Someone doing a book on the occult asked him to research Zoroastrianism. Tunneling through the subject, he discovered The Book of Arda Viraz, an autobiography by a Persian priest who purportedly survived death and came back to talk about what was "over there."
On the other side, among other tasks, Viraz had had to cross the "Bridge of the Separator," where he (and all other souls) met his conscience for a reassessment of all he'd done in life.
Fascinated by the idea, Phil dug deeper and found similarities in Islamic tradition. There, the story goes that on the day of judgment one must undergo "the trial of crossing al-Sirat, a bridge that is thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword, and, in some versions, set with hooks and thorns; the righteous cross easily to the Garden, but the wicked find the bridge slippery and dark and, after expending thousands of years attempting to cross, fall into the Fire below."
I didn't see him much in those days because I was about to go to Europe to film Babyskin and was caught up in my own solipsism. It was probably better, though, because our relationship was strained. Since graduating from college, I'd published a collection of poetry and made a film that was well reviewed. I was on my way, and however much he loved me and cheered my success, I knew it was hard for him to watch someone else get all the A's. Especially Phil, who'd been at the head of the class all his life.
When I returned from Europe several months later, he picked me up at the airport. Pulling the car away from the LAX curb, he handed me a script.
"What's this?"
"A script I wrote. You won't like it because it's a horror movie, but please read it and tell me if it's any good. If it has any potential."
"A horror film? 'Midnight.' What's it about?"
"Meeting our conscience on a bridge."
Something glitched in the universe. We never find out why, but it's implied early in the film it was mankind's fault. Wars, greed, sniffing around in certain dangerous corners of science. . . . Whatever, things on a cosmic level fell apart and the ceremony of innocence met Bloodstone. Whatever happened caused part of death to cross the mortal line into life in the form of Bloodstone. He could simply be an angry little sliver of death or part of our conscience come to meet us on the Bridge of the Separator . . . if we were dead, but we aren't. He could even be Death itself, helplessly forced to live in our east of Eden. All that matters is Bloodstone is angry – angry to be here, angry to be in a hated foreign land. Phil always smiled and called him the xenophobe.
The degree of violence and imagination in the things Strayhorn's fiend did were both obscene and startling. Reading the script for the first time, I couldn't believe what he was doing, page after page. But Bloodstone did them repeatedly in the most inventive and ghoulish ways. I called it car-crash art – you don't want to look, but you have to.
I called Matthew Portland, a producer who was always looking for scripts full of boobs, blood, and interesting gore. He asked for the story over the phone. Instead of telling him, I read the now-famous scene of Bloodstone, the infant, and the magnifying glass.
"That's the most repellent thing I've ever heard. Who wrote it?"
The three of us went to lunch. After they shook hands for the first time, Portland said he liked the script but it needed work. We all knew it was a perfect script, but every producer says that at the first meeting. Phil smiled and quietly said Matthew's last film, Hide and Sick, was a steaming pile of shit. The other smiled back and said he knew that, but it'd paid the bills.
They traded insults for most of the meal and then agreed on a deal: Phil's script stayed as it was, and he would play Bloodstone. In exchange, he asked for very little money but a nice guaranteed piece of the gross.
They got a young man straight out of USC film school to direct who knew just about every horror film ever made, including such howlers as Plan 9 from Outer Space. But they were lucky because they'd found a genuine aficionado and fan of the genre who also knew what he was doing.
It took twenty-nine days to shoot Midnight in a northern California town where the entire six-hundred-person population was delighted to have a movie crew setting fire to their streets and flinging fake body pieces out their windows.
Matthew Portland and half the crew played roles. Phil played three (including Bloodstone). The director was a perfectionist who pissed everybody off but whose enthusiasm for what they were doing kept people afloat.
At a sneak preview of the film in Hibbing, Minnesota, a teenage girl had a heart attack and died. It made national news and was the best free publicity they could have wanted.
Millions were made. T-shirts and posters were licensed. Merchandisers and distributors and major studios started licking their lips and rubbing their hands together for what they saw as a possible long and happy marriage between gold and a new ghoul.
The furor grew. It was understandable. Midnight is a kind of masterpiece, but it is also immoral and too convincing, too real. Horror films are fun to watch because they're usually so outrageous or hyperbolic you spend half the time smiling at all that red silliness.
Midnight is different. For one, it is a very smart film. Although Phil said it was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's work, I know a great deal of it came from his own utterly unhappy childhood. Not the horror so much as the almost tactile sadness that sits on the movie like the night demon on the sleeping woman's chest in that famous painting by Fuseli. Pauline Kael said it first when she wrote the wonderful review comparing Midnight to De Palma's Carrie and Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. That gave the intelligentsia permission to go to the film, much like Leonard Bernstein did in the seventies when he said he liked the Beatles.
"Do we really live in the world that Bloodstone haunts? If so, then he isn't the real monster in the story – our own mediocrity is, our silence and exile from ourselves. Forget the cunning." She also quoted the artist Robert Henri. "Low art is just telling things; as, There is the night. High art gives the feeling of night. . . . Here is an emotional landscape. It is like something thought, something remembered." In fact, "Something Thought, Something Remembered" was the title of her essay, which, with its faint reference to Proust, added even more prestige.
Years after I saw the film for the first time, I heard Spalding Gray do one of his monologues. In the middle of it, Gray said something that was also part of the essence of Midnight: "One of my brother's biggest fears was the basement of our house. When our parents would go away he'd turn out the lights and crawl on his belly from the bedroom down the front stairs, then down the basement stairs, and with his eyes closed he would feel the basement walls, every crack, feeling his way around the entire room until he either died or didn't die."
Somehow Phil Strayhorn had created a story that made his audience face their own basement fears with all the lights off and no weapon handy.
When Phil was a boy, his father used to tell him and his sister "bedtime stories." Not a nice man, Mr. Strayhorn probably thought of it as a good way of making up to two children he neither liked nor helped. According to his son, the stories were long and good but too often unnecessarily frightening or sad.
"He'd scare the shit out of us and make us cry. Then the bastard'd put his arm around us and say, 'It's okay, it's okay. Daddy's here! Daddy'll protect you.' He wanted both our fear and our love. That's not fair, man."
If you have seen Midnight Too, you're familiar with this scene. Only in the movie, Daddy is Bloodstone in disguise, and what happens to the children isn't okay. Phil and his parents stopped speaking after it came out. But he said too bad; they didn't like the story because the parts about them were true.