OUR STORY

Stan Winston's dog puppet from Carpenter's The Thing.

 Dan and I grew up a thousand miles (and a decade) apart. But we were both making monster movies in the woods. Mine in Alabama. His, here in New Jersey. We were inspired by the same flicks. The creature features of the day. Gremlins and The Dark Crystal. E.T., Critters, and later: The Thing, The Howling, Pumpkinhead, The Fly.  Even bad films like Legend. I remember being impressed by those black yak horns and the color of Tim Curry's skin, The Lord of Darkness, that particular shade of red, like the blood of a buck that's been shot in the liver. 

Rob Bottin's Lord of Darkness makeup; Tim Curry in Legend.

I remember the horses. How Mom knew her breeds and said they used a Spanish stallion in the unicorn scenes. How she pointed out the Arabians, Morgans, and Fresians in Excalibur. I lived on a ranch and could ride, which felt like good value in a Super 8 movie. I remember how our lake would almost dry up in October. All twisted root and cypress knees. Waves of bog grass that rolled in the wind. A wretched stretch of land that reminded me of the Swamp of Sadness. I remember riding a black pacer named Midnight across it. Wearing a flapping army poncho my stepdad used for duck hunting. More gray than green. Crocodile, mom called the color, not Olive. Hood up, Fiend Skull mask. I remember the suck of the mud at the horse's high-stepping gait, Midnight's Big Lick.

Me on Midnight, sans costume.

Dan was obsessed with Romero and zombies. The visceral effects and over-the-top gore. The humor and social commentary. The breakdown of civility and the return to more primitive behaviors.

Dan and Eric striking their best Beef Treats pose.

We had different ways of seeing them. Me, in a movie theater an hour away and across the state line; Dan, renting them on chunky VHS tapes at a local video store. We each had a crony, Dan and I, a pal that emboldened our pursuits. Someone who had our back, held the camera. Someone who made the undertaking, however insane, seem feasible. 

 

Dan and me, Lucille's Luncheonette, Barnegat.

Today that crony, that chum, that brother is one another. Those childhood projects are still our guiding light, those movies in the woods, those shows in the barn, those ridiculous Halloweens when we totally went overboard. We're hairier now. And the projects are more lavish. But the wonder and excitement, the magic is the same. 

 

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Dan backstage with Carlyle, who played Orlock.

Dan and I first met fifteen years ago when we teamed up on a stage production of Nosferatu. It somehow caught the attention of Tom Holland, who had directed Fright Night, my favorite vampire film. We met him in Manhattan for lunch. He was enthusiastic. He agreed to come on as a presenting producer. Fright Night stars William Ragsdale and Stephen Geoffreys agreed to come aboard, too. The plan was to produce it in LA, where they all lived, then move it to NYC. The project looked good. Felt real. Dan quit his day job. Something in Manhattan that made him money. And moved to California to meet with people and lay the groundwork. 

Carlyle Owens as Nosferatu, makeup by Dan.

It all fizzled out (through no fault of Tom's), as these things invariably do, but Dan stayed out there, building a pretty good career as a prop fabricator, working on mostly Marvel movies, like Guardians of the Galaxy; he built the battered Iron Man helmet in Avengers Endgame. We talked a lot on the phone. We saw each other at Christmas. Fast forward seven years. Dan moves back to get married. He asks me to officiate. I get certified as a civil celebrant, and he and Sara get married in the Catskills. On Friday the 13th. On top of a mountain under a full harvest moon. 

Wedding party zombie walk, Catskills.

Within weeks we were collaborating on a backyard haunt called Catch the Devil, about a hunter/collector who has tracked the Jersey Devil to a very particular patch of pineland. Dan built a twelve foot rod puppet. It rained. Still. A hundred folks lined up in front of my house. We set up canopies for them to wait under. They were escorted through my backyard in groups of fifteen. There was a witch and a banjo player and a side show couple called the Painproof Pineys, who hammered nails up their noses and clapped rat traps on their tongues.. It ended with a sprung bear trap and the Devil rising in fog and red light. 

 Jersey Devil puppet, backyard haunt.

 

We worked on a half a dozen other projects. A socially distant pandemic haunt, a sort of Halloween version of the Macy’s Christmas window display. Funded by my town. Full-size tableaus presented in the windows of shops that had been shuttered because of the pandemic. Depicting a town swallowed by a rising river (and the vampire mermen that rise with it). All under lit by blue and red lights, with QR codes that brought you to supplementary online content (pictorial, textual, video, audio).

The county hired us to do theatrical haunts in a historic village. An immersive show that mixed horror with history. History with bite. The first one, The Wolf of Washington Forge, was George Washington and werewolves. (“If men with mustaches make history, what do men completely covered in hair do?) The second one, The Thing at Raritan Landing, was time travel and Puritans. Sort of The Terminator meets The Crucible. (“First contact. Last stand. The future is history.”) 16 performances, starting at a bonfire and moving through the village to a church, a wagon barn, a blacksmith shop. It was a ton of fun, and The Devil and Daisy Dirt, rose, in part, from this desire to do something like this year round, not just the three weeks leading into Halloween.

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Lucille's Luncheonette.

Six years ago, on the way back from Ripley's, my family was hungry. It was 1 PM. My wife Googled places for lunch. We were near Barnegat. She found Lucille's Lucheonette. The reviews raved about Mama's meatloaf. There was an eight foot chainsaw carving of the Jersey Devil out front. It had horse hooves and deer antlers. It's wings were red and membraned like a bat's. Leathery looking despite being wood. A sticker on the door said "I'm a Piney From My Nose to My Hiney." It was a tiny place. A bar counter. A handful of tables. The waitress was wearing a shirt that said "I Ate with the Jersey Devil." I bought one for my son. There was a framed article on the wall. Anthony Bourdain had featured Lucille's in an episode of Parts Unknown. “Oh enchanted land of my childhood,” he said as the episode opened. He grew up in Leonia. The owner came out from the kitchen. "This used to be a one, big turkey freezer," she said. "My parents bought it in 1975." She pointed to a picture of her Mom. "Lucille Bates Wickward." Then to an orange 3/4 hanging from its chin strap. "That's my Dad's motorcycle helmet." The place fired my imagination. That week I wrote a story called I Ate the Devil, about an eating contest with a peculiar prize. At a luncheonette in the Pines. 

The real-life Lucille's, an inspiration for The Devil & Daisy Dirt.

Fast forward to now. I was down in Southhampton checking out the PPA barn where we're doing a mini-run of DDD in two weeks.  I was with my bud Will. We had lunch at Lucille's. I hadn't been there since that first time. I told them about the show. How it's largely set in and around a luncheonette called Lucille's. "I read about you guys," said the waitress.  I showed her a picture of Dan's Devil. "Wow," she said, waving over the other women. I got the meatloaf again. "Our specialty," the waitress said. It was weird being there. A place I'd  been only once before, but which had lived rent-free in my brain for over half a decade. While we waited for our food, Will talked how he'd felt the same way about The Devil Tree. "You know the Devil Tree?" I shook my head. He said it inspired his podcast Blackwood, but he didn't actually visit it until well after Blackwood was done. "The same kind of weird," he said. The waitress heard us talking. She came over with a coffee table book. The flame colored letters of Weird NJ on the cover.  She set it down with a whump. Split it wide. "That," she said "is the Devil Tree." She pointed to an ominous monochrome photo of a solitary oak with dead limbs in an empty field. "I've been to most of these places," she said. "Gates of Hell, Snake Hill, Gravity Road." She asked if I wanted any pie. "I'm good," I said. 

The ladies of Lucille's.

She dropped off the check. She talked about the rusted mast of the Sea King and how the second floor hallway of Elizabeth Edwards Elementary always smelled like chocolate. I asked her to record a video. "What do I say?" she asked. "I'm not an actress."  But she was great. "Go see The Devil and Daisy Dirt," she said, "then come to Lucille's for some pie." I bought a coffee mug for Devil Dan.

 

FAQ's (Questions Aaron Lupton of Rue Morgue; answers Alex Dawson):

 1. So the central cryptid is the NJ Devil…to the uninitiated…why bluegrass music?

New Jersey, specifically the Pine Barrens, has a rich heritage of folk music, Americana, and bluegrass. In the late forties, the “Piney Pickers,” as they were known, used to meet at a hunting cabin with no running water or electricity, dubbed the "Home Place,” every Saturday night, hosted by fiddlers (and cabin owners) Joe and George Albert. That turned into Albert Hall, a 350 seat theater, which since 1974, has hosted weekly Bluegrass, Country, Folk, Americana concerts and Pickin' Shed jams in the piney woods of Waretown.

Here’s something from the October ‘84 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited that might be helpful; the article is by one Joe Fili:

“A traveling businessman from Maryland once told me that whenever he thought of New Jersey all he could remember were power lines. After further discussion, I discovered that this was because he had never really gotten off the New Jersey Turnpike, and was satisfied to conceive of the entire state as a tangled web of wires and roads. Jerseyites are victims of this type of generalization all the time and their reactions are varied. Some shrug it off, others become offended. Most of us however find it all a bit amusing. Consider for example that we have the largest single wilderness area east of the Mississippi, the famed Pine Barrens, replete with moonshiners, monsters (the Jersey Devil), volumes of early American history and some of the finest country people imaginable. New Jersey today remains one of the few states in the Union with enough arable farmland to feed nearly all of its own population in the event of a serious economic collapse. We have mountains, coastal plains, rich central farmlands and beaches of unspeakable beauty and majesty. The early settlers of New Jersey, like their counterparts south of the Mason-Dixon line, brought with them a rich and enduring musical heritage from the Old World. As string music and country music evolved in America, Jersey lost no ground in forming and nurturing a folk music tradition of its own. Like the reclusive inhabitants of the hollers and hills down south, pickers in the mountains and Pine Barrens of New Jersey fiddled and picked their music for years and for years it remained quite guarded and provincial. The love for Bluegrass and Old-Time music which many Jerseyites have is not new. It has risen out of an authentic and vibrant folk tradition much like that of Appalachia.”

2. I understand there was a bit of a continuum from you growing up in Alabama to moving to the Pine Barrens which influenced this show?

I don’t live in the Pine Barrens. I live in Highland Park, across the bridge from Rutgers. But, yes, most of my writing, the tone, the voice, stems from my childhood in Alabama.  Bruce Springsteen has said that he uses his father’s working class life and voice in his songs. I use my stepdad’s, a rancher who owned a  thousand coniferous acres on the border of Alabama and Georgia. But it’s not a “Southern” voice, it’s a rural voice.  As I say below, when you get deep enough in the woods, it sounds, smells, and looks the same. The hiss of the wind in the needles, the quonk of the tree frog, the sharp resinous scent, the scabby blood brown plates that flake off like puzzle pieces.

I grew up in a converted trappers shack. Big barn, lots of land, small house. Two wood-burning stoves. No insulation. You could see daylight between the pine planks. In the winter we used to stuff the cracks with cotton and seal them with packing tape. 

I made movies in my backyard ("backyard" meaning, again, almost a thousand acres of feral swampland and piney woods). Being “a rancher’s boy,” I could ride, which felt like good value in a Super 8 film. I remember how our lake would almost dry up in October. All twisted roots and cypress knees. Waves of bog grass that rolled in the wind. A wretched stretch of land that reminded me of the Swamp of Sadness. I remember riding a black pacer named Midnight across it. Wearing a flapping army poncho my stepdad used for duck hunting. Hood up over a grinning skull mask. While my buddy worked the camera. I was inspired by the creature features of the day. Gremlins and The Dark Crystal.  E.T., Critters, and later: The Thing, The Howling, Pumpkinhead, The Fly.  Even bad films like Legend. I remember being impressed by those black yak horns and the color of Tim Curry's skin, The Lord of Darkness, that particular shade of red, like the blood of a buck that's been shot in the liver. I remember how Mom, who knew her breeds, said they used a Spanish stallion in the unicorn scenes. How she pointed out the Arabians, Morgans, and Fresians in Excalibur. 

This all mixed with my stepdad's love of outlaw country. Waylon and Willie. Paycheck and Cash. How he would sit out by the lake at night with that shoebox recorder, spray-painted with green and black splotches because he used to take into the woods to play turkey calls on account of how he couldn't work a cedar box.  I remember the woven webbing of his folding chair. How the legs canted and sank until he found a patch of hard ground. Or the chairs on the deck that ended in tennis balls so the legs didn’t drop between the slats. How he hung his beer bottle off his finger in between sips and sang along to “Pancho & Lefty.” A few years later, my stepfather got a new tape player and I got his old one, along with a handful of cassettes, loose in a boot box. I'd sit there picking turkey down from the cracks around the deck and buttons. Or laying on my back in the loft, up on my elbows every so often to sip my bottle of Big Red, cream soda the color of blood. Listening to Billy Dee until it was time to hay the horses and kibble our two dozen bird dogs.So, 80s creature features. My stepdad's redneck rock. And my mother's assertion that there were witches in the woods, heads dripping with what she called tree hair or beard moss, gray and wispy. That crooked pines were haunted. And that there were old things, forgotten things, covered up in kudzu. A whole world out there, she said, swallowed by weed. I wasn't sure if she really believed in these things or if she was just trying to make the hot, slow world of rural Alabama a little more interesting. (Though she read cards, too, and rolled bones and said she had second sight. )


3. Can you give us a bit of a snapshot of the classes you teach at Rutgers on horror and folklore and what from these have fed into The Devil and Daisy Dirt?

I teach two classes, informally called Wonder 101 and Worry 101. Both edge towards the dark fantastic.  The first is largely rooted in fantasy, the second, an audio storytelling class,  is largely rooted in horror and suspense, in worry. I use elements of audio drama in The Devil and Daisy Dirt, including narration and live Foley effects. We talk a lot about "music" in my classes. Sonic bounce. Versus the mute presence of words on a page. Even for stories whose ultimate form is the printed not the spoken word. And the words of DDD bounce around like bop jazz. Also, grounding the fantastical with real world particulars. For instance, if I’m writing a story about, say, werewolves, I’ll try to get the reader to believe in a man cleaning his gun with a Q-tip and some rifle grease before I ever introduce the wolf. 

4. Who designed the Pine Barrens ET creature and what can you tell us about that process, did you have feedback into it?

Dan Diana. He’s one of my closest friends. See above. He’s also my sounding board. And a co-producer of the show. There’s a pretty explicit breakdown of the build on our web site under “Fabrication.”  At one point, we started calling it Gossamer, because of how much it started to resemble the big red furry monster in Bugs Bunny (see “Fabrication” page). Dan was very inspired by Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who played Big Bird. Dan would check in with me from time to time. My biggest influence on him was the idea that he could be visible, that seeing the puppeteer wouldn’t detract from the magic of the puppet. His background is in film fabrication and effects, so I think he initially thought that he had to be completely concealed at all times. I remember taking my son to see King Kong on Broadway. The puppet was, of course, absolutely amazing, twenty feet tall, with a dozen puppeteers, dressed in black, but frequently visible, who climbed and swung across it like ninjas. I pointed him to the polar bears in a the Royal National Theater staging of His Dark Materials in London. He Googled the tiger in Life of Pi.

5. I understand there are some modern feminist tones to the narrative. Can you comment on those at all ?

There are couple of messages/themes:

In The Devil & Daisy Dirt, the Jersey Devil is mythical not monstrous, a wounded creature we feel for. Dan and I are monster kids from way back, and we always feel compassion for them.  King Kong, the Frankenstein monster, sure. The Gill-man, the Wolfman, yes. But also Seth Brundle in The Fly. The alien in the Thing. The Rancor. In DDD, like in so many creature features, the “monsters” are the men. "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here," says Shakespeare. Meaning, of course, that the source of suffering and torment is not supernatural, but rather the inherent capacity for wickedness within humanity, within men.

The Jersey Devil is a cryptid. And cryptids are deeply connected to the landscape, symbols of the natural world. This makes me happy. This idea that not every inch of our planet has been zoned for a Walmart. That the earth still holds secrets, wonder and surprise.

And, yes, there is message of female empowerment, the dismantling of patriarchal structures, ending with the idea that Daisy might just take control of her life and achieve her full potential. See answer #8 (Daisy’s Song).
 

6. What can you tell me about the music in the show by Arlan Feiles? How closely did you work with him on the songwriting and storytelling? It obviously goes well beyond bluegrass into almost experimental, soundscape territory.

Arlan plays the Balladeer, and the story bounces back0and-forth between me, the Narrator (I also play a number of characters, namely, Tasty Murder, a villianous and voracious deer hunter) and him. We flank the stage, with Daisy and the Devil performing a sort of fever dream of action in between.

Arlan is an old friend, too. He composed all the music. He wrote the lyrics to the intro song “The Devil’s Diner,” the outro song “The Devil and Daisy Dirt,” and a song in the middle, “The Devil’s Meat”; songs that occupy the same world as the show, and loosely reference the characters, but don’t propel the story forward. 

I wrote the lyrics to the dozen or so “narrative” songs throughout, as well as Daisy’s duet with the Balladeer at the end of the show. 

Arlan also plays an original soundscape of picking and slide under a lot of the scenes. He uses 1930 Gibson TG-O0 tenor guitar with a glass slide.


7. What kind of audiences are coming out to the barn performances?

A real mix. Young, old. Green hair. Overalls. Certainly tons of folks from the area, but also people who drove hours (I kid you not, hours) for one of our performances. And, sure, I like when folks say "lyrical," "moving," "strange," "brilliant," when they call the music "haunting," and the puppet "gasp-inducing," when they cheer during Daisy's duet and stand to clap at the end of the show. But what I really love is when a local says, "man, you got it right" or "where here do you live?" I had someone come up to me at the PPA (Pinelands Preservation Alliance) barn show: "I grew up in the Pinelands," he said, "and I've studied it, the flora, the fauna, the history, the lore, and shit, dude, you nailed it." Again, I was raised on a horse ranch in Alabama not New Jersey. But when you get deep enough in the woods, the shadows look the same. 

8. With so many different performance locations so far, what has been your favorite, and which provided the best atmosphere ?

We pick spots because of their atmosphere, so they’ve all had something, added something. As I said, a sort of small-time vaudeville circuit: barns, breweries, bars, clapboard churches. We operate like a band, mobile and lean. Probably those four sold-out shows in that big dairy barn in the Pine Barrens (though Kirkpatrick Chapel on Rutgers Campus, with it’s sixty foot ceilings and blood red walls was pretty amazing, too; the show is under lit by blue, red, and yellow lights, and looking at some of the photographs from that show, seeing the devil’s antlered shadow writ large, I’m talking thirty feet tall, on the cathedral wall behind us, was pretty incredible). We have a bunch of cool venues coming up. We have a show in two weeks at Vampa, a vampire museum housed in the lower level of a huge sill barn on a sprawling estate outside of Doylestown. And we're doing four shows at a barrel factory in Whitesbog Village, a ghost town in the Pine Barrens surrounded by blueberry bogs. Oh, and a couple of shows at PhilaMOCA, an event space in Philly that was once a showroom for mausoleums. We're looking forward to all of them.