Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  19. Once upon a time there was a lady who was saddled with Satan's child, and he knocked her over a gallery railing with his trike. What a mean thing to do! But lucky mommy! Because she died soon after, she didn't have to do the sequel!

  20. Once upon a time some friends went on a canoe trip down a magic river, and some bad men saw that they were having fun and decided to fix them for it. That was because the bad men didn't want those other fellows, who came from the city, to have a good time in their woods.

  Okay, did you write down all of your answers? If you find you have four or more blanks--not even an educated guess to plug in there--you have been spending far too much time seeing "quality" films like Julia, Manhattan, and Breaking Away. And while you've been watching Woody Allen give his imitation of an ingrown hair (a liberal ingrown hair, of course), you missed some of the scariest films ever made. For the record, the answers are: 1. WAIT UNTIL DARK

  2. HALLOWEEN

  3. PSYCHO

  4. COMA 5. LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR

  6. ALIEN

  7. THE HAUNTING

  8. MIDNIGHT EXPRESS

  9. THE BAD SEED

  10. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

  11. NIGHT WATCH

  12. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

  13. THE BIRDS

  14. DEMENTIA-13

  15. WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?

  16. I BURY THE LIVING

  17. MACABRE8

  18. X--THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES

  19. THE OMEN

  20. DELIVERANCE

  The first thing we can note about this list of films is that, of the twenty (which I would call the basic coursework in films of gut-level horror in the period we're discussing here), fully fourteen have nothing supernatural going on in them . . . fifteen if you count Alien, which is at least nominally science fiction (I do count it as a supernatural tale, however; I think of it as Lovecraft in outer space, mankind finally going to the Elder Gods rather than they coming to us). So we might be able to say, paradox or not, that movies of fairy-tale horror demand a heavy dose of reality to get them rolling. Such reality frees the imagination of excess baggage and makes the weight of unbelief easier to lift. The audience is propelled into the movie by the feeling that, under the right set of circumstances, this could happen.

  The second thing we could note is that a quarter of them bear a reference either to "night" or "the dark" in their titles. The dark, it goes almost without saying, provides the basis for our most primordial fears. As spiritual as we may believe our natures to be, our physiology is similar to that of all the rest of the mammals that creep, crawl, trot, or walk; we must make do with the same five senses. There are many mammals whose eyesight is keen, but we are not among them. There are mammals--dogs, for instance--which have even lousier eyesight than we do, but their lack of brainpower has forced them to develop other senses to a keenness we cannot even imagine (although we may think we can). With dogs, the overdeveloped senses are those of hearing and smell.

  So-called psychics like to prate of a "sixth sense," a vague term which sometimes means telepathy, sometimes precognition, sometimes God knows what, but we have a sixth sense, it is probably just (some just!) the keenness of our reasoning facilities. Fido may be able to follow a hundred scents of which we are completely unaware, but the little bugger is never going to be any good at checkers, or even Go Fish. This reasoning power has made it unnecessary for us to breed keener senses into the gene pool; in fact, a large part of the population has sensory equipment which is actually substandard even by human standards--hence eyeglasses and hearing aids. But we are able to make do because of our Boeing-747 brains.

  All of which is very fine when you're doing a deal in a well-lit executive boardroom or ironing the laundry in the living room on a sunny afternoon; but when the lights fail during a thunderstorm and we're left to creep around from place to place, trying to remember where we left the goddamn candles, the situation changes. Even a 747, sophisticated on-board radar and all, can't land in a heavy fog bank. When the lights go out and we find ourselves stranded in a shoal of darkness, reality itself has an unpleasant way of fogging in.

  When we cut off one avenue of sensory input, that sense simply shuts down (although it never shuts down 100 percent, of course; even in a dark room, we will see a trace pattern in front of our eyes, and in the most perfect silence we will hear a faint hum . . . such "phantom input" only means that the circuits are open and standing by). The same does not happen with our brains--fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the situation. It's fortunate if you happen to be stuck in a boring situation; you can use your sixth sense to plan the next day's work, to wonder what life might be like if you won the grand prize in the state lottery or the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes, or to speculate on what that sexy Miss Hepplewaite does--or doesn't--wear under those tight dresses of hers. On the other hand, the brain's constant function can be a mixed blessing. Ask anyone who is a victim of chronic insomnia.

  I tell people who say that horror movies don't scare them to make this simple experiment. Go see a film like Night of the Living Dead all alone (have you ever noticed how many people go to horror movies, not just in pairs or groups, but in actual packs?). Afterwards, get in your car, drive to an old, deserted, crumbling house--every town has at least one (except Stepford, Connecticut, but they have their own problems there). Let yourself in. Mount to the attic. Sit down up there. Listen to the house groan and creak around you. Notice how much those creaks sound like someone--or some thing--mounting the stairs. Smell the must. The rot. The decay. Think about the film you have just seen. Consider it as you sit there in the dark, unable to see what might be creeping up . . . what might be just about to place its dirty, twisted claw on your shoulder . . . or around your neck . . .

  This sort of thing can prove, by its very darkness, to be an enlightening experience.

  Fear of the dark is the most childlike fear. Tales of terror are customarily told "around the campfire" or at least after sundown, because what is laughable in the sunshine is often tougher to smile at by starlight. This is a fact that every maker of horror films and writer of horror tales recognizes and uses--it is one of those unfailing pressure points where the grip of horror fiction is surest.9 This is particularly true of the filmmakers, of course, and of all the tools that the filmmaker can bring to bear, it is perhaps this fear of the dark that seems the most natural, since movies must, by their very nature, be viewed in the dark.

  It was Michael Cantalupo, an assistant editor at Everest House, who reminded me of a gimmick used in the first-run engagements of Wait Until Dark, and in this context it bears an affectionate mention. The last fifteen or twenty minutes of that film are utterly terrifying, partially due to virtuoso performances turned in by Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin (and in my view, Arkin's performance as Harry Roat, Jr., from Scarsdale may be the greatest evocation of screen villainy ever, rivalling and perhaps surpassing Peter Lorre's in M), partially due to the brilliant gimmick on which Frederick Knott's story turns.

  Hepburn, in a final desperate effort to save her life, breaks every damned lightbulb in the apartment and hallway, so that she and the sighted Arkin will be on even terms. Trouble is, she forgets one light . . . but you and I probably would have forgotten it, too. It's the bulb inside the refrigerator.

  Anyway, the in-theater gimmick was to turn out every damn light in the auditorium except for the EXIT lights over the doors. I never realized until the last ten minutes of Wait Until Dark how much light there is in most theaters, even when the movie's playing. There are those tiny "dim-bulbs" set into the ceiling if the theater is one of the new breed, those gauche but somehow lovely electric flambeaux glowing along the walls in the older ones. In a pinch, you can always find your way back to your seat after using the bathroom by the light being thrown from the screen itself. Except that the climactic few minutes of Wait Until Dark are set entirely in that black apartment. You have only your ears, and what they hear--Miss Hepburn screaming,
Arkin's tortured breathing (he's been stabbed a bit earlier on, and we're allowed to relax a little, to think he might even be dead, when he pops out again like a malefic jack-in-the-box)--isn't very comforting. So there you sit. Your big old Boeing-747 brain is cranked up like a kid's jalopy with the pedal to the metal, and it has very little concrete input to work on. So you sit there, sweating it out, hoping the lights will eventually come on again . . . sooner or later, they do. Mike Cantalupo told me he saw Wait Until Dark in a theater so sleazy that even the EXIT lights were broken.

  Man, that must have been bad.

  Mike's recollection of that took me fondly back to another film--William Castle's The Tingler, which had a similar (if, in the Castle style, infinitely more crass) gimmick. Castle, whom I've already mentioned in connection with Macabre--known to all us WASPy little kids as McBare, you'll remember--was the king of the gimmicks; he originated the $100,000 "fright insurance" policy, for instance; if you dropped dead during the film, your heirs got the money. Then there was the great "Nurse on Duty at All Performances" gimmick; there was the "You Must Have Your Blood Pressure Taken in the Lobby Before Viewing This Horrifying Film" gimmick (that one was used as part of The House on Haunted Hill promo), and all sorts of other gimmicks.

  The exact plot specifics of The Tingler, a film so exquisitely low budget that it probably made back its production costs after a thousand people had seen it, now escape me, but there was this monster (the Tingler, natch) that lived on fear. When its victims were so scared they couldn't even scream, it attached itself to their spines and sorta . . . well . . . tingled them to death. I know that must sound pretty fucking stupid, but in the film, it worked (although it probably helped to be eleven years old when you saw it). As I remember, one sexy miss got it in the bathtub. Bad news.

  But never mind the plot; let's get on to the gimmick. At one point the Tingler got into a movie theater, killed the projectionist, and somehow shorted out the electricity. At that moment in the theater where you were watching the movie, all the lights went out and the screen went dark. Now as it happened, the only thing that could get the Tingler to let go of your spine once it had attached itself was a good loud scream, which changed the quality of the adrenaline it fed on. And at this point, a narrator on the soundtrack cried out, "The Tingler is now in this theater! It may be under your seat! So scream! Scream! Scream for your lives!!" The audience was of course happy to oblige, and in the next scene we see the Tingler fleeing for its life, vanquished for the time being by all those screaming people. Nor was that all; according to Dennis Etchison, there was yet another gimmick used by Castle during The Tingler's first run (in showcase theaters only). Certain rows of these theaters, Dennis says, "were wired with buzzing devices attached to the backs or bottoms of the seats, so at the appropriate moment you could hear--and feel--the Tingler in your row!"10

  Besides the movies which raise the scary concept of the dark in their titles, almost every other film listed in the little quiz I gave you uses that fear of the dark heavily. All but approximately eighteen minutes of John Carpenter's Halloween are set after nightfall. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the final horrible sequence (my wife ran for the women's room, believing she was going to toss her cookies), where Tom Berenger stabs Diane Keaton to death, is shot in her dark apartment, with only a flickering strobe-light for illumination. In Alien, that constant motif of the dark barely needs mentioning. "In space, no one can hear you scream," the ad copy read; it also could have said, "In space, it is always one minute after midnight." Dawn never comes in that Lovecraftian gulf between the stars.

  Hill House is always spooky, but it saves its really big effects--the face in the wall, the bulging doors, the booming noises, the thing that held Eleanor's hand (she thought it was Theo, but--gulp!--it wasn't)--for well past sunset. It was another Everest House editor, Bill Thompson (who has been my editor for about a thousand years; perhaps in a previous life I was his editor and now he's having his revenge), who reminded me of The Night of the Hunter--and mea culpa that I should have needed reminding--and told me that one of the scenes of horror which has remained with him over the years was the sight of Shelley Winters's hair floating in the water after the homicidal preacher has disposed of her in the river. It happens, naturally, after dark.11

  There is an interesting similarity between the scene in which the little girl kills her mother with a garden trowel in Night of the Living Dead and the climactic scene in The Birds, where Tippi Hedren is trapped in the attic and attacked by crows, sparrows, and gulls. Both of these scenes are classic examples of how dark and light can be used selectively. We will remember, most of us, from our own childhoods that a lot of light had the power to vanquish imagined evils and fears, but sometimes a little light only made them worse. It was the streetlight outside that made the branches of a nearby tree look like witch fingers, or it was the moonlight streaming in the window that made the jumble of toys pushed away in the closet take on the aspect of a crouching Thing ready to shamble in and attack at any moment.

  During the matricide scene in Night of the Living Dead (which, like the shower scene in Psycho, seems almost endless to our shocked eyes the first time we see it), the little girl's arm strikes a hanging lightbulb, and the cellar becomes a nightmare dreamscape of shifting, swinging shadows--revealing, concealing, revealing again. During the attack of the birds in the attic, it is the big flashlight Ms. Hedren carries which provides this strobe effect (also mentioned in connection with Looking for Mr. Goodbar and used again--more irritatingly and pointlessly--during Marlon Brando's incoherent monologue near the end of Apocalypse Now) and also provides the scene with a pulse, a beat--at first the flashlight beam moves rapidly as Ms. Hedren uses the light to ward off the birds . . . but as she is gradually sapped of strength and lapses first into shock and then into unconsciousness, the light moves more and more slowly, sinking to the floor. Until there is only dark . . . and in that dark, the tenebrous, whirring flutter of many wings.

  I'll not belabor the point by analyzing the "darkness quotient" in all these films, but will close this aspect of the discussion by pointing out that even in those few movies that achieve that feeling of "sunlit horror," there are often feary moments in the dark--Genevieve Bujold's climb up the service ladder and over the operating room in Coma takes place in the dark, as does Ed's (Jon Voight) climb up the bluff near the end of Deliverance . . . not to mention digging up the grave containing the jackal bones in The Omen, and Luana Anders's creepy discovery of the underwater "memorial" to the long-dead little sister in Francis Coppola's first feature film (made for AIP), Dementia-13.

  Still, before leaving the subject entirely, here's a further sampling: Night Must Fall, Night of the Lepus, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, The Black Pit of Dr. M., The Black Sleep, Black Sunday, The Black Room, Black Sabbath, Dark Eyes of London, The Dark, Dead of Night, Night of Terror, Night of the Demon, Nightwing, Night of the Eagle . . .

  Well, you get it. If there had been no such thing as darkness, the makers of horror movies would have needed to invent it.

  10

  I have held out mention of one of the films from the quiz, partially because it's the antithesis of many of those we've already discussed--it depends for its horror not upon darkness but upon light--and also because it leads naturally into a brief discussion of something else that the mythic, or "fairy-tale" horror movie will do to us if it can. We all understand about the "gross-out," which is fairly easy to achieve,12 but it is only in the horror movies that the gross-out--that most childish of emotional impulses--sometimes achieves the level of art. Now, I can hear some of you say that there is nothing artistic about grossing somebody out--all you really have to do is chew your food and then hang your open mouth in your table-mate's face--but what about the works of Goya? Or Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and soup cans, for that matter?

  Even the very worst horror movies sometimes achieve a moment or two of success on this level. Dennis Etchison reminisced fondly with me on the phone one day n
ot too long ago about a brief sequence in The Giant Spider Invasion where a lady drinks her morning high-potency vitamin cocktail, all unknowing that a rather plump spider fell into the blender just before she turned it on. Yum yum. In the eminently forgettable film Squirm, there is that one forgettable moment (for all two hundred of us who saw the picture) when the lady taking a shower looks up to see why the water stopped coming and sees a showerhead clogged with dangling nightcrawlers. In Dario Argento's Suspiria, a bunch of schoolgirls are subjected to a rain of maggots . . . while getting ready for bed, no less. All of it has nothing to do with the film's plot, but it is vaguely interesting, in a repulsive sort of way. In Maniac, directed by former soft-core filmmaker William Lustig, there is the incredible moment when the homicidal ding-dong (Joe Spinell) carefully scalps one of his victims; the camera does not even leer at this--it merely stares at it with a kind of dead, contemplative eye that makes the scene well-nigh impossible to watch.

  As noted previously, good horror movies often operate most powerfully on this "wanna-look-at-my-chewed-up-food?" level--a primitive, childish level. I would call it the "YUCH factor" . . . sometimes also known as the "Oh my God, was that gross!" factor. This is the point at which most good liberal film critics and most good reactionary film critics part company on the subject of the horror film (see, for instance, the difference between Lynn Minton's review of Dawn of the Dead in McCall's--she left after two reels or so--and the cover story in the Arts section of The Boston Phoenix on the same film). Like punk rock music, the horror movie capable of delivering the good gross-out wallop finds its art in childish acts of anarchy--the moment in The Omen where the photographer is decapitated by a pane of glass is art of the most peculiar sort, and one cannot blame critics who find it easier to respond to Jane Fonda as a wholly unbelievable screen incarnation of Lillian Hellman in Julia than to stuff like this.

  But the gross-out is art, and it is important that we have an understanding of this. Blood can fly everywhere and the audience will remain largely unimpressed. If on the other hand, the audience has come to like and understand--or even just to appreciate--the characters they are watching as real people, if some artistic link has been formed there, blood can fly everywhere and the audience cannot remain unimpressed. I can't remember, for instance, anyone who walked out of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde or Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch who didn't look as if he or she had been hit on the head with a very large board. Yet people walk out of other Peckinpah films--Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Cross of Iron--yawning. That vital linkage just never happens.