Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  "Yes, Morris," Quatermass replies. "I'm going to need some help."

  "Help, sir?"

  "Going to start again," Quatermass amplifies--it is the film's last line of dialogue. It fades to a scene of yet another rocket blasting off into outer space.

  Guest seems ambivalent about his ending and about the character of Quatermass, and it's that ambivalence which gives this early Hammer film its resonance and real power. Quatermass seems somehow closer to those very real Oak Ridge scientists of the postwar period than he does to the gibbering Mad Labs scientists of the thirties; his is no Dr. Cyclops in a white lab coat, chuckling evilly as he stares through his bottle-thick glasses at his creations. Au contraire, he is not only fairly good-looking and fearsomely intelligent, he is charismatic and impossible to turn from his purpose. If you are an optimist, you can see the coda of The Creeping Unknown as a testament to the glorious stubbornness of the human spirit, its determination to advance the store of knowledge at any cost. If, on the other hand, you are a pessimist, then Quatermass becomes the ultimate symbol of mankind's built-in limiting factor, and the high priest of the techno-horror film. The return of his first manned space probe has almost resulted in the end of the human race; Quatermass's response to this niggling little reversal is to launch another as quickly as he can. Foot-dragging politicians are apparently no match for the man's charisma, and as we see that rocket going up at the end of the picture, we're left with a question: What will this one bring back?

  Even such a much-loved American institution as the motor vehicle has not entirely escaped the troubled dreams of Hollywood; a few years before being run out of his mortgaged house in Amityville, James Brolin had to face the terrors of The Car (1977), a customized something-or-other that looked like a squatty airport limo from one of hell's used-car lots. The movie degenerates into a ho-hum piece of hackwork before the end of the second reel (the sort of movie where you can safely go out for a popcorn refill at certain intervals because you know the car isn't going to strike again for ten minutes or so), but there is a marvelous opening sequence where the car chases two bicyclists through Utah's Zion National Park, its horn bleating arrhythmically as it gains on them and finally runs them down. There's something working in that opening sequence, something that calls up a deep, almost primitive unease about the cars we zip ourselves up in, thereby becoming anonymous . . . and perhaps homicidal.

  A better film is the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Richard Matheson's short story Duel, a film which originally appeared as part of ABC's Movie of the Week series and went on to become something of a cult film. In this film, a psychotic trucker in a big ten-wheeler pursues Dennis Weaver over what seems to be at least a million miles of California highways. We never actually see the trucker (although we do see a beefy arm cocked out of the cab window once, and at another point we see a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots on the far side of the truck), and ultimately it is the truck itself, with its huge wheels, its dirty windshield like an idiot's stare, and its somehow hungry bumpers, which becomes the monster--and when Weaver is finally able to lead it to an embankment and lure it over the edge, the noise of its "death" becomes a series of chilling Jurassic roars . . . the sound, we think, a tyrannosaurus rex would make going slowly down into a tar pit. And Weaver's response is that of any self-respecting caveman: he screams, shrieks, cuts capers, literally dances for joy. Duel is a gripping, almost painfully suspenseful rocket ride of a movie; perhaps not Spielberg's best work--that must almost certainly wait for the eighties and nineties--but surely one of the half-dozen best movies ever made for TV.

  We could uncover other interesting tales of automotive horror, but they would be stories and novels, mostly; such turkeys as Death Race 2000 and Mad Max hardly count. Modern Hollywood has apparently decided that, as the day of the privately owned gasoline vehicle enters its late afternoon, the automobile in most cases must be reserved for funny car chases (as in Foul Play and the cheerfully mind-croggling Grand Theft Auto) or a kind of sappy reverence (The Driver). The interested reader might enjoy an anthology (now available in paperback) edited by Bill Pronzini and titled Car Sinister. Fritz Leiber's contribution alone, a funny/sinister tale of Car Future titled "X Marks the Pedwalk," is worth the price of admission.

  7

  Social horror films.

  We've already discussed a few films with social implications--pimples and the heartbreak of psoriasis in the fifties, not to mention Michael Landon drooling shaving cream all over his high school jacket. But there have been other films which tackle more serious social subjects. In some cases (Rollerball, Wild in the Streets), these films feature a logical or satirical extrapolation of current social trends and thus become science fiction. We'll restrict these, if you don't mind, on the grounds that they constitute another dance--a bit different from this dark cotillion we're currently engaged in.

  There have been a few films which have tried to walk the borderline between horror and social satire; one of those which seems to me to tread this borderline most successfully is The Stepford Wives. The film is based on the novel by Ira Levin, and Levin has actually been able to pull this difficult trick off twice, the other case being that of Rosemary's Baby, which we'll talk about in some depth when we finally arrive at our discussion of the horror novel. For now we'll stick to The Stepford Wives, which has some witty things to say about Women's Liberation, and some disquieting things to say about the American male's response to it.

  I spent some time trying to decide if the film, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss, really belonged in this book. It is as satiric as the best of Kubrick's work (although a good deal less elegant), and I defy an audience not to laugh when Ross and Prentiss step into the home of a neighbor (he's the local druggist, and a Walter Mitty type if ever there was one) and hear his wife moaning upstairs: "Oh, Frank, you're the greatest . . . Frank, you're the best . . . you're the champ . . ."6

  The original Levin story avoided the label "horror novel" (something like the label "pariah dog" in the more exalted circles of literary criticism) because most critics saw it as Levin's sly poke at the Women's Movement. But the scarier implications of Levin's jape are not directed at women at all; they are aimed unerringly at those men who consider it only their due to leave for the golf course on Saturday morning after breakfast has been served them and to reappear (loaded, more likely than not) in time for their dinner to be served them.

  I'm including it here--as social horror rather than social satire--because the film, after some uneasy backing and filling where it seems unsure of just what it does want to be--becomes just that: a social horror story.

  Katharine Ross and her husband (played by Peter Masterson) move from New York City to Stepford, a Connecticut suburb, because they feel it will be better for the children, and themselves as well. Stepford is a perfect little village where kids wait good-humoredly for the school bus, where you can see two or three fellows washing their cars on any given day, where (you feel) the yearly United Fund quota is not only met but exceeded.

  Yet there's a strangeness in Stepford. A lot of the wives seem a little . . . well, spacey. Pretty, always attired in flowing dresses that are almost gowns (a place where the movie slips, I think; as a labeling device, it's pretty crude. These women might as well be wearing stickers pasted to their foreheads which read I AM ONE OF THE WEIRD STEPFORD WIVES), they all drive station wagons, discuss housework with an inordinate degree of enthusiasm, and seem to spend any spare time at the supermarket.

  One of the Stepford wives (one of the weird ones) cracks her head in a minor parking lot fender-bender; later we see her at a lawn party, repeating over and over again: "I simply must get that recipe . . . I simply must get that recipe . . . I simply must . . ." The secret of Stepford comes clear immediately. Freud, in a tone which sounds suspiciously like despair, asked: "Woman . . . what does she want?" Forbes and company ask the opposite question, and come up with a stinging answer. Men, the film says, do not want w
omen; they want robots with sex organs.

  There are several funny scenes in the movie (besides the aforementioned "Frank, you're the champ" sequence); my own favorite comes when, at a women's "bitch session" Ross and Prentiss have arranged, the weird Stepford wives begin discussing cleaning products and laundry soaps with a slow and yet earnest intensity; everyone seems to have walked right out of one of those commercials male Madison Avenue execs sometimes refer to as "Two C's in a K"--meaning two cunts in a kitchen.

  But the movie waltzes slowly out of this brightly lit room of social satire and into a darker chamber by far. We feel the ring closing, first around Paula Prentiss, then around Katharine Ross. There is an uncomfortable passage when the artist who apparently creates the features for the robots sits sketching Ross, his eyes looking up from the sketch pad at her and then back down again; there is the smirking expression on the face of Tina Louise's husband as the bulldozer rips up the surface of her tennis court in preparation for the pool he always wanted; there is Ross discovering her husband sitting alone in the living room of their new house, a drink in his hand, weeping. She is deeply concerned, but we know that his shallow tears mean only that he has sold her out for a dummy with micro-chips in her head. Very soon she will lose all her interest in photography.

  The movie reserves its ultimate horror and its most telling social shot for the closing moments of the film, when the "new" Katharine Ross walks in on the old one . . . perhaps, we think, to murder her. Under her flowing negligee which might have come from Frederick's of Hollywood, we see Ms. Ross's rather small breasts built up to the size of what men discussing women over beers sometimes refer to as "knockers." And of course, they are no longer the woman's breasts at all; they now belong solely to her husband. The dummy is not quite complete, however; there are two horrible black pools where the eyes should be. Bad enough, and more spectacular, probably, but it was the import of those silicone-swollen breasts that chilled me. The best social horror movies achieve their effect by implication, and The Stepford Wives, by showing us only the surface of things and never troubling to explain exactly how these things are done, implies plenty.

  I'll not bore you by rehashing the plot of William Friedkin's The Exorcist, another film which relies on the unease generated by changing mores; I'll simply assume that if your interest in the genre has been sufficient to sustain you this far, then you've probably seen it.

  If the late fifties and early sixties were the curtain-raiser on the generation gap ("Is it a boy or a girl?" etc., etc., etc.), then the seven years from 1966 to 1972 were the play itself. Little Richard, who had horrified parents in 1957 when he leaped atop his piano and began boogeying on it in his lizardskin loafers, looked tame next to John Lennon, who was proclaiming that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus--a statement that set off a rash of fundamentalist record-burnings. The Brylcreem look was replaced by those long locks already discussed. Parents began to find strange herbs in their sons' and daughters' bureau drawers. The images in rock music had become increasingly distressing: Mr. Tambourine Man seemed to be about drugs; with the Byrds' Eight Miles High there could be no question. Radio stations continued to play discs by one group even after two male band members announced they were in love with each other. Elton John proclaimed his AC/DC sexual proclivities and continued successful; yet less than twenty years before, wildman Jerry Lee Lewis was blackballed from AM airplay when he married his fourteen-year-old cousin.

  Then there was the war in Vietnam. Messrs. Johnson and Nixon spread it out like a great big rancid picnic lunch over there in Asia. Many of the young elected not to attend. "I got no quarrel with them Congs," Muhammed Ali announced, and was stripped of his boxing title for declining to take off his gloves and pick up an M-1. Kids began burning their draft cards, running away to Canada or Sweden, and marching with Viet Cong flags. In Bangor, where I hung out in my college days, a young man was arrested and incarcerated for replacing the seat of his Levis with an American flag. Some fun, huh, kid.

  It was more than a generation gap. The two generations seemed, like the San Andreas fault, to be moving along opposing plates of social and cultural conscience, commitment, and definitions of civilized behavior itself. The result was not so much an earthquake as it was a timequake. And with all of this young vs. old nuttiness as a backdrop, Friedkin's film of The Exorcist appeared and became a social phenomenon in itself. Lines stretched around the block in every major city where it played, and even in towns which normally rolled up their sidewalks promptly at 7:30 P.M., midnight shows were scheduled. Church groups picketed; sociologists with pipes pontificated; newscasters did "back of the book" segments for their programs on slow nights. The country, in fact, went on a two-month possession jag.

  The movie (and the novel) is nominally about the attempts of two priests to cast a demon out of young Regan MacNeil, a pretty little subteen played by Linda Blair (who later went on to a High Noon showdown with a bathroom plunger in the infamous NBC movie Born Innocent). Substantatively, however, it is a film about explosive social change, a finely honed focusing point for that entire youth explosion that took place in the late sixties and early seventies. It was a movie for all those parents who felt, in a kind of agony and terror, that they were losing their children and could not understand why or how it was happening. It's the face of the Werewolf again, a Jekyll-and-Hyde tale in which sweet, lovely and loving Regan turns into a foul-talking monster strapped into her bed and croaking (in the voice of Mercedes McCambridge) such charming homilies as "You're going to let Jesus fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." Religious trappings aside, every adult in America understood what the film's powerful subtext was saying; they understood that the demon in Regan MacNeil would have responded enthusiastically to the Fish Cheer in Woodstock.

  A Warner Brothers executive told me recently that movie surveys show the average filmgoer to be fifteen years of age, which may be the biggest reason why the movies so often seem afflicted with a terminal case of arrested development. For every film like Julia or The Turning Point, there are a dozen like Roller Boogie and If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind. But it is worth noting that when the infrequent blockbusters which every film producer hopes for finally come along--pictures like Star Wars, Jaws, American Graffiti, The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, and of course The Exorcist--they always break the demographic hammerlock which is the enemy of intelligent filmmaking. It is comparatively rare for horror movies to do this, but The Exorcist is a case in point (and we have already spoken of The Amityville Horror, another film which has enjoyed a surprisingly old audience).

  A film which appealed directly to the fifteen-year-olds that provide the spike point for movie-going audiences--and one with a subtext tailored to match--was the Brian De Palma adaptation of my novel Carrie. While I believe that both the book and the film depend on largely the same social situations to provide a text and subtext of horror, there's maybe enough difference to make a few interesting observations on De Palma's film version.

  Both novel and movie have a pleasant High School Confidential feel, and while there are some superficial changes from the book in the film (Carrie's mother, for instance, seems to be presented in the film as a kind of weird renegade Roman Catholic), the basic story skeleton is pretty much the same. The story deals with a girl named Carrie White, the browbeaten daughter of a religious fanatic. Because of her strange clothes and shy mannerisms, Carrie is the butt of every class joke; the social outsider in every situation. She also has a mild telekinetic ability which intensifies after her first menstrual period, and she finally uses this power to "bring down the house" following a terrible social disaster at her high school prom.

  De Palma's approach to the material was lighter and more deft than my own--and a good deal more artistic; the book tries to deal with the loneliness of one girl, her desperate effort to become a part of the peer society in which she must exist, and how her effort fails. If it had any thesis to offer, this deliberate updating of High School Confidential, it was th
at high school is a place of almost bottomless conservatism and bigotry, a place where the adolescents who attend are no more allowed to rise "above their station" than a Hindu would be allowed to rise above his or her caste.

  But there's a little more subtext to the book than that, I think--at least, I hope so. If The Stepford Wives concerns itself with what men want from women, then Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, and what men fear about women and women's sexuality . . . which is only to say that, writing the book in 1973 and only out of college three years, I was fully aware of what Women's Liberation implied for me and others of my sex. The book is, in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality. For me, Carrie White is a sadly misused teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of man-and woman-eaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she's also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.

  Heavy, turgid stuff--but in the novel, it's only there if you want to take it. If you don't, that's okay with me. A subtext only works well if it's unobtrusive (in that I perhaps succeeded too well; in her review of De Palma's film, Pauline Kael dismissed my novel as "an unassuming potboiler"--as depressing a description as one could imagine, but not completely inaccurate).

  De Palma's film is up to more ambitious things. As in The Stepford Wives, humor and horror exist side by side in Carrie, playing off one another, and it is only as the film nears its conclusion that horror takes over completely. We see Billy Nolan (well played by John Travolta) giving the cops a big aw-shucks grin as he hides a beer against his crotch early on; it is a moment reminiscent of American Graffiti. Not long after, however, we see him swinging a sledgehammer at the head of a pig in a stockyard--the aw-shucks grin has crossed the line into madness, somehow, and that line-crossing is what the film as a whole is about.