"The Word Processor of the Gods"

Original Airdate: November 25, 1984

Directed by Michael Gornick.

Written by Michael McDowell, Based on the story “The Word Processor of the Gods” by Stephen King.

Starring Bruce Davison (Richard Hagstrom), Karen Shallo (Lina Hagstrom), Patrick Piccininni (Seth Hagstrom), William Cain (Tom Nordhoff), Jon Shear (Jonathan), Miranda Beeson (Belinda).

SYNOPSIS: Richard has just received a homemade word processor from his recently deceased nephew Jonathan, the victim of a car accident that also claimed the lives of his mother Belinda and drunkard father. Richard’s wife Lina derides him for his writerly ambitions, and his punk son Seth is too busy wailing on his guitar to pay him any mind. Not the best life, but Richard finds that the machine is here to fix that with whatever command he types on the keyboard.

CRITIQUE: Is there some unwritten rule that stipulates that all ambitious writers must be wed to total jerks? Richard’s wife has a complete lack of faith in her husband’s talents—even though he has published a novel—and sees the whole pursuit as a waste of time. It’s true that the vocation can be a very unfulfilling one, but I can’t help but notice that in almost all of the stories of this type the spouse of the struggling scribe must be the kind of “you’ll-never-really-amount-to-anything” bully that invariably sets up our protagonist for a “Well I’ll show them!” comeback.

For some inexplicable reason, Mr. Nordhoff remembers he left bacon on the stove. 

The cliché is given a further dollop of tired tropes by having Lina be an overweight, shrewish wife who guzzles soda and donuts in between emasculating her sweater-vested hubby and letting the house go to a messy hell of dirty dishes and garbage. Oh, and she plays Bingo. So now the stereotype is officially complete. This is all perfectly serviceable for the story—this is not one of King’s more powerful tales, working more in the simplistic E.C. vein that some of his early work did—but sometimes I just wish someone could turn everything around and maybe show the wife supporting her husband’s goals but growing steadily weary of the financial strain. Something that would show she actually did love him but also had her own personal limits. But I digress.

This is another in a long line of wish-fulfillment stories that the series will present to us, but this is a rare case where our hero doesn’t come to regret his desires and actually gets what he wants, probably because he wears glasses. Poor vision is usually a solid “Get Out of Eternal Judgment” card. An intriguing spin occurs when we discover that Richard had loved the late Belinda and had felt a fatherly kinship with whiz kid nephew Jonathan. It adds some perspective to Richard’s desire and makes his plight more sympathetic to us: he only wanted what was in his reach, but he could never have it.

The episode also realizes one of man’s deepest inherent wishes, to be able to write the book of our lives and dictate an upturn in our fortunes by the mere click of a key or rub of a magic lamp. The rest of the segment operates under the same trajectory of events that we have come to expect from this type of drama: Richard gradually realizes the power of his enchanted totem, here represented by the “Execute” and “Delete” buttons on the keyboard, first experimenting on some random object (a framed picture of his wife) before making a legitimate wish to further glean its power (first for twelve Spanish gold doubloons and then for his son's disppearance) only to hurriedly issue a final plea to restore order as everything goes up in smoke. If you’ve read “The Monkey’s Paw,” you’ve seen this before.

There’s a touch of W. W. Jacobs in a bit where Richard answers the door after he’s zapped Seth into the ether to find a weeping Lina in funeral garb, her running mascara giving her the look of a revenant as she stumbles forward and accuses Richard of killing their son. This is just a fake-out, a nervous vision inspired by Richard’s guilt, but it does distract for a little while with its expressionistic blue lighting that recalls the vibrant hues of CREEPSHOW (1982). The lead-up to Seth’s deletion is also reminiscent of THE BODY SNATCHER (1945) when we hear the guitar’s shrieking cut off after the duct tape-bound machine has carried out its function.

Rock all day. Every day.

McDowell’s adaptation of the material carries over King's tone and content so completely that it almost appears that Gornick simply filmed the story, adding a few small filmic touches that allow it to play out a little better for the aural/visual medium. The faithfulness to King is both for better and worse as some of the author's hinky dialogue gets carried over; at the conclusion Richard asks the revived Jonathan to "delete [the word processor] from our lives." The episode takes the overly-sweet final note of the boys indulging in a cup of hot cocoa like a real family and gives it some emotional resonance with the heavenly image of the radiant Belinda waiting for them, silent but smiling. It’s enough to make you forget the formulaic journey it took for us to get here and ask “Wouldn’t it be nice?”

"The Word Processor of the Gods" originally appeared in the January 1983 issue of Playboy, the magazine for shrimpy writers with fat wives fantasizing of better lives (and hotter women) everywhere. Pair with a cold Budweiser for optimium satisfaction.

“It’s always the wrong people who die, Mr. Hagstrom.”

***

Rating: 2 1/2 Lizzies

Coming Up: Christian Slater finds his grandpappy is restless in peace in "A Case of the Stubborns."

"Inside the Closet"

Original Airdate: November 21, 1984

Directed by Tom Savini.

Written by Michael McDowell.

Starring Fritz Weaver (Dr. Fenner), Roberta Weiss (Gail Aynsley).

SYNOPSIS: With exams coming up and a shortage of available room and board, student Gail Aynsley resorts to renting out a humble space from veterinarian Dr. Fenner. He’s a bit of a stiff, and the small closet in the bedroom that always remains locked can’t help but pique the girl’s interest. Far less interesting and more terrifying are the weird scratching noises she hears in the dead of night and the unshakable feeling that something is lurking within the walls of the old house.

CRITIQUE: We can sit here all day and talk about the intelligent commentaries that some of these episodes bring up, but nothing quite stays with you like a nice, solid punch to the gut. We always remember the things that have some kind of emotional attachment to them, whether it be love or sadness or joy. Our minds may crave cerebral caviar, but our guts cry out for the greasy shock and the instant satisfaction it brings. With horror though, that satisfaction is more than likely to come in the form of a cold weight in the pit of the stomach than any sense of warm contentment.  

“Inside the Closet” remains so memorable to fans of the show because it fulfills this hunger. It can be enjoyed without paying any mind to subtext or metaphor or whatever other academic term you want to throw in there but that is not to suggest that it is lacking in any of these areas; we’ll get to that in a minute. The episode functions primarily as a ghost story, a campfire tale, a shudder yarn. Its design is to prey upon our terrors of the dark and the unknown and make us feel uneasy for a little while. When the question of just what is inside the closet is revealed by the shaking beam of a flashlight, all that’s missing is a big, loud “BOO.”

Roberta, I love you even with the eyebrows. Hell, I love you because of the eyebrows.

This entry marks the first script by author Michael McDowell (of such emblematic 80s paperbacks as THE AMULET, COLD MOON OVER BABYLON, and the BLACKWATER series), who would go on to become the most prolific screenwriter for the series with many memorable titles to his credit. Here he plays on that oft-feared mainstay of childhood, the Thing in the Closet. Simple in concept, but oh-so-powerful in execution. All we need be told is that there is a door that is never--under any circumstances--to be opened or even can be opened; the sight of that door yawning wide, the inner darkness full of horrible implication, does the rest.

Tom Savini, renowned for his makeup effects for such genre efforts as DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) and MANIAC (1980), takes his first stab at directing and shows that he has a steady hand and keen eye for imagery. He frames the characters in some modestly innovative ways that subtly add to the tension between Gail and Fenner, such as when the doctor speaks directly to the camera, the lens slowly dipping down and angling up to give us the impression that we’re looking up at the domineering medico or the slow pan away from Gail as she desperately tries to explain her apprehension, moving further back from her as Fenner derisively shoots her theories down, isolating her.

The episode is really a small masterpiece of camerawork, not even mentioning the suspenseful POV shots that we get as the closet creature scampers across the bedroom and ducks under the bed. This leads to another moment of repressed kinder-horror: the thought that the beastie under the bed will grab you by the foot if you’re foolish enough to dangle it over the edge like a tasty bit of bait. Gail misses out on realizing this phobia, but only just. There’s another nice touch when we see slides of Bosch’s paintings of Hell that Gail is viewing. The snap of one of her mouse traps sounding off in the closet gives her pause and her panting shadow is cast over the two-dimensional tortures. She knows she’s about to come face-to-face with her own denizen of the inferno.

One of the smaller details that I enjoyed and was only able to glean after several viewings was the décor of Fenner’s house. His main foyer and living room are bedecked with stuffed animal heads and skulls, their gleaming ivory fangs pointing us to the eventual reveal of that which slumbers in the crawlspace of the house. McDowell ends the story on a sardonic note that brings it all back to his original premise: as kids we were scared of the closet, but did we ever think that what was inside was another child all along? For the albino, scarlet-eyed biter that snatches Gail away for private playtime is none other than Fenner’s own daughter, the monstrous offspring of his late wife. When we see her cuddle up on her daddy’s leg, it seems like it’s meant to be comforting in an “Aww, the monster wasn’t so bad all along” way. But it’s not. It’s actually very perverse. I’d like to think that McDowell knew that.

This was another aspect of “Inside the Closet” that caught my attention on the last viewing. Fenner describes his wife’s passing from malignant cancer, detailing the futile operations that she underwent in the process. Are we to assume that Lizzie—as the lovely creature is so-called outside the narrative of the actual episode—was mutated as a result of her mother’s tumor-riddled body? And just when was Lizzie born anyway? Could it have been through a post-mortem Caesarian? And is it an accident that Fenner is, of all things, a veterinarian?

It may be a bit of stretch to assume that the doctor had some kind of animalistic coupling, but that’s what I love about McDowell’s story. The questions are still there. We turn them over in our heads as we lie in bed, trying to tell ourselves that the open closet across the room is really nothing to be afraid of.

“There are no rats in this house.” 

***

Rating: 4 Lizzies (But she's biased)

Coming Up: Bruce Davison is looking for happiness in all the write places in "The Word Processor of the Gods."