by Стивен Кинг
Brolin says he'll write a covering check, which he does, and later he stands off the angry caterer, who has specified only cash, in a halfwhispered washroom argument while the wedding party whoops it up outside. After the wedding, Lutz turns the living room of the Bad House upside down looking for the lost money, which has now become his money, and the only way of backing up the bank paper he has issued the caterer. Brolin's check may not have been 100 percent Goodyear rubber, but in his sunken, purple-pouched eyes we see a man who didn't really have the money any more than his hapless brother-in-law did, regardless.
Here is a man tottering on the brink of his own financial crash. He finds the only trace under the couch: a bank money-band with the numerals $500 stamped on it. The band lies there on the rug, tauntingly empty. "Where is it?" Brolin screams, his voice vibrating with anger, frustration, and fear. At that one moment we hear the ring of Waterford, clear and true-or, if you like, we hear that one quiet phrase of pure music in a film that is otherwise all crash and bash.
Everything which The Amityville Horror does well is summed up in that scene. Its implications touch on everything about the Bad House's most obvious effect-and also the only one which seems empirically undeniable: little by little, it is ruining the Lutz family financially.
The movie might as well have been subtitled The Horror of the Shrinking Bank Account. It's the more prosaic fallout of the place where so many haunted-house stories start. "It's on the market for a song," the realtor says with a big egg-sucking grin. "It's supposed to be haunted.” Well, the house that the Lutzes buy is indeed on the market for a song (and there's another good moment-all too short-when Cathy tells her husband that she will be the first person in her large Catholic family to actually own her own home; "We've always been renters," she says), but it ends up costing them dear. At the conclusion, the house seems to literally tear itself apart. Windows crash in, black goop comes dribbling out of the walls, the cellar stairs cave in . . . and I found myself wondering not if the Lutz clan would get out alive but if they had adequate homeowner's insurance.
Here is a movie for every woman who ever wept over a plugged-up toilet or a spreading water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs shower; for every man who ever did a slow burn when the weight of the snow caused his gutters to give way; for every child who ever jammed his fingers and felt that the door or window which did the jamming was out to get him. As horror goes, Amityville is pretty pedestrian. So's beer, but you can get drunk on it.
"Think of the bills," a woman sitting behind me in the theater moaned at one point . . . but I suspect it was her own bills she was thinking about. It was impossible to make a silk purse out of this particular sow's ear, but Rosenberg at least manages to give us Qiana, and the main reason that people went to see it, I think, is that The Amityville Horror, beneath its ghost-story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby.
Think of the bills, indeed.
5
The horror film as political polemic, then.
We've mentioned a couple of films of this stripe already-Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the Siegel version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, both from the fifties. All the best films of this political type seem to come from that period-although we may be coming full circle again; The Changeling, which at this writing seems on its way to become the big "sleeper" of the spring of 1980, is an odd combination of ghosts and Watergate.
If movies are the dreams of the mass culture-one film critic, in fact, has called watching a movie "dreaming with one's eyes open"-and if horror movies are the nightmares of the mass culture, then many of these fifties horrors express America's coming-to-terms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation over political differences.
We ought to eliminate the horror movies of that period that sprang from technological unease (the so-called "big bug" movies are among these) and also those "nuclear showdown” movies such as Fail-Safe and Ray Milland's intermittently interesting Panic in the Year Zero.
These movies are not political in the sense that Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is political; that was a film where you could see the political enemy of your choice around every corner, symbolized in those ominous pods from space.
The political horror films of the period we're discussing here begin, I think, with The Thing (1951), directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks (who also had a hand in the direction, one suspects). It starred Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, and James Arness as the blood-drinking human carrot from Planet X.
Briefly: A polar encampment of soldiers and scientists discovers a strong magnetic field emanating from an area where there has been a recent meteor fall; the field is strong enough to throw all their electronic gadgets and gizmos off whack. Further, a camera designed to start shooting pictures when and if the normal radiation background count suddenly goes up has taken photos of an object which dips, swoops, and turns at high speeds-strange behavior for a meteor.
An expedition is dispatched to the spot, and it discovers a flying saucer buried in the ice.
The saucer, superhot on touchdown, melted its way into the ice, which then refroze, leaving only the tailfin sticking out (thus relieving the special-effects corps of a potentially big-budget item). The Army guys, who demonstrate frostbite of the brain throughout most of the film, promptly destroy the extraterrestrial ship while trying to burn it out of the ice with thermite.
The occupant (Arness) is saved, however, and carted back to the experimental station in a block of ice. He/it is placed in a storage shed, under guard. One of the guards is so freaked out by the Thing that he throws a blanket over it. Unlucky man! Quite obviously all his good stars are in retrograde, his biorhythms low, and his mental magnetic poles temporarily reversed. The blanket he's used is of the electric variety, and it miraculously melts the ice without shorting out. The Thing escapes, and the fun begins.
The fun ends about sixty minutes later with the creature being roasted medium-rare on an electric sidewalk sort of thing that the scientists have set up. A reporter on the scene reports the news of humankind's first victory over invaders from space to a presumably grateful world, and the film fades out, like The Blob seven years later, not with a THE END title card, but with a question mark.
The Thing is a small movie (in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, Carlos Clarens quite rightly calls it "intimate") done on a low budget and as obviously done "on-set" as Lewton's The Cat People. Like Alien, which would come more than a quarter-century later, it achieves its best effects from feelings of claustrophobia and xenophobia, both of them feelings we're saving for those films with mythic, "fairy-tale" subtexts,* but as pointed out before, the best horror movies will try to get at you on many different levels, and The Thing is also operating on a political level. It has grim things to say about eggheads (and knee-jerk liberals; in the early fifties you could have put an equals sign between the two) who would indulge in the crime of appeasement.
*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.
The very presence of Kenneth Tobey and his squad of soldiers gives the film a militaristic, and thus political, patina. We're never under any illusions that this Arctic base has been set up just for the eggheads, who want to study such useless things as the aurora borealis and the formation of glaciers. No, this base is also spending the taxpayers' money in important ways: it is a part of the Distant Early Warning line, part of America's Vigilant and Unceasing Etc., Etc., Etc. In the chain of command, the scientists are very much under Tobey. After all, the film whispers to the audience, we know what these ivory-tower eggheads are like, don't we? Full of big ideas but not worth much in a situation calling for a practical man. Really, it says, when you get right down to it, those bigdome ideas make most scientists as responsible as a child with
a box of matches. They may be great with their microscopes and telescopes, but it takes a man like Kenneth Tobey to understand about America's Vigilant and Unceasing Etc., Etc., Etc.
The Thing is the first movie of the fifties to offer us the scientist in the role of the Appeaser, that creature who for reasons either craven or misguided, would open the gates to the Garden of Eden and let all the evils fly in (as opposed, let us say, to those Mad Labs proprietors of the thirties, who were more than willing to open Pandora's Box and let all the evils fly out-a major distinction, although the end results are the same). That scientists should be so constantly vilified in the techno-horror films of the fifties-a decade that was apparently dedicated to the idea of turning out a whole marching corps of men and women in white lab coats-is perhaps not so surprising when we remember that it was science which opened those same gates so that the atomic bomb could be brought into Eden-first by itself and then trundled on missile carriers. The average Jane or Joe on the street during those spooky eight or nine years that followed the surrender of Japan had extremely schizoid feelings about science and scientists- recognizing the need for them and at the same time loathing the things they had let in forever.
On the one hand, there was their pal, that neat little all-around guy, Reddy Kilowatt; on the other hand, before getting into the first reel of The Thing down at your local theater, you could watch newsreel footage as an Army mockup of a town just like yours was vaporized in a nuclear furnace.
Robert Cornthwaite plays the Appeasing Scientist in The Thing, and we hear from his lips the first verse of a psalm that any filmgoer who grew up in the fifties and sixties became familiar with very quickly: "We must preserve this creature for science." The second verse goes, "If it comes from a society more advanced than ours, it must come in peace. If we can only establish communications with it, and find out what it wants-” Only scientists, Cornthwaite says, are capable of studying this creature from another world, and it must be studied; it must be debriefed; we gotta find out what heats up his rocket tubes.
Never mind the fact that the creature has exhibited nothing but murderous tendencies, laying low a couple of huskies (it loses a hand in the process, but not to worry, it grows back) and living on blood instead of Green Thumb Plant Food.
Twice, near the film's conclusion, Cornthwaite is hauled away by soldiers; at the climax, he breaks free of his guards and faces the creature with his hands open and empty. He begs it to communicate with him and to see that he means it no harm. The creature stares at him for a long, pregnant moment . . . and then bats him casually aside, as you or I might swat a mosquito. The medium-rare roasting on the electric sidewalk follows.
Now I'm only a journeyman writer and I will not presume to teach history here (too much like trying to teach your grammy to suck eggs). I will point out that the Americans of that time were perhaps more paranoid about the idea of "appeasement" than at any other time before or since. The dreadful humiliation of Neville Chamberlain and England's resulting close squeak at the beginning of Hitler's war was still very much with those Americans, and why not? It had all happened only twelve years prior to The Thing's release, and even Americans who were just turning twenty-one in 1951 could remember it all very clearly. The moral was simple-such appeasement doesn't work; you gotta cut 'em if they stand and shoot 'em if they run.
Otherwise, they'll take you over a bite at a time (and in the case of The Thing, you could take that literally). The Chamberlain lesson to Americans of the early fifties was that there can be no peace at any price, and never appeasement. Although the Korean police action would mark the beginning of the end for the idea, in 1951 the idea of America as world policeman (a kind of international Clancy growling. "Whaddye think yes doin' there, boyo?" at such geopolitical burglars as North Korea) was still quite respectable, and many Americans undoubtedly saw the idea in even stronger terms: the United States not just as policeman, but as the gunslinger of the free world, the Texas Ranger who had pushed his way into the brawling saloon of Asian/European politics in 1941 and who had cleaned house in a mere three and a half years.
So that moment comes in The Thing when Cornthwaite faces the creature-and is slammed roughly aside. It is a purely political moment, and audiences applauded the creature's destruction fervently when it came moments later. In the confrontation between Cornthwaite and the hulking Arness, there is a subtext which suggests Chamberlain and Hitler; in the destruction of the creature moments later by Tobey and his soldiers, audiences may have seen (and applauded) the quick, nononsense destruction of their favorite geopolitical villain- North Korea perhaps; more likely the dastardly Russians, who had so quickly replaced Hitler as the man in the black hat.
If all this seems much too heavy a cargo for a modest little fright flick like The Thing to bear, please remind yourself that a man's point of view is shaped by the events he experiences, and that a man's politics are shaped by his point of view. I am only suggesting that, given the political temper of the times and the cataclysmic world events which had occurred only a few years before, the viewpoint of this movie is almost preordained. What do you do with a blood-drinking carrot from outer space? Simple. Cut him if he stands and shoot him if he runs.
And if you're an Appeasing Scientist like Robert Cornthwaite (with a yellow streak up your back as wide as the no-passing line on a highway, that subtext whispers), you simply get bulldozed under.
Carlos Clarens points out how remarkably the creature of this film resembles Universal's Frankenstein monster from twenty years before, but there is really nothing so remarkable about it, surely; this particular card from the Tarot should be familiar to us by now, and if it's not, the title helpfully informs us that we're again dealing with the Thing Without a Name. It perhaps strikes more modern viewers as strange that a creature intelligent enough to conquer space should be presented in the film as an out-and-out monster (as opposed, let us say, to the saucerians in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, who speak English with a moderate warble but with the grammatical poise of an Oxford don; Hawks's Thing can only grunt like a pig getting its back scratched with a wire brush). One wonders why he came to Earth at all. My own suspicion is that he/it got off-course and that the original plan was for him to seed all of Nebraska or perhaps the Nile delta with little bits of himself. Just think-a home-grown invasion force (get in their way and they kill you, but smoke them and . . . real mellow, man-oooh, the colors!).
Yet even this is not much of an inconsistency when we put ourselves into the temper of the times again. The people of those times saw both Hitler and Stalin as creatures possessed of a certain low animal cunning-Hitler, after all, was first with the jet fighter and the offensive missile. But they were animals for all that, mouthing political ideas that were little more than grunts. Hitler grunted in German; Stalin in Russian, but a grunt is a grunt, for all that. And perhaps the creature in The Thing is saying something, after all, which is perfectly harmless- "The people of my star system wish to know if the Get Out of Jail Free card may be sold to another player," perhaps-but it sounds bad. Real bad.
By contrast, consider the other end of this telescope. The children of World War II produced The Thing; twenty-six years later a child of Vietnam and the self-proclaimed Love Generation, Steven Spielberg, gives us a fitting balance weight to The Thing in a film called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1951, the soldier standing sentry duty (the one who has foolishly covered the block of ice in which the Thing has been entombed with an electric blanket, you will remember) empties his automatic into the alien when he hears it coming; in 1977, a young guy with a happy, spaced-out smile holds up a sign reading STOP AND BE FRIENDLY. Somewhere in between the two, John Foster Dulles evolved into Henry Kissinger, and the pugnacious politics of confrontation became détente.
In The Thing, Kenneth Tobey occupies himself with building an electric boardwalk to kill the creature; in Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfuss occupies himself with building a mock-up of Devil's Tower, the creatures' landing place, i
n his living room. And he would be just as happy, we feel, to run around up there placing those landing lights. The Thing is a big, hulking brute; the creatures from the stars in Spielberg's film are small, delicate, childlike. They do not speak, but their mothership plays lovely harmonic tones-the music of the spheres, we assume. And Dreyfuss, far from wanting to murder these emissaries from space, goes with them.
I'm not saying that Spielberg is or would think of himself as a member of the Love Generation simply because he came to his majority while students were putting daisies in the muzzles of M-1's and while Hendrix and Joplin were playing the Fillmore West. Neither am I saying that Howard Hawks, Christian Nyby, Charles Lederer (who wrote the screenplay for The Thing), or John W. Campbell (whose novella formed the basis for the film) fought their way up the beaches of Anzio or helped to raise the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. But events determine point of view and point of view determines politics, and CE3K seems to me every bit as preordained as The Thing. We can understand that the latter's "let the military handle this” thesis was a perfectly acceptable one in 1951, because the military had handled the Japs and the Nazis perfectly well in Duke Wayne's "Big One," and we can also understand that the former's attitude of "don't let the military handle this" was a perfectly acceptable one in 1977, following the military's less-than-startling record in Vietnam, or even in 1980 (when CE3K was rereleased with additional footage), the year when American military personnel lost the battle for our hostages to the Iranians following three hours of mechanical fuckups.
