Like any good ’80s kid, I went to the movies on Thanksgiving night in 1999 to see End of Days, the first big Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle in years. But thanks to the tryptophan in my Thanksgiving turkey, I promptly fell asleep and didn’t see much of it. And then, without planning it, in 2000, a friend asked to watch it in our college dorm on Thanksgiving night (we were both back from break early due to film project commitments), and I fell asleep once again.
This officially started a very silly tradition. For 25 years now, every Thanksgiving night I put on End Of Days and challenge myself to see if I can stay awake. A couple of years into it, I met my now-wife, and she would groan every time I put it on, but I promised if I ever stayed awake for the whole thing, I would stop. Have I ever succeeded?
I’ll tell you in a bit. But I will say that five or six years into the tradition, I saw a scene I had never seen before, which speaks to how silly the whole endeavor is. But this makes each “rewatch” feel like a little puzzle, sorting out what I missed from previous viewings. However, after 25 of these fragmented experiences I am confident I have seen it enough times to say that the novelization by Frank Lauria is pretty faithful for the most part, but contains a few key differences that make it worth a read if you’re a fan.
For those who can’t recall or have never been blessed with seeing this odd action/horror blend (or maybe just slept through it too), the film concerns Arnold as Jericho Cane (hmm, those initials…), the top dog at a security firm who is also suicidal as a result of the loss of his wife and daughter. But he finds a new reason to live thanks to Christine York (Robin Tunney), a 20-year-old woman who was chosen at birth to be the carrier of the Devil’s child.
The Devil, in the form of Gabriel Byrne, has to impregnate her before midnight on New Year’s Eve in order to bring about the titular End of Days. And who better to stop him than Arnold friggin Schwarzenegger?
As mentioned, the book doesn’t change much, and I’m guessing only someone who has seen (some of) the movie 25 times will be able to spot most of the differences. But there are a few diversions that I found interesting. For starters, Lauria seems to have written it before it was cast, or at least didn’t bother consulting the IMDb while he wrote.
The character of Marge, played by veteran scene-stealer CCH Pounder, is described as having porcelain skin and red hair, suggesting perhaps Julianne Moore or someone like that. And despite Byrne having two of the most piercing blue eyes in all of Hollywood, the character is repeatedly described as having green eyes. Not the end of the world (heh), but certainly an odd thing to keep mentioning when it’s so different from the character we know.
Another noticeable difference is the ordering of key sequences in the film’s opening. After the 1979-set prologue, in which the Vatican is alerted to the impending birth of the marked woman who will be chosen to carry the Devil’s spawn, followed by the birth of that child in New York, things get very different on the page than they do in the movie. In the movie, Christine’s birth is followed by a present-day scene in which the Devil’s soul/ ghost/ whatever explodes out of a manhole near a construction crew, and then makes its way to a fancy restaurant where it possesses Byrne.
In the novelization, that happens much later. Here, Christine’s birth is followed by our introduction to Jericho. The scene mostly plays out just as it does in the film, but instead of delaying the explanation for why he seems to be about to kill himself for a later time, as it does in the movie, the novel tells us right off the bat–albeit with a story that differs greatly from the film’s explanation.
In Lauria’s take, Jericho was part of a Navy SEAL team who was on a supposed rescue mission in Cambodia, only to discover the whole operation was a front to get one of his teammates killed in order to safely smuggle drugs back into the US in the man’s body bag (which wouldn’t be inspected out of respect for the fallen soldier). Jericho catches on, destroys the drugs, and kills the teammate responsible for the whole thing. The drug lord, in turn, has Jericho’s family killed, prompting Jericho to kill him as well (cutting his head off and putting it on a car as a hood ornament!) before devolving into a life of booze and bar hookups.
In the movie, the explanation is much simpler: Jericho ratted on some dirty cops, and they got back at him by murdering his family when he wasn’t home, done and done. And we don’t get the explanation until the movie’s halfway point, when “The Man” (the given name for the Devil in Byrne’s body) visits Jericho’s apartment and offers him a chance to be with his family again in exchange for Christine.
I can see why they’d change it (and save the production some money for a lengthy jungle-set flashback that presumably just existed to put Arnold into a Predator-style action sequence). Still, it’s interesting that they changed the film around in such a way that it’d be even longer before we saw our beloved icon.
For those who have forgotten or maybe even weren’t around yet, End of Days was Arnold’s big screen comeback after a two-year absence following some heart issues, so one can imagine it wasn’t an easy decision to cut a sequence showing that he was still able to do his thing, not to mention one that would have gotten him on screen in any capacity earlier than the final cut offered.
On the other hand, it does fix something that’s never made much sense in the movie. After his introduction, Jericho goes with his partner Bobby (Kevin Pollak) to protect some “Wall Street scumbag” and we in the audience are surprised to see that said scumbag is none other than a freshly possessed Byrne. The irony is nice, but it leaves us to wonder why Lucifer was still sticking to this guy’s schedule. The book avoids this rather silly moment by flipping the two events around.
After that, the novel pretty much plays out exactly as the movie does until the end. No additional scenes of note, no major diversions from the on-screen events, etc. And those rare variations are rather inconsequential when they do pop in from time to time. For example, in the movie, Udo Kier’s character (who has been making all the necessary preparations for the Devil’s arrival) is killed when “The Man” punches a hole in his head, but here he is just given a massive heart attack.
One little beat I did like and probably should have been retained (assuming it was part of the script at all) was a brief and sinister explanation for why Christine had been able to keep her virginity: it’s insinuated that whenever she met someone she liked, her adopted mother Mabel (Miriam Margolyes), also part of the Devil’s cult, would make the guy disappear.
Another small but noticeable difference is that the “Y2K” of it all is completely omitted. In the movie, an offscreen DJ keeps reminding us of the impending ball drop and how many nights until “every computer fails,” but there is no such character here.
Of course, as we know, the actual issues that arose were minor and easy enough to fix, such as someone in New York being given a $91k late fee for a video rental that appeared to be 100 years overdue. No plane crashes, no global electricity outages, etc. Just a handful of random inconveniences that were quickly resolved. So while the movie functions as a charming little time capsule, the book is more timeless in that regard.
The final major change is at the very end (so, spoilers!). Just as in the movie, Jericho realizes that guns and explosions cannot take the Devil down and instead pulls a Father Karras, letting himself get possessed and then using what’s left of his humanity to sacrifice himself by diving on a sword. But here, instead of seeing his wife and daughter and joining them in heaven, he clings to life as the clock counts down until midnight, at which point the Devil’s window of opportunity has closed and he returns to Hell. As for Jericho, his wound heals and he walks out of the church with Christine, his faith restored.
The film is notable for being the first time Arnold played a human character who died (his other deaths were his Terminator robots), but by letting him live the novel denies us this rare occurrence. Again, assuming this was taken from the draft Lauria was working from, it’s interesting that, apparently, the powers that be went for a slightly darker ending in a big-budget studio film. I suppose one can look at being reunited with his family in the afterlife as the happier ending, but still, someone had to argue that killing our biggest action hero off in his comeback movie was the right way to go.
At just a little over 200 pages (in a font size I didn’t even really need my reading glasses for) it’s not the most in-depth novelization I’ve read. Lauria sticks to the script and doesn’t spend a lot of time on lengthy descriptions or interior monologues, and even when he does it doesn’t really amount to anything important. If not for the change to Jericho’s backstory and the modified ending, it would come off more like modern novelizations, where they remain so close to the finished version that it’s barely worth the time to read it.
But hey, I only paid a dollar for it, so it was well spent. Plus, it was the rare installment for this column that didn’t require a rewatch of the movie to ensure the changes were legit and not just my poor memory. And that’s a good thing, because I wanted to have this up before the holiday but wanted to keep my tradition of watching it Thanksgiving night.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, yes, I actually managed to stay awake for the whole thing in 2022 and told my wife now that I had finally “beaten” the movie, I no longer had to watch it. I figured she’d be relieved, but surprisingly enough, last year, when I said I wasn’t going to put it on, she actually got a bit sad because it had become part of HER tradition as well. So I put it on as usual, and… yep, fell asleep again. So now, I guess, I’m going to see if I can ever stay awake a *second* time. See you on Thursday, Jericho.