Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  In regard to the early talkies, which came nearly forty years after Melies pioneered the fantasy film and the idea of "special effects," audio limitations dictated the stationary camera to some extent; the camera made a loud clacking noise as it operated, and the only way to beat it was to put it in a soundproof room with a glass window. Moving the camera meant moving the room, and that was expensive in terms of time as well as money. But it was more than camera noise, a factor Melies certainly didn't have to contend with. A lot of it was simply that mental set thing again. Bound by stage conventions, many early directors simply found themselves creatively unable to innovate.

  1 One success in skating over this thin ice does not necessarily guarantee that the filmmaker will be able to repeat such a success; while his innate talent saves Hooper's second film, Eaten Alive, from descending to The Bloody Mutilators category, it is still a disappointment. The only director I can think of who has explored this gray land between art and porno-exhibitionism successfully--even brilliantly--again and again with never a misstep is the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg.

  2 Van Helsing's daughter? I hear you saying with justifiable dismay. Yes indeed. Readers familiar with Stoker's novel will see that Badham's film (and the stage play from which it was drawn) has rung any number of changes on the novel. In terms of the tale's interior logic, these changes of plot and relationship seem to work, but to what purpose? The changes don't cause Badham to say anything new about either the Count or the vampire myth in general, and to my mind there was no coherent reason for them at all. As we have too far too often, we can only shrug and say, "That's showbiz."

  3 Some would say that feelings of xenophobia are in themselves political, and there's an argument there to be made--but I would rather discuss it as a universal feeling, which I believe it to be, and exclude it (for now, at least) from the sort of subliminal propaganda we're discussing here.

  4 D. F. Jones could hardly be classed as the Pollyanna of the science fiction world; in his follow-up to Colossus, a newly developed birth control pill that you only have to take once results in a worldwide sterility and the slow death of the human race. Cheery stuff, but Jones is not alone in his gloomy distrust of a technological world; there is J. G. Ballard, author of such grim tales as Crash, Concrete Island, and High-Rise; not to mention Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (whom my wife fondly calls "Father Kurt"), who has given us such novels as Cat's Cradle and Player Piano.

  5 And a host of others, many of them Japanese imports, all linked by either long-term radiation or nuclear blast as first cause: Godzilla, Gorgo, Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster. The idea was even played for laughs once before Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, in an odd little fifties picture called The Atomic Kid, starring Mickey Rooney.

  6 But the credit for this particular scene belongs to neither Forbes nor Levin, but with the film's screenwriter, William Goldman, who is a very funny fellow. If you doubt, see his wonderful send-up of fantasy and fairy tales, The Princess Bride. I can think of no other satire, with the possible exception of Alice in Wonderland, which is so clearly an expression of love and humor and good temper.

  7 From The Andrew Lang Fairy Tale Treasury, edited by Cary Wilkens (New York: Avenel Books, 1979), p. 91.

  8 This William Castle feature--his first, but unfortunately not his last--was perhaps the biggest "gottasee" picture of my grammar school days. Its title was pronounced by my friends in Stratford, Connecticut as McBare. "Gottasee" or not, very few of our parents would let us go because of the grisly ad campaign. I, however, exercised the inventiveness of the true aficionado and got to see it by telling my mother I was going to Davy Crockett, a Disney film which I felt I could summarize safely because I had most of the bubble-gum cards.

  9 Now and then someone will run brilliantly counter to the tradition and produce a piece of what is sometimes called "sunlit horror." Ramsey Campbell does this particularly well; see his aptly named collection of short stories Demons by Daylight, for instance.

  10 God, it's fun to think about some of the desperate gimmicks that have been used to sell bad horror movies--like those Dish Nights and Bank Nights used to lure people into the movie houses during the thirties, they linger pleasantly in the memory. During one imported Italian turkey, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (nifty title!), the theaters advertised "bloodcorn," which was ordinary popcorn with a red food dye added. During Jack the Ripper, a 1960 example of "Hammer-style horror" written by Jimmy Sangster, the black-and-white film turned to gruesome color during the last five minutes, when the Ripper, who has unwisely chosen to hide in an elevator shaft, is squished under a descending car.

  11 Dennis Etchison (see the Forenote to the 1983 Edition) disputes Bill Thompson's memory--he says it happens in daytime, else Shelley Winters would not have been visible--or photographable--at the bottom of that river. (This raises the interesting idea that we make the dark in our memories . . . ) 12 I can remember, as a kid, one of my fellow kids asking me to imagine sliding down a long, polished bannister which suddenly and without warning turns into a razor blade. Man, I was days getting over that.

  13 This might lead to the accusation that my definition of the horror movie as art is much too wide--that I just let in everything. That is not true at all--movies like Massacre at Central High and Bloody Mutilators work on no level. And if my ideas concerning the boundaries of art seem rather lenient, that's too bad. I'm no snob, and if you are, that's your problem. In my business, if you lose your taste for good baloney, it's time you got into some other line of work.

  14 From Kids: Day in and Day Out, edited by Elisabeth Scharlatt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); this particular story related by Walter Jerrold.

  15 Now, don't get me wrong or misinterpret what I'm saying. Kids can be mean and unlovely, and when you see them at their worst, they can make you think black thoughts about the future of the human race. But meanness and cruelty, although related, are not the same thing at all. A cruel action is a studied action; it requires a bit of thought. Meanness, on the other hand, is unpremeditated and unthinking. The results may be similar for the person--usually another child--who gets the butt end, but it seems to me that in a moral society, intent or lack of it is pretty important.

  1 I wasn't able to have any fun with Friedkin's more recent film, Cruising, although it fascinated me because I suspect it indicates the wave of the future for the bad film which has a big budget; it has a sparkly look that is still somehow cheesy--it's like a dead rat in a Lucite block.

  2 Home Box Office, in its endless quest for prime-time filler, is now making many of these "little" films available in a way that such spotty distributors as New World Pictures have never been able to do. Of course, there's no shortage of dreck on HBO either, as any subscriber will tell you; still, there is an occasional prize in the pay-TV box, which is usually full of such mouldy cinematic Cracker Jacks as Guyana: Cult of the Damned and Moment by Moment. In the last year or so HBO has offered Cronenberg's The Brood and an interesting AIP picture called The Evictors (starring Vic Morrow and Michael Parks), which got no American theatrical distribution . . . and Tourist Trap.

  3 Compare, for instance, the single and unified vision which powers Spielberg's Jaws to the sequel, which was produced by committee and directed by the unfortunate Jeannot Szwarc, who was brought in from the bullpen in the late innings to mop up, and who deserved better.

  4 The one exception is Judith Crist, who seems to genuinely like horror movies and who is often able to look past a poverty-row budget to whatever is working there--I've always wondered what she made of Night of the Living Dead.

  5 If you are interested in my own determination of the best horror movies of the last thirty years, see Appendix I.

  1 I would date the more overtly violent horror movies not from Psycho but from two nonhorror movies, shot in living, bloody color: Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde.

  2 From The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946
-Present, edited by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), p. 586.

  3 And some say it was the single most frightening story ever done on TV. I would disagree with that. My own nominee for that honor would be the final episode of a little-remembered program called Bus Stop (adapted from the William Inge play and film). The series, a straight drama show, was canceled following the furor over an episode starring then rock star Fabian Forte as a psychopathic rapist--the episode was based on a Tom Wicker novel. The final episode, however, deviated wildly into the supernatural, and for me. Robert Bloch's adaptation of his own short story "I Kiss Your Shadow" has never been beaten on TV--and rarely anywhere else--for eerie, mounting horror.

  4 For much of this material I am indebted to the entry on The Outer Limits in The Science Fiction Handbook, published by Doubleday (New York: 1979). The entry (p. 441 of this huge volume) was written by John Brosnan and Peter Nicholls.

  In addition, there is a magazine-type publication devoted to reviewing The Outer Limits. Each issue is $2.50, and it is available from Ted Rypel, 11100 Governor Ave., Cleveland, Ohio 44111.

  5 The part is really only a refinement of the part of David Ross, a private eye McGavin played in a wonderful (if short-lived) NBC series called The Outsider. Probably only the late David Janssen as Harry Orwell and Brian Keith as Lew Archer (in a series that only lasted three weeks--if you blinked, you missed it) can compare with McGavin's performance as a private eye.

  6 For much of the material on The Night Stalker, I am indebted to Berthe Roeger's comprehensive analysis of both the two movies and the series, published in Fangoria magazine (issue #3, December 1979). The same issue contains an invaluable episode-by-episode chronology of the series' run.

  7 For this and much of the material on Serling and The Twilight Zone, I'm indebted to "Rod Serling's Dream," by Ed Naha, published in Starlog #15 (August 1978), and to Gary Gerani, who compiled the complete episode guide in the same issue.

  8 Quoted in an interview conducted by Linda Brevelle shortly before Serling's death and published under the title, "Rod Serling's Last Interview" (a rather ghoulish title, I think, but then, what do I know?), in the 1976 Writer's Yearbook.

  9 Meredith became perhaps the most familiar face of all to Twilight Zone fans, save for Serling's own. Probably his best-remembered role came in "Printer's Devil," where he plays a newspaper owner who is really Satan . . . complete with a jutting, crooked cigar that was somehow diabolical.

  10 In 1972 CBS discovered another "prestige program"--The Waltons, created by Earl Hamner, Jr., who wrote a good many Twilight Zones . . . including, coincidentally, "The Bewitchin' Pool," the last original Twilight Zone episode to be telecast on the network. Placed against brutal competition--NBC's The Flip Wilson Show and ABC's own version of The Church of What's Happening Now, The Mod Squad--CBS stuck with Hamner's creation in spite of the low ratings because of the prestige factor. The Waltons went on to outlive its competition and at this writing has run seven seasons.

  1 A word about Arkham House. There is probably no dedicated fantasy fan in America who doesn't have at least one of those distinctive black-bound volumes upon his or her shelf . . . and probably in a high place of honor. August Derleth, the founder of this small Wisconsin-based publishing house, was a rather uninspired novelist of the Sinclair Lewis school and an editor of pure genius: Arkham was first to publish H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Bloch in book form . . . and these are only a few of Derleth's legion. He published his books in limited editions ranging from five hundred to four thousand copies, and some of them--Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep and Bradbury's Dark Carnival, for instance--are now highly sought-after collectors' items.

  2 At one point, while under strain, Don gives a long, rambling lecture to an undergraduate class on the subject of Stephen Crane. In the course of his talk he describes The Red Badge of Courage as "a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears." Considering the book's moody approach to the subjects of cowardice and bravery, it is an oddly apt description of that novel.

  3 The best of these occurs when Lewis Benedikt goes to his death. He sees a bedroom door formed by an interlocking spray of pine needles while hunting in the woods. He goes through the door and into a deadly fantasyland.

  4 But there are exceptions to every rule, obviously. While two adaptations of old EC-comics horror yarns, Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, are miserable failures, Robert Bloch did two "frame-story" films for the British Amicus production company, The House That Dripped Blood and Asylum. The stories in both of these were adapted from Bloch's own short stories, and both are good fun. Of course, the champ is still Dead of Night, the 1946 British film staring Michael Redgrave and directed by Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Basil Dearden.

  5 The article "Waiting for the End: Shirley Jackson's The Sundial" by John G. Park, Critique, Vol. XIX, No. 3, 1978.

  6 Or in The Shining, which was written with The Sundial very much in mind. In The Shining, the characters are snowbound and isolated in an old hotel miles from any help. Their world has shrunk and turned inward; the Overlook Hotel becomes the microcosm where universal forces collide, and the inner weather mimics the outer weather. Critics of Stanley Kubrick's film version would do well to remember that it was these elements, consciously or unconsciously, which Kubrick chose to accentuate.

  7 From Shirley Jackson, by Lenemaja Friedman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), p. 121. Ms. Friedman quotes directly from Shirley Jackson's account of how the book came to be; Miss Jackson's account was published in an article entitled "Experience and Fiction."

  8 Friedman, Shirley Jackson, p. 133.

  9 In case you're one of the five or six readers of popular fiction in America who has missed them, they are A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby, This Perfect Day, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil. He has written two Broadway plays, Veronica's Room and the immensely successful Deathtrap. Less known is a modest but chillingly effective made-for-TV movie called Dr. Cook's Garden, starring Bing Crosby in a wonderfully adroit performance.

  10 I have always wanted to publish a novel with the last thirty pages simply left out. The reader would be mailed these final pages by the publisher upon receipt of a satisfactory summary of everything that had happened in the story up to that point. That would certainly put a spoke in the wheels of those people who TURN TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT.

  11 As previously noted, the late-seventies remake of the Finney novel resets the story in San Francisco, opting for an urban paranoia which results in a number of sequences strikingly like those which open Polanski's film version of Rosemary's Baby. But Philip Kaufman lost more than he gained, I think, by taking Finney's story out of its natural small-town-with-a-bandstand-in-the-park setting.

  12 At the same time Finney and Matheson began administering their own particular brands of shock treatment to the American imagination, Ray Bradbury began to be noticed in the fantasy community, and during the fifties and sixties, Bradbury's name would become the one most readily identified with the genre in the mind of the general reading public. But for me, Bradbury lives and works alone in his own country, and his remarkable, iconoclastic style has never been successfully imitated. Vulgarly put, when God made Ray Bradbury He broke the mold.

  13 Not much new in this. Writers in the fantasy and science fiction genres moan about the critical coverage they get from mainstream critics--sometimes with justification, sometimes without--but the fact is most critics inside the genre are intellectual dorks. The genre magazines have a long and ignoble history of roasting novels which are too large for the genres from which they've come; Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land took a similar pasting.

  14 The one reference to sexual carnality here occurs during the business of the Theater, which Bradbury declined to discuss in his letter to me, although I asked him if he would be so kind as to elaborate a bit. It remains one of the book's most tantalizing episodes. Jim and
Will discover the Theater, Bradbury says, on the upper floor of a house "while they were monkey-climbing for the sourest apples." Bradbury tells us that looking into the Theater changed everything, including the taste of the fruit, and while I have a tendency to bolt at the first stench of graduate-school analysis like a horse smelling good water polluted with alkali, the apple-and-Eden metaphor here is too strong to be denied. What exactly is going on in this second-or third-floor room, this "Theater" that changed the taste of the apples, that so fascinates Jim of the dark name and his friend, whose Christian name is so associated with our supposed ability (our supposed Christian ability) to consciously command goodness in any given situation? Bradbury suggests that the Theater is one room in a whorehouse. The people inside are naked; they "let fall clothes to the rug, stood raw and animal-crazy, naked, like shivering horses . . . " If so, it is the book's most telling foreshadowing of the carnal deviation from the norm which so strongly attracts Jim Nightshade as he stands on the threshold of adolescence.

  15 The only novels I can think of that avoid making childhood into a myth or a fairy tale and still succeed wonderfully as stories are William Golding's Lord of the Flies and A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes. Someone will write me a letter and suggest that I should have added either Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden or Beryl Bainbridge's Harriet Said, but I think that, in their differing ways (but uniquely British outlook), both of these short novels romanticize childhood as thoroughly as Bradbury ever did.