Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  331 Played by Matthew Lillard. Scream again.

  332 The running Star Wars joke: C3PO always getting taken or blasted apart, then put back together.

  333 The dialogue from Detroit Rock City goes “I mean, they—they make scary movies that start out like that / Hey, but—but they make porno movie that start out like that too,” which of course leads directly to the porn-star studded Evil Breed’s “How many horror movies start this way?”

  334 In John Hughes’s teen-anthem The Breakfast Club. Before he ever became Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone (2002–).

  335 Continuing with Breakfast Club†—their “group essay” voice-over at the end of the movie, as paired with Simple Minds’s “Don’t You Forget About Me” and Judd Nelson’s raised, partially gloved fist (and matching diamond-stud earring)—but also part of a larger tradition: the soliloquy, that direct, unhindered speech to the audience without which, say, Othello (1604) simply doesn’t work, even when it’s updated to the 20th century (O, finally released in 2001, after the Columbine shooting delayed it for two years).

  336 From Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 adaptation/expansion of Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (completed September 13, 1965), Total Recall; Stone and Verhoeven’s first picture together.

  337 Like Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk was born in 1962. Not to be confused with the Frontier Frankenstein, either (debuted in Tomahawk and His Rip-Roaring Rangers, #103, 1966), though Frontier Frankenstein is what the Hulk would come to look like soon enough.

  338 Gini Gray Scott, Lowell House, 1998.

  339 A verb even parts Scottish-Gaelic (glaum) and “oceanographic” (clam), meaning, roughly, to steal (glaum) in the manner of a clam, i.e., to close your hand over a desired item very fast. Not related to Robert A. Heinlein’s Martian word grok (to know or understand not just thoroughly, but ontologically, spiritually), from Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).

  340 In the 1998 screen adaptation of Dean Koontz’s 1983 Phantoms (about which Ebert says it [the adaptation] “seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding it to this one”), this “terror from the pipes” is more than just cheap foreshadowing; it’s actually how the (finally nonsupernatural) “phantom” gains entrance.

  341 A 1952 movie, which, though twenty-one years after Frankenstein, thirty-five before Cherry 2000, and fifty before S1m0ne, is nevertheless a mixture of the three.

  342 A 1988 Ned Beatty outing, where a priest fights a demon that keeps killing sinners in the act of sinning. Has had a longer-than-average video shelf life, perhaps because of the excellent cover.

  343 Another 1988 movie, this one based on an H. P. Lovecraft story about a monster so ugly/evil that it can’t really be named. The tagline: “There are things on God’s earth that we can’t explain and we can’t describe. From the depths of Hell comes … The Unnamable.” Has also had a longer-than-average shelf-life.

  344 see n 8

  345 i.e., the Jim Morrison of the later years of the Doors (1965–1971), when, if we’re to believe Oliver Stone’s screen version (1991), he was fairly oblivious, mostly mellow, more interested in completely opening William Blake’s “doors of perception”† than tuning the real world back in.

  346 see n 226

  347 Novelist and Nobel Laureate Claude Simon (1913–2005): “I cannot write my novels other than by constantly defining the different positions that the narrator or narrators occupy in space (field of vision, distance, mobility in relation to the scene described—or, if you prefer, in another vocabulary†: camera angle. Close-up, medium shot, motionless shot, etc.).”

  348 The first time Billy Loomis† asks this in Scream, indirectly (the “edited for television” line), his girlfriend Sidney Prescott’s suggestive answer is to ask back if he would “settle for a PG-13 relationship.” Once the corn syrup‡ starts flying, however, they’re not as sentimental: “But this is not a movie,” Sidney tells him; his answer is “Yes it is, Sidney. It’s all one big movie.”

  349 As is The Story of Us (1999): Rob Reiner’s situational comedy/date movie starring Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer, which James Berardinelli calls “When Harry Met Sally† 15 Years Later.”

  350 Bill Raisch, from the 1963–1967 series The Fugitive (wrapped up into a feature film for Harrison Ford in 1993).

  351 Snow Demons was released 1967, and not to be confused with either The Thing from Another World (1951) or John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of it, The Thing, though they all involve aliens, an arctic team, extravagant special effects, etc.

  352 A term already five hundred years old by the time Bram Stoker used it, in Dracula (1897).

  353 Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 Space Odyssey (loosely based on Clarke’s 1948 short story “The Sentinel”), which, though written in conjunction with the novel 2001, was released before the novel (which claims to be “based on a screenplay”† by Kubrick and Clarke). The fourth installment of the series is 3001 (published 1997).

  354 The television series on wildlife and insurance. Full title: Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It ran from 1963 until 1988; the first eight seasons were even prime time.

  355 i.e., Mutual’s Jim Fowler, animal-handler extraordinaire. Steve Irwin (the Crocodile Hunter [1996– ]) back when Steve Irwin himself was just crocodile bait (not to be confused with the alligator bait Amos Moses was for Jerry Reed in his crossover 1970 hit “Amos Moses”).

  356 “Mommie dearest” was what Christina Crawford—Joan Crawford’s adopted daughter—says her mother insisted on being called. Wire hangers were involved. The “unremittingly depressing” (Ebert’s description) movie hit in 1981, with Faye Dunaway as a spookily convincing Joan Crawford.

  357 The Hardy Boys’s female counterpart. Her series was better illustrated, though (first installment, The Secret of the Old Clock [1929, two years after the Hardy Boys’s debut]; last [175th] installment, Werewolf in a Winter Wonderland [2003]).

  358 As Adam’s and God’s fingertips almost touch in the Sistine Chapel, so do Elliot’s and E.T.’s—the terrestrial and the “heavenly”—in E.T.

  359 Carrie Henn in James Cameron’s 1986 plural sequel to Alien (see n 287†). Her only role ever.

  360 Respectively, Rob Lowe and C. Thomas Howell in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 The Outsiders† (based on S. E. Hinton’s 1967 novel).

  361 Digital theater systems, with emphasis on the digital, for high-quality sound. Debuted in Jurassic Park (1993).

  362 Beowulf again. Or, still.

  363 Old territory for horror, though, of course. From the dark woods Dante starts his Divine Comedy trilogy with (14th century, i.e., contemporary with Sawney Bean [see n 63C]) to “Little Red Riding Hood” to “Young Goodman Brown” to The Hills Have Eyes, Mother’s Day (1980), Just Before Dawn (1981), Campsite Massacre (1983), The Blair Witch Project, The Village, Wrong Turn (2003), Wolf Creek, etc.

  364 Down the hole into Wonderland, where “she discovers a world of nonsensical and amusing characters.”†

  365 Clive Barker’s Puritan again, always pushing his fingers into other people’s heads.

  366 From 1984, directed by Mark L. Lester and starring a young Drew Barrymore and an “Indian” George C. Scott, among others. Based on Stephen King’s 1980 novel.

  367 Ving Rhames’s famous line as Marsellus Wallace in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

  368 The famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit.

  369 From 1982, directed by Michael Miller. The tagline: “Science created him. Now Chuck Norris must destroy him.”†

  370 Just one year younger than the Hulk and Spiderman.

  371 Conan again, echoed by Stu in Stephen King’s novel The Stand: “Do you dogfaces want to live forever?” then again, with no variation, in 1980’s Flash Gordon, then again, in 1997’s Starship Troopers, then one more time, by one of the animal-soldiers in the final sequence of The Emporer’s New Groove (2000; the line by then is “Nobody lives forever”). Bob Hope’s answer to this ques
tion, however, precedes them all: “No, I just want to reach forty” (from The Jack Benny Program, 1950).

  372 Debut: 1994.

  373 Yet another version of Robert Duvall’s line from Apocalypse Now (1979), “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” (a line the uncredited Joseph Conrad didn’t write, of course, as his Heart of Darkness [in serial form] is forty-three years older than napalm).

  374 Relevant excerpt from the Dick Lourie poem already excerpted at the end of Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals (1998): “Do we forgive our Fathers in our ages or in theirs or their deaths saying it to them or not saying it? / If we forgive our Fathers what is left?”†

  375 Started scaring kids into eating their peas—and, presumably, corn—in 1928.

  376 Traditional exit line for going to pee: “Got to see a man about a horse” (or, before that, “a dog,” a phrase that gained currency during Prohibition, when you had to refer to alcohol in as oblique a way as possible. The phrase originated in the 1863 play The Flying Scud, however, where one of the characters persistently uses it as an excuse to get out of whatever unsavory situation he’s just gotten himself into).

  377 Kiefer Sutherland’s Crazy Horse line from Flatliners.

  378 “/ I smell the blood of an Englishman,” a Jack and the Beanstalk† line that likely has roots in the Scottish Red Etin, from 1528, where a giant says upon entering: “Snouk but and snouk ben / I find the smell of an earthly man.”‡

  379 Spielberg and Hanks and DiCaprio, 2002. “The true story of a real fake.”

  380 “Something wicked this way comes” is one of the witches’s lines from Macbeth (1605-ish). The 1983 movie is based on the 1962 novel† by Ray Bradbury.

  381 In Friday the 13th 6: Jason Lives (1986), Jason doesn’t grab the litterbug’s wrist, but the raised, about-to-be-tossed bottle, then uses it to slash up the litterbug (Martin the caretaker, not to be confused with Marvin the caretaker, of Die Hard 2 [see n 271]), a “socially responsible” act Cheerleader Camp would make proper obeisance to the following year, with “the guy with the gun” getting shot and killed up against the NO HUNTING sign.

  382 Per Lethal Weapon, the final fight between Riggs and Mr. Joshua (a style William Friedkin would more or less adopt for The Hunted [2003]).

  383 Technically, T800 (or, Cyberdyne systems model 101, the one specific to the Schwarzenegger skin/body type).

  384 Terminator 2 again—the sleek, fluid (evil) model vs. its (redeemed) prototype.

  385 Clash of the Titans, 1981, directed by Desmond Davis. Burgess Meredith won a Saturn Award for his role as Ammon. Ray Harryhausen and Cliff Culley pulled off most of the claymation.

  386 From 1961; animated.

  387 In the deputy-shooting scene of Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses† (2003—three years after production wrapped), this “pregnant silence” lasts twenty-six and a half seconds.

  388 As Nancy finally figures out, this is the key to Freddy’s power in Nightmare on Elm Street.

  389 From 1984; based on the 1983 English translation of the 1979 Michael Ende novel Die unendliche Geschichte. Premise: because the children have stopped believing in fairy tales, the fairy-tale world is slowly ceasing to exist.

  390 This is the way the “vampire” rises from his casket both in Nosferatu (1922) and its “Rest of the Story”†/“Behind the Music”‡ version, Shadow of the Vampire (2000), and in a hundred vampire movies in between.

  391 A possibility already shut down by Reese in The Terminator: “Nobody goes home.”

  392 Carrie again. Right at the end. Or, too, the end you keep wanting in Deliverance†; Jon Voight’s guilt-ridden Ed Gentry’s the only one who sees it, though …

  393 Frank Cotton (no relation to Scream’s Cotton Weary), plaything of the Cenobites†; he’s in the second Hellraiser as well (1988). After that, the next Cotton in the series is his daughter, Kirsty Cotton, in Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), the sixth installment (of eight).

  394 The chessmate both in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), also called Bill & Ted Go to Hell (probably not meant to be an imperative sentence).

  395 b. 1972. Alter-ego: Johnny Blaze (not to be confused with the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch, Johnny Storm).

  396 Psalms 23:2.

  397 In Groundhog Day (1993), Bill Murray’s Phil Connors (no Sarah Connor relation either) also tries every possible solution to escape the temporal loop he seems to be in.

  398 As does Ashton Kutcher in The Butterfly Effect† (2004—“Change one thing, change everything”), Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys, Jean-Claude Van Damme in Timecop (1994), Kris Kristofferson in Millennium (1989), Jeff Daniels in Grand Tour: Disaster in Time (1992), Kylie Travis and James Belushi in Retroactive (1997), Amanda Plummer in the new Outer Limits’s “Stitch in Time” (1996), Kim Possible in (her) Stitch in Time (2002), the “risen machines” in the Terminators (1984–2003), the entrepenuers in Primer (2004), Michael J. Fox and crew in the Back to the Futures (1985–1990), etc.,‡ including of course the last-minute temporal heroics of Bill and Ted in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and the bad-news temporal meddling of Homer Simpson in “Time & Punishment,”†† from The Simpsons’s “Treehouse of Horror V.”

  399 This closing-credits shift in aspect ratio, from Cinemascope/Panavision down to Academy (i.e., wide-screen to pan & scan: 2.35:1 [1.85:1, etc.] to 1.33:1), is what has to happen in order for those closing credits to display properly. While the rest of the movie can be butchered up, have its left and right sides lopped off to fully fill a standard 4:3 television screen, if you do that to the closing credits, you often lose beginnings of titles and ends of names, e.g., “Spartacus” becomes “partacu.” Thus, instead of cutting the image to fit, you compress it to fit, and everything on-screen becomes just a little bit more narrow, more stretched-out, which, for the viewer, has come to signal both that nothing of import is going to happen from here on out—it’s okay to look away, now—and that, as in the western, all these characters and things are now wavering back into the mirage they stepped out of not two hours ago,† High Plains Drifter–style (1973).

  400 “Onward, Christian Soldiers” is the full title of the hymn, first published in 1871.

  401 In The Neverending Story, the “nothing” is what’s crumbling away the magical realm Fantasia,† Langolier‡-style.

  402 A title Bruce Joel Rubin of course nabbed from the Bible, Genesis 28:10–22. The “ladder” is one reaching from Earth to Heaven, the one the angels use. Jacob himself doesn’t climb it.

  403 What Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) finally gets to say to Michael Myers in Halloween: Resurrection (2002).

  404 see n 57

  405 Unreliable, surprise narrator of Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, written by Christopher McQuarrie from a throwaway Casablanca line.

  406 “I have always thought that books† are structured like houses.” Ondaatje, as interviewed by Peter Coughlan on March 28, 2001.

  † The eponymous killer of any “slasher movie,” a term coined by New York City Detective Joseph Horman in the October 2, 1975, Whig-Standard (Kingston, Ontario), when quoted about an investigation into supposed “snuff” films: “the 8-millimetre [sic], eight-reel films called ‘snuff’ or ‘slasher’ movies had been in tightly controlled distribution.” The year before had seen Black Christmas,A considered by many to have provided the model for all subsequent slashers.

  ‡ i.e., “Panaglide,” a.k.a. “Steadicam,” which gets its “gliding” quality or its “steadiness” from the gyroscope built into it.

  A Though about a massacre in a sorority house, still, Black Christmas isn’t to be confused either with Sorority House Massacrei (1987)—often considered either a remake of the original Slumber Party Massacre (1982) or an answer to 1987’s other sorority house massacre, Blood Sisters—or with Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960), which gave us a hook Saw II would use forty-five years later: opening the movie with a character dying in a spike-mask.

 
; i A title surely meant to evoke Ted Bundy’s July 14/15, 1978, attack§ on the Chi Omega house (Florida State University), where he dressed in black and carried a club.

  § Unlike The House on Sorority Row (1983), which, though it has a similar title, has more of a “just desserts”–premise,a i.e., the girls bring the attack on themselves, via the ever-dangerous prank.b

  a Not to be confused with the “just desserts,” say, Hell Night (1981) makes use of: staying overnight in the supposedly haunted house as part of a Greek initiation ceremony, a premise still alive, with variation, as late as 2004’s The Hazing.

  b After sex and drugs and curiosity and all the other “punishable-by-death” teen-sins, the only thing equally as dangerous and nearly as prevalent as pranks is carelessness, usually, as in Prom Night (1980) or I Know What You Did Last Summer¢ (1997; based on the 1973 Lois Duncan novel) or Urban Legend (1998), expressed as an accident that didn’t exactly have to happen.

  ¢ Not to be confused with William Castle’s I Saw What You Did♥ from eight years before Last Summer (Duncan’s title), a.k.a. I Saw What You Did and I Know Who You Are!, which entails pranks, not “carelessness-born-of-privilege.”

  ♥ A title Phil Collins would incorporate into his 1981 lyrical indictment of the camp counselors who, we just learned the year before, had let Jason Voorhees drown in 1957: “I was there and I saw what you did / saw it with my own two eyes.”

  † One creative variant is “beyond fucking Egypt,” a term that, for the complete effect, probably needs to be used outside Africa.

  † of course the ur-ur-text for haunted house stories is Horace Walpole’s schauerroman (“shudder novel”) The Castle of Otranto (published pseudonymously in 1764; based on a dream he had).

  ‡ Adapted to the screen for the first time in 1963, then most recently in 1999 (also the year of The Haunting of Hell House), as The Haunting.A The tagline there is “Some houses are born bad.”

  A It hit the box office just three months before The House on Haunted Hilli remake’s Halloween release. There the tagline is “Evil loves to party.”