Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  CofF had this to say about I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a 1958 Paramount release which formed the lower half of "summer shocker" double bills along with either The Blob or the hilarious Pat Boone film Journey to the Center of the Earth: Kiddy-oriented sf programmer. Gloria Talbot marries a monster from outer space which is disguised to look like Tom Tryon. Good argument against hasty marriages, but not much of a movie.

  Still, this one was a lot of fun, if only for the once-in-a-lifetime chance it offered to see Tom Tryon with a snout. And before leaving this one and proceeding on to what (sadly) may be the worst of the Grade-Z movies, I'd like to say something a little more serious about the peculiar relationship which obtains between terrible horror movies (of which there are a dozen for each good one, as this chapter testifies) and the genuine fan of the genre.

  The relationship is not entirely masochistic, as the foregoing may make it seem. A film like Alien or Jaws is, for either the true fan or simply the ordinary moviegoer who has a sometime interest in the macabre, like a wide, deep vein of gold that doesn't even have to be mined; it can simply be dug out of the hillside. But that isn't mining, remember; it's just digging. The true horror film aficionado is more like a prospector with his panning equipment or his wash-wheel, spending long periods going patiently through common dirt, looking for the bright blink of gold dust or possibly even a small nugget or two. Such a working miner is not looking for the big strike, which may come tomorrow or the day after or never; he has put those illusions behind him. He's only looking for a livin' wage, something to keep him going yet awhile longer.

  As a result, horror-movie fans communicate their likes to each other by a kind of grapevine which is part word of mouth, part fanzine reviews, part convention-hall chatter at such meetings as the World Fantasy Convention, the Kubla Khan Ate, or the IguanaCon. Word gets around. Long before David Cronenberg made something of a splash with Rabid, fans were muttering that he was someone to watch on the basis of an earlier film--an extremely low-budget flick called They Came from Within, starring X-rated queen Marilyn (Behind the Green Door) Chambers--and Cronenberg got a bravura performance out of her, by the way. My agent, Kirby McCauley, raves about a small picture called Ritual, filmed in Canada and starring Hal Holbrook. These films don't get wide American release, but if you watch the papers faithfully, you may see one of them playing at the drive-in as a pick-up second feature below some overrated major studio flick. Similarly, I heard about a little-known early John Carpenter film called Assault on Precinct 13 from Peter Straub, the author of Ghost Story and If You Could See Me Now. Done on a shoestring (and Carpenter's first feature, Dark Star, is reputed to have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000, a sum that makes even George Romero look like Dino De Laurentiis), Carpenter's talent as a director nonetheless shines through, and Carpenter went on to do Halloween and The Fog.

  These are the nuggets, the horror-film fan's reward for sifting through films like Planet of the Vampires and The Monster from Green Hell. My own "discovery" (if you don't object to the word) is a little film called Tourist Trap, starring Chuck Connors. Connors himself isn't very good in the film--he tries gamely, but he's simply miscast. Yet the film wields an eerie, spooky power. Wax figures begin to move and come to life in a ruined, out-of-the-way tourist resort; there are a number of effective, atmospheric shots of the dummies' blank eyes and reaching hands, and the special effects are effective. As a film that deals with the queer power that inanimate dummies, mannequins, and human replicas can sometimes cast over us, it is a more effective film than the expensive and ill-advised film made from William Goldman's bestseller, Magic.2

  But to get back to I Married a Monster from Outer Space: bad as it is, there is one absolutely chilling moment in the movie. I won't say that it's worth the price of admission, but it works . . . boy, does it work! Tryon has married his girlfriend (Gloria Talbot) and they are on their honeymoon. While she stretches out on the bed, dressed in the obligatory filmy white nightgown and waiting for the consummation of all those steamy clinches on the beach, Tryon, who is still a good-looking man and who was even better looking twenty years ago, goes out on the balcony of their hotel room for a cigarette. A thunderstorm is brewing, and a sharp stroke of lightning abruptly renders that handsome face transparent for a moment. We see the horrible alien face beneath--runnelled and knotted and warty. It is a "seat-jumper" for sure, and during the fadeout we perhaps have time to think about the consummation to follow . . . and gulp.

  If movies such as Tourist Trap and Rituals are the nuggets fans sometimes find by sticking around for the B picture (and no one is so optimistic as the dyed-in-the-wool fan), a moment such as this one is the equivalent of the gold dust that can sometimes be panned out by the faithful toiler. Or to put it another way, there is that marvelous Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," where the Christmas goose, when slit open, yields up the beautiful and priceless stone that has been lodged in its gullet. You sit through a lot of shlock, and maybe--just maybe--there is that frisson that makes it at least partially worthwhile.

  There is no such frisson in Plan 9 from Outer Space, unfortunately, to which I reluctantly award the booby-prize as the worst horror film ever made. Yet there is nothing funny about this one, no matter how many times it has been laughed at in those mostly witless compendiums which celebrate the worst of everything. There's nothing funny about watching a Bela Lugosi (actually, a stand-in was used for most shots) wracked with pain, a morphine monkey on his back, creeping around a southern California development with his Dracula cape pulled up over his nose.

  Lugosi died shortly after this abysmal, exploitative, misbegotten piece of trash was released, and I've always wondered in my heart if maybe poor old Bela didn't die as much of shame as of the many illnesses that were overwhelming him. It was a sad and squalid coda to a great career. Lugosi was buried (at his own request) in his Dracula cape, and one likes to think--or hope--that it served him better in death than it did in the miserable waste of celluloid that marked his last screen appearance.

  3

  Before we move on to horror on TV, where failures in the genre have been every bit as common (but somehow less spectacular), it seems appropriate to finish here by asking a question: Why have there been so many bad horror movies?

  Before trying to answer that, let's be honest and say that a great many movies are very bad--not all the turkeys are gobbling in the horror pen, if you take my meaning. Consider Myra Breckinridge, Valley of the Dolls, The Adventurers, and Blood-line . . . to mention just a few. Even Alfred Hitchcock produced one of those Thanksgiving birds, and unfortunately, it was his last picture: Family Plot, with Bruce Dern and Karen Black. And these pictures only scratch the surface of a list that could continue on for a hundred pages or more. Probably more.

  There's an impulse to say something's wrong here. There may well be. If another business--United Airlines, let us say, or IBM--ran their affairs the way 20th Century-Fox ran the making of Cleopatra, their boards of directors would soon be down at the local 7-11 store, buying pizza mix with foodstamps--or maybe the stockholders would just break down the door and wheel in the guillotine. It seems almost incredible to believe that any major studio could even approach the brink of bankruptcy in a country that loves the movies as much as this one does; one might as well try to imagine, you might think, Caesar's Palace or the Dunes wiped out by a single crapshooter. But in fact there is not one major American film studio which has not at least once during the thirty-year period under discussion here tottered on the brink. MGM is perhaps the most infamous case, and for a period of seven years the MGM lion ceased to roar almost entirely. Perhaps significantly, during this period when MGM was leaving the unreal world of the movies and pinning its hopes for corporate survival upon the unreal gambling world (the MGM Grand in Vegas, surely one of the world's more vulgar pleasure domes), their one major success was a horror movie--Michael Crichton's Westworld, in which a disintegrating Yul Brynner, dressed in blac
k and looking like a nightmare revenant from The Magnificent Seven, intones again and again: "Draw. Draw. Draw." They draw . . . and lose. Yul is pretty fast, even with his circuits showing.

  Is this, you ask me, any way to run a railroad?

  My own answer is no . . . but the failure of so many films released by "the majors" seems more explicable to me than the failure of so many of the horror films released by what Variety calls "the indies." At this writing, three of my novels have been released as films: Carrie (United Artists/theatrical/1976) 'Salem's Lot (Warners/television/1979), and The Shining (Warners/theatrical/1980), and in all three cases I feel that I have been fairly treated . . . and yet the clearest emotion in my mind is not pleasure but a mental sigh of relief. When dealing with the American cinema, you feel like you won if you just broke even.

  Once you've seen the film industry's workings from the inside, you realize that it is a creative nightmare. It becomes difficult to understand how anything of quality--an Alien, a Place in the Sun, a Breaking Away--can be made. As in the Army, the first rule of studio filmmaking is CYA: Cover Your Ass. On any critical decision, it is well to consult at least half a dozen people, so that someone else's butt will go up in that fabled sling if the film drops dead and twenty million dollars goes swirling down the toilet. And if your butt must go up, it then becomes possible to make sure it doesn't go up alone.

  There are, of course, filmmakers who either don't know this kind of fear or whose particular visions are so clear and fierce that such fear of failure never becomes a factor in the equation. Brian De Palma comes to mind, and Francis Coppola (who teetered on the edge of being fired from The Godfather shoot for months, and yet persisted in his own particular vision of the film), Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Steven Spielberg.3 This factor of vision is so real and apparent that even when a director such as Stanley Kubrick makes such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as The Shining, it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable; it is simply there.

  The real danger inherent in studio films is mediocrity. A clinker like Myra Breckinridge has its own horrid fascination--it is like watching slow-motion footage of a head-on collision between a Cadillac and a Lincoln Continental. But what are we to make of films like Nightwing, Capricorn One, Players, or The Cassandra Crossing? These are not bad films--not the way that Robot Monster or Teenage Monster are bad, certainly--but they are mediocre. They're blah. You leave the theater after one of these films with no taste in your mouth but the popcorn you ate. They are films where, halfway through the second reel, you begin wishing for a cigarette.

  As the cost of production balloons up and up, the risks of going for all of it become greater and greater, and even a Roger Maris looked pretty stupid when he was badly fooled, totally overswung the ball, and fell on his ass. The same obtains in films, and I would predict--with some hesitation, because the film industry is such a crazy place--that we will never again see such a colossal risk as the one Coppola took with Apocalypse Now or the one Cimino was allowed to take with Heaven's Gate. If anyone tries, that dry, dusty snapping sound you'll hear coming from the West Coast will be the accountants of every major studio out there snapping the corporate checkbooks closed.

  But the indies . . . what about the indies? There is less to lose here, certainly; in fact Chris Steinbrunner, an amusing guy and an astute follower of the films, likes to call many of these flicks "backyard movies." By his definition, The Horror of Party Beach was a backyard film; so were The Flesh Eaters and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (Night of the Living Dead, which was made by an existing film company with access to TV studio facilities in Pittsburgh, doesn't qualify as "backyard.") It's a good term for those films made by amateurs, gifted or otherwise, on a shoestring budget with no major distribution guaranteed--these films are the much more expensive equivalent of the unsolicited manuscript. These are guys who are shooting with nothing to lose, shooting for the moon. And yet most of these films are just awful.

  Why?

  Exploitation, that's why.

  It was exploitation that caused Lugosi to put finish to his career by creeping around a suburban tract development in his Dracula cape; it was exploitation that prompted the making of Invasion of the Star Creatures and Don't Look in the Basement (and believe me, I didn't have to keep telling myself it was only a movie; I knew what it was--in a word, wretched). After sex, low-budget moviemakers are attracted to horror because it seems to be a genre which is easily exploited--an easy lay, like the sort of girl every guy wanted to date (at least once) in high school. Even good horror can sometimes have a tawdry carnival freak-show feel . . . but it's a feel that can be deceptive.

  And if it is courtesy of the indies that we have seen the greatest failures (the Ro-Man's war-surplus shortwave/bubble machine), then it is also courtesy of them that we have seen some of the most unlikely triumphs. The Horror of Party Beach and Night of the Living Dead were made on similar budgets; the difference is George Romero and his vision of what the horror movie is and what the horror movie is supposed to do. In the former we have the monsters attacking a slumber party in a scene which becomes hilarious; in the latter we have an old woman peering nearsightedly at a bug on a tree and then munching it up. You hear your mouth trying to laugh and scream at the same time, and that is Romero's remarkable achievement.

  Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory and Dementia-13 were made on similar nothing budgets; here the difference is Francis Coppola, who created an almost unbearable atmosphere of mounting menace in the latter, a black-and-white, rapidly shot suspense movie (which was made on location in Ireland, for tax purposes).

  It is, perhaps, too easy to become enamored of bad films as "camp"; the great success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show may point to nothing so much as the degeneration of the average moviegoer's critical capacity. It might be well to go back to the basics and remember that the difference between bad movies and good (or between bad art--or nonart--and good or great art) is talent, and the inventive utilization of that talent. The worst movie sends its own message, which is simply to stay away from other movies done by these people; if you have seen one film by Wes Craven, for instance, it is safe enough, I think, to skip the others. The genre labors under enough critical disapproval and outright dislike; one need not make a bad situation worse by underwriting films of porno-violence and those which want to plunder our pocketbooks and no more. And there is no need to do it, because even in the movies there is no real pricetag on quality . . . not when Brian De Palma found it possible to make a fine, scary film like Sisters for something like $800,000.

  The reason for seeing bad movies, I suppose, is that you don't know it's going to be bad until you've seen it for yourself--as previously pointed out, most movie critics cannot be trusted here. Pauline Kael writes well, and Gene Shalit demonstrates a certain rather tiresome surface wit, but when these two--and other critics--go to see a horror movie, they don't know what they are seeing.4 The true fan does; he or she has developed his or her basis for comparison over a long and sometimes painful span of time. The real movie freak is as much an appreciator as the regular visitor to art galleries or museums, and this basis for comparison is the bedrock upon whatever theses or point(s) of view he or she may develop must stand. For the horror fan, films such as Exorcist II form the setting for the occasional bright gemstone that is discovered in the darkness of a sleazy second-run moviehouse: Kirby McCauley's Rituals or my own low-budget favorite, Tourist Trap.

  You don't appreciate cream unless you've drunk a lot of milk, and maybe you don't even appreciate milk unless you've drunk some that's gone sour. Bad films may sometimes be amusing, sometimes even successful, but their only real usefulness is to form that basis of comparison: to define positive values in terms of their own negative charm. They show us what to look for because it is missing in themselves. After that has been determined, it becomes, I think, actively dangerous to hold on to these bad films . . . and they must be discarded.5

  CHAPTER VIII

&nb
sp; The Glass Teat, or,

  This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers

  All those of you out there among the great unwashed who ever believed that TV sucks were dead wrong, you see; as Harlan Ellison pointed out in his sometimes amusing, sometimes scathing essays on television, TV does not suck; it is sucked. Ellison called his two-volume diatribe on the subject The Glass Teat, and if you've not read it, be aware that it comes recommended as a kind of compass with this particular stretch of the territory. I read the book with amazed absorption three years ago, the fact that Ellison had devoted valuable time and space to such forgettable series of yesteryear as Alias Smith and Jones barely obtruding on a total volcanic effect that made me suspect I was experiencing something roughly similar to a six-hour rant delivered by Fidel Castro. Always assuming that Fidel was really on that day.

  Ellison circles back and back to television in his work, like a man held in thrall by a snake he knows to be ultimately deadly. For no apparent reason, the longish introduction to Strange Wine (a book we'll discuss at some length next chapter), Ellison's 1978 collection of short stories, is a diatribe on TV titled "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself."

  When you strip Ellison's TV-rap to its core, it is simple enough and not blazingly original (for blazing originality, you have to read how he says it): TV is a spoiler, Ellison says. It spoils story; it spoils those who make the stories; eventually it spoils those who watch the stories; the milk from this particular teat is poisoned. This is a thesis I would agree with completely, but let me point out two facts.

  Harlan has a TV. A big one.

  I have a TV which is even bigger than Harlan's. It is, in fact, a Panasonic CinemaVision which dominates one whole corner of my living room.

  Mea culpa, all right.

  I can rationalize Harlan's TV and my own monster, although I cannot completely excuse either of us--and I should add that Ellison is a bachelor, and he can watch the thing twenty hours a day if he wants and hurt nobody but himself. I, on the other hand, have three young children in the house--ten, eight, and four--who are exposed to this gadget; to its possible radiation, its untrue colors, and its magic window on a vulgar, tawdry world where cameras ogle the butts of Playboy bunnies and linger over endless visions of an upper-upper-upper-middle-class materialism that, for most Americans, has never existed and never will. Mass starvation is a way of life in Biafra; in Cambodia, dying children are shitting out their own collapsed intestines; in the Middle East a kind of messianic madness is in danger of swallowing up all rationality; and here at home we sit mesmerized by Richard Dawson on Family Feud and watch Buddy Ebsen as Barnaby Jones. I think my own three kids have a better fix on the reality of Gilligan, the Skipper, and Mr. Howell than they do on the reality of what happened at Three Mile Island in March of 1979. In fact, I know they do.