Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  170 R.E.M’s “Shiny Happy People,” off their 1991 Out of Time album.

  171 Full title: “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Off their (R.E.M.’s) 1987 Document album.

  172 Gene Wilder’s drunken, lovable, heroic character from Mel Brook’s 1974 Blazing Saddles.

  173 … and Ham. Dr. Seuss’s 1960 classic. Not be confused with Too Much Joy’s 1987 album Green Eggs and Crack.

  174 Off the Rolling Stones’s 1967 Flowers album, redone twenty-three years later by Tesla, on their live album Five Man Acoustical Jam (a tribute to the band Five Man Electrical Band, who recorded “Signs” for the first time back in 1971).

  175 Of Drugstore Cowboy (1989). Not to be confused either with Marshall Dillon of Gunsmoke (b. 1955, nine years before Matt) or with the Michael Shoeffling (Jake Ryan) of Sixteen Candles (1984—twenty-one years before Dillon would finally/really play a Ryan-character, in Crash).

  176 As Matt Dillon’s girlfriend Dianne was, as played once and forever by Kelly Lynch.

  177 Pernell Roberts in Trapper John, M.D. (1979–1986); not to be confused with St. Elsewhere† (1982–1988).

  178Another Schwarzenegger vehicle (1987), this time directed by John McTiernan, already shooting Die Hard by then. Instead of Ripley going to space, however, now the alien is coming to her (or, him: Mr. Universe).

  179A Richard Donner film, 1987. It opens by contrasting “Jingle Bell Rock” with an apparent overdose/suicide. Along with 48 Hours (1982), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), and Running Scared (1986), Lethal Weapon more or less cemented the conventions of the “buddy-cop” movie.†

  180The 1978 remake not of 1943’s Heaven Can Wait, as 2005’s Hostage plays with, but of 1941’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan. In 1978, however, the title “Heaven Can Wait” was, thanks to Meatloaf and Jim Steinman, very popular.

  181The popular slogan of the now-defunct Protect-It Car Wax, still available (in slogan form) in select vintage clothing shops.

  182Coined in 1853 by Robert Surtees in his Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour, “Once burned twice shy” is of course a variation on “Once bitten, twice shy,” which can be traced backward as far as William Caxton’s translation of Aesop in 1484, and forward as far as Great White’s 1989 follow-up to their 1987 Once Bitten …: … Twice Shy.

  183Stephen King used this device in his 1979 The Dead Zone, which Cronenberg adapted to the screen in 1983, casting Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, the man able to see into the “dead zone.”

  184Which is how it usually works out in his (Romero’s) Night of the Living Dead†,‡ (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), and all the remakes, including but not limited to Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return to Terror‡ (1991; “In Shocking 2-D!”), “The Son of the Ghost of the Bride of Frankenstein” (from the “That’s Monstertainment” episode of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo [1985]), and all the fun Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell have had with The Evil Dead (b. 1981, reanimated†† in 1987, then again in 1993, with Army of Darkness), itself not to be confused with The Return of the Living Dead series (b. 1985, still undead twenty years later).

  185 Played Michael Myers’s putative therapist in Halloween, Dr. Sam Loomis.

  186 Penny Marshall’s 1990 Robin Williams treatment of Oliver Sack’s Cocoon-like experience with postencephalitic patients, minus Steve Guttenberg.

  187 Roy Scheider’s plea to Murray Hamilton in Jaws, a plaint Steve McQueen’s character, Steve, was already making in his best Luke Skywalker whine in The Blob (1958): “How do you get people to protect themselves from something they don’t believe in?” The English subtitles for The Eye (2002) aren’t all that different either: “She [Mun] foresaw a big disaster and tried to warn everyone, but no one listened to her” (which also, of course, suggests the Cassandra Complex [see n 33]).

  188 William Peter Blatty, 1990.† A vast improvement over The Heretic (1977), just not quite as controversial as the original. George C. Scott, though. Geriatric people spider-crawling up the walls in a way that wouldn’t be seen again until 2002 (or 2004, depending on the country), in The Darkness.‡ There, however, the geriatric people were naked as well. And had black eyeballs.

  189 Lamberto Bava’s 1985, sequel-spawning Dèmoni, released on VHS in America as Demons, had the title in grab-me-from-the-shelf yellow,† in typical double-feature font.

  190From 1990. “A terrifying tale of sluts and bolts.” Not to be confused with the early Tim Burton effort Frankenweenie (1984), for which Disney fired him, or the bootleg classic Frankenchicken (1995), which of course includes ninjas, or the Dead Kennedys’s 1985 album Frankenchrist, which includes shriners (which, in spite of the title, has nothing to do with Christopher Lambert’s 1999 Resurrection, where, to properly “celebrate” Easter, a serial killer tries to piece together a Christ).

  191 Giant, ill-tempered ape at the end/top of the popular video game created in 1981 by Shigeru Miyamoto, who in 2000 finally admitted he got the name Donkey Kong from pushing manuke (Japanese for “stupid”) and “King Kong” together.

  192 Fay Wray, the distressed damsel in the 1933 King Kong.

  193 More X-Files: “Objective scientist” Dana Scully wears (and regularly distributes or loses) a small crucifix necklace as well, which she either got on her fifteenth birthday or for Christmas, depending on whether the “Ascension” episode or the “Christmas Carol” one got it right.†

  194“555” is the prefix that, forty years ago, when “exchange” names were still popular, you couldn’t spell anything with, as “5” only corresponds with the letters J, K, and L. Thus, it was a safe prefix,† was what Hollywood was encouraged to use, as it wouldn’t result either in unwanted calls or in people trying to get their own numbers quoted in movies. Outside of the movies, all it’s used for now, pretty much, are numbers like directory assistance (555-1212). The numbers Bellcore has set aside specifically for Hollywood to use are 555-0100 through 555-0199,‡ a homogeneity The Adventures of Ford Fairlane pokes fun at, with Ford†† giving a girl in a bar his phone number, “555-6321”; his response to her saying that “they only use that in the movies” is “No shit, honey. What do you think this is, real life?” 555 is also the title of a low-budget, 1988 horror movie, involving but not limited to necrophilia; the justification for the title is that every five years, for five nights, young couples are killed, a pattern The X-Files would repeat, with variation, in its third episode, “Squeeze,” which introduces us to Eugene Victor Tooms, who surfaces every thirty years to harvest the five livers he needs. The subsequent follow-up episode, “Tooms” (episode 20), would, in turn, introduce us both to Asst. Director Skinner‡‡ (“AD Skinner”) and to the fact that the Cigarette Man could talk.

  195Rudyard Kipling’s juvenile adventure story, adapted into many movies since 1894. Kaa is the snake.

  196 John Badham, 1977.

  197 “Stayin’ Alive,” by the Bee Gees. Iconic enough that it would be the title of Saturday Night Fever’s sequel (1983), which ends where Saturday Night Fever started six years before: with Travolta, consciously “strutting.”

  198 In Ringu, Rie Inou’s Sadako character (Samara in the American remake) appears to move in a similar, “wrong” fashion—an effect achieved by a combination of her kabuki-influenced body language and the fact that the shot was filmed with her walking backward, then reversed for playback.

  199 According to Better Homes and Garden’s Soups & Stews Cook Book (Meredith Corporation, 1978), these are the two main ingredients for Cucumber-Cream Soup.

  200 When drug dogs die, this is the heaven they go to.

  201 The term for this would be “palimpsest”—writing over the already written—which appears in the credits of the 1986 film adaptation of Umberto Eco’s 1980 The Name of the Rose: “A palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s ‘The Name of the Rose.’” It was probably all the payment Eco, a semiotician, really needed for the film. And, even though “palimpsest” and “incest” both s
ound the same and seem to inhere the same dynamic, that’s really just an accident of sounds: “cest” is from cestus (chaste), while “sest” is derived from “psestós” (scraped, rubbed).

  202 Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel (1974), in which the end result of the “plug it up” locker-room chant is Sissy Spacek supposedly wearing her character Carrie’s “pig blood” for three days—how long it took them to shoot the prom scene.

  203 Unlike any of the Buford Pussers from the Walking Tall movies (1973–2004) or series (1981), to say nothing of the sheriff they were all based on, in McNairy County, Tennessee.

  204 i.e., James Belushi as that cop (K-9, 1988, though of course by that time it was pretty much a standard for dog/animal “hero” movies).

  205 The original of this, from Luke 4:23, is “Physician heal thyself,” which Joel and Ethan Coen lifted for their 1991 Barton Fink, where the following line is “Good luck with no fuckin’ head.”

  206 Wally’s sycophantic classmate from Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963) and Still the Beaver (1985–1989).

  207 Not just the “number of the beast” in the Bible or the congenital birthmark/tattoo Damien has on his scalp in The Omen or the combination to Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction (1994), but also what the sixth installment of Halloween (The Curse of Michael Myers, 1995) used as a working title to make fun of the “evil” franchise it already was: Halloween 666 (four years later, the Children of the Corn franchise would take a similar tack, with its fifth installment: Children of the Corn 666).

  208 Fell off the wall and forever into children’s rhymes (one version of the rhyme’s origin is that, during the English Civil War, “Humpty Dumpty” [“Humpti-Dumpti”] referred to a Royalist cannon mounted on top of St. Mary’s at the Wall Church in Colchester, and was just too catchy a name to ever quit singing it; another is that it originally referred to King Richard III, the hunchbacked monarch, whose horse was named Wall).

  209 In trying to both accurately “capture” or render teenage slang and appease the censors, the 1951–1952 (and 1954) series Meet Corliss Archer (based on the 1943 radio show, which was itself working off the series of early forties stories by stage comedian F. Hugh Herbert) unintentionally gave the Robin of the 1966–1968 Batman series license for all his “Holy [insert benign, unexpected word here]!” exclamations, which themselves were coopted back into teenage slang, though given some bite, via profanity: “Holy shit” (a logical intensification or “product” of “holy cow,” presumably). And of course it’s unclear whether it’s the “holy” or the “shit” which is supposed to be offensive, there …

  210 After 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit and 1978’s Convoy, CB (citizen band) jargon and syntax was, for a while, very cool, as were black Trans Ams (however, it wouldn’t be until 1978, with the factory introduction of fatter swaybars, that the Trans Am would handle anything like the one Burt Reynolds drove). Of note is that the 1976 song Sam Peckinpah was adapting his movie from, “Convoy,” was performed by CW McCall, who started out in 1972 not as a singer at all, but as a truck-driving spokesman for Metz Baking Company on a series of Clio-winning television ads.† But then he caught on, became real, an American icon, the rugged individual, the modern-day cowboy without any of the biker saddlebags. His name before that was William Dale Fries (not to be confused with Espera De Corti [of Italian heritage], who, thanks again to advertising, “became” Iron Eyes Cody‡—the “crying Indian” of the anti-litter commercials).

  211 Jim Henson’s 1982 remix of Star Wars and Tolkien.

  212 The famous exchange between Hannibal Lecter† and Special Agent Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 big-budget slasher Silence of the Lambs (Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Scott Glenn), based on Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel. Of note is that it (Demme’s version) comes almost right between the first slasher to go legit,‡ Fatal Attraction (1987), and the slasher that’s supposed to have made any further attempt at a slasher illegitimate: Scream.††

  213 Superman’s secret clubhouse.

  214 “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” was the lead track off the Animals’s Animal Tracks. In 1965, when it debuted, it was taken to be about Vietnam.

  215 i.e., would be in the ‘Strawweight’ division in boxing (less than 105 lbs.), the smallest category of all, even below Mini-and Junior flyweight.

  216 DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), pretty much, or, as it was not quite accurately called in Vietnam, Agent Orange, because of the orange-painted drums it was transported in. A defoliant-herbicide soluble in fat, not water, allowing it to accumulate up the food chain, the dioxin(s) causing all kinds of neural and biological problems, many of them hereditary. Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States sprayed more than twelve million gallons of this over Vietnam, a policy/tactic Metallica would of course lampoon a bit with their 1983 Kill ’Em All.†

  217 Though the birth of pay-per-view is usually associated with Hulk Hogan and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Junkyard Dog and Randy Savage (the Wrestling Classic of 1985), technically, the first pay-per-view service was provided by Phonevision in 1950, though you didn’t see movies or events with it, but whomever you were talking with on the phone (the television signal piggybacked on the phone line).

  218Cronenberg again, in 1981. This time with Michael Ironside and exploding heads.†

  219 A series of short, disparate images showing an association of ideas or representing an overview of larger action.

  220 In Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park, based on Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel and owing the birdlike movement of its CGI dinosaurs largely to “rebel” paleontologist Robert Bakker† (in gratitude, Spielberg would let Bakker get eaten by a T. rex‡ in the blockbuster sequel, The Lost World [1997]).

  221, 222 Robert Patrick’s new and improved terminator in James Cameron’s 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, who also pried open some elevator doors.

  223 Evoking of course the smile at the end of 1999’s Magnolia, recycled from Federico Fellini’s 1960 La Dolce Vita, much as Bandits (2001) would reuse the ending of The Sting (1973), or Boogie Nights that of Raging Bull (1997, 1980), or how Open Range (2003) would be Road House (1989) with cowboy hats, or how Dogville (2003) was The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) in the thirties, or how 1982’s Deathtrap would have the same final-frame developments as North by Northwest, which Get Shorty, Wonder Boys, Psycho Beach Party (both 2000), and Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000) would all make use of.

  224 I or II. In the first, though—1995—Natasha Henstridge “develops” similarly, from child to bonafide killing machine.

  225 The method of duplication, or “symbiosis,” in The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers† (1956); the “products” of these pods were of course “pod-people.” As Dr. Kaufman says, in reference to them: “Your new bodies are growing in there … ” Whether this is one of the lines the movie’s uncredited “meter reader” Sam Peckinpah was supposed to have rewritten, of course, we’ll never know.

  226 The Exorcist’s Regan (1973, Friedkin and Blatty). Pertinent: “Something beyond comprehension is happening to a little girl on this street, in this house.”†

  227 Where eating disorders are stylized, eyes are shadowed to suggest brooding disinterest, and pants are sold.

  228 Eveready batteries, where the slogan is the name itself.

  229 Star Wars again, always.

  230 Mr. Miyagi’s pet name for Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid (1984) was “Daniel-san.”

  231 Introduced the microprocessor to the video game system in 1976. The company (Nintendo Koppai) was already eighty-seven years old then, too. Its first big hit in the arcades was Donkey Kong, in 1981. Its first big hit ever was Hanafuda playing cards, in 1889 (in Japan).

  232 According to Drew Barrymore’s Karen Pomeroy in Donnie Darko (2001), “This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that cellar door is the most beautiful.”
Though this is far from a direct quote, the famous linguist here would seem to be J.R.R. Tolkien. Drew Barrymore’s character, however, would have to be directly based on Ms. Ferenczi, from Charles Baxter’s 1985 short story “Gryphon,” itself subsequently adapted into a PBS movie.

  233 This is the set piece at the end of both Don’t Look Now and The Blair Witch Project.

  234 The concept of parallel realities (as opposed to Donald Sutherland’s “nested realities,” of 1978’s Body Snatchers remake) was formally proposed in 1957 by Princeton doctoral student Hugh Everett III, to explain away the “double-slit” problem in quantum mechanics without resorting to the observation-reliant Copenhagen Explanation (which attempts to account for why, at the quantum level, photons can be in two places simultaneously, while at the macro level, this doesn’t happen). Nearly fifty years later, in a thought-experiment so extravagant as to be practically infeasible, mathematician Sir Roger Penrose would up the ante on Everett and Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (who proposed the Copenhagen Interpretation in the twenties), by using Newton’s revolutionary concept of gravity to reconcile Einstein’s general relativity with the weirdness of the quantum world. As for “perfect” worlds, though, outside of the Kevin Costner–Clint Eastwood film† (1993), they are, according to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), impossible for God to have created.

  235 Blood-as-seizure-inducing-medium-of-communication is what the vampire Lestat experiences when he first tastes Aaliyah/Akasha’s blood in Queen of the Damned (2002; based on the 1985 Anne Rice novel, and no longer starring Tom Cruise as Lestat).

  236 One of the chorus’s many refrains in the dance number “Summer Nights,” from Grease (1978).

  237 Norman Jewison’s 1973 adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s anachronistic (re)telling of the last few weeks in the life of Jesus. Recent productions star Sebastian Bach† as Jesus.

  238 Egon Spengler’s admonition in Ivan Reitman’s 1984 Ghostbusters.

  239 A Top Gun term (Tony Scott, 1986), subsequently adopted by the Navy.