by Robert Bloch
Despite vivisections made vivid by Technicolor and shrieks of agony enhanced by stereophonic sound, despite on-camera atrocity and cruelty in close-up, all that the filmmakers have given us over the years is more ketchup on our people-burgers.
Traditionally, the strength of the so-called horror cinema has always lain in its performers. Conrad Veidt, Paul Wegener and Werner Krauss made lasting reputations in German silent films. Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre and Vincent Price gained worldwide fame in American productions; Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing did the same in England. Actors made big reputations in small-budget pictures because audiences came to see the stars. Since then the budgets have become more monstrous than the films they finance, and technology can transform fantasy into seeming reality. But despite these added advantages and despite the huge increase in the number of annual releases, modern horror films have created few memorable monsters, and no true stars whatsoever.
Today’s monsters are merely the product of makeup, and today’s stars are the special effects.
It must be conceded that with few exceptions, horror pictures are scarcely more credible than Wuthering Heights or Gone With the Wind. As is the case with these mainstream examples, farfetched plots depend on characterization for credibility. Beneath Lon Chaney’s gallery of grotesques he gave us glimpses of humanity; Karloff’s creature has a depth and dimension that evokes empathy. Temporarily we suspend our disbelief in filmic fantasies because the actors’ artistry compels us to believe in the characters they portray.
This temporary suspension of disbelief is, of course, a classic and much-reiterated requisite of fiction in the genre. Unfortunately the author can bring few artificial aids to his task. His lines have no musical accompaniment to enhance mood, no sound effects for sudden shock; his words appear upon the printed page in a simple arrangement of black and white, without transformation to Technicolor. And while he can use as many players in as many settings as he chooses without regard for budgetary restrictions, the creative responsibilities are his alone. He has no producer to oversee all of the aspects and elements which must be assembled for use in his project. He himself must take on the role of director and decide how he wants his characters to act, how he wishes them to deliver their lines. He is his sole cinematographer; lining up the shots, coming in for a close-up of a character here, pulling back for an action shot there, and making sure that everyone in the scene hits the chalk marks he’s drawn for them in his own mind. He is also the makeup artist, the costume designer, sound engineer, set-builder, prop man, stunt advisor, research consultant, supervisor of special effects, and anything or everything else the production demands. All he will have to fall back upon later is an editor, but like the director of a film, he too will share responsibility for the cuts and changes which may be made.
Every contributor to these pages is, accordingly, the exemplar of talent far more protean than that of the most adulated filmmakers. Even an Orson Welles was dependent upon the quite considerable help of a Herman Mankiewicz, a Gregg Toland, a Bernard Herrmann. The writers represented in this anthology had to perform their task without assistance from others, but however variable the results, the task itself was a constant—to tell a story. In this instance, a horror story dealing with the psychopathological rather than the supernatural.
No explicit limitations were placed on content; the very nature of the theme suggests that shock and shudders spring not from the nature of the deed but from the nature of the thought which prompts it.
If there’s any pattern to these tales, their purpose is to explore the rationale and irrationale of violent behavior. This anthology was not meant to demonstrate that if you build a grosser gross-out than your neighbor, the world will beat a path to your door.
Such attempts are already available, enough to warrant a neologistic designation of their own as “splatter-punk.” Activists and apologists involved in this area have announced their intention “to go too far” and, eventually, “to go all the way,” with the implication that this mystical mission will effect some sort of mental and/or spiritual purgation. These efforts, we are told, will bring about a genre revolution.
Experience suggests otherwise. In the sixties the hippies switched from pot to substances which afforded increasingly stronger effects. The honest majority freely admitted they indulged in search of an increased “high.”
But the articulate minority insisted on informing us that they were using LSD and similar drugs in a quest for “heightened consciousness” and “expanding awareness.” Some of them continued their search for this holy grail for many years, but we have seen few genuine intellectual revelations forthcoming from the self-proclaimed messiahs of the drug culture.
Today one hears echoes of this apologia from the devisers and devotees of S and M in film and in print, but apart from the change in lyrics it’s the same old song. If someone wants to get wired on the weird, that’s their privilege, but let them not insult our intelligence by pretending that they’re really on some sort of spiritual trip.
More is not a synonym for better. It does not necessarily lead either to revelation or revolution.
Over twenty years ago John Waters made a film called Pink Flamingos, generously endowed with something to offend everybody. Dramatizing its creator’s apocalyptic vision, a poodle defecated on-camera, whereupon a three-hundred-pound transvestite named Divine promptly ingested the results. At the time many believed that this act of cinematic coprophagy went too far, but today everyone knows that Pink Flamingos did not revolutionize motion pictures.
The idea that a road through hell is the best route to heaven has both theological and historical antecedents. It’s my understanding that one of the precepts of Tantric Buddhism involves seeking salvation through debauchery, a principle also reputedly espoused by Rasputin. Tantric doctrine has not revolutionized Buddhism, nor did Rasputin overturn Greek Orthodoxy.
In the light of such examples I venture to predict that “splatterpunk” will not have much of a metaphysical and/or metamorphic effect on horror fiction. While the Marquis de Sade perpetuated his name in the lexicon of psychotherapy, his work did not effect any radical change in the horror tale per se.
If there is any value in exposure to extreme dosages of graphic violence, then what need is there to filter it through fiction? There are enough factual accounts of cruel behavior and hideous happenings to supply any conceivable requirements. The greatest horror story of all is history.
To return for a moment to our filmic analogy: if the intention is merely to shock and nauseate, why write screenplays when you can run newsreels?
The same holds true for equivalent offerings on the printed page. One of the apparent misconceptions of the writers is that describing the infliction of pain or the throes of death makes their stories realistic. All it does, actually, is demonstrate that they’ve been seeing too many movies.
The basic flaw of “splatterpunk” fiction lies in the conscious or unconscious imitation of comic books and contemporary slice-and-dice films. Its concept of reality consists of continuous involvement with drugs, sex and violence on the part of people blessed with an ability to communicate with others through a shared vocabulary of vulgarisms. The “real” world in which they live is populated by a superbly versatile group of cops and robbers. Good and bad alike, they can instantly understand and operate any form of computerized device, expertly handle every kind of weapon, pilot all types of aircraft at a moment’s notice, and kill without hitch or hesitation. Their macho attitude and image is derived from espionage comics and capers.
Meanwhile, in another world—the one many of us actually live in—most people don’t seem to be quite that knowledgeable or sophisticated. Nor do they seem so stolid, with so little reaction to slaughter and its aftermath.
It is this world, and those people, which are dealt with by the writers who have contributed to the content of this anthology. In so doing they have contributed their concepts of horror and wh
ere it’s at—not in the weapon or the wounds it inflicts, not in the knife itself but in Jack the Ripper. Each and every author has offered an individual insight into the dark recesses of the human mind where true dread dwells.
It is customary, in volumes like these, to summarize the personal backgrounds and achievements of the writers represented therein, very much as if one were providing them with individual resumes and lists of credentials. I tend to doubt that readers are greatly influenced by learning that Mr. Poe won a prize for his poem or short story, that Mr. Machen entered an acting career in middle age, or that Mr. Lovecraft was a closet ichthyophobe. Nor does it matter which of the three enjoyed the greatest popular recognition or critical acclaim.
Many of the contributors here are well-known to readers familiar with the genre. Other names, I predict, will soon become so. If you admire them as much as I do, seek out other works in magazines or books bearing their by-lines. None of them require advocacy; their stories speak for themselves.
Some of these stories are violent, some are gruesome, but none depend upon death for their existence, nor upon a supernatural premise. They depend upon characters and characterization. They afford insight, which is the first step toward understanding. And understanding is the only way to exorcise our fears.
These writers have found the source of many of those daily dreads. Today’s bogeyman is the psychopath, and he is all too real. He assumes many guises; the terrorist, the serial killer, the mass-murderer, the sadist, the revenge-seeker.
But whatever mask he wears, he cannot escape recognition by our writers. They have had the courage to confront him in the pages that follow; stay close to them and you will not be harmed.
I hope.
—Robert Bloch
Them Bleaks
Gahan Wilson
Sheriff Olson had no sooner emerged from Mae’s Café and tilted the big, gold-starred car toward the driver’s side by heaving his considerable bulk down behind its wheel than he heard the voice of Wilbur, his chief deputy, fighting its way through the speaker of the two-way radio along with a tangle of static.
“It’s them Bleaks, Sheriff.” Wilbur’s voice was muffled in what seemed to be a fearsome cold. “It’s that Mr. Bleak, the writer fellah. He just called in and says you’re to hurry over to his place right away on account of what he found.”
Olson leaned forward and snatched the microphone from its dashboard hammock as the frown line between his tufty orange eyebrows extended slightly. There had been no frown line on the sheriff’s broad, smooth forehead before the Bleaks moved into Commonplace, but now there was, and every week it seemed to grow just a little longer and dig in just a little deeper.
“What’s he got to show me, Wilbur?” the sheriff asked, speaking very calmly.
“He says he’s gone and found somebody what’s been murdered.”
The crease in the sheriff’s forehead climbed like the red line in a thermometer nearly halfway up to the edge of his close-cropped copper hair. Wilbur’s words had struck him like a snake. He turned, quietly and gently like a fragile man, and then suddenly pounded the cushions violently enough to bounce himself in the seat.
“Damn!” he shouted, raising muffled echoes from the car’s padded insides. “Damn and double goddamn damn!”
He took three deep breaths in a row, holding the microphone helpless in a strangler’s grip before his blotching, swelling face. Now he could no longer even pretend to doubt. Now he knew for certain sure he’d been wrong all along about the Bleaks.
“I’ll take care of that call, Wilbur.” He growled it out in a soft, confidential whisper through grinding teeth. “Don’t you let nobody else take that call, you hear me? Don’t you let nobody else get near it!”
The second he heard Wilbur’s awed “Yezzur,” he started up the engine with a roar, gripped the wheel with both his big, freckly hands, and spat gravel as he spun out of Mae’s parking lot and down the road with the car’s sparklers and sirens on full tilt.
They’d seemed to be so nice, he thought grimly to himself, giving his square head a fierce, bulldog shake as two of Willy Orville’s chickens died all unnoticed underneath his wheels. He’d checked the whole family over carefully, or thought he had, and they’d looked to be just as nice and friendly a bunch as you could hope for.
Of course he’d been downright pleased when they’d come house hunting here in Commonplace half a year ago, bringing their two kids and their big, black, toothy old mastiff. He had to admit he was awed by the very idea a famous and successful writer like Robert Bleak, a man who could live wherever he chose, would even consider living in Le Piege County. Most outsiders who had any choice at all steered clear of this whole part of the state and were unkind enough to call it the armpit of America when they didn’t call it worse.
It seemed difficult for strangers to get by the endless flatness of the landscape, not to mention the unusual and persistent gloominess of its climate, and he supposed that the grey, twisty scrub growth together with the withered, gnarly trees didn’t help too much, nor did those bogs and swamps and hollows full of all that spooky, clammy mist. You had to make the best of things in Le Piege County, truth be told.
Then people would keep on spreading the worst rumors they could get hold of, going all the way back to those foolish tales the early settlers spread about every local Indian they came across being a cannibal down to the last brave and squaw, and if the newspapers or the television anchormen ever spoke of the area, they were always sure to insert some witty reference to those old-time legends about the scruffy, spooky Hawker family and the weird and deadly hotel they operated during the gold rush days where the guests were killed and robbed and then served up as stew dinners to any following pioneers who’d paused to take advantage of the Hawker hospitality.
Of course what really got the place’s reputation permanently into trouble was the Worper child, Wendell, who’d killed his bullying mother and then stitched her up and stuffed her because he’d felt guilty about hacking her into small, gory pieces with his ax, and because he didn’t like messes. When Wendell saw that she’d come out of the process looking rather well, it seemed to have stirred up some sort of peculiar creative spark in the boy and inspired him to go on to produce further artistic sculptures using the corpses of other ladies he’d acquired from various local graveyards and from killing a variety of old women who’d been unlucky enough to remind him of his mother.
Naturally all that might have gone unnoticed and no one the wiser, but Wendell hadn’t been content with confining his new hobby to interior decoration, no, he’d felt the need to continue by suspending a quantity of new dead females from the outside corners of his house like gargoyles and to beautify the roof with others, including rigging up one of them so that she held out a black lace umbrella and then mounting her onto a swivel atop the peak over the widow’s walk to serve as a weather vane.
Even that wasn’t enough for Wendell now he’d hit his full creative stride and he was soon happily absorbed in the process of posing and arranging more than a dozen more stuffed dead women as lawn ornaments on the property overlooking the road. It may be significant that he was working on the thirteenth one, seating her on a planter made from a truck tire painted white, when a gentleman from the Museum of Folk Art in the city who was passing through had to stop his car in the middle of the road at the sight of all that beauty, and in no time at all Wendell found himself having a one-man retrospective show filling two floors of the museum. But when the big-city police read the rave reviews in the papers and started pondering his sources of supply, Wendell soon commenced his long unhappy slide into trouble and the State Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
However none of all that seemed to bother the Bleaks the tiniest little bit. They even surprised Dorry Phipps, the realtor who showed them the place, by falling in love with the Worper place on first sight—which she had to admit to herself was a decidedly gloomy old pile, especially now that it had been cleared of the brightening eff
ect which Wendell’s funereally gaudy artworks had lent it—and when she finally got her nerve up enough to tell Mr. Bleak about who had lived there, she was amazed and delighted to find the author was so pleased about the revelation that he clapped his hands and chuckled!
The rest of the family seemed just as nice, Dorry said, and she told about Mrs. Bleak lighting up when she spotted some pumpkins growing in a corner of a field and making a homely little joke about having a jack-o’-lantern patch, and Dorry and old Ned Whalen at the garage had to smile at one another when they saw the Bleak children enthusiastically pretending to bring a plastic toy Frankenstein monster to life in the backseat of the car when the family stopped for a little gas. The sheriff listened to all that along with a good many other encouraging reports, and when he read a few of the horror stories Mr. Bleak wrote for a living on top of that, every doubt fled and it seemed to him that they were just the sort of people who’d blend right into the admittedly eccentric ways of Commonplace without giving the town any problems at all. Now, speeding faster and faster down Route 46 until the fence posts blended, he knew with a sickening certainty that he had aided and abetted the establishment of a viper’s nest in the very heart of the community he’d solemnly sworn to protect.
The first hints he might have guessed wrong on the Bleaks came in fairly early, but though they did sound a little odd, he didn’t find it all that hard to brush them off, and he never even so much as noticed the first little dent between his eyes which marked the commencement of his brand-new frown line.
The postman Harry Billings started it all by informing the sheriff about the time he came by with his mail truck and found Mrs. Bleak pulling weeds alongside the fence as he drove up. He had barely managed to get in a “good morning” before she stood, wringing her hands, and proceeded to go on about how worried she was about their neighbors on the opposite hill, the Whitbys, and she asked him in a whisper did he know if there’d been some tragedy? When Harry said as how he didn’t know of one Mrs. Bleak anxiously told him about the Whitbys’ lights going off and on at “odd hours” during the night, and how she and Mr. Bleak had been awakened time after time by “strange noises.” Harry asked her what kind of noises and she paused and swallowed and then suddenly blurted out that they were sometimes “like the horrible screams of people being killed!”, and when Harry gave her a grin and shrugged and tried to reassure her by pointing out that since it was warm and folks’s windows weren’t shut like they would be in colder times, you had to expect to hear private doings every now and again, this reassurance did not seem to calm Mrs. Bleak in the least. She silently opened and closed her mouth a couple of times as though she were trying to speak but only succeeded in making a couple of soft little squawks, and Harry said she watched after him as he drove off, and kept doing it till he was all the way out of sight, and he recalled clearly that she had a very odd look on her face.
