Overdriven

The 1986 movie Maximum Overdrive is not a good movie. It was written and directed by Stephen King himself, based upon one of his short stories. This time in King’s life apparently included a lot of cocaine and alcohol, and it shows.

Starring Emilio Estevez, the movie tells the story of a group of people holed up in a gas station after machines across the world have suddenly attained consciousness and begun murdering humans at random. A lot of the situations in which said murders occurred were so implausible as be laughable, as with the Coke machine that managed to shoot canned beverages at such velocity as to impair and kill a grown man, or the steamroller that manages to flatten a boy on a Little League team.

How exactly did these things happen? Are beverage dispensers equipped with more than gravity-fed chutes? Is a steamroller built with motion-detection technology? A lot of people today wonder if these complex word-guessing machines called Large Language Models are somehow going to kill us all, but they seem a bit fuzzy on how—or even why. I blame Maximum Overdrive and other stories like it for taking machine consciousness as necessarily implying machine murderousness.

But I discovered Stephen King early in seventh grade and quickly began reading everything I could find of his and watching all the movie adaptations, including Maximum Overdrive, which also connected to my emerging interest in hard rock through the use of AC/DC songs throughout the movie. In fact, the AC/DC album Who Made Who was partially marketed as the official soundtrack of Maximum Overdrive, although not every song was made specifically for the movie, and in fact some had been featured on earlier releases by the band.

As an album, it rocked. “You Shook Me All Night Long,” “Hells Bells,” “Sink the Pink” all stood out, but the song that I loved the most was that title track—“Who Made Who.” It was also the song I absolutely hated.

You must understand that, back in the 1980s, we had English teachers who fell fully on the prescriptive side of language use, and the rules we learned were rightly the rules that they had learned decades before. Objective pronouns were considered sacrosanct among them, including a word that, in my opinion, still separates a proper user of the English language from your weekend dabblers:

Whom.

I internalized all those grammatical rules as a child, so why couldn’t AC/DC get this right? Two years before Maximum Overdrive hit theaters, Metallica had released Ride the Lightning, an album featuring the song “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Yes, that song’s title is drawn from a John Donne poem that later provided the title to an Ernest Hemingway novel, but that simply goes to demonstrate the cultural value of the word “whom,” the gravitas it lends the slightest utterance.

Every time I listened to “Who Made Who” (and it pains me just to type that phrase), my soul was torn in twain (another good word). I enjoyed the beat and the theme but just tripped over the chorus. I tried to solve this by singing a louder and more grammatically correct version over Brian Johnson’s vocals:

Who made whom?

Who made you?

Who made whom?

Who…made whom?

Maybe I could pretend to myself that the lyrics were different, but I couldn’t fix the album cover, where the words WHO MADE WHO were positioned in a confined space between two sets of columns. One couldn’t find a pen of the right color and add the M in an appropriate spot without it looking very obviously modified. I had to stare at that cover each time I wanted to pull the cassette out and play it, and each time it just killed a little bit of the joy. It got to where I couldn’t even enjoy those songs with grammatically correct titles, and so I ended up giving the album to a friend and went and bought Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? by Megadeth.

If you’ve ever wondered what sort of person ends up editing an encyclopedia—and actually likes his job—I can tell you that it’s someone who was once a thirteen-year-old boy headbanging to AC/DC in his bedroom with the volume turned up, singing along but also singing a little more loudly all the WHOMs he insists upon adding to the chorus. This kid now has a job where he and the rest of the staff actually get to fix the mistakes other people have made. Some of these mistakes are grammatical, and they are fixed as an entry goes through the process. But some of these mistakes, like the title track of Who Made Who, have ended up in print and been recycled by historians for generations now, only to be corrected during our fact-checking process or following the later emergence of previously unseen documents, and we get to fix those, too.

Maximum Overdrive turned forty years old this year. It bombed both at the box office and with critics but has since become something of a cult classic. The CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas turned twenty years old in 2026. It was highly praised at its launch and has only grown in the estimation of both scholars and the general public. The difference, I feel, is this—unlike AC/DC’s lyricist, all of us involved in producing the Encyclopedia of Arkansas understand the value of being objective.

Guy Lancaster is the editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas.