The centuries-old demon that is said to dwell in the Pine Barrens is now blamed for the alleged "Jersey Devil murders." This diabolical crime was supposedly documented in "The Last Broadcast," a no-budget independent film that flickered briefly last year, only to be conjured back by its fans on the Internet in response to this season's similarly plotted megahit movie, "The Blair Witch Project."
The popular myth of the Jersey Devil has been kept alive for more than 250 years by occasional "eyewitness" accounts that have described it as everything from a fire-breathing "flying serpent," to a monster that is part human but mostly animal, and anywhere from 18 inches to 20 feet tall.
More people, however, have probably seen the actual Jersey Devil than "The Last Broadcast," which appeared in very limited release, despite a four-star review from a Philadelphia paper that called it "creepy and provocative."
But that has been changing, thanks to a controversy over the parallels between "The Last Broadcast" and "Blair Witch," a shoestring film that is the most talked-about movie of the summer and grossed nearly $100 million in less than a month.
The Jersey Devil murders, according to the "The Last Broadcast," occurred in late 1995 when two hosts of a cable-access TV show, "Fact or Fiction," and a couple of their fans disappeared into the Pine Barrens. Only one of them came out of the woods alive, with bloody clothes, and the damning videotape.
Amazon.com begins selling "The Last Broadcast" video over the Internet on Aug. 24. Meanwhile the movie -- like "Blair Witch" -- keeps its own mythology moving with teasers on a "Last Broadcast" Web site:
"It took the police two days to find the body parts.
"It took the coroner four days to put them back together.
"It took the jury only one and a half hours to sentence [the survivor] to life in prison.
"Why would he commit two, most likely three murders so monstrous as to defy description?"
The Jersey Devil's role in all this is murky. But how fitting that the state's favorite folk figure frightens again in this summer of Hollywood haunted houses, psychic kids, and woodland witches.
Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos, the young filmmakers who shot "The Last Broadcast" two years ago, heard about the Jersey Devil while growing up in Bucks County, Pa.
"As a kid, I camped in the Barrens. You'd lay in your tent and wonder is he going to come for you or not," said Weiler, 29.
The theatrical release, in October 1998, was limited to five cities including Philadelphia. But Weiler and Avalos, 30, say they were the first to beam their film into theaters digitally via satellite -- even before George Lucas' latest "Star Wars" installment. Viewers in five more cities, including New York, saw the film in May and June during an "International Electronic Cinema Tour."
Three years ago a friend suggested that the filmmakers "do something about the Jersey Devil," Weiler recalled. "So we kind of adopted it into a story idea we had about some guys in the woods, with an atrocity happening," he said.
Their movie was "shot for under $1,000," Weiler said. But it spawned a fan base that rose up and felt there were massive similarities between "Last Broadcast," which was completed first, and "Blair Witch" -- which also features pseudo-documentary filmmakers terrorized in the woods. But Weiler and Avalos added there are also enough differences between the two movies that there really is no conflict among the directors of the two films.
"Blair Witch" filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick set their film in the Maryland woods, not the Jersey woods. And their monster, of course, is the Blair Witch -- not the Jersey Devil.
Regardless of who was first, the Pine Barrens made their forest fright flick special, Weiler said, "because they're so amazing, so cinematic and underused. Though our movie may change that."
The Jersey Devil has not been underused, especially in recent decades. The creature has appeared in books and cocktail recipes, as tattoos, on T-shirts, and as the logo for National Guard fighter pilots, and the name of a champion National Hockey League team.
By most accounts the creature was born in 1735, say James F. McCloy and Ray Miller Jr., native New Jerseyans and authors of two extensively researched books about the Jersey Devil. He is popularly believed to be the cursed and unwanted 13th child, ill-begotten of a Colonial woman named Mother Leeds, and fathered perhaps by the Devil himself, either in Burlington, or at Leeds Point near Atlantic City.
Moments after his birth on that dark, stormy night, the infant gargoyle screeched, flew up the chimney on tiny bat wings, and fled to the dark heart of the Barrens.
Sightings of the Jersey Devil continue to the present day.
Yet another firsthand account appears in the next issue, due in October, of Weird N.J., the magazine that chronicles all that is bizarre and supernatural in the state.
This "eyewitness," a woman named Cathie, wrote the magazine that she and her aunt were driving home from Atlantic City before dawn on Dec. 2, 1995, when they spotted something that looked like a deer in the road, on an overpass in Bass River.
"In front of my car was this 'thing' that looked like it had a human face with an animal body in the shape of a kangaroo, covered with very fine cat fur. . . .
"I was thinking that it was some sort of animal that was messed up from the nuclear power plant not far from there," Cathie added. She has not seen it since then.
"We've run small things in the past," said Mark Sceurman of Bloomfield, who edits Weird N.J. with Mark Moran. "But the Jersey Devil has been so overblown, we don't want to rewrite the same stuff that's been around for 100 years.
"A lot of these legends never die. They just keep getting passed down. The stories change, the locations change, but the basis is still there.
"We won't do a major article until we go to the Pine Barrens and camp out and try to find it ourselves. But there are more scary things in the Pine Barrens than the Jersey Devil," Sceurman said, without elaborating.
Apparently, though, the Jersey Devil was deemed scary enough for its ultimate pop culture canonization. In 1994, it appeared in "Goblins" by Charles Grant, the first novel spun off "The X-Files," the wildly popular TV series.
In "Goblins," a murder mystery set at Fort Dix, a drunken soldier staggers into the woods and hears noises out there in the cold, dark wind.
"He heard it again, something moving toward him, not bothering to mask its approach," Grant wrote.
"His first thought was Jersey Devil, and he giggled. Right. A real live monster in the middle of New Jersey. Right. Tell me another."
Moments later, he screamed . . . but only once.
Jersey Devil Haunts Forest Fright Film
Like a foul gust of swamp gas, the legendary Jersey Devil has appeared again, this time in cyberspace, and soon in a mysterious videotape.
[Source published The Record / NJ / By Bob Groves - August 15 1999]
