by Stephen King
Rape, 67, 68-69
Rat (book), 4
Raven, The (film), 70
Rebirth (book), 41
Religion, 76, 320-21
Repulsion (film), 80
Rice, Jeff, 245
Riders to the Stars (film), 8
Right Stuff, The (book), 9
Ritual (film), 222
Robbins, Marty, 44
Robot Monster (film), 213-14
Rockabilly (book), 397
Rock and roll, 41, 43
Rocky Horror Picture Show, The (film), 228-29
Rodrigues, 34
Romero, George, 81, 143, 216, 421
Rose, Reginald, 251
Rosemary's Baby (book), 311-23
Ruby (film), 219
Russell, Ray, 202
'Salem's Lot (book), 26-27, 69-70, 87, 205, 280
'Salem's Lot (TV film), 215, 226, 239, 262
Sanctuary (book), 292
Sandman, The, 37
Sangster, Jimmy, 197n.
Scarf, The (book), 79
Scenery, see Set design
Science fiction, 16
Scorpion, The, 36
Search for Bridey Murphey (book), 149
"Sentry, The" (TV show), 249
Serling, Rod, 123, 250-60
Set design, 122-23
Sex, 68-72, 86, 297
Sexism, 70
Sexuality, 67
Sheed, Wilfrid, 375
Shelley, Mary, 53, 59-60, 62-63, 82, 83
Shelley, Percy, 62-63
"Shelter, The" (TV show), 253
Shining, The (film), 108, 122, 123, 226-27
Shrinking Man, The (book), 30, 360-68, 369-74
Siamese twins, 33-34
Siddons, Anne Rivers, 282
Siegel, Don, 5-6, 57, 139, 326
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 128
Siodmak, Curt, 17-18
Sisters (film), 229
Sleeping Beauty (film), 106
"Slime" (short story), 23
Small World (book), 375n.
Smith, Clark Ashton, 383, 408-9
Smith, Guy N., 383
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (film), 106, 111
Social horror films, 174-83
Sohl, Jerry, 243
Solo, Jay, see Ellison, Harlan
Something Wicked This Way Comes (book), 344-60
Sorcerer (film), 214
Space travel themes, 170-71
"Spanish Moss Murders, The" (TV show), 249
Spicy Stories (magazine), 419
Spider Kiss (book), see Rockabilly
Spiderman, 369n.
Spielberg, Steven, 159, 173-74
Squirm (film), 200
Stand, The (book), 274, 425-28
Starring Boris Karloff (TV series), 238
Star Trek (film), 395n.-96n.
Star Trek (TV series), 395
Star Wars (film), 16
Stefano, Joseph, 80, 242
Stepford Wives, The (book), 313, 314
Stepford Wives, The (film), 33, 174-75
Stevens, Leslie, 242
Stevenson, R. L., 50, 72, 82
Stewart, George R., 424, 425
Stoker, Bram, 26-27, 64, 65, 82, 83 see also Dracula (book) Stone, Robert, 78
Straitjacket (film), 80
Strange Eons (book), 79
Strange Wine (book), 397, 404
Straub, Peter, 26, 266, 267
"Strawberry Spring" (short story), 241
Sucking Pit, The (book), 383
Sundial, The (book), 296, 297
Superheroes, 36-37
Survive (film), 109
"Survivor Type" (short story), 380n.
Suspense (radio series), 114
Suspension of disbelief, 128-29
Suspiria (film), 200
Swarm, The (film), 219
Symbolism, see Allegory
Taboos, 139-40, 142-43, 184, 293-94
Tales from the Crypt (comic), 22, 23
Tales of the Unexpected (TV series), 262
Tarantula (film), 4
Techno-horror films, 163-74
Teenage Monster (film), 218
Teenagers, 41-43, 46-47
Television, 132
"Tell-Tale Heart, The" (short story), 23, 65
Tessier, Thomas, 376
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (film), 43, 108, 138
Them! (film), 81, 149
Theroux, Paul, 376
They Came from Within (film), 139, 142, 222, 381
Thing, The (film), 81, 154-60
Thing Without a Name, 59, 81, 158
"Third from the Sun" (TV show), 254
Third Level, The (book), 258, 259
"Thirty-Fathom Grave, The" (TV show), 255
This Island Earth (film), 71
Thomas, Ted, 23n.
Thompson, Bill, 198, ix-xii Thriller (TV series), 237-41
Tiger, Derry, see Ellison, Harlan
Time and Again (book), 258, 333
"Time Enough at Last" (TV show), 253
Tingler, The (film), 196-97
Tors, Ivan,
Tourist Trap (film), 223
Toys, 57
"Trevi Collection, The" (TV show), 249
Trilogy of Terror (film), 247
Turn of the Screw, The (book), 51
Tuttle, William, 260
Twilight Zone (TV series), 38, 242, 250-60
2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 162
Universal Pictures, 61
Untouchables, The (TV series), 237
Vampires, 26-27, 63-64, 68, 71, 81 see also Dracula "Vampyre, The" (short story), 63-64
Vault of Horror, The (comic), 22
Violence, 133-34, 138, 143, 200-201
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., 163n., 234
Wait Until Dark (film), 192, 195-96
War babies, 42
Warhol, Andy, 187
War of the Worlds, The (film), 161
War of the Worlds, The (radio program), 124
Weird Tales (magazine), 30, 31, 240
Welles, Orson, 124, 435
Werewolves, 72-78, 81, 166, 298
Westworld (film), 225-26
Whale, James, 60
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (film), 81, 192
When a Stranger Calls (film), 185
"Wig for Miss DeVore, A" (short story), 240
Wild Angels, The (film), 204
Wild Bunch, The (film), 207
Wild One, The (film), 44
Wilhelm, Kate, 23n.
Williams, Tennessee, 392
Wise, Robert, 25, 118-19, 120, 300
Wolfe, Tom, 9
Woolrich, Cornell, 392
Wyndham, John, 41
X--The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (film), 192, 202-3
Zombies, 166
Zukofsky, Louis, 385-86
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1 There is in the Philip Kaufman remake, though. There is a moment in that film which is repulsively horrible. It comes when Donald Sutherland uses a rake to smash in the face of a mostly formed pod. This "person's" face breaks in with sickening ease, like a rotted piece of fruit, and lets out an explosion of the most realistic stage blood that I have ever seen in a color film. When that moment came, I winced, clapped a hand over my mouth . . . and wondered how in the hell the movie had ever gotten its PG rating.
1 And on back to Faust? Daedalus? Prometheus? Pandora? A genealogy leading straight back into the mouth of hell if ever there was one!
2 You can see why Donovan liked the kid enough to want to leave him his money, I think. Just a chip off the old block.
3 No less a writer than Kate Wilhelm, the acclaimed main
stream and science fiction novelist (author of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and The Clewiston Test, among others), began her career with a short but gruesomely effective horror novel--a paperback original called The Clone, written in collaboration with Ted Thomas. In this story, an amorphous creature made of almost pure protein (more blob than clone, The Science Fiction Encyclopedia rightly points out) forms in the sewer system of a major city . . . around a nucleus of half-rotted hamburger, yet. It begins to grow, swallowing hundreds of people into its noxious self as it does. In one memorable scene, a little kid is yanked arm-first into the drain of the kitchen sink.
4 The scene in 'Salem's Lot which works best in the E.C. tradition--at least, as far as I'm concerned--is when the bus driver, Charlie Rhodes (who is a typical E.C.-type rotter in the best Herbie Satten tradition), awakes at midnight and hears someone blowing the horn of his bus. He discovers, after the bus doors have swung shut forever behind him, that his bus is loaded with children, as if for a school run . . . but they're all vampires. Charlie begins to scream, and perhaps the reader wonders why; after all, they only stopped by for a drink.
Heh, heh.
5 Rats are nasty little buggers, aren't they? I wrote and published a rat story called "Graveyard Shift" in Cavalier magazine four years prior to 'Salem's Lot--it was, in fact, the third short story I ever published--and I was uneasy about the similarity between the rats under the old mill in "Graveyard Shift" and those in the basement of the boarding house in 'Salem's Lot. As writers near the end of a book, I suspect that they cope with weariness in all sorts of ways--and my response as I neared the end of 'Salem's Lot was to indulge in this bit of self-plagiarism. And so, even though I suspect there's a disappointed rat-fan or two out there, I've got to say I believe Bill Thompson's judgment that the rats in 'Salem's Lot should simply fade from the scene was the right one.
6 And there is life in the old Enquirer yet. I buy it if there's a juicy UFO story or something about Bigfoot, but mostly I only scan it rapidly while in a slow supermarket checkout lane, looking for such endearing lapses of taste as the notorious autopsy photo of Lee Harvey Oswald or their photo of Elvis Presley in his coffin. Still, it is a far cry from the old MOM COOKS PET DOG AND FEEDS IT TO THE KIDS days.
7 Take for instance Bill Lee, late of the Montreal Expos and the Boston Red Sox. Lee was dubbed "The Spaceman" by his colleagues and is remembered fondly by Boston fans for exhorting those who attended a rally following the Sox's pennant win in 1975 to pick up their trash when they left. Perhaps the strongest proof of his "leftiness" came when he referred to Red Sox manager Don Zimmer as "the designated gerbil." Lee moved to Montreal soon after.
8 Quoted in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, by Carlos Clarens (New York: Capricorn Books, 1968).
1 Much of the story is unintentionally hilarious. The monster hides in a shed adjacent to a peasant hut. One of the peasants, Felix, just happens to be teaching his girlfriend, a runaway Arabian noblewoman named Safie, his language; thus the monster learns how to talk. His reading primers are Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Werter [sic], books he has discovered in a cast-off trunk lying in a ditch. This baroque tale-within-a-tale is only rivaled in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe strips naked, swims out to the foundering ship that has marooned him, and then, according to Defoe, fills his pockets with all sorts of goodies. My admiration for such invention knows no bounds.
2 "Ole greenskin is back," my seven-year-old son Joe is apt to say comfortably when David Banner begins his shirt-ripping, pants-shredding transformation. Joe quite rightly sees the Hulk not as a frightening agent of chaos but as a blind force of nature fated only to do good. Oddly enough, the comforting lesson that many horror movies seem to teach the young is that fate is kind. Not a bad lesson at all for the little people, who so rightly see themselves as hostages to forces larger than themselves.
3 The greatest of the Hammer Frankenstein monsters was probably Christopher Lee, who went on to nearly eclipse Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. Lee, a great actor, is the only man to approach Karloff's interpretation of the role, although Karloff was far more fortunate in matters of script and direction. All in all, Christopher Lee fared better as a vampire.
4 The Count appears onstage another half-dozen times, most splendidly in Mina Murray Harker's bedroom. The men in her life burst into her room following the death of Renfield and are greeted with a scene worthy of Bosch: the Count clutching Mina, his face slathered with her blood. In an obscene parody of the marriage sacrament, he opens a vein in his own chest with one dirty fingernail and forces her to drink. Other glimpses of the Count are less powerful. We glimpse him once strolling along an avenue in a foppish straw hat, and once ogling a pretty girl like any run-of-the-mill dirty old man.
5 I thought there was another extremely sexist interlude in Alien, one that disappoints on a plot level no matter how you feel about women's ability as compared to men's. The Sigourney Weaver character, who is presented as tough minded and heroic up to this point, steps out of character at the scriptwriters' whim by going after the ship's cat. Enabling the males in the audience, of course, to relax, roll their eyes at each other, and say either aloud or telepathically, "Isn't that just like a woman?" It is a plot twist which depends upon a sexist idea for its believability, and we might well answer the question asked above by asking in turn, "Isn't that just like a male chauvinist pig of a Hollywood scriptwriter?" This gratuitous little twist doesn't spoil the movie, but it's still sort of a bummer.
6 I must admit that, after reading Stevenson's description of Utterson, I found myself curious as to just how he was lovable!
7 Romero's Martin is a classy and visually sensuous rendering of the Vampire myth, and one of the few examples of the myth consciously examined in film, as Romero contrasts the romantic assumptions so vital to the myth (as in the John Badham version of Dracula) with the grisly reality of actually drinking blood as it spurts from the veins of the vampire's chosen victim.
8 In all fairness it must be added that Bram Stoker wrote some absolutely champion short stories--"The Squaw" and "The Judge's House" may be the best known. Those who enjoy macabre short fiction could not do better than his collection Dracula's Guest, which is stupidly out of print but remains available in the stacks of most public libraries.
1 The thought is not original with me, but I'll be damned if I can remember who said it--so let me just credit that most prolific of writers, Mr. Author Unknown.
2 One of the more plausible explanations of the phenomenon is that the stick doesn't dowse the water; the person holding the stick does, and then imputes the ability to the stick. Horses can smell water twelve miles away if the wind is right; why should not a person be able to sense water fifty or a hundred feet underground?
3 But, I hasten to add, only if you have the talent there to begin with. You can spend ten years refining common earth and come out at the end with nothing but common earth, sifted flame. I have been playing guitar since the age of fourteen, and at the age of thirty-three I've not progressed much beyond where I was at sixteen, playing "Louie, Louie" and "Little Deuce Coupe" on rhythm guitar with a group called the MoonSpinners. I can play a little, and it sure cheers me up when I've got the blues, but I think Eric Clapton is still safe.
4 Dennis Etchison (see the Forenote to the 1983 Edition) writes: "Virtually all of the 3-D movies made in the fifties were made using the Polaroid process (the only exception I know of is Robot Monster). The Polaroid process did not use red-and-green (or red-and-blue) glasses, but clear gray leases; hence we were able to see many of (the films) in full Technicolor, since the glasses added no color of their own. The confusion arises because reissues of a select few black and white films (italics mine) in recent years have been in a single-strip, one-projector, red-and-green anaglyphic 3-D, a cheapjack simulation of the original process . . . every other 3-D film we remember from the fifties was originally shown as Polaroid with clear gray glasses."
Dennis further points o
ut that 3-D is back with a vengeance (Parasite, Friday the 13th Part III, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Treasure of the Four Crowns). He suggests that "bi-polarized permanent lenses are available for die-hard fans," but a theater manager suggested to me that a pair of off-the-rack Foster Grant polarized sunglasses--clip-on if you wear prescription specs--would do the trick nicely for under twelve bucks. Ain't modern technology wonderful?
5 In one of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke stories, this actually happens. In this vignette, aliens from space land on earth after the Big One has finally gone down. As the story closes, the best brains of this alien culture are trying to figure out the meaning of a film they have found and learned how to play back. The film ends with the words A Walt Disney Production. I have moments when I really believe that there would be no better epitaph for the human race, or for a world where the only sentient being absolutely guaranteed of immortality is not Hitler, Charlemagne, Albert Schweitzer, or even Jesus Christ--but is, instead, Richard M. Nixon, whose name is engraved on a plaque placed on the airless surface of the moon.
1 And for some people, Chickenman doesn't work at all. My good friend Mac McCutcheon once played an album of the Great Fowl's adventures to a group of friends who simply sat and listened with polite, blank expressions on their faces. No one even chuckled. As Steve Martin says in The Jerk: "Take those snails off her plate and bring her the toasted cheese sandwich like I told you in the first place!"
2 William F. Nolan, mentioning this film, said that the memory which remained with him most strongly from the Central Park sequence was the pattern of "light-shadow-light-shadow-light-shadow" as the camera moves with Ms. Randolph--and it is indeed a fine, eerie effect.
3 Want more proof of how the set of reality changes, whether we want it to or not? Remember Bonanza, which ran on NBC for a thousand years or so? Check it out in syndication someday. Look at that Ponderosa set--the front yard, the big family room--and ask yourself how you ever believed it was "real." It seemed real because we were used to seeing TV series shot on soundstages up until 1965 or so; nowadays even TV producers don't use soundstages for exteriors. The state of the art has, for better or worse, moved on.
4 Or what about Hitler? Most of us associate him now with newsreel footage and forget that in the pretelevision thirties, Hitler used radio with a kind of malevolent brilliance. My guess is that two or three appearances on Meet the Press or maybe one you're-on-the-griddle 60 Minutes segment with Mike Wallace would have cooked Hitler's goose quite effectively.
5 "Staging" was another convention that both the early talkies and early TV leaned upon heavily until they found their own more fluid methods of storytelling. Check out some TV kinescopes from the fifties sometime, or an early talking film like It Happened One Night, The Jazz Singer, or Frankenstein, and notice how often the scenes are played out from one stationary camera location, as if the camera was in reality a representative playgoer with a front-row seat. Speaking of the pioneering director of silents, Georges Melies, in his fine book Caligari's Children, S. S. Prawer makes the same observation: "The double exposures, jump-cuts, and other technical tricks which Melies played with the shots he had taken from a fixed position corresponding to a fixed seat in the stalls of a theatre--these amused rather than frightened their audiences, and, in the end, wearied them sufficiently to ensure Melies's bankruptcy."
