smash—E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

  40 While Creepazoids was the 1987 postapocalyptic horror movie, it gets its title of course from “Freak-A-Zoid,” one of Midnight Star’s 1983 skating-rink smashes (the other being “No Parking (On the Dance Floor)”).

  41 Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd, 1985.

  42 A shot made from a moving dolly is a “dolly shot.”

  43 The full quote is “Home again, home again, market is done,” from Mother Goose’s “To Market,” but corruptions (and, as here, truncations) abound: “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig / … jiggety-jog” (to rhyme with “pig” and “hog”).

  44 A Star Trek cliché for whatever nameless crewmember† is sacrificed on the away mission in the interest of drama (or, specifically, in the interest of core cast conservation). Holds more for the series (1966–1969 or any of the offshoots: Next Generation, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) than the movies.

  45 Blizzard of Ozz (1981) was Ozzy Osbourne’s first album after leaving Black Sabbath, and the first to feature Randy Rhodes.

  46 Sam Elliott’s character (Conn Conagher) from the 1991 television movie Conagher, based on the 1969 Louis L’Amour novel.

  47 Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character from Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer (1984), each based on stories by Robert E. Howard. Not counting 1979’s western send-up The Villain or 1976’s Stay Hungry, which earned three stars from Ebert, Conan was Schwarzenegger’s breakthrough role, perhaps siphoning some legitimacy from James Earl Jones, playing opposite Schwarzenegger as Thulsa Doom. And, though Schwarzenegger is dressed as Conan in Red Sonja (1985), which is also based on Howard’s stories, and in spite of the fact that the original plan was to have him reprise Conan for Red Sonja, nevertheless his character there is Kalidor.

  48 The inner frame of the shot constitutes the outer frame of the inset item, usually, as here, some form of media.

  49 Term for a contestant on either The Dating Game (debuted 1965) or Love Connection (1983), though most likely from Love Connection, as The Dating Game featured significantly more (numbered) bachelors than bachelorettes, just because its run started eighteen years earlier, when television, in trying to be socially conscious, radical even, was actually just being typically conservative (i.e., by putting the woman in charge of selecting the man—a seeming “reversal,” as it meant the man had to make himself attractive—it suggested that for every one woman, there were three men, ready to fight, win her as a “prize”).

  50 In spite of the fact tha
t, since 1959, there’s been everything from Civil War Nurse Barbies to Baby Doctor Barbies, Mattel’s yet to market a Barbie anatomically correct enough to open for major or minor surgery more than once.

  51 voice-over.

  52 Prototype for 1986’s Top Gun (fighter planes, love, etc.). Directed by Taylor Hackford and not starring John Travolta, who turned down the role Gere took, a repeat of American Gigolo for the two of them.

  53 The Joe Cocker–Jennifer Warnes duo off the soundtrack. Written by Buffy Sainte-Marie. Recycled by Baz Luhrmann in his Moulin Rouge (2001, the year of the ‘other’ big unconventional pop-musical, A Knight’s Tale).

  54 In Peeping Tom† (1960), the title character’s father’s “extensive” and ultimately corrosive film collection spans at least three shelves, if not the whole room.

  55 Joel Schumacher’s starpacked 1990 film (Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, William Baldwin, Kiefer Sutherland). Plot summary: “Medical students begin to explore the realm of near-death experiences.”

  56 Kevin Costner’s second baseball film. 1989. Based on W. P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe. “If you build it, they will come.”

  57 Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, tenderly played by both Burt Lancaster and Frank Whaley.

  58 The famous exchange from early in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) is: “What makes you think she’s a witch?” / “Well she turned me into a newt!” “A newt?” (embarrassed, Cleese-ian pause) “I got better.”

  59 “interior.”

  60 Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic,† based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel (and, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974], influenced by serial killer Ed Gein, arrested only two years before the novel). Introduces us once and forever to Norman Bates and his mother. Or, just Norman.‡

  61 Though it’s not illegal to own a three-wheeler, in the late eighties, due to accidents like this and the resultant lawsuits,† three-wheelers became the only off-road vehicle ever willingly‡ taken off the market by manufacturers.

  62 Though the origin of numbered doors and the “prizes” behind them are buried deep in the origin stories of many cultures, “door number two” (and one, and three) was born into television and thus the American psyche on December 30, 1963, in Monty Hall’s gameshow Let’s Make a Deal. Thirty-eight years later, thanks to Marilyn Vos Savant’s weekly column, it would spawn “The Monty Hall Paradox” (or, if you’re a mathematician, “Controversy”).

  63 i.e., Fred(dy) Krueger,† the franchise slasher of Wes Craven’s 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street,‡ which Michael Bracken identifies as a “watershed horror film”†† in spite of the “hook”—i.e., Phantasm‡‡ (1979)—ending that “negates everything that’s happened in the entire film and feels like a cheat.” It would go on to have six sequels, one television series, and, so far, one spin-off (Freddy vs. Jason, 2003—or, sixty years after Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man).

  64 Penélope Cruz’s term for this in Cameron Crowe’s 2001 remake of Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los Ojos (1997, also starring Penélope Cruz), Vanilla Sky, is “pleasure delayer”—what Peter Brooks, in his Psychoanalysis and Storytelling† (Blackwell, 1994) refers to as the “dance of the seven veils,” a form of perpetually delayed gratification already cited twenty years before Brooks, by Silent Night, Bloody Night: “One of the great pleasures in life is the pleasure of anticipating pleasure.”

  65 “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” is the evil presence in Children of the Corn (1984, from a 1977 Stephen King story,† originally published in Penthouse), taglined, perhaps in homage to Dario Argento,‡ “A Nightmare for Adults.”

  66 All the conspiracies at once: Elvis is alive, JFK’s 1963 assassination, Amelia Earhart’s 1937 disappearance, and whatever did or didn’t happen in New Mexico ten years after that.

  67 To take in a wide scene without stopping to focus on any one view.

  68 “Giving them their privacy” like this—using visual metaphors to indicate offscreen sex†—is, informally, the Lubitsch touch, after Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) who directed a string of pre-Code, tongue-in-cheek sexual comedies. The famous scene at the end of North by Northwest (1959) uses the same touch—a long train gliding into a dark tunnel—though of course, in Hitchcock’s hands, it was less tongue-in-cheek, more thumbing his nose at the censors. While Cheech and Chong: Still Smokin’ (1983) would take the Lubitsch touch to its logical extreme, panning away from the sexual romp to an escalating series of, by then, cliché visual references, like rockets, and some new ones as well, from the wild kingdom, American Beauty (1999), by directing us away from sex with a minor to focus on her abandoned shoe, would kind of rein it all back in.

  69 The TimeLife series is Mysteries of the Unknown (1988–1992).

  70 Almost verbatim from Reader’s Digest’s 1982 Mysteries of the Unexplained (p.121).

  71 Not to be confused with a “Vertigo shot,”† i.e., that dramatic effect Hitchcock‡ used in Vertigo (1958) to express Jimmy Stewart’s singular state of mind, a bit of camerawork M. Night Shyamalan would use again, respectfully, in Signs, forty-four years later.

  72 More or less, Eric the Cavalier’s recurring, sarcastic line from the animated series Dungeons & Dragons (b. 1983). Its premise: a group of suburban kids get on an amusement park ride and are transported to a fantasy realm, Land of the Lost–style (except, in this fantasy realm, orcs are orcs, more or less, not Sleestaks†). Their “campaign” is to find their way home, doing good deeds along the way.

  73 In the series of Cadbury commercials (b. 1980), what the children say is “Thank you, Easter Bunny. Bwok! Bwok!”

  74 Underage porn star, founding member of Heart, and Gene Simmons’s bombshell sometimes-wife, respectively. Each more blonde than the last.

  75 Term permanently wedged into the American idiom by Steven Spielberg, in his landmark Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

  76 Crude update of what G. W. Bailey’s sidekick/town drunk/occasional narrator Peter says in 1985’s western spoof Rustlers’ Rhapsody.

  77 i.e., “captain’s log.” All that’s missing to make this the traditional opening of just about every Star Trek (1966–1969) and many of the early Star Trek: The Next Generations (1987–1994) is a stardate.

  78 The common abbreviation for “fucking ass,” that, by retaining the n, manages to keep some of its verb-as-adjective bite. A variant spelling, based on the often-corrupt pronunciation, is “F ‘n’ A,” presumably for “F and A”—“fuck and ass,” probably infected by “T&A” (“tits and ass”)—which, as it forces the profanity out of the adjective slot, doesn’t have much of a bite at all.

  79 Stephen King’s 1986 novel, eight years after The Stand, and longer. Released as a television miniseries in 1990. In addition to that bicycle ride, it also gave us Pennywise the chrome-eyed clown.

  80 Short for “kimosabe” (sometimes “kemosabe”), which supposedly meant “faithful friend” each time Tonto said it to the Lone Ranger (or, according to Gary Larson, “horse’s rear end” [5/6/88]). Though The Lone Ranger had been around in various forms since 1920—as adapted from the 1915 Zane Grey novel The Lone Star Ranger, serialized in All-Story Cavalier the year before—Tonto didn’t debut until the tenth installment of the radio program (debuted 1930, hit that tenth episode in 1933). As for the word itself, some say it’s a corruption of the Anishinaabe “giimoozaabi,” meaning “scout,” “spy,” or “masked man,” while revisionists insist it’s a corruption of the Spanish “quien no sabe” (“he who knows nothing”). The director of the radio show, however, says he simply got the name from a boy’s camp at Mullet Lake (Michigan) and thought it a good fit, because, according to the camp, who got it anywhere, it meant “trusty scout” (at Mullet Lake, it was spelled “Kee-Mo-Sah-Be,”† while in the radio program scripts it was “Kemo Sabay,” then, later, “Kemo Sabe”). Of interest is that, on the radio program, “kimosabe” was what the Lone Ranger and Tonto called each other; only later did it become Tonto’s‡ pet name for his boss, whom he wa
s always having to save (presaging the Green Hornet/Kato dynamic of the forties).

  81 Usually done with animals that prey upon one another in some form, meaning very few of them can sit in the same boat with each other. The associated joke, of course, is the scorpion, hitching a ride across the river on the back of a dog, coyote, etc., then biting his ride halfway across, effectively killing them both; his explanation is the punch line: “I’m a scorpion. What did you think I was going to do?”

  82 David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of the 1958 classic, based on the Playboy short story by George Langelaan. One of the endings, which was cut, had Geena Davis—Goldblum’s girfriend—dreaming her unborn (fly-) child as a butterfly.

  83 What Mammy says to Sambo in the 1935, eight-minute cartoon Little Black Sambo. Her full line is “Now run along and play, honey child, but watch out for that bad old tiger. That old tiger sure do like dark meat.”

  84 Ogden Edsl’s big hit, available on vinyl on Dr. Demento’s 1978 Stuffed.

  85 Host and possible citizen of The Twilight Zone (1959–1964).

  86The housing development in Tobe Hooper–Steven Spielberg’s 1982 Poltergeist, which is built on an old and particularly evil graveyard. Cueste Verde translates into English as “green hill,” more or less.

  87 In Wilder Napalm† (1993), Dennis Quaid’s Wallace offers the more complete term: “Dirty mud-hopping rat bastard!” Eleven years later, however, Albert in I ♥ Huckabees would bring it back, with the more standard “rat fucking bastard.”

  88 Though “splatter” is the common usage, the forensic term for the result of splatter is nevertheless “spatter,” perhaps because Webster’s definition for it (spatter) specifies the scattering of “small particles or drops,” rather than the simple “splashing upon impact” of splatter. But of course that “splashing” was just what David J. Schow was looking for when he coined “splatterpunk” at the 1986 World Fantasy Convention (as the fiction version of the oft-maligned “splatter film,” presumably, with some of Bruce Bethke’s “cyberpunk” thrown in for good measure (from his 1980 short story of the same name).