Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  † From Blake’s 1790 Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”; Blake of course, for a while, was a member of the Swedenborgian Church, founded on the works of Emanuel Swedenborg (see n 123 and n 143), who also wrote a book called Heaven and Hell. More important, however, is a passage from his (Swedenborg’s) True Christian Religion: “There are two worlds, a spiritual world where angels and spirits are,A and a natural world where men are.” His De Telluribis would be important as well, influencing writers as far away as 1937 (Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel Star Maker, which in turn [in scope] would have no small effect on Clarke’s Childhood’s End).

  A This being of course where Swedenborg and the equally cerebral Spock part ways, as Spock indicates in the “The Galileo Seven” (January 5, 1967) episode of the original series: “I, for one, do not believe in angels.”

  † Trying to communicate what they’ve experienced, but filtered through the fantasies they’ve evolved to cope (Warren Ellis’s Charles Xavier, Ulitmate Galactus Vol. 1: Nightmare, Marvel, 2005).

  † No direct relation either to the Sam Loomis of Halloween or to the Sam Loomis of Psycho or to the (teenage) Sam Loomis of 1989’s Night Visitor, a.k.a. Never Cry Devil.

  ‡ About this “corn syrup,” or whatever proprietary mix different directors and special effects artists use to simulate human blood, legendary effects guru Tom Savini would say he has “way too much movie blood on [his] hands.”A

  A From the foreword to 1992’s Still Dead, a zombie anthology based in Romero’s world of, as they’re called in Land of the Dead, “stenches.”

  †From 1989, with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, the first of a string of romantic comedies for each, culminating, respectively, in Forget ParisA (1995) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993), each of which consciously riff on the ghosts of romantic comedies past (i.e., respectively, An American in ParisB [1951] and An Affair to Remember [1957]).

  A Rick’s goal in Casablanca (1942).

  B Not to be confused with An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), the seemingly logical sequel to John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (though 2006’s An Erotic Werewolf in London would then be similarly logical). And, while Mexican Werewolf in Texas (2005) would seem to be perhaps the most logical development, it’s actually not about a werewolf at all.

  † Much as Ray Bradbury’s 1972 novel The Halloween Tree was based on a screenplay he’d written (in 1967). His revision of it into a teleplay (1992/1993, directed by Mario Piluso; animated; narrated by Bradbury) would garner him an Emmy, while the novel would go on to be reprinted with an intense cover by Yearling in 1999, then again in 2005 by Gauntlet; the subtitle for the last one is Previously Unpublished Author’s Preferred Text.A

  A As Bradbury is the “Author” here, of course, the hyphen between “Previously” and “Unpublished” is implied.

  †Like Diner the year before, a movie almost presciently starpacked. (see n 55 and n 91)

  † as does Val Kilmer’s John Holmes in 2003’s rashomon,A Wonderland. However, the outcome of the two “discoveries” is quite different.

  A a fractured, multivocal mode of accretive storytellingi often considered emblematic of the modernist movement in the arts, and taking its name from a 1922ii Akutagawa Ryunosoke short story that Akira Kurosawa would use as the title of his 1950 movie Rashomon.

  i Think Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s version of Kurosawa’s Rashomon, or Hero (2002, known in China as Ying xiong—the most expensive Chinese movie ever, so far), which got its theatrical run in America two years later thanks to Tarantino, or talking the post-Toy Story (1995) animation boom, Hoodwinked (2005).

  ii The year King Tutankhamen’s tomb was finally plundered, the year Ulysses, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,§ Charles Mingus, and Reader’s Digest were born, the year a television signal was first transmitted,ε the year Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, etc.

  § Whose novels are typically “fractured” at more levels than Joyce’s ever were.

  ε€ i.e., the year Alexander Graham Bell died.

  † With kickboxing.

  † The uppercase suggesting Tyler Durden’s famous line from David Fincher’s 1999 Fight Club, based on the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel: “Our fathers were our model for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?”

  †a.k.a. “Jack the Giant-Killer.”

  ‡ The cleaned-up version of this is usually along the lines of “Fee fie foe fumb / I smell a boy as big as my thumb!”

  † Thirty years after Aldous Huxley lifted another Shakespeare line (from The Tempest [1611]) for his Brave New World, the Shakespeare term itself simply building on the term still popular in the beginning of the 17th century, Amerigo Vespucci’s “Novus Mundus” (coined in a 1503 letter)—“New World.”A

  A A term Terrence Malick used for his 2006 The New World, starring a barely post-Alexander Colin Farrell, whose John Smith still has cause to “weep,” as now, literally, there are no more “paradises” to conquer, as Gérard Depardieu’s Columbus had learned fourteen years before, in Ridley Scott’s “pentacentennial,”i 1492.

  i penta of course meaning “five,” as in “pentagram,”§ but also forming the root of “repentance.”

  § The alternate title for The First Power (“Satan has created the perfect killer.a One who cannot be stopped. Be warned”).

  a (smallpox).

  † Shot in the same house The Best Little Whorehouse in TexasA had used, for different effect, some twenty-one years earlier.

  A A bona fide “video nasty.” ( see n 150 iv )

  †, ‡ Paul Harvey and VH-1, respectively.

  †Friday the 13th would of course give us this exact ending eight years later. And then some.

  † According to Webster’s, a cenobite is “a member of a religious order living in a convent or community.” According to Clive Barker, that convent or community is a plane or level of hell accessible only through the “Lament Configuration.”

  † Not to be confused with Kevin Costner’s 2002 Dragonfly, which also entails the “fantastic.”

  ‡ Then there’s all those “one-shot” time-travel pieces, where it really does save the day: Superman, bringing Lois Lane back to life in 1978; Eddie the Cruiser, making it back to his native time in 1984’s The Philadelphia Experiment; Kirk and crew, saving the whales in 1986; Robin Williams, making it home at last in Jumanji (1995), etc ….

  †† Riffing on Dostoevsky, but based on the Ray Bradbury short story “A Sound of Thunder” (1952, with the movie adaptation fifty-three years later).

  † i.e., “the manipulation of light and color produces an illusion of profound intensity”—Stanley Kubrick, as quoted at a poolside party in Mother’s Day.

  † From 1940.

  ‡ From 1995.

  † While there are various books and journals calling themselves P/Q—the twin workhorse variables of symbolic logic—none of them have indexed a “Neider” in the last twenty years, or any variant, anagram, or homonym of “Neider.” Similarly, there are no Owl Creek Mental Facilities in the contiguous United States. There is the Ambrose Bierce story from 1891, however, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which the main character, while being hanged, projects his escape, misleading the reader—and himself—into believing that that escape really happens, that he wasn’t hanged. And, while the “unauthorized best-seller” D is also a fabrication—a Graham Greene character—the first of the trilogy of movies “based” on it did at least make it as far as principal photography. Gambling almost entirely on the strength of the INXS title song, a young New Line purchased the Ruth Avergon script and the option for two more, but then four weeks into scouting locations, the WGA strike of 1988 siphoned what little financial surety had been there in the first place, and The Devil Inside stayed inside.

  It may have never made it to the horror shelf anyway. Adrienne King, tentatively attached as the Nona character, was, due to the
traumatic stalking her role in Friday the 13th had generated, touch and go at best, and perhaps not as interested in reigniting her iconic status in the slasher as she was in just living unmolested by role-playing fans. She wasn’t the only one suddenly without a project, though: in a 1992 Spin interview with Billy Sheehan, in response to Spin’s question about musicians making it in the movies, Sheehan recalls a backstage anecdote from INXS bassist Garry Gary Beers, that INXS’s Michael Hutchence was passed over for the Jim Morrison role in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) not solely because they were afraid he would start doing Morrison numbers on stage with INXS, but because he came into the negotiations still slightly hostile from having the rights to “Devil Inside” tied up with New Line for longer than he cared. As Sheehan says Beers said, too, you have to understand that the “hostility” Stone & Co. found so disagreeable in Hutchence likely seemed all the more disagreeable with Billy Idol out in the hall, begging just for the chance to be in The Doors, anywhere, even though one of his legs was still in a cast from a motorcycle accident (from which his Charmed Life album would come). Sheehan adds that it probably didn’t help that Hutchence “isn’t really an actor” either, at least not in America.

  While no souvenir shooting scripts have surfaced online or in print (or from Avergon), and any audition tapes with Adrienne King as Nona have vanished, a visit to the Library of Congress does yield one bit of realia, descriptively cataloged: a prototype studio package for Devil Inside. The contents are listed in a note: one black rosary, with beads alternately smooth and pliable; one mock-account of the initial screen test; one fortune cookie, broken to reveal a bibliographical citation on plain white paper; one scroll, 8x4, which unrolls to reveal a recycled glossy of, instead of Adrienne King, Molly Ringwald (possibly a cataloging error, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club each being more recent and widely seen than the first two Friday the 13ths); and, last, a miniature version of the legal pad upon which the case notes were “originally” recorded, hand-signed by a “Dr. Neider.”

  Whether or not the Avergon script was working from (or back toward) these promotional case notes will have to remain speculation, however, as LC claims this item was “cataloged-in-process,” which is to say the information came from the distributor in advance of the actual studio package, which, in this case, never materialized. So the record’s still masked. There was the matter of the bibliographical citation in the fortune cookie, however, which the archivist at New Line had provided. Gini Gray Scott’s Famous American Murders Encyclopedia (F.A.M.E.), Lowell House, 1998, pp. 189–190, which falls toward the end of the section “Keeping It in the Family.”

  This is the entry: “The Indiana Statesman reports that on October 17th, 1971, the Montgomery Co. Sheriff’s Dept. responded to motorist reports of an ambulance in need of help on eastbound 47. The ambulance, as it turned out, was mechanically sound. It was the paramedics in need of help. They had locked themselves in after responding to an emergency call to one Seth Ainsley’s remote home, a call they refused to discuss. In the Statesman’s words, ‘When the officers couldn’t get a coherent statement from the paramedics, they approached the Ainsley house and made a grisly discovery. In the living room was Seth Ainsley’s handicapped daughter, evidently murdered some days ago. Upstairs they found Seth Ainsley, also a victim of foul play. The cold had preserved them both, as it had the body of Seth’s teenage son in the cellar, where he had apparently hung himself after killing his family. The only survivor was his mother, Madonne Ainsley. She was in the kitchen, washing the dishes and humming what the investigating officer called a lullaby. “In my officer’s words, and he’s been on the force for fourteen years now, ‘She was just stacking them up, the plates. Like nothing was wrong. We asked her who called the ambulance then, and, I swear, she didn’t know what we were talking about.’ She is currently awaiting psychological evaluation.”’

  F.A.M.E. doesn’t mention it, either, but the title it uses for its entry is the subtitle of the Statesman’s October 18, 1971 headline: “Too Close to Home: American Medea,” a reference to the play by Euripides in which a mother kills her children. Subsequent tabloid reports suggest that a copy of Medea was found on the premises, annotated like a script. Though this was never confirmed, it’s become part of the legend all the same, as has the misprint on the original police report, that when the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department arrived at the Ainsley home, theirs was the first set of tracks in the snow.

  DEMON THEORY

  Everything That Rises: An Afterword

  But it seemed fun to take it one step further.

  —John Carpenter

  In 1967 Harlan Ellison said there must be some way a writer can write a book that has all the visual and sensory impact of a movie, and he used exclamation marks. That same year John Barth said somebody ought to make a novel with scenes that pop up, like the old children’s books, and then said that was just something people say. Six years later Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote and drew Breakfast of Champions. People called it juvenile. In 1985 Alan Moore wrote The Watchmen, and Dave Gibbons drew it. It was a comic book for grown-ups. In 1992 Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash, which had started out as a graphic novel. In the late eighties, Ronald Shusett adapted Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” into a screenplay, which Paul Verhoeven turned into the movie Total Recall, which Piers Anthony then adapted back into a book, Total Recall. Though fake books are a real thing, this wasn’t one. A year or two after that, in the version of Scream 2 that leaked to the internet, Kevin Williamson says, “Wes does some scary shit here.” He used brackets. Mark Z. Danielewski had been writing House of Leaves for about three years, then. It would be published four years after David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which itself came five years after Coupland’s Generation X, some thirty-four years after Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and the same year as VH1’s Pop-Up Video. In Cervantes’s day and for a long time after, the preface and the prologue had been the legitimate way to layer meaning, to introduce “play.” Now it was the footnote. And not just in books. The 1976 film version of Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Percent Solution has footnotes in the opening credits. That year Eaters of the Dead hit the shelves. It was the same Beowulf story John Gardner had rewritten five years earlier. In the “Factual Notes” following the main body of “ibn Fadlan’s” narration, Crichton says, “I also added commentary and some extremely pedantic footnotes.” None of those footnotes mention William Goldman’s “S. Morgenstern.” In 1971, Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum came out. Instead of footnotes, which Noël Coward would be quoted thirty years later as saying were like “having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love,” Perfect Vacuum had the subtitle “Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books.” Two years later, Peter Shaffer wrote Equus. He used neither footnotes nor subtitles nor prologues nor postscripts nor marginalia, but stage directions, much as James Dickey would use a horse, in his poem “A Birth,” or as John Vanderslice would use liner notes for his 2001 LP, Time Travel Is Lonely. In 1981, Calvino wrote If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, ten distinct novels in one. As Borges said in 1967, “Still we can imagine, over time, the distortions correcting themselves, and returning to the truth through a circle like a stroller and his dog.” Calvino walks that dog dizzy. In the opening of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Roger Ebert is excerpted saying of the first Blair Witch Project that “it starts out light-hearted.” He’s talking about more than just one text there. In Stroheim, a 1968 book from the series Movie Paperbacks, Joel W. Finler says that Poto-Poto and Paprika were novels written by Stroheim during the early thirties, adapted from film projects he was never given a chance to put into production. In 1999 Joan Tewkesbury said movies are to watch, to feel, to be involved with, but not to read. This when I was reading the screenplay for Closely Watched Trains, a movie that reads better than it plays. The year before, screenwriter Richard Whiteside said if you absolutely want to control everything, write a novel. In the version of The
Cider House Rules screenplay John Irving published, he said when he feels like being a director, he writes a novel. Since 1976, more than twenty-five of Stephen King’s novels have been adapted into movies. In the sixteenth episode of the first season of Hunter, a naïve character says she was promised a role in a movie that was “one of those slasher pics, with a classier script.” The comma is important there. In 1951, the novelist Raymond Chandler said that a preoccupation with words for their own sake was fatal to good filmmaking. This three years after a character in Hitchcock’s Rope said, “You often pick words for sound rather than meaning,” fifty-two years before David Lynch said in the liner notes for The Straight Story that it was his “opinion that a film is not like a book.” In the commentary to the screenplay version of Jacob’s Ladder, Bruce Joel Rubin says he realized the film he was writing was flawed if it couldn’t communicate in strictly visual terms. In an episode of the X-Files, Jose Chung says, “I don’t know what was more disturbing, his description of the inner core’s reincarnated soul sex orgy, or the fact that the whole thing was written in screenplay format.” In 2005, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean published Mirrormask. It claims to be an “Illustrated Filmscript.” And maybe it is. In 1937, Delmore Schwartz wrote a story where a young man finds himself in a theater, watching an impossible movie of his parents’s life. The story is called “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” In it an old woman says that “all of this is only a movie, young man, only a movie.” It’s unclear, however, if she’s talking about the theater, the images on-screen, or the story itself. In 1999, Walter Dean Myers wrote the children’s novel Monster as if it were a screenplay. In it, the narrator Steve Harmon says, “Sometimes I feel I have walked into the middle of a movie. It is a strange movie … ” Thirty-two years before, John Barth had said someone ought to write a novel with scenes that pop up. The essay he says that in was originally called “Prologue,” later “The Literature of Exhaustion.” We’re far from exhausted, though. Later prints of James Cameron’s Terminator have Harlan Ellison in the closing credits. The exclamation marks are implied. Total Recall 2 was supposed to have been released in 2001. Clarke’s year, Kubrick’s year. It thrills me to imagine what it might have been based on, if anything.