Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  89 H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), American horror writer known for his creepily florid prose.

  90 The recurring line from the “Mrs. Olson” (Virginia Christine†) series of Folger’s Coffee commercials (b. 1963) is “He never has a second cup at home.”

  91“… ’twixt the cup and the lip.” Emilio Estevez’s Billy the Kid line from the starpacked† Young Guns (1988).

  92 Grendel of Beowulf (8th century), where we get to see through his eyes. Like how Halloween opens: a handheld camera looking through Michael Myers’s mask, instead of at it, effectively hiding/delaying his identity (i.e., at the end of that introductory sequence, when we think the horror’s over, it effectively escalates, from just “people getting knifed” to “people getting knifed by a child”).

  93 The mercury thermometer—“thermoscope,” to the 18th century—was invented by Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1714. What he gave his name to was the thermometric scale (i.e., units or scale of temperature). Two-hundred and thirty-seven years later, he would of course be in the title of the Ray Bradbury short story “Fahrenheit 451,” which would have expanded into a novel by 1953 and a François Truffaut movie by 1966. And, presumably Bradbury used the Fahrenheit scale because, unlike Celsius and Kelvin, the ignition, or “burning,” point of paper is a whole number (Celsius and Kelvin have it at 232.78 and 505.78, respectively).

  94The 1980 Stanley Kubrick/Stephen King/Jack Nicholson film, which introduced us to REDRUM. After the credits, the ghosts applaud.

  95The rest of the Baby Bear line is “… and she’s still there,” from Goldilocks and the Three Bears, written in verse (and illustrated) in 1831 by Eleanor Mure for her nephew, though Robert Southey’s 1837 version, published in his The Doctor, would prove to be much more influential. Both of them, however, are probably just variations on the Scrapefoot story, which Tolstoy’s “Frenchwoman” in Anna Karenina (1877) properly refers to as an “English nursery tale” (the “English” perhaps meant to distinguish the Goldilocks fairy tale from the Russian version Tolstoy himself drew upon for his “The Three Bears”).

  96Though it’s a trope by now, bodies disappearing if not closely watched—2003’s Identity is perhaps the best recent example, Halloween the most “classic”—in 1955 it was done as good as it ever would be, in Les Diaboliques.

  97The complaint/plea made in Terror Train (1980), which also has fun with body parts lifted from gross anatomy class …

  98A shortening of “B movie cheese,” which probably gets its pejorative use of “cheese” from the slang term for welfare rations, “government cheese”—that low-protein, high-fat stuff you’re not always proud about needing, but need all the same.

  99H. G. Wells’s 1896 The Island of Dr. Moreau, which, though it touches on the same themes as Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein—man punished for playing God—nevertheless doesn’t quite infringe, as Moreau is more of an action or adventure story. Each novel has been adapted to death, pretty much.

  100As the Lizard was to Spiderman for Marvel, so was Manbat to Batman for DC.

  101Poltergeist, Poltergeist, Tommyknockers (a Stephen King novel in 1987, a TV movie in 1993), Q (for “Quetzlcoatl,” the feathered/winged serpent† that terrorized New York in 1982, and laid its eggs in a nest high atop the Chrysler Building) …

  102 A brutal distillation of the Sherlock Holmes maxim from Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1901), properly quoted and cited in Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (1982): “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  103Two of the three vital components of the Midway arcade game Joust (1982), the third of course being shelves of rock to jump or glide to (though eggs play a part as well).

  104 All too similar to a line delivered in monotone by Leroy (Franklyn Ajaye), the black zombie-librarian in the Hudson Brothers’ 1983 send-up of horror, Hysterical: “The library is closed. All white people must leave” (the “black” version of what all the “white” zombies† are saying: “What difference does it make?”‡).

  105Either Curly, Shemp, Joe, or Curly Joe, depending on the year in question.

  106“mit out sound,” how German directors in the early days of film were supposed to have consistently mispronounced “without sound.”

  107i.e., Neve Campbell, Sidney Prescott in Wes Craven–Kevin Williamson’s 1996 Scream. Plot outline: “A psychopathic serial killer is stalking a group of teens just like in the movies!” And the teens all know it, and talk about it, perhaps prompting Clive Barker to say about the 2004 graphic novel adaptation† of his 1987 Hellraiser,‡ “I was delighted that there was a sizable audience for a horror film that didn’t dice adolescents in the shower, or have its tongue buried so deeply in its cheek it could lick out its ear from the inside.”

  108While in 1936 this was a Boris Karloff film, merging crime, revenge, and reanimated corpses, in 1995 it was itself reanimated, albeit poorly, as a Vietnam movie, then better, in 2004, as a series of graphic novels dealing again with reanimated corpses.

  109 b. inconspicuously in 1941, in All Star Comics 8, but popularized once and forever by Maybelline spokeswoman Lynda Carter in the hit series Wonder Woman (1976–1979).

  110 The exact set-up† Carol Kane finds herself in in Fred Walton’s 1979 When a Stranger Calls.‡ Based on the urban legend, which is itself building on a device Black Christmas popularized: somebody calling you from inside the house you’re in. One year after When a Stranger Calls, Armand Mastroianni would add to the sentence for us, with He Knows You’re Alone, leaving the implied “And Then You Die” for Francis Mankiewicz to finally say out loud seven years later. The sentence wouldn’t be quite complete until 2005’s Alone in the Dark, however (unless you prefer “Home Alone,” in which case the sentence was complete in 1990).

  111playing Robert Mitchum’s role in the 1991 remake of Cape Fear (1962), which many consider as groundbreaking a role for slashers as Anthony Perkins’s role two years before† (itself usually paired up with Karlheinz Böhm’s role in Peeping Tom).

  112Close Your Eyes was released in 2002,† by, of all companies, the BBC. Based on Madison Smartt Bell’s 1991 novel Doctor Sleep.

  113 In The Burning (1981), Cropsy uses a set of garden shears to slash, impale, eviscerate, definger, or otherwise kill ten formerly happy campers. In the French release of The Burning, Carnage, the shears would provide the central image for one of the promotional posters, as they would twenty-one years later, for The Greenskeeper’s promotional material.† Of note is that The Burning’s “final guy” preceeded Vin Diesel’s Riddick (of Pitch Black) by nineteen years and Hostel’s Jay Hernandez‡ by twenty-four.

  114From Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked slasher in all the Friday the 13ths (1980–) except, as we know from Scream, the first (to say nothing of Part V: A New Beginning [1985]). Harder to kill than Michael Myers (see n 12 again). His trademark, puppy-doggish tic, of course—usually just preceeding a very non-puppy-doggish act—is courtesy of Kane Hodder, who’s portayed Jason more times than anybody else.

  115 i.e., the cuts the T-1000 gives Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), when he’s stabbing down through the top of an elevator with his arm/sword.

  116Pure Suspiria, from the first kill-scene.

  117An Agatha Christie graft, from her proto-slasher novel And Then There Were None, originally published in 1939 with the titles Ten Little Niggers‡ and Ten Little Indians and adapted to the screen at least three times (1945, 1965, and 1974). Not to be confused with And Then There Was None† (1991), a postapocalypse story set in Singapore.

  118Of Deathwish fame (parts 1–5, 1974–1994). A bad person to be related to.

  119Like Bronson,† his characters always live too, but only after kickboxing his opponents into submission.

  120The same thing Wayne and Garth ask for in Wayne’s World (1992), only five years after Return to Horror High† had given us one.‡

  121The Phil Donahue Show, weekdays at 9:00 in the
morning, 1970–1996. An institution.

  122For more like this, see The Ring, or Fangoria’s The Last Horror Movie† (2003), two which add a camera between the audience and the “cameo” mirror.

  123(1688–1772).

  124Not to be confused with the Emmanuelle series (b. 1974).

  125Andy Griffith’s comeback persona, on television defending the innocent and the framed from 1986 through 1995.

  126Again, that first kill from Suspiria.

  127out-of-body experience.

  128A tagline is the line branded onto all the movie posters or other promotional material, meant to hook the audience into the theater. It’s supposed to characterize a whole movie, to distill it down to one crisp, unforgettable sentence. For Alien (1979), the tagline was “In space no one can hear you scream.” For Dirty Harry (1971), it was “You don’t assign him to murder cases, you turn him loose.”

  129i.e., Jamie Lee Curtis, identified by Scream’s Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) once and forever as the “scream queen”† of horror.

  130Chorus for INXS’s “Devil Inside,” off their 1987 Kick.

  131One of James Kirk’s† many memorable lines from 1982’s Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, delivered as only William Shatner could: “No … not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death, tricked my way out of death, and then patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.” Perhaps in homage, Switch in The Matrix‡ (1999) utters the same line (“Not like this”), just before the traitor Cypher pulls her plug, killing her.

  132standard operating procedure.

  133see n 122

  134In Peter Benchley’s Creature (1988), the complete statement is “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Had there have been a footnote to it, it would have cited reborn Darwinist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who coined the phrase for the theory that, during embryonic development, an animal passes through all the stages of its evolution (a fact Orca takes the time to note in 1977, then Prophecy in 1979). The footnote to Creature itself should have cited Piranha (1978) as a direct source too, Piranha of course being more or less a Jaws (1975) rip-off.

  135In context, the line looks like this: “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so;” it’s mostly by Anna B. Warner, from her and her sister’s 1860 novel, Say and Seal, where it’s spoken, not sung, to a dying child.

  136Just without the light sabers. Either the “fifth” Star Wars† episode, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), or Episode “VI,” Return of the Jedi (1983), which includes what Harrison Ford would later call “the teddy bear picnic.”

  137Or, Lucasfilm quality standards. Not quite an acronym, though, as it’s derived both from Tomlinson Holman’s eXperiment and from George Lucas’s first movie, THX 1138† (1971).

  138What Father Merrin tells Father Damien in Blatty and Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), more or less: “The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us … So don’t listen to him. Remember that—do not listen.”

  139By the final kill-scene in the fourth Friday the 13th installment, The Final Chapter (1984), where the audience counts aloud and in unison how many times Corey Feldman’s Tommy Jarvis hits Jason with the machete. The count is fifteen. Other important “counts” in the movie, according to Joe Bob Briggs’s April 20, 1984, review, are dead bodies and breasts: thirteen and sixteen, respectively.

  140James Woods’s trick in David Cronenberg’s 1983 Videodrome, which literally means “video course”—all the “tape” Woods has to run through.

  141Dreamed up in 1871 by the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell either to contradict the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) or to unwittingly prepare the thought-experiment field for Schrödinger’s cat (1935). Both hinge on the peculiarities of quantum mechanics.

  142René Descartes’s “evil genius,” manipulating reality just for fun in his (Descartes’s) Meditations (1641).

  143Hilary Putnam’s term from his Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge, 1975), where he also exposes some of the weakness of Descartes’s evil genius. “Demon theory” itself, however, is a term that, though it still has currency in religious discussions (as the evil behind various illnesses), had more currency before the medical revolutions of the 20th century. In particular, demon theory was, for a long time, the accepted explanation for epilepsy, and, as such, was used to explain Swedenborg’s seizures (which, in retrospect, seem to have been of the generalized tonic-clonic set [GTCS]: complex-partial seizures of the temporal lobe, formerly classed “grand mal,” and not to be confused with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” from his 1879 The Brothers Karamazov, where Jesus is interrogated and, finally, arrested. Dostoevsky, of course, like Swedenborg, suffered from a temporal lobe disorder,† which made him see certain things).

  144Each summoned, depending upon who you ask, by repeating their names out loud five or so times (with Bloody Mary/Mary Worth, you’re supposed to look in a mirror as you say you believe in her).

  145For more of people talking to themselves in unlikely ways, see David Lynch’s set piece from Lost Highway (1997), which itself seems to suggest an unsettling conversation in Don’t Look Now (1973; based on a Daphne du Maurier story and, twenty years before Schindler’s List, introducing us to a girl in a curiously red coat).

  DEMON THEORY 17

  146The state of the road-movie in 1981.

  147Already answered, in 1987’s Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors: “Mom, I’m still having those awful dreams.”

  148The Puritan who wanted to “murder the world” in Clive Barker’s 1995 Lord of Illusions (which probably got a few more box office receipts due to repeat viewing of the “R-rated” version of the Showgirls trailer it included).

  149How Ricky Ricardo announced his entrance in episode 67 of I Love Lucy, “Never Do Business with Friends,” and for just about all of them thereafter.

  150Gunnar Hansen’s unforgettable cannibal (based, like everything, on Ed Gein) in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre† (“Who will survive and what will be left of them?”), itself supposedly based on actual events.‡ A never-on-screen John Larroquette narrates.

  151Stat, eppy, etc., all household words ever since Michael Crichton’s ER† debuted in September 1994, ten years after the brief series E/R, which also starred George Clooney (by 1994, he of course had Return to Horror High under his belt).

  152For a while, this was a medical-sounding name, evidently (see 1934’s My Grandfather’s Clock, 1941’s Doctors Don’t Tell, and 1972’s They Only Kill Their Masters).

  153The famous Frankenstein line from 1931 (“Look, it’s moving. It’s alive, it’s alive!”), used as the title for the 1974 Larry Cohen movie, which starts in the maternity ward and ends in C.H.U.D. (1984) territory. Tagline: “It’s newborn. It’s alive. And murder is what it knows best.” Two sequels and one 3-D spoof. Fourteen years before Child’s Play and twenty-eight years after Ray Bradbury’s short story “Small Assassin.”

  154Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece, which transplants the slasher to outer space and casts Sigourney Weaver as Jamie Lee Curtis.

  155Richard Donner’s 1976 film, starring Gregory Peck and the Antichrist.

  156Roman Polanski’s 1968 adaptation of Ira Levin’s book. Mia Farrow as Rosemary, who, like Lisa Bonet in Angel Heart nineteen years later, may or may not be carrying Satan’s child, an issue Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) was very interested in as well.

  157 Along with some of the early Friday the 13ths, Halloween II (1981) would open with continuous action† (i.e., it would pick up right where the previous one left off), essentially “extending” the original into a longer movie rather than adding another installment.

  158 i.e., Dana Scully.

  159 Part of the chorus from Sheena Easton’s 1984 “Strut,” the first track off Private Heaven and one of two on the album written by Prince (the other being of course “Sugar Walls”).

  160 “E” for “Easton”; not to be confused with Sheila E.

  161 The Jaws 2
(1978) tagline was “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water” (though it could just as easily have been Brody’s “I think we’ve got another shark problem”).

  162 “A dream is a wish your heart makes while you’re asleep”—Cinderella, 1950.

  163 A common enough line in horror, perhaps intoned best, singsong, by Samara, in the 2002 American remake of 1998’s Ringu, The Ring.

  164 James Cameron’s monster 1984† vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger, not often recognized for the slasher it is.‡

  165 Sutter Cane† is the Stephen King character from John Carpenter’s 1994 In the Mouth of Madness. Roger Ebert says of it that “the notion of a book that drives its readers mad is intriguing.” And, though the title was surely influenced by H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), the stories are wholly distinct from one another.

  166 In Sol Yurick’s Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel (Autonomedia, 1985), Metatron isn’t a Transformer,† but a term for the meta-surveillance system. All very gnostic and paranoid and seductive. Historically, Metatron to the Kabbalists has been considered closest to the throne of God, the first and last of the archangels, etc.

  167The press kit for Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983, starring Molly Ringwald) included a detailed explanation of just how 3-D works. And, though Bwana Devil (1952) is often billed as being the first movie presented in 3-D—with Warner Brothers’s House of Wax (1953) getting credited as the first 3-D from a major studio—really, 3-D debuted in 1922, with The Power of Love.

  168 Worn by the cat in Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (1957), perhaps meant to either make the cat less an animal (i.e., less naked) or to visually ally all his gadgets and his just generally inventive nature with magicians. Or both. Nothing remotely phallic, though. Because then he becomes a smooth-talking stranger the kids are opening the door for, a stranger that, at the end, they’re not sure they’re going to tell their mother about (“What would YOU do / If your mother asked YOU?”†).

  169 Frontman for R.E.M.; thin, often bald.