Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  i Ricardo Tubbs on the hit series Miami Vice (1984–1989), doing his African/Cuban/ Puerto Rican/American Indian/Irish/German§ best to undo the “ethnic sidekick” curse. (see n 80)

  § His term for his family background was “American Gumbo.”

  † Maybe the best “psycho-killer” name since Prom Night’s red herring,A,B “Leonard Murch.”C

  ‡ Which, arguably, is where it started thirteen years before (the very legitimate Black Christmas).

  †† Of interest too with Silence of the Lambs is that it also comes within one year of being exactly between Night School (1981) and Mindhunters (2004), two movies that lay bare the set of conventions the slasher and the serial killer movie share.

  A That without which Happy Birthday to Me (1981) couldn’t have functioned.

  B Not to be confused with that other famous plot device, popularized by Hitchcock, the MacGuffin—some mysterious item around which the story more or less turns. Think the statuette in The Maltese Falcon (1941), the transit papers in the following year’s Casablanca, the stash of cash in (his) Psycho, or, more contemporary, the briefcase in 1994’s Pulp Fiction, or, from the following year, either the SQUIDi disc in Strange Days (1995) or the implanted “data package” in Johnny Mnemonic (1995).

  C One year later, the Leonard Murch of My Bloody Valentine would be the perpetually offscreen yet well-named “maniac” Harry Warden.

  i superconductor quantum interference device

  † The first part of the Marine saying popular in the cold war (and often accompanied with images of mushroom clouds), the second part being “let God sort them out,” as corrupted from what the Abbot of Citeaux said of the “heretic” Cathars (Albigensians) in July 1209: “Kill them all, for God will recognize his own.”

  † An effect Tom SaviniA had just popularized the year before, in Maniac, by getting his own head blown off.

  A Who either did or didn’t provide the makeup for Nightmare (1981, i.e., the year he did The Burning and The Prowler, the year after Friday the 13th [and Maniac], the year before Alone in the Dark, etc.).

  † Not to be confused with special effects whiz Rick Baker, of An American Werewolf in London, It’s Alive II, The Ring, Hellboy, etc.

  ‡ Not to be confused with Tyrannosaurus Rex, the Tolkien-richA Marc Bolan band from the sixties that, in the seventies, minus Steve Took, abbreviated themselves to the more manageable “T. Rex,” released some influential albums (and album covers), and started getting covered by just about everybody.

  A The other big “Tolkien” band would be Led Zeppelin (b. 1968).

  †A term coined in the cinema eleven years earlier, by The Body Snatcher,A based on a story Robert Louis Stevenson wrote nearly three years before Boris Karloff—The Body Snatcher’s body snatcher—was born.

  A Debuted three years after The Corpse Vanishes.

  † Sixteen years later, this would get updated to “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K” (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure).

  † Which owes a lot to Sugarland Express (1974), which crosses the same bridge The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 would cross twelve years later.

  † Formerly of Skid Row, most recently of Gilmore Girls (born on the WB in 2000).

  † Not the “Tip Toe Through the Tulips” Tiny Tim (b. Herbert Khaury, who would later adopt the middle name “Buckingham”) or the Tinny Tim from the orphanarium of Futurama (1999–2003).

  † Never to be confused with the “bee kiss” from Candyman (1992).

  † Not to be confused with the 1960’s “crooner” Engelbert Humperdinck (b. Arnold Dorsey).

  † Not to be confused either with Silent Night, Bloody NightA (1974) or the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise (b. 1984) or Black Christmas, or any of the others: Christmas Nightmare, One Hell of a Christmas, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Christmas Season Massacre, Don’t Open ’til Christmas, Christmas Evil (“You better watch out … ”), Santa’s Slay, Santa Claws (“His slay bells are ringing!”), Satan Claus,B Jack Frost, To All a Good Night, Gremlins (set at Christmas), etc.

  A As Silent Night, Bloody Night preceeded Black Christmas (see n 12†) by some eight months, and possibly influenced it, it’s occasionally given credit for having effectively codified the “modern” (i.e., post-Psycho) slasher.i

  B This of course is what Bruce Willis’s Joe Hallenbeck’s daughter in The Last Boy Scout (1991) draws, which gets her in trouble at school.

  i Another slasher often not given its due either is Massacre at Central High§ (1976), which includes a body count of (naked, camping, “sinning,” etc.) teens, which is itself in the teens, and mandatory lines like “We’re all going to die,” or this one, from B movie regular Rainbeaux Smith: “Let’s just take off, and have some fun, and come back when all this shit blows over.”

  § a.k.a. Blackboard Massacre, and, according to the poster art, “Massaker in Klasse 13.” Not to be confused with 1989’s Cutting Class,a starring a pre–Thelma & Louise Brad Pitt.

  a Itself not to be confused with the cover for Slaughter High: “Marty majored in cutting classmates.”

  † Itself not to be confused with amanita virosa, the “destroying angel” (a particularly lethal mushroom).

  † Norman Bates’s first victim in the extended introductory sequence of Psycho.

  † Set, like the first Die Hard, at Christmas, thus securing the holiday claim away from Lethal Weapon.

  † As the premise for the story is “person unjustly killed by thugs, returns to pick them off one by one,” of course The Crow’s predecessors are too many to begin naming. However, one that both includes then-“hip” culture and had somebody die on the set would be The Wraith (1986), starring Charlie Sheen in the black leather.

  † Became a movie in 2005, starring The Rock.

  ‡ Is supposed to be a movie by 2007.

  †† As for where first-person-shooter games start, you’d have to go back to 1973’s Maze War and 1974’s Spasim.A For one place they definitely don’t end, maybe Gus Van Sant’s 2003 Elephant.

  A Neither of which are movies yet, unless 1997’s Cube can be considered a kind of “maze war.”

  † Unless you count Lance Henrikson’s nonandroidal return in the clamored-for AVP (Alien Vs. Predator, 2004).

  † In Prophecy: The Monster Movie (1979), this same creature,A more or less—“sort of a bigfoot, only it’s uglier, larger than a dragon, it’s got the eyes of a cat … everything but the kitchen sink”—is called the “Katahdin.”

  A i.e., “Native-owned,” used either to defend them or to exact revenge for them …

  †Already matched up twelve years before, in the sixth retread of Howling (see n 10).

  † About which Ebert would say, “Scrooged is one of the most disquieting, unsettling films to come along in quite some time.”

  † Perpetually kidnapped, i.e., “vulnerable,” child actor, spirited away in Trapped (2002), Taken (2002), Man on Fire (2004), even Hide and Seek (2005), where her abduction from the city and her mother doesn’t seem to be an abduction at all, at first.

  † In The First Power (1990), however, the character who jumps lands softly on his feet. Of note is that in the nonsupernatural The Arrival (1996), this “fall” is reversed, so that the (backward-kneed alien) character is able to jump up onto a building, and thus escape.

  † Not to be confused with Molly Ringwald’s first slasher, also starring Kylie Minogue: Cut (2000).

  † A wardrobe he’d resurrect for 1987’s Near Dark (starring Lance Henrikson), where a background marquee would bill AliensA (1986), a movie both PaxtonB and Henrikson were already in.

  ‡, A James Cameron 1984, James Cameron 1986.

  B Not, as people insist, to be confused with Bill Pullman, who, in 1986, was busy reprising Harrison Ford’s Han Solo§ for Spaceballs (1987, a.k.a. Planet Moron).

  § Already reprised once, just after The Return of the Jedi, by Robert Urich (The Ice Pirates,i 1984).

  i So called because, as gasoline had been t
o Mad Max three years earlier, so is water to Urich’s “ice pirate” Jason, a premise lifted of course from Frank Herbert’s breakthrough 1965 novel Dune, to be released (in David Lynch form) nine months after Ice Pirates.

  † The title of course from the KISS song, the lead track off their seminal 1976 album, Destroyer.

  ‡ Descended from vaudeville players.

  † Of Sephardic Jewish descent.

  † Alec Holland (played by Ray Wise), not Alan Moore.

  † Not to be confused with 1982’s The Last American Virgin.

  ‡ Whereas in Cherry Falls (2000), where virgins are being targeted by a slasher, “losin’ it”A is the only surefire way to remove yourself from the victim pool.

  †† A shot/scene seemingly intentionally echoed in Mike Figgis’s 1995 Leaving Las Vegas,B where Elizabeth Shue’s Sarah Connor character is even named Sera.

  ‡‡ Tagline for the X-Files movie (1998): “Fight the Future.”

  A Title of the 1983 teen comedy (“The last word about the first time”), starring Tom Cruise as “Woody.”

  B Itself not to be confused with 1992’s Honeymoon in Vegas, which also starred Nicolas Cage. A year later, of course, the “comedy” would be taken out of Honeymoon, and it would be Indecent Proposal (which Julia Roberts declined being in). Of note with Proposal is that Robert Redford’s body double was adult film star Randy West, of the extensive Up and Cummers and Please Cum Inside Me series.

  † Starring Rachel Ward, soon to be in both Campsite Massacre (1983, the year of The Thornbirds, for her) with a pre-Splash Daryl Hannah and Against All OddsA (like Splash, 1984) with “Starman” (1984) Jeff Bridges. Also starring an out-of-place hockey mask on a mantle, which in most other slashers would be a respectful nod in Sean Cunningham’s direction. Night School was 1981, however—the year before Jason got his mask.B

  A Phil Collins again (see n 12♥), this time rerecording and retitling the balladi he’d left off his 1981 album, Face Value.

  B i.e., two years before Quiet Riot’s “almost-Eddie” got his mask,ii on the cover of their chart-topping Metal Health, which would open the floodgates of L.A., spilling glitter and Aqua Net and alcohol across America in the form of that hybrid of Alice Cooper stage theatrics and David Bowie androgeny called glam metal (i.e., glam rock + heavy metal),iii which, once it got started, would have a heyday that would last just about as long as the slasher’s.iv

  i original title: “How Can You Just Sit There?”

  ii Formerly available at Sear’s, for ten dollars.

  iii While not all of the hair bandsa would have started out at Whiskey A Go-Go (not to be confused with Herschell Gordon Lewis’s post-Bloodfeast 1965 gorefest Monster A Go-Go), still, as with the slasher,b there was a set of ironclad conventions: open with the power ballad, tease your hair up, slither into the spandex, tear up your hotel room, etc.

  iv If glam metal is in fact the slasher’s charismatic, out-of-control little brother, then of course pro wrestling is the drunk uncle, whispering in Vince Neil’s ear that what he’d do is call Axl Rose out on Headbanger’s Ball …

  a e.g., Motley Crüe, Twisted Sister, Ratt, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Poison, Whitesnake, Skid Row, etc., each possibly responsible, as Brett Michaels suggests, for the subsequent hole in the ozone layer.

  b As with the slasher as well, just one year after each was officially “born,” they would each be spoofed, the slasher by Student Bodies (one year after Friday the 13th), glam metal by This Is Spinal Tap (one year after Metal Health).

  † As has Veronica in Heathers (1989), as established by her answer to Heather’s remark that she “looks like hell”: “Yeah? I just got back.”

  ‡ A term Joseph Campbell (of The Hero with a Thousand Faces fame) borrowed from James Joyce’s post-Ulysses mock-epic, Finnegans Wake (1939).

  † i.e., Michael Knight, billed as “the man who doesn’t exist,” a situation Thomas Veil would find himself in thirteen years later, in the (conspicuously incompleteA) hit series Nowhere Man.

  ‡ Any confusion with “helicopter”- or “motorcycle”-B shows from the mid-eighties (Air Wolf, Blue Thunder; Street HawkC) is probably intentional.

  A For more “never-finisheds,” see Prey, Dark Angel, Firefly, The Kindred, Wolf Lake, VR5, Millennium, The Lone Gunmen, American Gothic, Brimstone, the second Nightstalker, etc.

  B Correct: unless The Love Boat§ or certain sequences from Miami Vice count, there’s no boat-as-hero shows (both Sealabs, of course—1972 and 2000—were set on submarine complexes, not submarines).

  C To say nothing of Automan, Manimal,ε etc., which is one direction the vehicle-as-star developed, the other being the Dukes of Hazzard/Fall Guy/A-Team/Hardcastle & McCormick/BJ & the Bear direction, which, as the heroes’s occupation in each of those series, it seemed, was essentially solving crime, led of course to shows in which the hero or heroes, like Charlie’s Angels, really were in the business of solving crimes (and still, with the exclusion of 21 Jump Street, driving serious machines): Simon & Simon, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice, T.J. Hooker, Spenser for Hire, The Equalizer, etc.

  § However, it did host the crime-solving Hart to Hart couple. Never went to Fantasy Island, though.

  ε Each owing more than a little to Buck Rogers, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Man from Atlantis, The Bionic Woman, the first Nightstalker (based on the movie), Shazam!, etc.—the “fantastic”-powers set of the previous TV generation, themselves of course just amplifications of Baretta, which was itself largely enabled by Steve McQueen’s “car show” Bullitt (1968), and all the Bullitt pretenders.

  † Not to be confused with Hellhole (the 1985 one), Hellgate (the 1989 one), or Hell’s Gate (the 1989 one), or the one they’re all trying to be: The SentinelA (1977).

  A Not, as is sometimes suggested, simply cashing in on the Exorcist/Omeni,ii craze, as its cavalcade of eager cameosiii might indicate. It would have its own eventual inheritors, however, most recently (i.e., 2005) Dark Water and Skeleton Key.

  i Themselves of course looking to draw the audience for so-called nonexploitational horror Rosemary’s Baby§ had created.ε€

  ii However, what The Sentinel did cash in on was the “controversy” of using actors who supposedly needed no makeup. (see n 150)

  iii Jeff Goldblum, Tom Berenger, a very pre-Vacation (1983) Beverly D’Angelo, Jerry Orbach, Christopher Walken, etc. To say nothing of its “billed” cast.δ

  § Which The Sentinel does somewhat resemble.

  ε€ Much as, in the last few days of 1996, Scream renewed interest in the supposedly “tired” slasher, resulting in a quick spate of teen massacres,a a spate that, with Cry_Wolf and Tamara (2005), not to mention all the interesting side-developmentsb along the way (The Blair Witch Project, Wrong Turn, The Devil’s Rejects, Session 9, Deadbirds, etc., to say nothing of the “imports”: The Ring, The Grudge, Audition, High Tension, Pulse, etc.), or all the 2006 remakes (Black Christmas, When A Stranger Calls, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen), or even the prequel to the remake (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning), isn’t feeling much like a spate at all, really.c

  δ Chris Sarandon, a hauntingly “blind” John Carradine, José Ferrer, Ava Gardner, a barely post-Rocky Burgess Meredith, Eli Wallach, etc.

  a e.g., I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Valentine, Cherry Falls, Final Destination, etc., various sequels of both old and burgeoning franchises, including the comprehensive parody of them all, Scary Movie (a.k.a. Last Summer I Screamed Because Halloween Fell on Friday the 13th), which gets its title of course from the working title of Scream, its ambition from Saturday the 14th (1981—Saturday the 14th being the bad night to have a party in that year’s My Bloody Valentine).

  b see n 65†

  c In Terrors of Uncertainty (Routledge, 1989), literary critic Joseph Grixti proposes that perhaps the reason for this continual, persistent fascination with or compulsion for horror is that “popular horror fictions … form part of a complex discursive process which is an integral component o
f the models deployed by contemporary society to understand itself.Ӣ

  ¢ Or, more directly: “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses♥ and oppresses” writes film critic Robin Wood in his introduction to American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film (1979).

  ♥A repression/discovery that that original fan of the genre, Kurtz—“The Horror! The Horror!”—knew a little something about.

  † Each of which are of course variations and/or extensions of 1980’s The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, which is itself just a version of all the Mummy movies (started in 1932, with Karloff, and still going strong in 2002, with The Rock). What King Tut’s Tomb brought to the formula was, instead of a shuffling mummy or possessed bystander or some other high-budget make up job, a little Rube Goldberg ingenuity (some of it of course owing more than a little to the wholly inevitable, chillingly “agentless” deaths in The Omen).

  †Not to be confused with John Hughes, of Mr. Mom/Vacation/Sixteen Candles/The Breakfast Club/Weird Science/Pretty in Pink/Ferris Bueller’s Day Off/Planes, Trains & Automobiles/The Great Outdoors/Uncle Buck/Home Alone/Dutch/Beethoven–fame.

  † A character possibly based on alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel, who lived in the region, anyway, of Castle Frankenstein, and liked to do experiments with human corpses.

  ‡ “The rebel god,” i.e., the one who didn’t play by the rules, but over reached, much as that other “Victor von”A would start doing in the Marvel Universe one hundred and forty-four years after Mary Shelley had properly “charged” the name.

  A … Doom, born in Fantastic Four 5.

  †As Gene Hackman would do as well, with his voice-over at the end of The Replacements (2000), not to be confused either with his coaching role in Hoosiers (1986) or with Major League (1989), which shares a premise with The Replacements: the pros are on strike, now bring in the underappreciated scabs (so they can redeem themselves, etc.).