Give me an O

My recent experiments with Googling Christopher Walken (chosen for no particular reason) led me to an article by Chris Evangelista called "The Quarantine Stream: 'Communion' Is One Of The Weirdest Alien Movies You'll Ever Watch." (Walken plays Strieber in the 1989 film version of Communion.) Here's an excerpt.

And we get to see the aliens here, and boy, some of them are not what you expect. There are two types of aliens that Streiber encounters. There's a species that looks like the more familiar "grey" aliens – skinny, long-limbed creatures with almond-shaped heads and big black eyes. Only these aliens are not grey, they're pink. Also, they seem to be made of rubber? Or latex? In any case, they flail around like they don't have bones, and flap their hands as if they're dancing. Then there is a group of squat, round aliens with huge heads. At first, they're expressionless. But late in the movie, these aliens – which are nicknamed "Little Blue Doctors" –  suddenly have rounded lips that appear as if they're constantly puckering up for a kiss. I don't know if this is intentional, or just a case of the film not having a big enough budget to make aliens with more expressive faces. In any case, it's weird as f***, and looking at those big puckered alien lips kind of made me want to die.

Yes, it was intentional, not a budget issue, and reflects a dialogue between Whitley Strieber and his young son Andrew in Communion. Andrew is relating some of his dreams, which his father suspects are actually distorted memories of real close encounters.

"I was in the middle of the air when I switched to this dream where I was in the hospital in the future where they were trying to cure some kind of disease. I'm not sure what it was. And I was taken out of my bed and onto a cot and out on the porch."

"Who took you out of your bed and onto the cot?"

"Some kind of doctor."

"What did he look like?"

"Oh, he was a very short and fat man with glasses that came out pointed upward like that. [Gestures as if eyes have a pronounced slant.] And he always has a big fake smile on him. [Smiles from ear to ear with his mouth closed.] He kind of kept it there except when he was asleep."

"How did you know he was asleep?"

"Well, he had -- well, that's because he worked in the night and slept in the day."

"What did his eyes look like?"

"He was wearing regular glasses. His eyes were a kind of greenish-blue color. Dark. The only two faces he had was this. [Again demonstrates smile.] And then a small one when he was sleeping. [Makes an O.]"

"Mouth open?"

"Yeah."

"When his mouth was opened, it was round?"

"Yeah. Puckered. Big puckered."

Evangelista seems not to have read Communion, so his use of the exact phrase that appears there, 
"big puckered," is interesting. (The word puckered does not occur in the Communion script.)

Today I was reading the 1989 "Satanic panic" book The Edge of Evil by Jerry Johnston. It includes a tapescript of an interview with a possessed teenager called Ann, and of her subsequent exorcism. Here is Ann discussing her depression, which began at the age of 8 or 9 when she "spoke in tongues."

"I was depressed even before. Yeah, I guess it started about the time I started speaking in tongues . . .  it's still there. And sometimes I can feel this screaming inside of me. And sometimes sort of like baby talk is coming out. It's different from the tongues."

"Garbled, sort of?"

"Yeah. It's not the same all the time. There's variation in it. Well, the tongues is I guess more or less the same. But then as well as the tongues, I get feeling really funny sometimes. It starts right here, just like the tongues, and my mouth goes tense and it starts to go funny."

A Mrs. Sibble from the girls' home adds, "It goes sort of round, too. The other night when you spoke in tongues it almost sort of went round, like a fish's mouth."

"Yeah, it does that. Ooh, it's awful. . . ."

The exorcism itself follows, performed by Archie Huewright.

"Now. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, tell me your name."

"My name is Greyer," the girlish voice sings. "Greyer had a little pony once --"

"All right. I rebuke you in the name of Christ. Do you have associates?"

"Two of them. Grayer, and G-R-A-Y-E-R-E; give me an O, give me an E --"

"Three of you," Archie says.

Three demons called Greyer, Grayer, and Grayere. The entities Strieber writes about are typically called "Grays" despite the fact that (as Evangelista notes) they aren't actually described as being that color. After spelling out the name of one of its demonic associates, Greyer says, "give me an O, give me an E," even though none of the three names has an O in it.