by Stephen King
We ought to eliminate the horror movies of that period that sprang from technological unease (the so-called "big bug" movies are among these) and also those "nuclear showdown" movies such as Fail-Safe and Ray Milland's intermittently interesting Panic in the Year Zero. These movies are not political in the sense that Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is political; that was a film where you could see the political enemy of your choice around every corner, symbolized in those ominous pods from space.
The political horror films of the period we're discussing here begin, I think, with The Thing (1951), directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks (who also had a hand in the direction, one suspects). It starred Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, and James Arness as the blood-drinking human carrot from Planet X.
Briefly: A polar encampment of soldiers and scientists discovers a strong magnetic field emanating from an area where there has been a recent meteor fall; the field is strong enough to throw all their electronic gadgets and gizmos off whack. Further, a camera designed to start shooting pictures when and if the normal radiation background count suddenly goes up has taken photos of an object which dips, swoops, and turns at high speeds--strange behavior for a meteor.
An expedition is dispatched to the spot, and it discovers a flying saucer buried in the ice. The saucer, superhot on touchdown, melted its way into the ice, which then refroze, leaving only the tailfin sticking out (thus relieving the special-effects corps of a potentially big-budget item). The Army guys, who demonstrate frostbite of the brain throughout most of the film, promptly destroy the extraterrestrial ship while trying to burn it out of the ice with thermite.
The occupant (Arness) is saved, however, and carted back to the experimental station in a block of ice. He/it is placed in a storage shed, under guard. One of the guards is so freaked out by the Thing that he throws a blanket over it. Unlucky man! Quite obviously all his good stars are in retrograde, his biorhythms low, and his mental magnetic poles temporarily reversed. The blanket he's used is of the electric variety, and it miraculously melts the ice without shorting out. The Thing escapes, and the fun begins.
The fun ends about sixty minutes later with the creature being roasted medium-rare on an electric sidewalk sort of thing that the scientists have set up. A reporter on the scene reports the news of humankind's first victory over invaders from space to a presumably grateful world, and the film fades out, like The Blob seven years later, not with a THE END title card, but with a question mark.
The Thing is a small movie (in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, Carlos Clarens quite rightly calls it "intimate") done on a low budget and as obviously done "on-set" as Lewton's The Cat People. Like Alien, which would come more than a quarter-century later, it achieves its best effects from feelings of claustrophobia and xenophobia, both of them feelings we're saving for those films with mythic, "fairy-tale" subtexts,3 but as pointed out before, the best horror movies will try to get at you on many different levels, and The Thing is also operating on a political level. It has grim things to say about eggheads (and knee-jerk liberals; in the early fifties you could have put an equal sign between the two) who would indulge in the crime of appeasement.
The very presence of Kenneth Tobey and his squad of soldiers gives the film a militaristic, and thus political, patina. We're never under any illusions that this Arctic base has been set up just for the eggheads, who want to study such useless things as the aurora borealis and the formation of glaciers. No, this base is also spending the taxpayers' money in important ways: it is a part of the Distant Early Warning line, part of America's Vigilant and Unceasing Etc., Etc., Etc. In the chain of command, the scientists are very much under Tobey. After all, the film whispers to the audience, we know what these ivory-tower eggheads are like, don't we? Full of big ideas but not worth much in a situation calling for a practical man. Really, it says, when you get right down to it, those bigdome ideas make most scientists as responsible as a child with a box of matches. They may be great with their microscopes and telescopes, but it takes a man like Kenneth Tobey to understand about America's Vigilant and Unceasing Etc., Etc., Etc.
The Thing is the first movie of the fifties to offer us the scientist in the role of the Appeaser, that creature who for reasons either craven or misguided, would open the gates to the Garden of Eden and let all the evils fly in (as opposed, let us say, to those Mad Labs proprietors of the thirties, who were more than willing to open Pandora's Box and let all the evils fly out--a major distinction, although the end results are the same). That scientists should be so constantly vilified in the techno-horror films of the fifties--a decade that was apparently dedicated to the idea of turning out a whole marching corps of men and women in white lab coats--is perhaps not so surprising when we remember that it was science which opened those same gates so that the atomic bomb could be brought into Eden--first by itself and then trundled on missile carriers. The average Jane or Joe on the street during those spooky eight or nine years that followed the surrender of Japan had extremely schizoid feelings about science and scientists--recognizing the need for them and at the same time loathing the things they had let in forever. On the one hand, there was their pal, that neat little all-around guy, Reddy Kilowatt; on the other hand, before getting into the first reel of The Thing down at your local theater, you could watch newsreel footage as an Army mockup of a town just like yours was vaporized in a nuclear furnace.
Robert Cornthwaite plays the Appeasing Scientist in The Thing, and we hear from his lips the first verse of a psalm that any filmgoer who grew up in the fifties and sixties became familiar with very quickly: "We must preserve this creature for science." The second verse goes, "If it comes from a society more advanced than ours, it must come in peace. If we can only establish communications with it, and find out what it wants--"
Only scientists, Cornthwaite says, are capable of studying this creature from another world, and it must be studied; it must be debriefed; we gotta find out what heats up his rocket tubes. Never mind the fact that the creature has exhibited nothing but murderous tendencies, laying low a couple of huskies (it loses a hand in the process, but not to worry, it grows back) and living on blood instead of Green Thumb Plant Food.
Twice, near the film's conclusion, Cornthwaite is hauled away by soldiers; at the climax, he breaks free of his guards and faces the creature with his hands open and empty. He begs it to communicate with him and to see that he means it no harm. The creature stares at him for a long, pregnant moment . . . and then bats him casually aside, as you or I might swat a mosquito. The medium-rare roasting on the electric sidewalk follows.
Now I'm only a journeyman writer and I will not presume to teach history here (too much like trying to teach your grammy to suck eggs). I will point out that the Americans of that time were perhaps more paranoid about the idea of "appeasement" than at any other time before or since. The dreadful humiliation of Neville Chamberlain and England's resulting close squeak at the beginning of Hitler's war was still very much with those Americans, and why not? It had all happened only twelve years prior to The Thing's release, and even Americans who were just turning twenty-one in 1951 could remember it all very clearly. The moral was simple--such appeasement doesn't work; you gotta cut 'em if they stand and shoot 'em if they run. Otherwise, they'll take you over a bite at a time (and in the case of The Thing, you could take that literally). The Chamberlain lesson to Americans of the early fifties was that there can be no peace at any price, and never appeasement. Although the Korean police action would mark the beginning of the end for the idea, in 1951 the idea of America as world policeman (a kind of international Clancy growling, "Whaddye think yer doin' there, boyo?" at such geopolitical burglars as North Korea) was still quite respectable, and many Americans undoubtedly saw the idea in even stronger terms: the United States not just as policeman, but as the gunslinger of the free world, the Texas Ranger who had pushed his way into the brawling saloon of Asian/European politics in 1941 and who had cleaned h
ouse in a mere three and a half years.
So that moment comes in The Thing when Cornthwaite faces the creature--and is slammed roughly aside. It is a purely political moment, and audiences applauded the creature's destruction fervently when it came moments later. In the confrontation between Cornthwaite and the hulking Arness, there is a subtext which suggests Chamberlain and Hitler; in the destruction of the creature moments later by Tobey and his soldiers, audiences may have seen (and applauded) the quick, no-nonsense destruction of their favorite geopolitical villain--North Korea perhaps; more likely the dastardly Russians, who had so quickly replaced Hitler as the man in the black hat.
If all this seems much too heavy a cargo for a modest little fright flick like The Thing to bear, please remind yourself that a man's point of view is shaped by the events he experiences, and that a man's politics are shaped by his point of view. I am only suggesting that, given the political temper of the times and the cataclysmic world events which had occurred only a few years before, the viewpoint of this movie is almost preordained. What do you do with a blood-drinking carrot from outer space? Simple. Cut him if he stands and shoot him if he runs. And if you're an Appeasing Scientist like Robert Cornthwaite (with a yellow streak up your back as wide as the nopassing line on a highway, that subtext whispers), you simply get bulldozed under.
Carlos Clarens points out how remarkably the creature of this film resembles Universal's Frankenstein monster from twenty years before, but there is really nothing so remarkable about it, surely; this particular card from the Tarot should be familiar to us by now, and if it's not, the title helpfully informs us that we're again dealing with the Thing Without a Name. It perhaps strikes more modern viewers as strange that a creature intelligent enough to conquer space should be presented in the film as an out-and-out monster (as opposed, let us say, to the saucerians in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, who speak English with a moderate warble but with the grammatical poise of an Oxford don; Hawks's Thing can only grunt like a pig getting its back scratched with a wire brush). One wonders why he came to Earth at all. My own suspicion is that he/it got off-course and that the original plan was for him to seed all of Nebraska or perhaps the Nile delta with little bits of himself. Just think--a home-grown invasion force (get in their way and they kill you, but smoke them and . . . real mellow, man--oooh, the colors!) Yet even this is not much of an inconsistency when we put ourselves into the temper of the times again. The people of those times saw both Hitler and Stalin as creatures possessed of a certain low animal cunning--Hitler, after all, was first with the jet fighter and the offensive missile. But they were animals for all that, mouthing political ideas that were little more than grunts. Hitler grunted in German; Stalin in Russian, but a grunt is a grunt, for all that. And perhaps the creature in The Thing is saying something, after all, which is perfectly harmless--"The people of my star system wish to know if the Get Out of Jail Free card may be sold to another player," perhaps--but it sounds bad. Real bad.
By contrast, consider the other end of this telescope. The children of World War II produced The Thing; twenty-six years later a child of Vietnam and the self-proclaimed Love Generation, Steven Spielberg, gives us a fitting balance weight to The Thing in a film called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1951, the soldier standing sentry duty (the one who has foolishly covered the block of ice in which the Thing has been entombed with an electric blanket, you will remember) empties his automatic into the alien when he hears it coming; in 1977, an old guy holds up a sign reading STOP AND BE FRIENDLY. Somewhere in between the two, John Foster Dulles evolved into Henry Kissinger, and the pugnacious politics of confrontation became detente.
In The Thing, Kenneth Tobey occupies himself with building an electric boardwalk to kill the creature; in Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfuss occupies himself with building a mockup of Devil's Tower, the creatures' landing place, in his living room. And he would be just as happy, we feel, to run around up there placing those landing lights. The Thing is a big, hulking brute; the creatures from the stars in Spielberg's film are small, delicate, childlike. They do not speak, but their mothership plays lovely harmonic tones--the music of the spheres, we assume. And Dreyfuss, far from wanting to murder these emissaries from space, goes with them.
I'm not saying that Spielberg is or would think of himself as a member of the Love Generation simply because he came to his majority while students were putting daisies in the muzzles of M-l's and while Hendrix and Joplin were playing the Fillmore West. Neither am I saying that Howard Hawks, Christian Nyby, Charles Lederer (who wrote the screenplay for The Thing), or John W. Campbell (whose novella formed the basis for the film) fought their way up the beaches of Anzio or helped to raise the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. But events determine point of view and point of view determines politics, and CE3K seems to me every bit as preordained as The Thing. We can understand that the latter's "let the military handle this" thesis was a perfectly acceptable one in 1951, because the military had handled the Japs and the Nazis perfectly well in Duke Wayne's "Big One," and we can also understand that the former's attitude of "don't let the military handle this" was a perfectly acceptable one in 1977, following the military's less-than-startling record in Vietnam, or even in 1980 (when CE3K was rereleased with additional footage), the year when American military personnel lost the battle for our hostages to the Iranians following three hours of mechanical fuckups.
Political horror films are by no means common, but other examples come to mind. The hawkish ones, like The Thing, usually extol the virtues of preparedness and deplore the vices of laxness, and achieve a goodly amount of their horror by positing a society which is politically antithetical to ours and yet possesses a great deal of power--either technological or magical, it matters not which; as Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out, when you reach a certain point, there is absolutely no difference between the two. There is a wonderful moment near the beginning of George Pal's adaptation of The War of the Worlds when three men, one of whom is waving a white flag, approach the first of the alien spacecraft to land. Each of the three appears to come from a different class and a different race, but they are united, not just by their common humanity, but by a pervasive sense of Americanness which I don't believe was accidental. As they approach the smoking crater with their white flag, they evoke that Revolutionary War image we all grew up in school with: the drummer, the fifer, the flag-bearer. Thus their destruction by the Martians' heat ray becomes a symbolic act, calling up all the ideals Americans have ever fought for.
The film 1984 makes a similar statement, only here (the film being largely stripped of the rich resonance George Orwell brought to his novel) Big Brother has replaced the Martians.
In the Charlton Heston film The Omega Man (adapted from what David Chute calls "Richard Matheson's tough-minded, peculiarly practical vampire novel I Am Legend"), we see exactly the same sort of thing; the vampires become almost cartoon Gestapo agents in their black clothes and their sunglasses. Ironically, an earlier film version of that same novel (The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price in a rare non-villain role as Matheson's Robert Neville) proposes a political idea which raises a different sort of horror. This film is more faithful to Matheson's novel, and as a result it offers a subtext which tells us that politics themselves are not immutable, that times change, and that Neville's very success as a vampire-hunter (his peculiarly practical success, to paraphrase Chute), has turned him into the monster, the outlaw, the Gestapo agent who strikes at the helpless as they sleep. For a nation whose political nightmares perhaps still include visions of Kent State and My Lai, this is a particularly apt idea. The Last Man on Earth is perhaps an example of the ultimate political horror film, because it offers us the Walt Kelly thesis: We have met the enemy and he is us.
All of which brings us to an interesting borderline that I want to point out but not step over--this is the point at which the country of the horror film touches the country of the black comedy. Stanley Kubrick has been a resident of thi
s borderline area for quite some time. A perfectly good case could be made for classing Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as a political horror film without monsters (a guy needs a dime to phone Washington and stop World War III before it can get started; Keenan Wynn grudgingly obliges by blowing a Coke machine to smithereens with his burpgun so our hero can get at the change; but he tells this would-be savior of the human race that "you're going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company for this"); for A Clockwork Orange as a political horror film with human monsters (Malcolm McDowell stomping a hapless old man to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain"); and for 2001: A Space Odyssey as a political horror film with an inhuman monster ("Please don't turn me off," the murderous computer HAL 9000 begs as the Jupiter probe's one remaining crewman pulls its memory modules one by one) that ends its cybernetic life by singing "A Bicycle Built for Two." Kubrick has consistently been the only American film director to understand that stepping over the borderline into taboo country is as often apt to cause wild laughter as it is horror, but any ten-year-old who ever laughed hysterically at a traveling-salesman joke would agree that it is so. Or it may simply be that only Kubrick has been smart enough (or brave enough) to go back to this country more than once.
6
"We have opened a door on an unimaginable power," the old scientist says gloomily at the conclusion of Them! "and there will be no closing it now."
At the end of D. F. Jones's novel Colossus (filmed as Colossus: The Forbin Project), the computer which has taken over everything tells Forbin, its creator, that people will do more than learn to accept its rule; they will come to accept it as a god. "Never!" Forbin responds in ringing tones that would do the hero of a Robert Heinlein space opera proud. But it is Jones himself who has the final word--and it's not a reassuring one. "Never?" reads the final paragraph of his cautionary tale.4
