Biggerboat | The Geeks Shall Inherit

Ten years ago, The Lord of the Rings was a cult novel and Star Wars was a popular film with a devoted but relatively marginal group of fans. The rise of the Internet has changed all that, and made fandom a force to be reckoned with.
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by Jason Clarke

I was one of those lucky children whose parents read to them almost every night, at least until I was ten or so. One of my favorites was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. For some reason, it wasn't until my sophomore year of high school that my father, a longtime Tolkien fan, decided to inform me that there was a sequel entitled The Lord of the Rings. Up to that point, my tastes had run toward science fiction, not fantasy (and fairly weak science fiction at that - I'd read dozens of Star Trek novels, but no Herbert, Heinlein, Asimov or Bradbury). LR changed all that. Between the novel and the card game Magic: The Gathering,¹ I was well on my way to being the fantasy fan I am today.

But a lot has changed since I first read LR eight years ago. It's unlikely that any child today under the age of five could be unaware of the existence of something called The Lord of the Rings - with the release of the movie, it's everywhere. From posters to toys to Burger King cups to innumerable different versions of the novel itself, it has been practically impossible to go anywhere in the last year and avoid seeing something related to the late Professor's works. Gandalf on light-up drinking cups...what's next? Childe Roland Underoos? Beowulf comicbooks? (oh wait, those exist...) As for Star Wars - while the SW films have always enjoyed fairly high visibility, since the advent of the prequels it is not possible to escape the implacable juggernaut that is Mr. Lucas's personal empire.

But I have chosen two very obvious examples of so-called "cult" works bursting into massive popularity. It is arguable that even before the recent films, both LR and SW enjoyed a greater-than-cult status. So instead, I submit to you the Evil Dead films. Again, this is an instance in which I made a pleasant, personal discovery that later became more popular than I might ever have imagined.

There are three Evil Dead films: The Evil Dead (the scary one), Evil Dead II (the funny one), and Army of Darkness (the action-adventure one). All three films star Bruce Campbell, a man who is familiar with the phrase "cult following." The first film, released in 1982, was one of those low-budget drive-in flicks that sometimes become runaway hits ( it the Blair Witch Project of its time). The sequel, in released in 1987, did well enough to merit production of the third film, Army of Darkness (1993), which bombed.

I first saw Evil Dead II in high school. I was immediately taken with it - and that's putting it lightly. Obsessed would be a better word. I wanted them all on tape, but couldn't find them anywhere. With the exception of Army of Darkness, in 1996 these films were not in circulation on VHS. My parents finally tracked down two used copies from a video store in Canada for Christmas. I did find a thriving Evil Dead fan community on the Internet, including the website that would eventually become the premier Evil Dead fansite, Deadites Online. There was even an excellent modification of the game Doom, based on Army of Darkness.

But soon after I had discovered these cult films, something began to happen. Within a few years, both the The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II were available, new, on tape. But that's not all - by 1999, they were available on DVD, too. In special, THX-approved editions, with director's commentary as well as commentary by Campbell. In 2000, due to intense pressure from fans, McFarlane Toys released an action figure of Ash, the main character from the films, as part of their "Movie Maniacs" line. It was the best-selling figure of the line. Since then, McFarlane has released three more figures based on Army of Darkness (AOD), including an 18" figure of Ash. Soon Sideshow Toys, another toy company, will release 12" figures of Ash and his evil twin, also from AOD, complete with fabric clothing. A book about the making of the films, The Evil Dead Companion, was released in 2000. Campbell wrote a memoir, Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, which sat high on the NY Times Bestseller list for all of summer 2001. A videogame, Evil Dead: Hail to the King, also came out in 2001. Perhaps most shocking of all, after numerous claims that there would never be an Evil Dead 4, director Sam (Spider-Man) Raimi recently hinted that he might very well team-up with Campbell one last time.

What can possibly account for this astounding rise in popularity (and profitability) for a trilogy of modestly successful, relatively obscure horror films? I think it's the same thing that has given us a quality film based on The Lord of the Rings as well as, quite possible, the Star Wars prequels. That thing is the Internet.

It's a cliché to say that pornography was one of the driving forces in the rapid spread of the Internet in the 1990s. While I won't deny this claim, I propose that a confluent force was that of fandom. One of my earliest Internet experiences was joining a bulletin board devoted to the '80s toy line The Transformers back in 1992, when my family got the Prodigy service. I made numerous friends on that board and I still communicate with some of them to this day. To a young teenager still a year away from getting a real social life, the Prodigy bulletin boards offered a place where I could make friends and have (relatively) intelligent conversations about things such as transforming toys, which my other friends had little or no interest in.

When the Internet exploded, fans were right behind it. Newsgroups had already existed for years, many dedicated to particular television shows or movies. One television show that benefitted directly from the early years of the Internet was The X-Files; this was one of the first shows where word-of-mouth spread as quickly over cyberspace as it did around the watercooler. Other shows swiftly gained large 'Net followings. And of course, the heavy cult hitters got their own sites. Star Wars fansites were (and are) legion, though eventually the SW fan base began coalescing around Theforce.net. Online forums and chat rooms, heirs to the low-tech bulletin boards of the Prodigy days, became vast meeting centers for huge fan communities.

Slowly, new definitions began to appear - a "fan" was anyone who liked a particular show, comicbook or whatever, whereas a "fanboy" (or "geek" to the gender-conscious²) was someone who built much of their life around their fannish propensities. What the Internet has done is raised fandom into a much more visible part of society. No longer can they be smirked at and told to "get a life" by aging, toupeed celebrities. As mentioned before, the success of the prequels, the Lord of the Rings film, and the recent Spider-Man film can be partly - perhaps even greatly - attributed to the Internet and the fans that congregate through it.

The empowerment of the geeks began in earnest in 1997 when Harry Knowles, now the patriarchal saint of all geekdom, brought national attention to his aesthetically-challenged website, Aint-It-Cool-News. In a now-familiar practice, Knowles posted a number of early reviews of the film Batman and Robin on his website. The reviews were written by fans who had been to test screenings and were scathingly critical of the film. Appearing on Knowles's site two months before the film was released, the reviews unleashed a furor of negative buzz that undoubtedly contributed to the film's dismal failure at the box office. Warner Brothers allegedly considered suing Knowles but (wisely) backed off.

After this, the geeks recognized their power. Through websites like Aint-It-Cool-News, TheForce.net and others, fans could directly affect the development and financial success of films. I think it is reasonable to assume that one factor in George Lucas's decision to go back and create the prequels was seeing the enormous fan base Star Wars had on the Internet - and more importantly, the potential the Internet had to introduce SW to legions and legions of new fans (as well as their piggybanks, pocketbooks, wallets and second mortgages). Furthermore, I doubt Peter Jackson would have been able to persuade New Line Cinema to pay over $200 million for three back-to-back films based on Lord of the Rings if not for the Brobdingnagian-proportioned fan base Tolkien's novel enjoyed on the Internet.

Movie studios were quick to recognize a friend rather than an enemy in Harry Knowles and his disciples. Geeks are, by and large, a forgiving lot, often willing to find the good points in a film no matter how awful it is (The Phantom Menace, anyone?). Whether this is due to an implacable optimism or a desperate need to justify their obsessive behavior is something I'm not going to explore. The upshot was that Knowles & friends were soon receiving lots and lots of passes to free screenings. Given the geeks' forgiving attitude, the positive reviews greatly outnumber the negative. Furthermore, little bits of information about upcoming films are "accidentally" leaked to fansites on a daily basis. New Line released an "Internet preview" of The Fellowship of the Ring more than a year before the film was released to theaters. Far from being annoying pests, fansites have been embraced by studios as cheap profit-making ancillary products. Fansites are now often given exclusive content as a way to maintain fan interest and, the studios hope, drive up profits when the film hits. There's even a business-speak term for it now - viral marketing - complete with its own set of tenets. The business world is losing its touch...it's blatantly titling its policies after disease-producing vermin.

But while I certainly enjoy seeing the empowerment of fans - I'm sure I would not have an Ash action figure on my shelf, nor perhaps have had the opportunity to see The Fellowship of the Ring six times, if not for the power of the fans - I can't help but wonder if something is being lost in the process. As I mentioned before, I made it to my sophomore year of high school without more than the vaguest notion of what The Lord of the Rings was. I knew Star Wars as a trio of great sci-fi movies that me and a bunch of other vaguely nerdy guys liked (movies in which Han Solo shoots Greedo first...sigh). Transformers was a fondly-remembered cartoon show, not a merchandising empire with fifteen different toylines and a new comicbook with unheard-of sales.³ Evil Dead II was an obscure cinematic treat that could be found only in the dark corners of dusty, non-Blockbuster video stores.

I suppose it's the same old complaint that the underground music movement has had for years - all their cool, unknown bands go mainstream and, in their opinion, are no longer cool because everyone likes them. I'm not so ungracious as to believe Professor Tolkien's work suffers simply by being popular (though there is a legion of literary critics who seem to hold that opinion), but I will admit to some sense of loss when those three little paperbacks my dad bought me in high school sit in the same room with a number of movie-related action figures and other assorted pieces of Tolkienana, much of it made possible by the advent of the movie and the precipitous rise of Tolkien fandom. Nothing is sacred - discover almost any little book, comicbook or television show, and you can usually find at least a modest fan base on the Internet. The Internet has brought upon us the end of obscurity and the death of the cult. Cult movies, cult books - if it's big enough to be "cult anything," chances are it's edging ever so close to the mainstream. As seems to be happening to everything else - even to the antiglobalization movement - cult movies have been gobbled up by the mainstream and turned into product. Truly, nothing is sacred.u

¹ Yes, I was once a complete and total geek. We might as well establish that now. My geekiness has been lessened since that time by a combination of my own personal growth and the narrowing line between geekiness and the mainstream - when films based on comicbooks, i.e. Spider-Man, have $114 million opening weekends, it's clear that mainstream culture is going geek.

² The term geek has, at this point, been entirely divorced from its chicken-cranium-consumption-related origins.

³ In May 2002, the second issue of Dreamwave Comics' new Transformers miniseries sold 165,000 copies, a ridiculously high number for the current comic market.