by Stephen King
That's all fine, and there is little argument about the virtues of Bonnie and Clyde as art, but let us return momentarily to the pureed arachnid in The Giant Spider Invasion. This doesn't qualify as art in respect to that idea of linkage between audience and character at all. Believe me, we don't care very much about the lady who drinks the spider (or anyone else in this movie, for that matter), but all the same there is that moment of frisson, that one moment when the groping fingers of the filmmaker find a chink in our defenses, shoot through it, and squeeze down on one of those psychic pressure points. We identify with the woman who is unknowingly drinking the spider on a level that has nothing to do with her character; we identify with her solely as a human being in a situation which has suddenly turned rotten--in other words, the gross-out serves as the means of a last-ditch sort of identification when the more conventional and noble means of characterization have failed. When she drinks the drink, we shudder--and reaffirm our own humanity.13
Having said all that, let's turn to X--The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, one of the most interesting and offbeat little horror movies ever made, and one that ends with one of the most shuddery gross-out scenes ever filmed.
This 1963 movie was produced and directed by Roger Corman, who at that time was in the process of metamorphosing from the dull caterpillar who had produced such meatloaf movies as Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Little Shop of Horrors (not even notable for what was one of Jack Nicholson's earliest films) and into the butterfly who was responsible for such interesting and rather beautiful horror films as The Masque of the Red Death and The Terror. The Man with the X-Ray Eyes marks the point where this strange two-step creature came out of its cocoon, I think. The screenplay was written by Ray Russell, the author of Sardonicus and a number of other stories and novels--among them the rather overripe Incubus and the much more successful Princess Pamela.
In The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Ray Milland plays a scientist who develops eyedrops which enable him to see through walls, clothing, playing cards, you name it; a kind of super-Murine, if you will. But once the process begins, there is no slowing it down. Milland's eyes begin to undergo a physical change, first becoming thickly bloodshot and then taking on a queer yellow cast. It is at this point that we begin to feel rather nervous--perhaps we sense the gross-out coming, and in a very real sense it's already arrived. Our eyes are one of those vulnerable chinks in the armor, one of those places where we can be had. Imagine, for instance, jamming your thumb into someone's wide-open eye, feeling the squish, seeing it sorta squirt out at you. Nasty, right? Immoral to even consider such a thing. But surely you remember that time-honored Halloween party game Dead Man, where peeled grapes are passed from hand to hand to hand in the dark, to the solemn intonation of "These are the dead man's eyes"? Ulp, right? Yuck, right? Or as my kids say, Guh-ROSS!
Like our other facial equipment, eyes are something we all have in common--even that old poop the Ayatollah Khomeini had a pair. But to the best of my knowledge, no horror movie has ever been made about a nose out of control, and while there has never been a film called The Crawling Ear, there was one called The Crawling Eye. We all understand that eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft. Maybe that's the worst . . .
So when Milland dons shades for the second half of the movie, we become increasingly nervous about what might be going on behind those shades. In addition, something else is happening--something that elevates The Man with the X-Ray Eyes to a rather higher plateau of art. It becomes a kind of Lovecraftian horror movie, but in a sense that is different--and somehow purer--than the sort of Lovecraftiness used in Alien.
The Elder Gods, Lovecraft told us, are out there, and their one desire is to somehow get back in--and there are lines of power accessible to them, Lovecraft intimates, which are so powerful that one look at the sources of these lines of power would drive mortal men to madness; forces so powerful that a whole galaxy aflame could not equal its thousandth part.
It is one of these power sources, I think, that Ray Milland begins to glimpse as his sight continues to improve at a steady, inexorable pace. He sees it first as a prismatic, shifting light somewhere out in the darkness--the trippy sort of thing you might see at the top of an LSD high. Corman, you'll remember, also gave us Peter Fonda in The Trip (co-written by Jack Nicholson), not to mention The Wild Angels, which contains that wonderful moment when a dying Bruce Dern croaks out, "Somebody gimme a straight cigarette." Anyway, this bright core of light Milland sometimes sees gradually grows larger and clearer. Worse still, it may be alive . . . and aware it's being watched. Milland has seen through everything to the very edges of the universe and beyond, and what he has found there is driving him crazy.
This force eventually becomes so clear to him that it fills the whole screen during the point-of-view shots: a bright, shifting, monstrous thing that won't quite come into focus. At last Milland can stand it no longer. He drives his car to a deserted spot (that bright Presence hanging before his eyes all the time) and whips off his shades to reveal eyes which have gone an utter, glistening black. He pauses for a moment . . . and then rips his own eyes out. Corman freezes the frame on those staring, bloody sockets. But I have heard rumors--they may or may not be true--that the final line of dialogue was cut from the film as too horrifying. If true, it was the only possible capper for what has already happened. According to the rumor, Milland screams: I can still see!
11
This is only to dip our fingers in that deep, deep pool of common human experience and fears which form the myth-pool. It would be possible to go on with dozens of other specifics; with phobias such as the fear of heights (Vertigo), fear of snakes (Ssssssss), of cats (Eye of the Cat), of rats (Willard, Ben)--and all those movies which depend on the gross-out for their ultimate effect. Beyond these there are even wider vistas of myth . . . but we have to save something for later, right?
And no matter how many specifics we cover, we'll always find ourselves returning to that idea of phobic pressure points . . . just as the most lovely waltz relies, at bottom, on the simplicity of the box-step. The horror movie is a closed box with a crank on the side, and in the last analysis it all comes back to turning that crank until Jack jumps out into our faces, holding his ax and grinning his murderous grin. Like sex, the experience is infinitely desirable, but a discussion of specific effect takes on a certain sameness.
Rather than going on and on over what is essentially the same plot of ground, let's close our brief discussion of the horror movie as myth and fairy tale with what is, after all, the Big Cassino: death itself. Here is the trump card which all horror movies hold. But they do not hold this card as a veteran bridge-player would hold it, understanding all its implications and possibilities for gain; they hold it, rather, as a child would hold the card which will make the winning pair in a game of Old Maid. In that fact lies both the limiting factor of the horror movie as art and its endless, morbidly captivating charm.
"Death," the boy Mark Petrie thinks at one point in 'Salem's Lot, "is when the monsters get you." And if I had to restrict everything I have ever said or written about the horror genre to one statement (and many critics will say I should have done, ha-ha), it would be that one. It is not the way adults look at death; it is a crude metaphor which leaves little room for the possibility of heaven, hell, Nirvana, or that old wheeze about how the great wheel of Karma turns and we'll get 'em next life, gang. It is a view which--like most horror movies--addresses itself not to any philosophical speculation about "the afterlife" but which speaks only of the moment when we finally have to shuffle off this mortal coil. That instant of death is the only truly universal rite of passage, and the only one for which we have no psychological or sociological input to explain what changes we may expect as a result of having passed through. All we know is that we go; and while we have some rules of--etiquette, would it be called?--which bear on the subject, that actual moment has a way of catching f
olks unprepared. People pass away while making love, while standing in elevators, while putting dimes in parking meters. Some go in midsneeze. Some die in restaurants, some in cheap one-night hotels, and a few while sitting on the john. We cannot count on dying in bed or with our boots on. So it would be remarkable indeed if we did not fear death a little. It's just sort of there, isn't it, the great irreducible x-factor of our lives, faceless father of a hundred religions, so seamless and ungraspable that it usually isn't even discussed at cocktail parties. Death becomes myth in the horror movies, but let's be clear on the fact that horror movies mythicize death on the simplest level: death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you.
We fans of the horror movies have seen people clubbed, burned at the stake (Vincent Price, as the Witchfinder General in AIP's The Conqueror Worm, surely one of the most revolting horror pictures to be released by a major studio in the sixties, had a regular cookout at the climax of this one), shot, crucified, stabbed through the eyes with needles, eaten alive by grasshoppers, by ants, by dinosaurs, and even by cockroaches; we have seen people beheaded (The Omen, Friday the 13th, Maniac), sucked dry of their blood, gobbled up by sharks (who could forget the little kid's torn and bloodstained rubber float nudging gently against the shoreline in Jaws?) and piranha fish; we have seen bad guys go down screaming in pools of quicksand and pools of acid; we have seen our fellow humans squashed, stretched, and bloated to death; at the end of Brian De Palma's The Fury, John Cassavetes literally explodes.
Again, liberal critics, whose concepts of civilization, life, and death are usually more complex, are apt to frown on this sort of gratuitous slaughter, to see it (at best) as the moral equivalent of pulling wings off flies, and, at worst, as that symbolic lynch mob in action. But there is something in that wing-pulling simile that bears examination. There are few children who have not pulled the wings off a few flies at some point in their development, or squatted patiently on the sidewalk to see how a bug dies. In the opening scene of The Wild Bunch a group of happy, giggling children burn a scorpion to death--a scene indicative of what people who care little (or know little) about children often erroneously call "the cruelty of childhood." Children are rarely cruel on purpose, and they even more rarely torture, as they understand the concept;14 they may, however, kill in the spirit of experimentation, watching the death struggles of the bug on the sidewalk in the same clinical way that a biologist would watch a guinea pig die after inhaling a whiff of nerve gas. Tom Sawyer, we'll remember, just about broke his neck in his hurry to get a look at Huck's dead cat, and one of the payments he accepts for the "privilege" of whitewashing his fence is a dead rat "and a string to swing it on."
Or consider this: Bing Crosby is said to have told a story about one of his sons at the age of six or so who was inconsolable when his pet turtle died. To distract the boy, Bing suggested that they have a funeral, and his son, seeming only slightly consoled, agreed. The two took a cigar box, lined it carefully with silk, painted the outside black, and then dug a hole in the back yard. Bing carefully lowered the "coffin" into the grave, said a long, heartfelt prayer, and sang a hymn. At the end of the service, the boy's eyes were shining with sorrow and excitement. Then Bing asked if he would like to have one last look at his pet before they covered the coffin with earth. The boy said he would, and Bing raised the cigar-box lid. The two gazed down reverently, and suddenly the turtle moved. The boy stared at it for a long time, then looked up at his father and said, "Let's kill it."15
Kids are endlessly, voraciously curious, not only about death but about everything--and why not? They are like people who just came in and sat down during a good movie that's been on for thousands of years. They want to know what the story is, who the characters are, and most of all, what the interior logic of the play may be--is it a drama? a tragedy? a comedy? perhaps an out-and-out farce? They don't know because they have not (as yet) had Socrates, Plato, Kant, or Erich Segal to instruct them. When you're five, your big gurus are Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald; life's burning questions include whether or not you can eat crackers upside down and if that stuff in the middle of the golfball really is a deadly poison. When you're five, you seek knowledge down those avenues that are open to you.
Pursuant to this, I'll tell you my own dead cat story. When I was nine and living in Stratford, Connecticut, two friends of mine--brothers--from down the street discovered the stiffening body of a dead cat in the gutter near Burrets' Building Materials, which was across the street from the vacant lot where we played baseball. I was called into consultation to add my thoughts to the problem of the dead cat. The very interesting problem of the dead cat.
It was a gray cat, quite obviously mashed by a passing car. Its eyes were half-open, and we all noticed that there seemed to be dust and road grit gathering on them. First deduction: You don't care if dust gets in your eyes when you're dead (all our deductions assumed that if it was true for cats, then it must be true for kids).
We examined it for maggots.
No maggots.
"Maybe there's maggots inside it," Charlie said hopefully (Charlie was one of the fellows who referred to the William Castle film as McBare, and on rainy days he was apt to call me up and ask me if I wanted to come down the street to his house and read "comet bwoots").
We examined the dead cat for maggots, turning it from one side to the other--using a stick, of course; no telling what germs you might get from a dead cat. There were no maggots that we could see.
"Maybe there's maggots in its brain," Charlie's brother Nicky said, his eyes glowing. "Maybe there's maggots inside it, eating up its braiiiin."
"That's impossible," I said. "Your brains are, like, airtight. Nothin' can get inside there."
They absorbed this.
We stood around the dead cat in a circle.
Then Nicky said suddenly: "If we drop a brick on its heinie, will it shit?"
This question of postmortem biology was absorbed and discussed. It was finally agreed that the test should be made. A brick was found. There was a discussion of who should get to bombs-away the brick on the dead cat. The problem was solved in time-honored fashion: we put our feet in. The rites of eenie-meenie-miney-moe were invoked. Foot after foot left the circle until only Nicky's was left.
The brick was dropped.
The dead cat did not shit.
Deduction number two: After you're dead, you won't shit if someone drops a brick on your ass.
Soon after, a baseball game started up, and the dead cat was left.
As the days passed, an ongoing investigation of the cat continued, and it is always the dead cat in the gutter out in front of Burrets' Building Materials that I think of when I read Richard Wilbur's fine poem "The Groundhog." The maggots put in their appearance a couple of days later, and we watched their fever-boil with horrified, revolted interest. "They're eatin' his eyes," Tommy Erbter from up the street pointed out hoarsely. "Look at that, you guys, they're even eatin' his eyes."
Eventually the maggots moved out, leaving the dead cat looking considerably thinner, its fur now faded to a dull, uninteresting color, sparse and knotted. We came less frequently. The cat's decay had entered a less gaudy stage. Still, it was my habit to check the cat on my mile's walk to school each morning; it was just another stop on the way, part of the morning's ritual--like running a stick over the picket fence in front of the empty house or skipping a couple of stones across the pond in the park.
In late September the tag-end of a hurricane hit Stratford. There was a minor flood, and when the waters went down a couple of days later, the dead cat was gone--it had been washed away. I remember it well now, and I suppose I will all my life, as my first intimate experience with death. That cat may be gone from the charts, but not from my heart.
Sophisticated movies demand sophisticated reactions from their audiences--that is, they demand that we react to them as adults. Horror movies are not sophisticated, and because they are not, they allow us to regain our childish perspective on de
ath--perhaps not such a bad thing. I'll not descend to the romantic oversimplification that suggests we see things more clearly as children, but I will suggest that children see more intensely. The greens of lawns are, to the child's eye, the color of lost emeralds in H. Rider Haggard's conception of King Solomon's Mines, the blue of the winter sky is as sharp as an icepick, the white of new snow is a dream-blast of energy. And black . . . is blacker. Much blacker indeed.
Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber's leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety . . . for a little while, anyway.
The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat (or the shape under the sheet, to use a metaphor from the introduction to my short story collection) . . . but not as an adult would look at it. Never mind the philosophical implications of death or the religious possibilities inherent in the idea of survival; the horror film suggests we just have a good close look at the physical artifact of death. Let us be children masquerading as pathologists. We will, perhaps, link hands like children in a circle, and sing the song we all know in our hearts: time is short, no one is really okay, life is quick and dead is dead.
