"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #4.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Artist Keith Haring prepares Grace Jones's costume and make up on the set of Vamp, 1986.

Movies: "Eh, I'm sure the first-class passengers are fine."

The Netflix copy that appears on the white slip pocket for Crocodile 2: Death Swamp (a.k.a. Crocodile 2: Death Roll for you Brits who, I guess, don't enjoy films with "swamp" in their title) ends with the following comparison: "Think a scaly Jaws."

This comparison isn't totally inapt, though the Jaws they're thinking of is Jaws 3.

C2: DS or R is a unconnected follow-up to Crocodile, the 2000 straight-to-video data point on Tobe Hooper's long downward spiral from legendary horror director to guy-who-makes-stuff-like-Crocodile. The only link between the two films is the presence of the titular reptiles. So, if you thought that all the nagging questions that Crocodile left you with were going to finally receive the answers that viewers demanded, you are going to be sorely disappointed.

Even if you didn't want those answers, don't get smug – you're going to be sorely disappointed too.

C2: DS or R starts off as a heist flick. A group of four bank-robbers roll a small southwestern bank only to have their "carefully planned" heist go all Wild Bunch on them when police arrive at the party early. The robbers blast their way out and – cut – make it to the airport where they board a plane for Mexico. Joining them on this flight are several supporting characters, including two stews (the smart one and the panicky one who, improbably, is afraid of flying), the winner of a trivia bowl contest on his prize trip, the plane's pilot, a nurse, and an ambulance chasing lawyer.

To round out the cast, we are also introduced to the smart stew's fiancée, who is waiting for her in Mexico.

The flight takes off and encounters some nasty weather (weather so bad, in fact, that it actually changes the configuration of the plane they're flying in). The captain is told to turn his crate around and notifies the passengers and crew of this development. This doesn't sit well with our criminals and they seize the plane and force the captain to fly on. Like their bank-robbery plan, this doesn't go so well either. Some gunplay in the cabin dooms the flight and they crash down in a vast and trackless swamp. On impact, the first class cabin actually sheers off the economy-section, which then promptly explodes. (Didn't you always suspect that's what happens when a plane goes down? The cheap seats just blow up and the first class folks get to walk away?) This leaves our tiny cast stranded in the swamp.

Meanwhile, Smartie's fiancée hires a tracker he randomly encounters in a bar to track the missing plane down. He does this instead of going to the authorities because the Mexican government seems profoundly unconcerned about searching for downed airliners. This is, I believe, a sad reality of life south of the boarder. Hundreds of thousands of passenger jets go down in Mexico every year, but the Mexican government's attitude is, "Eh, I'm sure the first-class passengers are fine."

We should pause here because there's a noticeable shift in the flick. The set-up of C2: DS or R is, curiously, a very different flick from what follows. The robbery and botched escape gives Gary Jones the chance to play with some 70s grindhouse-era elements, from the clunky title fonts to the use of split screen. And, to his credit, he uses these retro visuals confidently. In fact, his evocation of the cheapie exploitation aesthetic is, in some ways, more sincere and genuine than the ironic, winking, non-committal efforts of a flick like Grindhouse. The former is genuinely a cheap effort to make something visually appealing, the latter is sort of a Disney version: enough to make you feel you're there without making you suffer through any of the downsides of the real experience. That said, Grindhouse is, of course, better if only because a believable recreation of crap is, for all intents and purposes, crap.

After we've stranded our croc-bait in an environment with suitable waist deep water, the flicks visuals calm down and what we get is a fairly by the numbers body count flick, given a slight spin by the group's robber/hostage dynamic. Shortly after crash down, the group is attacked - and partially devoured - by an outsized croc. The robbers promptly dispatch it and then make the unarmed survivors mule their loot through the swamp. But the robbers never counted on the powerful maternal instincts of the common North American crocodile. On finding her baby dispatched, Momma Croc's heart turns black and only bloodshed will quench her thirst for revenge! This emotional dynamic is common is many large aquatic predators. It is not only common in crocs (Crocodile) but great white sharks as well (Jaws 3).

As Momma Croc begins to pick off the cast one by one, Fiancée and tracker attempt a rescue. But will it be too late to our stranded hostages?

Yeah. For most of them.

Oh. Wait. I meant to leave that a cliffhanger.

Regular readers of ANTSS know that I'll pretty much watch anything with a giant alligator or crocodile in it. Tell me that you've got a flick in which a giant croc lurks in the potted plants of a bowling alley and preys on the wacky regulars of league night - the plot of the Mario Bava 1975 classic Beyond the Crystal Door of the Torture Chamber of Professor Blood Madness, L.L.D., 2: Dark Whispers in the Tomb of the Laughing Tears (a.k.a. Scream, Terry, Scream) – and I'll go along, despite my better judgment. This flick, while pretty much on par with the previous installment in the "series," pushes the limits of even my utterly uncritical indulgence. If you're a normal human with a perfect healthy lack of interest in the revenge fantasies of postpartum mother crocodiles, there's really little of interest for you here.

Book: House of thieves?

Even the most cursory summary of Stephan Graham Jones’s newest novel, Demon Theory, begs the comparison, so let’s just get it out of the way. The links between Demon Theory and the experimental landmark horror novel House of Leaves are both obvious and only superficial. Both revolve around the retelling of fictional films, both play with narrative conventions in an overtly postmodern way, and both books are laced with pop cultural and academic references in the form of asides and footnotes. I bring this up because, upon reading the jacket cover summary, I think anybody who has read House of Leaves (which Jones acknowledges as an influence in the back of the book) is immediately going into the book with preconceived notions about what they’re getting into. And, unfairly, this works against Jones’s novel. Despite the similarities, Demon Theory is very different beast.

Demon Theory, the novel, is written as a collection of three “film treatments,” the larval stage of a screenplay. It presents the story of a trilogy of horror movies surrounding a cursed family and a horde of bat-like demonic entities. The first film, a pseudo-slasher flick, takes place in an isolated country house during Halloween night. A young medical student, who needs to bring insulin to his mentally disorganized diabetic mother, convinces his friends to join him on his errand. As such errands seem to do, this one goes horribly wrong and the gang ends up trapped in the house and facing down a masked killer with dark connections to the family’s past. The sequel involves a series of possessions in a local hospital. Several of the original cast (some of whom actually didn’t make it out of the first flick) race against time in order to stop a full-on demonic invasion. The third, and strangest of the three films, follows our cast back to the old country house of the first film. Again, strangely, several of the characters are inexplicably back to help face down the secrets of the old house and end their demonic troubles forever.

Jones rolls through these three sections like a big freakin’ truck. His plots don’t advance so much as they montage forward in leaps and bounds. The gore is there, but, mainly due to the treatment-style language he employs, it is merely stated and moved over. Jones doesn’t leave himself time to linger over the details of the carnage. His characters start as the stock characters familiar to fans of the slasher genre, but ultimately gain an uncanny, but very uneven, depth as they must confront the rising levels of surreality in their lives, becomes less stereotypical as Jones’s plot becomes more atypical.

Unlike the chopped-up, concrete-poetry style of House of Leaves, Demon Theory is written in a clipped, propulsive, minimalist “filmese.” The language is spare, littered with film production jargon (POV, f.g.), and vigorous. It drives the action along, dragging the reader somewhat breathlessly through scenes. The idea, one assumes, is that, in a film treatment, where the writer doesn’t have control over the visuals anyway, one favors plotting and dialogue. Here, instead of describing an action, setting, or detail, Jones might just drop a film reference in its place. For example, when describing a demon nesting site, Jones evokes the queen alien’s lair for the Aliens franchise and pretty much leaves it at that. This is probably the biggest make or break point in the book. Readers will either adapt to the distinct rhythms and limitations of this approach, rolling along with the book’s often breakneck pacing, or they’ll find the writing thin, clunky, and lazy. You’ll either find it a “literate film treatment” or a “film treatment-like novel.” I suspect that those with the former point of view will feel the book is a greater success than those who adopt the latter. Personally, I alternated between the two extremes. Often, especially during the action scenes, found myself tearing along with the book. Though, in other places, it becomes a bother that you don’t really know what the characters or setting look like.

This occasional frustration with Jones style was sometimes amplified when Jones would congratulate himself on a particular image or detail, actually inserting self-praise like “nice effect” into the prose after one of his few descriptive passages. It is never clear if this grating effect is meant to be taken on some meta- level. Perhaps, were meant to think that this is not how Jones writes, but how a Jones who was selling film treatments to Hollywood would write. Either way, in the end, it doesn’t matter. Whether intentionally or unintentionally grating, either you can go along with it or you can’t, questions of intentionality won’t save it or damn it. In fact, the question of just which Jones – the near hack or the clever postmodernist imitating a near hack – is paradigmatic of the whole book. Sometimes the plot comes off as a bit hokey, but is that because his plot is hokey or because the plots of so many of the films he’s paying homage to are a bit hokey. The strained dialogue: awkward writing or expertly imitated awkward writing? One could take the occasionally pointless footnotes as either the work of a Hollywood treatment writer trying to show he’s made an important work or as Jones trying to make light fun of the post-David Foster Wallace hip-lit crowds love of foot- and endnotes.

The real question is: Does it matter? If you have to read awkward and unrealistic dialogue (and it is awkward precisely because it is so polished and “crisp,” to use the Hollywood term – Jones’s characters talk in the overly allusive jabber of Kevin Williamson characters) for some three hundred pages, does it make a difference if you’re in on the joke?

If the answer is yes, then Demon Theory is written for you. Its curious plot and knowing genre mischief make for light, but witty entertainment. If your answer is no and you enjoy your horror with more straight-up kicks than po-mo tricks, I suggest looking elsewhere.

Demon Theory was published last April by MacAdam/Cage and will cost you 24 smackers, US, in hardback. I don’t believe it is available in paperback yet.