Blobs, Demons, and Dark Stars: Remembering Jack H. Harris

While studying film at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the nineties, I worked at the Video Station, an Alexandrian library of cinema containing nearly 50,000 rental titles. I ran the counter with an extraordinary group of friends that included Derek Cianfrance, who later directed Blue Valentine (2010), and future Criterion Collection senior producer Susan Arosteguy.

The Video Station was our Cinémathèque française, and proprietor Scott Woodland (who owned the business with Ivory Curtis) our Henri Langlois. The shop—which closed last month after thirty-five years—had a VHS copy of Equinox (inexplicably retitled The Beast by Charles Band’s Wizard Video). I practically wore the tape out, and eventually bought it. At the time, I considered writing a magazine article on the movie, but life and my own film projects got in the way.

Fast forward several years, and I’m a programming executive at the Starz cable network, writing and producing documentaries for The Westerns Channel. By that time, I had boxes of Equinox-related articles and memorabilia. Inspired by Peter Bogdanovich’s monographs, I decided to write a book on the film but changed my mind after watching more and more Criterion DVDs. Why pen a monograph when word, image, and recorded interviews could all be captured by a single medium?

I phoned Susan Arosteguy, asking her advice on a DVD company I might approach. I hadn’t given a thought to the possibility of producing the project with Criterion but, as luck would have it, they’d acquired the DVD rights to Equinox along with The Blob. I e-mailed my DVD proposal, and soon I was given the green light to contact Jack H. Harris and Dennis Muren. Both became friends, and were a joy to work with.

Along with Criterion producer Curtis Tsui, Susan and I spent three years on the project, collecting and cataloguing materials, tracking down the original cast and crew from both versions of the film, shooting interviews, and recording audio commentaries in Los Angeles and George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in Northern California. I also wrote the monograph, included as a booklet with the double DVD set.

On July 12, 2006, we premiered the DVD to a packed house at the historic Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Everyone we’d located from both film crews was there, including Jack Harris. Forry Ackerman, who’d published that fateful demon photo years before, was sitting in the front row.

The DVD release seemed to awaken a sleeping stop-motion giant. Equinox has a massive following of fans. One of them is Tom Sullivan, who, a decade after Harris’s release, created the special makeup effects for The Evil Dead (1981), another shoestring “kids vs. demons” flick.

“I had seen Equinox at least twice in drive-ins before making The Evil Dead,” says Sullivan. “I don’t recall having discussed it with [Evil Dead director] Sam Raimi, but the similarities are remarkable. I think they come from the low-budget nature of both films. That is, a few characters, an isolated, inexpensive location, and ambitious special effects. All in all, Equinox did inspire me to continue my goal of making movies. ‘If they can do it . . .’”

In the years following the premiere, I spoke occasionally with Jack, who was always supportive of my career. In 2015, Jack, Dennis, and I launched an extended fiftieth anniversary tour of Muren’s original version of Equinox. My short film Pondwing (2015), inspired by a synchronistic memory of The Empire Strikes Back I had at Skywalker Ranch, would open the screenings.

Last October, Dennis and I took the show to the Cinefamily in West Hollywood. The talented stop-motion artist John Barnett, who built and animated a Dagobahn pterodactyl for Pondwing, flew in from Texas. I’d hoped that Jack could join us for the screening, but his poor health prevented it. Graciously, Jack and his charming wife, Judy, invited John and me to join them for breakfast the next morning at their oceanside home in Malibu. It was a wonderful visit, and the last time that I’d see Jack.

I brought along the Pondwing puppet, which Jack got a kick out of playing with. As he and I clowned around, taking photos, I held the puppet in front of us, creating a forced perspective of the creature flying toward the endless Pacific, framed by the Harrises’ living room window.

In a heartbreaking mishap, the puppet was lost at the airport that afternoon. When I mentioned this in an e-mail to the Harrises a few days later, Judy sent a sweet reply on behalf of Jack and her.

“We’re so sad to hear about the missing puppet,” she wrote. “Maybe he flew away for a vacation in Malibu.”

That’s as good an ending as I can think of. Question mark or not.