by Stephen King
Tightly.
"There," the dentist says soothingly. "Snug as a bug in a rug . . . that's a curious thing to call you, isn't it? You're no bug, are you? You're more the lover-boy type . . . aren't you?"
Oh-oh, the morbid little guy inside speaks up. This looks bad for old Fred Houseman. Yes indeedy.
It is bad indeed. The dentist, still speaking in that low, pleasant, and oh-so-rational voice, continues to call Houseman "lover-boy." It turns out that Houseman ruined the girl who later became the dentist's wife; Houseman slandered her name from one end of town to the other. The dentist found out that Houseman's regular dentist was Dr. Charles, and so he bought out Charles's practice, figuring that sooner or later Houseman would come back . . . come back to "the painless dentist."
And while he was waiting, the new dentist installed restraint straps on his chair.
Just for Fred Houseman.
All of this, of course, has parted company with any semblance of reality early on (but then, the same can be said of The Tempest--how's that for an impudent comparison?); yet the mind cares not a fig for that at this crucial juncture, and Oboler, of course, never cared at all; like the best writers of horror fiction, he is interested in effect above all else, preferably one that will wallop the listener like a twenty-pound chunk of slate. He achieves that quite nicely in "A Day at the Dentist's."
"W-What are you going to do?" Houseman asks fearfully, echoing the very question that has been troubling our own minds almost since the moment we were foolish enough to turn on this piece of cold-blooded grue.
The dentist's answer is simple and utterly terrifying--more terrifying because of the unpleasant seminar it convenes in our own minds, a seminar in which Oboler ultimately refuses to take part, thus leaving the question to hang for as long as we want to consider it. Under the circumstances, we may not want to consider it long at all.
"Nothing important," the dentist replies as he flicks a switch and the drill begins to whine. "Just going to drill a little hole . . . and let out some of lover-boy."
As Houseman gasps and slobbers with fear in the background, the sound of the drill comes up . . . and up . . . and up . . . and finally, out. The end.
The question, of course, is where exactly did the demon dentist drill the hole to "let out some of lover-boy"? It is a question that only radio, by the very nature of the medium, can pose really convincingly and leave unanswered so uneasily. We hate Oboler a little for not telling us, mostly because our minds are suggesting the most outrageously nasty possibilities.
My first thought was that the dentist had almost surely used the drill on one of Houseman's temples, murdering him with a little impromptu brain surgery.
But later, as I grew up and grew into a better comprehension of just what the nature of Houseman's crime had been, another possibility began to suggest itself. An even nastier one.
Even today, as I write this, I wonder: exactly where did that crazy man use his drill?
4
Well, enough is enough; it is time to move on from the ear to the eye. But before we go, I'd like to remind you of something that you probably already know. Many of the old radio programs, from Inner Sanctum to Gangbusters to the sudsy Our Gal Sal have been preserved on record and tape, and the quality of these recordings is actually better in most cases than the quality of the TV kinescopes that are broadcast on nostalgia programs from time to time. If you're interested in seeing how your own ability to suspend disbelief and to circumnavigate that visual set engendered by TV and the movies is holding up, you can get a start at almost any well-stocked record store. A Schwann's Catalogue of spoken-word records can be even more helpful; what your friendly neighborhood Record Mart doesn't have, they'll be glad to order. And if your interest in Arch Oboler has been at all piqued by the foregoing, let me whisper a little secret in your ear: Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horror--produced, written, and directed by Arch Oboler, available for your delectation on Capitol Records (Capitol: SM-1763). Probably more of a summer cooler than a tall glass of iced tea . . . if you can get rid of that visual set for forty minutes or so.
CHAPTER VI
The Modern American Horror Movie--Text and Subtext
Right now you could be thinking to yourself: this guy must have one hell of a nerve if he thinks he's gonna cover all the horror movies released between 1950 and 1980--everything from The Exorcist to the less-than-immortal The Navy vs. the Night Monsters--in a single chapter.
Well, actually it's going to be two chapters, and no, I don't expect to be able to cover them all, as much as I would like to; but yes, I must have some kind of nerve to be tackling the subject at all. Luckily for me, there are several fairly traditional ways of handling the subject so that at least an illusion of order and coherence emerges. The path I've chosen is that of the horror movie as text and subtext.
The place to start, I think, would be a swift recap of those points already made on the subject of the horror movie as art. If we say "art" is any piece of creative work from which an audience receives more than it gives (a liberal definition of art, sure, but in this field it doesn't pay to be too picky), then I believe that the artistic value the horror movie most frequently offers is its ability to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and our real fears. I've said and will reemphasize here that few horror movies are conceived with "art" in mind; most are conceived only with "profit" in mind. The art is not consciously created but rather thrown off, as an atomic pile throws off radiation.
I do not contend by saying the above that every exploitation horror flick is "art," however. You could walk down Forty-second Street in Times Square on any given afternoon or evening and discover films with names like The Bloody Mutilators, The Female Butcher, or The Ghastly Ones--a 1972 film we are treated to the charming sight of a woman being cut open with a two-handed bucksaw; the camera lingers as her intestines spew out onto the floor. These are squalid little films with no whiff of art in them, and only the most decadent filmgoer would try to argue otherwise. They are the staged equivalent of those 8-and 16-millimeter "snuff" movies which have reputedly oozed out of South America from time to time.
Another point worth mentioning is the great risk a filmmaker takes when he/she decides to make a horror picture. In other creative fields, the only risk is failure--we can say, for instance, that the Mike Nichols film of The Day of the Dolphin "fails," but there is no public outcry, no mothers picketing the movie theaters. But when a horror movie fails, it often falls into painful absurdity or squalid porno-violence.
There are films which skate right up to the border where "art" ceases to exist in any form and exploitation begins, and these films are often the field's most striking successes. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of these; in the hands of Tobe Hooper, the film satisfies that definition of art which I have offered, and I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country. I would not do so for The Ghastly Ones. The difference is more than the difference between a chainsaw and a bucksaw; the difference is something like seventy million light-years. Hooper works in Chainsaw Massacre, in his own queerly apt way, with taste and conscience. The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras.1
So, if I'm going to keep this discussion in order, I'll keep coming back to the concept of value--of art, of social merit. If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unreal--to provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these subtexts are often culture-wide.
In many cases--particularly in the fifties and then again in the early seventies--the fears expressed are sociopolitical in nature, a fact that gives such disparate pictures as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and William Friedkin's The Exorcist a crazily convincing documentary feel. When the horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hats--the B-picture as tabloid editorial--they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things which trouble the night-thoughts of a whole society.
Bu
t horror movies don't always wear a hat which identifies them as disguised comments on the social or political scene (as Cronenberg's The Brood comments on the disintegration of the generational family or as his They Came from Within treats of the more cannibalistic side-effects of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck"). More often the horror movie points even further inward, looking for those deep-seated personal fears--those pressure points--we all must cope with. This adds an element of universality to the proceedings, and may produce an even truer sort of art. It also explains, I think, why The Exorcist (a social horror film if there ever was one) did only so-so business when it was released in West Germany, a country which had an entirely different set of social fears at the time (they were a lot more worried about bomb-throwing radicals than about foul-talking young people), and why Dawn of the Dead went through the roof there.
This second sort of horror film has more in common with the Brothers Grimm than with the op-ed page in a tabloid paper. It is the B-picture as fairy tale. This sort of picture doesn't want to score political points but to scare the hell out of us by crossing certain taboo lines. So if my idea about art is correct (it giveth more than it receiveth), this sort of film is of value to the audience by helping it to better understand what those taboos and fears are, and why it feels so uneasy about them.
A good example of this second type of horror picture is RKO's The Body Snatcher (1945), liberally adapted--and that's putting it kindly--from a Robert Louis Stevenson story and starring Karloff and Lugosi. And by the way, the picture was produced by our friend Val Lewton.
As an example of the art, The Body Snatcher is one of the forties' best. And as an example of this second artistic "purpose"--that of breaking taboos--it positively shines.
I think we'd all agree that one of the great fears which all of us must deal with on a purely personal level is the fear of dying; without good old death to fall back on, the horror movies would be in bad shape. A corollary to this is that there are "good" deaths and "bad" deaths; most of us would like to die peacefully in our beds at age eighty (preferably after a good meal, a bottle of really fine vino, and a really super lay), but very few of us are interested in finding out how it might feel to get slowly crushed under an automobile lift while crankcase oil drips slowly onto our foreheads.
Lots of horror films derive their best effects from this fear of the bad death (as in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, where Phibes dispatches his victims one at a time using the Twelve Plagues of Egypt, slightly updated, a gimmick worthy of the Batman comics during their palmiest days). Who can forget the lethal binoculars in Horrors of the Black Museum, for instance? They came equipped with spring-loaded six-inch prongs, so that when the victim put them to her eyes and then attempted to adjust the field of focus . . .
Others derive their horror simply from the fact of death itself, and the decay which follows death. In a society where such a great store is placed in the fragile commodities of youth, health, and beauty (and the latter, it seems to me, is very often defined in terms of the former two), death and decay become inevitably horrible, and inevitably taboo. If you don't think so, ask yourself why the second grade doesn't get to tour the local mortuary along with the police department, the fire department, and the nearest McDonald's--one can imagine, or I can in my more morbid moments, the mortuary and McDonald's combined; the highlights of the tour, of course, would be a viewing of the McCorpse.
No, the funeral parlor is taboo. Morticians are modern priests, working their arcane magic of cosmetics and preservation in rooms that are clearly marked "off limits." Who washes the corpse's hair? Are the fingernails and toenails of the dear departed clipped one final time? Is it true that the dead are en-coffined sans shoes? Who dresses them for their final star turn in the mortuary viewing room? How is a bullet hole plugged and concealed? How are strangulation bruises hidden?
The answers to all these questions are available, but they are not common knowledge. And if you try to make the answers part of your store of knowledge, people are going to think you a bit peculiar. I know; in the process of researching a forthcoming novel about a father who tries to bring his son back from the dead, I collected a stack of funeral literature a foot high--and any number of peculiar glances from folks who wondered why I was reading The Funeral: Vestige or Value?
But this is not to say that people don't have a certain occasional interest in what lies behind the locked door in the basement of the mortuary, or what may transpire in the local graveyard after the mourners have left . . . or at the dark of the moon. The Body Snatcher is not really a tale of the supernatural, nor was it pitched that way to its audience; it was pitched as a film (as was that notorious sixties documentary Mondo Cane) that would take us "beyond the pale," over that line which marks the edge of taboo ground.
"Cemeteries raided, children slain for bodies to dissect!" the movie poster drooled. "Unthinkable realities and unbelievable FACTS of the dark days of early surgical research EXPOSED in THE MOST DARING SHRIEK-AND-SHUDDER SHOCK SENSATION EVER BROUGHT TO THE SCREEN!" (All of this printed on a leaning tombstone.) But the poster does not stop there; it goes on very specifically to mark out the exact location of the taboo line and to suggest that not everyone may be adventurous enough to transgress this forbidden ground: "If You Can 'Take It' See GRAVES RAIDED! COFFINS ROBBED! CORPSES CARVED! MIDNIGHT MURDER! BODY BLACKMAIL! STALKING GHOULS! MAD REVENGE! MACABRE MYSTERY! And Don't Say We Didn't Warn You!"
All of it has sort of a pleasant, alliterative ring, doesn't it?
2
These "areas of unease"--the political-social-cultural and those of the more mythic, fairy-tale variety--have a tendency to overlap, of course; a good horror picture will put the pressure on at as many points as it can. They Came from Within, for instance, is about sexual promiscuity on one level; on another level it's asking you how you'd like to have a leech jump out of a letter slot and fasten itself onto your face. These are not the same areas of unease at all.
But since we're on the subject of death and decay, we might look at a couple of films where this particular area of unease has been used well. The prime example, of course, is Night of the Living Dead, where our horror of these final states is exploited to a point where many audiences found the film well-nigh unbearable. Other taboos are also broken by the film: at one point a little girl kills her mother with a garden trowel . . . and then begins to eat her. How's that for taboo-breaking? Yet the film circles around to its starting point again and again, and the key word in the film's title is not living but dead.
At an early point, the film's female lead, who has barely escaped being killed by a zombie in a graveyard where she and her brother have come to put flowers on their dead mother's grave (the brother is not so lucky), stumbles into a lonely farmhouse. As she explores, she hears something dripping . . . dripping . . . dripping. She goes upstairs, sees something, screams . . . and the camera zooms in on the rotting, weeks-old head of a corpse. It is a shocking, memorable moment. Later, a government official tells the watching, beleaguered populace that, although they may not like it (i.e., they will have to cross that taboo line to do it), they must burn their dead; simply soak them with gasoline and light them up. Later still, a local sheriff expresses our own uneasy shock at having come so far over the taboo line. He answers a reporter's question by saying, "Ah, they're dead . . . they're all messed up."
The good horror director must have a clear sense of where the taboo line lies, if he is not to lapse into unconscious absurdity, and a gut understanding of what the countryside is like on the far side of it. In Night of the Living Dead, George Romero plays a number of instruments, and he plays them like a virtuoso. A lot has been made of this film's graphic violence, but one of the film's most frightening moments comes near the climax, when the heroine's brother makes his reappearance, still wearing his driving gloves and clutching for his sister with the idiotic, implacable single-mindedness of the hungry dead. The film is violent, as is its sequel, Dawn of the Dead--but the violence has its own
logic, and I submit to you that in the horror genre, logic goes a long way toward proving morality.
The crowning horror in Hitchcock's Psycho comes when Vera Miles touches that chair in the cellar and it spins around to reveal Norman's mother at last--a wizened, shriveled corpse from which hollow eyesockets stare up blankly. She is not only dead; she has been stuffed like one of the birds which decorate Norman's office. Norman's subsequent entrance in dress and makeup is almost an anticlimax.
In AIP's The Pit and the Pendulum we see another facet of the bad death--perhaps the absolute worst. Vincent Price and his cohorts break into a tomb through its brickwork, using pick and shovel. They discover that the lady, his late wife, has indeed been buried alive; for just a moment the camera shows us her tortured face, frozen in a rictus of terror, her bulging eyes, her clawlike fingers, the skin stretched tight and gray. Following the Hammer films, this becomes, I think, the most important moment in the post-1960 horror film, signaling a return to an all-out effort to terrify the audience . . . and a willingness to use any means at hand to do it.
Other examples abound. No vampire movie can be complete without a midnight creep through the tombstones and the jimmying of a crypt door. The John Badham remake of Dracula has disappointingly few fine moments, but one rather good sequence occurs when Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier) discovers his daughter Mina's grave empty . . . and an opening at its bottom leading deeper into the earth.2 This is English mining country, and we're told that the hillside where the cemetery has been laid out is honeycombed with old tunnels. Van Helsing nevertheless descends, and the movie's best passage follows--crawling, claustrophobic, and reminiscent of that classic Henry Kuttner story, "The Graveyard Rats." Van Helsing pauses at a pool for a moment, and his daughter's voice comes from behind him, begging for a kiss. Her eyes glitter unnaturally; she is still dressed in the cerements of the grave. Her flesh has decayed to a sick green color and she stands, swaying, in this passage under the earth like something from a painting of the Apocalypse. In this one moment Badham has not merely asked us to cross the taboo line with him; he has quite literally pushed us across it and into the arms of this rotting corpse--a corpse made more horrible because in life it conformed so perfectly to those conventional American standards of beauty: youth and health. It's only a moment, and the movie holds no other moment comparable to it, but it is a fine effect while it lasts.
