“It’s back.”
With those words, Greg Caputo, who teaches Technical Theatre
and Stagecraft, rolled his eyes over the wall featuring unsettling words and
disturbing photos linked together by string and colored tacks. “It’s just too
amazing,” Caputo says. “It’s overwhelming.”
He’s talking about Jayme Warner’s and Jude Owen’s so-called
“conspiracy wall.” By day, the two are assistants in the School of Arts &
Communication’s division office at Salt Lake Community College’s South City
Campus. Outside of work, they are horror movie “geeks, fanatics, take your
pick,” says Jayme.
Last year they plotted how best to decorate their office for
Halloween. Naturally, they will readily admit, their minds went to “crazy news
clippings” and notions of characters losing their minds in movies and somehow
connecting everything back to “one source of evil.” Good fortune and timing
conspired with the 2017 release of filmmaker Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of
Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel “It.”
“It had just come out,” says Jude. “We read the book, so we
thought, why not?”
The two set about concocting ways to connect events from
horror movies across the genre back to a central source, Pennywise the Dancing
Clown from “It.” The wall took shape, much in the same way moviegoers might see
law enforcement try to trace back crimes to one person. It was an instant hit.
“People wanted to get a closer look,” Jayme says. “They
asked us what it was, at first. Then they would get in really close and see how
everything relates back. People were giving us suggestions for more movies to
add.”
This past July they took a broader approach, deciding to
make the devil (as depicted in an illustration from Dante’s Inferno) the centerpiece of the wall.
They used parchment paper for printing photos, articles and headlines, all
representing cursed items, cursed people and cursed places. Red tacks symbolize
the devil. Green tacks are for cursed people, blue for cursed places and purple
for objects. Clear tacks are used as placeholders for information that can’t be
correlated into a specific category. And strings tie everything back to, you
guessed it, the devil.
As Jayme and Jude look at their own creation, the geek out a
little. They talk about needing to re-watch scary movies like “The Conjuring
II” and “As Above, So Below,” which they excitedly recount how it was shot in
France’s catacombs. They love talking about all the movies represented on the
wall.
“It makes you want to stand here and look at it,” Caputo
says. “I’m not surprised they did it. I’m glad they did. This is the kind of
work you usually see around this school.”
