Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  —sgj, 11/99 (& 3/06)

  Credits

  and then I made a list of who all had helped with Demon Theory, and it was legion, and it scared me, because it was impossible I wouldn’t forget some key person, without whom I would have just been floundering across the pages. but here goes. for my undying and as-yet undead compulsion for horror, my Uncle Bruce and Aunt Tami, who, when I was six and living with my grandmother, showed up on the back porch one night, wrapped in blankets, their trailer only fifty feet away. what they wanted was to sleep on the floor of the living room, because they’d just seen Halloween. I watched them step in, then looked behind them, into that darkness. then, a few years later, Brett Watkins, who got to watch R movies, and so closed the door to his bedroom one day and told me about this Terminator robot, and the way he told it, the whole story, the reverence and awe and terror, how each of us kept forgetting to breathe, it was more real to me than any movie ever. after that, David Mills’s dad, who let us watch Jason and Freddy and Leatherface in his garage each Friday night, and would, come two in the morning, sneak outside, bang on the metal door with bottles then chase us through the trees. I’ve never run so fast. next, many years later, a poet named Miles Watson, for giving me what would become the first sliver of Demon Theory: Murray Head. just the way he said it, like everybody knew who did that Bangkok song. it struck something in me, something that was still ringing when Ryan Van Cleave dragged me from the keyboard one weeknight, to this movie Scream, which I saw for six nights in a row after that. the only other movie I’d ever done that with was Exorcist III, with my roommate, Danny Broyles, a walking encyclopedia of poorly arranged horror movies. a few years later, then, another poet, Diane Warner, who hired me to be, of all things, a video cataloger, a thing just as random as the book my mother had left out one afternoon, when I was too young to know better: Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. so many nights I went without sleep because of that book. but the movies I had to watch for work now, they helped somehow. by then I was writing this strange novel that wasn’t really a novel but wasn’t really a screenplay either, was more like how that kid in one of the Friday the 13th novelizations puts his hand into the garbage disposal one day, fascinated, then turns it on. next, Kate Garrick, my agent, who picked Demon Theory out of some unlikely pile, started carrying it around. it’s a glass slipper; we’re Cinderella. and then my always-editor Brenda Mills, for reading draft after draft of Demon Theory, year after year, and to Rob Bass, for trading sleep for that exact kind of trivia Eric Binford was warned about in Fade to Black. and I have to start going fast, here. thanks to my local horror expert, Rob Weiner, both for all the talk and for all the movies, and to Joe Ferrer and J. Marcus Weekley and Evan B. Bruno, for talking horror at all hours, and to Patrick Whitfill, for movies and movies, and to Video Classics and Hastings and Netflix, for stocking the old stuff, and thanks to all the people I hit up with strange questions about stranger things: Sean Grass, Scott Baugh, Connie Kuriyama, Crystal Hicks, Brian McFadden, Marliss Desens, Bryce Conrad, Jesse Wichterman, Madonne Miner, Gordon Highland. Marcus van Bavel at DVFilm.com, Will Terrel of Lucid Press. all kinds of listservs and bulletin boards. Bawls, Sobe. Slavoj Žižek, whose Ridiculous Sublime showed me just how transparent I was. IMDb.com and FantasticFiction.co.uk and Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chain Saws and VH-1’s Pop-Up Video and Beat the Geeks and Infinifilm’s Fact Tracks and Roger Ebert’s words and and and Wikipedia.org, which I found too late, along with Mark Whitehead’s Pocket Essential Slasher Movies and Jim Harper’s Legacy of Blood and Vera Dika’s Games of Terror and Adam Rockoff’s Going to Pieces. and surely more, because I never know anything, always have to ask, and ask again. too, the last person Kate carried Demon Theory to: Jason Wood, my editor at MacAdam/Cage, who saw and felt and knew what I was trying to do with this annotated treatment. and let me. and made it better. and gave it to Dorothy-with-the-beautiful-name, to set in type somehow, and Melanie Mitchell, to set on all the shelves, then handed it off to Dave Adams, who made this version of it the master file, the primary version, the holy text, thank you. too, for believing before they even knew about Demon Theory, the original BlueMonkeys, Nick the Noose Campbell, Naked Dan Donche, and long-distance caller Drew McCoy, and all the Velvet droogs, and, like the dedication says, my dad, for sneaking me into Full Metal Jacket once when I was young enough that that part of me stayed in that theater. and Darla, for being there that day when we were both twelve and Demon Theory happened. and, before and after the rest, always, my wife, Nancy. without her sitting on a faded couch with me in a box of a rented living room, watching ten or twelve forty-nine-cent rentals a weekend for most of 1998 and all of 1999, there would be no Demon Theory. she kept me safe. the sun came up for us every morning. I’ll never forget.