Stone on SEIZURE.
Henry Baker as Jackal the Giant. Though mute in the film, Baker was a trained opera singer who made his film debut in GIRL ON A CHAIN GANG (1965).
Where did the idea for SEIZURE come
from? It was based on a dream I had in August of
1971. The nightmare went like this: I was in my apartment in New York, had some friends over for dinner, and some mysterious creatures [inter­ vened]. I say “mysterious” because they were never fully shaped. There seemed to be a woman, most definitely a dwarf, and there seemed to be some large, dark man. They broke into my apartment during the course of the night and literally were killing off my guests one by one. Eventually, I knew, they would come to me. My wife disappeared. The fear in me was pretty great and I jumped through the window of the apartment. I remember running away and this giant jumped out after me, and just as I was seized, I woke up. In the film, you can see some of this, when Edmund Blackstone is running out of the house and is caught in the swamp—not by the giant (I changed this) but by the dwarf. As
Edmund is strangled, he awakens. That is the parallel. Incidentally, in the dream I never actually saw
the deaths of my guests. As I remember, we were sequestered in my study, strangely enough, paral­ leling Edmund’s study in the film. We were in this room lined with my books and, one by one, my friends were led out by the three creatures into another part of the house, where I could sense that they were being killed. I never saw this, however. In the film, I show the deaths. The only death I was permitted to see was my own imminent one.
As the film opens, the screen is completely dark and slowly fades into dawn at the lakeside. IVs like an awakening. Yes. It’s the moment between waking and
dreaming, between life and death. The literal description of twilight is “the crack between two worlds.” In concrete time, that fade-in is Edmund
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