Notes on Crucifax
In the mid-1980s, I lived in southern California, and for part of that time, I occupied a dingy little studio apartment in North Hollywood. The San Fernando Valley is a strange place. It's a giant blob of little suburban towns that are difficult to distinguish from one another if you don't notice the signs as you leave one and enter the next. It's a smoggy landscape of strip malls, gas stations, fast food restaurants and donut shops. It gave birth to the "valley girl" phenomenon of the early 1980s and helped create the mall culture that consumed the country during that decade. It's also the porn movie capital of America — when you see people take off their clothes and have sex in a porn video, chances are very good that they're doing it in the San Fernando Valley. It's also close to movie and television studios, so among all that suburban blandness, it's not uncommon to see celebrities shopping or filling their gas tanks. I once stood on the other side of a gas pump from actress Linda Fiorentino, and when shopping at a nearby grocery store, I frequently spotted Star Trek veterans James Doohan and Roger C. Carmel. As enjoyable as that sort of thing is, it's also a bit disorienting.
I'm a walker and would take long walks, sometimes at night, through my neighborhood. I noticed that there were a lot of teenagers hanging around ... well, everywhere. That in itself is not too unusual, but these teenagers were walking the streets when school was in session, in the middle of the night, at all hours. They didn't seem to be doing anything — they would play video games at the 7-Eleven near my apartment, sit around and people watch, walk aimlessly. And they watched me. They didn't just notice me as I passed — they actually seemed to follow me with their eyes, almost suspiciously, as if they were wondering what I was up to. And all the while, of course, I was watching them and wondering what they were up to. It looked almost as if they were waiting for something. I didn't know what, but judging by their morose faces, it couldn't be good. Didn't they have parents who worried about them and wondered where they were? An idea began to form.
After Live Girls, I wanted to write something that did not involve another traditional horror icon like the vampire. I wanted to come up with something of my own. As I watched the teenagers in North Hollywood, it occurred to me that perhaps they really were waiting for something ... but that even they didn't know what it was. So what if something came along and claimed to be what they'd been waiting for? And what if that something did not have their best interests in mind?
Mace — the hipster villain with a three-foot-long tongue — was born and Crucifax began to take shape. While it's set in the '80s, I think it's theme is timeless. What parent isn't horrified by the possibility of losing a child? What parent doesn't wonder, Am I a good parent? Am I screwing this up? Mace is every parent's worst nightmare.