Danse Macabre

by Стивен Кинг

  This is the mood which the best films of mythic "fairy-tale horror" summon up in us, and it also suggests that, below the level of simple aggression and simple morbidity, there is a final level where the horror movie does its most powerful work. And that is well for us, because without more, the human imagination would be a poor, degraded thing, in need of no more in the way of horror than such things as Last House on the Left and Friday the 13th. The horror movie is planning to harm us, all right, and that is exactly why it is lurking here in the very darkest part of the forest. At this most basic level, the horror film isn't fooling around: it wants to get you. Once it has reduced you to a level of childlike expectation and point of view, it will begin playing one or more of a very few simple harmonic melodies-the greatest limitation (and therefore the greatest challenge) of the horror form is its very strictness. The things that really scare people on a gut level can be reduced like fractions to an irreducible handful. And when that has finally happened, analyses such as those I've given in the foregoing pages become impossible . . . and even if analysis were possible, it would be irrelevant. One can point out effect, and that must be the end of the matter. To try and go any further is as useless as trying to divide a prime number by two and come out even. But effect may be enough; there are films, like Browning's Freaks, that have the power to reduce us to jelly, to make us mutter (or whimper) to ourselves, "Please let it stop"; they are those films which hold their spell over us in spite of all we can do, even including the recitation of that most magic spell-breaking incantation: "It's only a movie." And they can all be invoked with that wonderful fairy -tale door-opener, "Once upon a time.” So, before we proceed any further, here's a little quiz for you. Get a scrap of paper and something to write with and jot down your answers. Twenty questions; give yourself five points per question. And if you score below 70, you need to go back and do some postgraduate work in the real fright films . . . the ones that scare us just because they scare us.

  Ready? Okay. Name these films:

  1. Once upon a time, the husband, of the world's champion blind lady had to go away for awhile (to slay a dragon, or something of that sort) and a wicked man named Harry Roat, who came from Scarsdale, came by to see her while her husband was gone.

  2. Once upon a time, three babysitters went out on Halloween night, and only one of them was still alive come All Saints Day.

  3. Once upon a time a lady who stole some money spent a not-so enchanted evening at an out-of-the-way motel. Everything seemed pretty much okay until the motel owner's mother came by; mother did something very naughty.

  4. Once upon a time some bad people tampered with the oxygen line in one operating room of a major hospital and a lot of people went to sleep for a long, long time-just like Snow White. Only these people never woke up.

  5. Once upon a time there was a sad girl who picked up men in bars, because when the men came home with her, she didn't feel so sad. Except one night she picked up a man who was wearing a mask. Underneath the mask he was the boogeyman.

  6. Once upon a time some brave explorers landed on another planet to see if someone needed help. Nobody did, but by the time they got going again, they discovered that they had picked up the boogeyman.

  7. Once upon a time a sad lady named Eleanor went on an adventure in an enchanted castle. In the enchanted castle, Lady Eleanor was not so sad, because she found some new friends. Except that the friends left, and she stayed . . . forever.

  8. Once upon a time a young man tried to bring some magic dust from another country to his own aboard a magic flying carpet. But he was caught before he could get on his magic carpet, and the bad people took away his magic white powder and locked him in an evil dungeon.

  9. Once upon a time there was a little girl who looked sweet, but she was really very wicked. She locked the janitor up in his room and set his highly flammable bed of wood-chips and excelsior on fire because he was mean to her.

  10. Once upon a time there were two little children, very much like Hansel and Gretel, in fact, and when their father died, their mommy married a wicked man who pretended to be very good. This wicked man had LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand and HATE tattooed on the fingers of the other.

  11. Once upon a time there was an American lady living in London whose sanity was under some question. She thought she saw a murder in the old boarded-up house next door.

  12. Once upon a time a lady and her brother went to put flowers on their mother's grave and the brother, who liked to play mean tricks, scared her by saying, "They're coming to get you, Barbara." Except that it turned out they really were coming to get her . . . but they got him, first.

  13. Once upon a time all the birds in the world got mad at the people and started to kill the people because the birds were under an evil spell.

  14. Once upon a time a crazyman with an ax started to chop up his family, one by one, in an old Irish house. When he chopped off the groundskeeper's head, it rolled right down into the family pool-wasn't that funny?

  15. Once upon a time two sisters grew old together in an enchanted castle in the Kingdom of Hollywood. Once one of them had been famous in the Kingdom of Hollywood, but that was long, long ago. The other one was stuck in a wheelchair. And do you know what happened?

  The sister who could walk served her paralyzed sister a dead rat for dinner! Wasn't that funny?

  16. Once upon a time there was a cemetery caretaker who discovered that if he put black pins into the vacant plots on his cemetery map, the people who owned those plots would die.

  But when he took out the black pins and put in white pins, do you know what happened? The movie turned into a big pile of shit! Wasn't that funny?

  17. Once upon a time a bad man stole the little princess and buried her alive . . . or at least, he said he did.

  18. Once upon a time there was a man who invented some magic eyedrops, and he could use them to see through people's cards in Las Vegas and make lots of money. He could also see through girls' clothes at cocktail parties, which was maybe not such a nice thing to do, but wait a minute. This man kept seeing more . . . and more . . . and more . . . 19. Once upon a time there was a lady who was saddled with Satan's child, and he knocked her over a gallery railing with his trike. What a mean thing to do! But lucky mommy! Because she died soon after, she didn't have to do the sequel!

  20. Once upon a time some friends went on a canoe trip down a magic river, and some bad men saw that they were having fun and decided to fix them for it. That was because the bad men didn't want those other fellows, who came from the city, to have a good time in their woods.

  Okay, did you write down all of your answers? If you find you have four or more blanks-not even an educated guess to plug in there-you have been spending far too much time seeing "quality" films like Julia, Manhattan, and Breaking Away. And while you've been watching Woody Allen give his imitation of an ingrown hair (a liberal ingrown hair, of course), you missed some of the scariest films ever made. For the record, the answers are:

  1.Wait Until Dark2.Halloween 3. Psycho 4.Coma 5. Looking for Mr. Goodbar 6. Alien 7. The Haunting 8. Midnight Express 9. The Bad Seed 10. The Night of the Hunter 11. Night Watch 12. Night of the Living Dead 13. The Birds 14. Dementia-13 15. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?16. I Bury the Living 17. Macabre * 18. X-the Man with the X-Ray Eyes 19. The Omen 20. Deliverance

  The first thing we can note about this list of films is that, of the twenty (which I would call the basic coursework in films of gut-level horror in the period we're discussing here), fully fourteen have nothing supernatural going on in them . . . fifteen if you count Alien, which is at least nominally science fiction (I do count it as a supernatural tale, however; I think of it as Lovecraft in outer space, mankind finally going to the Elder Gods rather than they coming to us). So we might be able to say, paradox or not, that movies of fairy-tale horror demand a heavy dose of reality to get them rolling. Such reality frees the imagination of excess baggage and makes the weight of unbelief easier to
lift. The audience is propelled into the movie by the feeling that, under the right set of circumstances, this could happen.

  The second thing we could note is that a quarter of them bear a reference either to "night" or "the dark" in their titles. The dark, it goes almost without saying, provides the basis for our most primordial fears. As spiritual as we may believe our natures to be, our physiology is similar to that of all the rest of the mammals that creep, crawl, trot, or walk; we must make do with the same five senses. There are many mammals whose eyesight is keen, but we are not among them. There are mammals-dogs, for instance-which have even lousier eyesight than we do, but their lack of brainpower has forced them to develop other senses to a keenness we cannot even imagine (although we may think we can). With dogs, the overdeveloped senses are those of hearing and smell.

  *This William Castle feature-his first, but unfortunately not his last-was perhaps the bigest "gotta-see" picture of my grammar school days. Its title was pronounced by my friends in Stratford, Connecticut as McBare.

  "Gotta-see" 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.

  So-called psychics like to prate of a "sixth sense," a vague term which sometimes means telepathy, sometimes precognition, sometimes God knows what, but if we have a sixth sense, it is probably just (some just!) the keenness of our reasoning facilities. Fido may be able to follow a hundred scents of which we are completely unaware, but the little bugger is never going to be any good at checkers, or even Go Fish. This reasoning power has made it unnecessary for us to breed keener senses into the gene pool; in fact, a large part of the population has sensory equipment which is actually substandard even by human standards- hence eyeglasses and hearing aids. But we are able to make do because of our Boeing-747 brains.

  All of which is very fine when you're doing a deal in a well-lit executive boardroom or ironing the laundry in the living room on a sunny afternoon; but when the lights fail during a thunderstorm and we're left to creep around from place to place, trying to remember where we left the goddamn candles, the situation changes. Even a 747, sophisticated on-board radar and all, can't land in a heavy fog bank. When the lights go out and we find ourselves stranded in a shoal of darkness, reality itself has an unpleasant way of fogging in.

  When we cut off one avenue of sensory input, that sense simply shuts down (although it never shuts down 100 percent, of course; even in a dark room, we will see a trace pattern in front of our eyes, and in the most perfect silence we will hear a faint hum . . . such "phantom input" only means that the circuits are open and standing by). The same does not happen with our brains-fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the situation. It's fortunate if you happen to be stuck in a boring situation; you can use your sixth sense to plan the next day's work, to wonder what life might be like if you won the grand prize in the state lottery or the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes, or to speculate on what that sexy Miss Hepplewaite does-or doesn't- wear under those tight dresses of hers. On the other hand, the brain's constant function can be a mixed blessing. Ask anyone who is a victim of chronic insomnia.

  I tell people who say that horror movies don't scare them to make this simple experiment.

  Go see a film like Night of the Living Dead all alone (have you ever noticed how many people go to horror movies, not just in pairs or groups, but in actual packs?). Afterwards, get in your car, drive to an old, deserted, crumbling house-every town has at least one (except maybe Stepford, Connecticut, but they have their own problems there). Let yourself in. Mount to the attic. Sit down up there. Listen to the house groan and creak around you. Notice how much those creaks sound like someone-or something-mounting the stairs. Smell the must. The rot. The decay. Think about the film you have just seen. Consider it as you sit there in the dark, unable to see what might be creeping up . . . what might be just about to place its dirty, twisted claw on your shoulder . . . or around your neck . . . This sort of thing can prove, by its very darkness, to be an enlightening experience.

  Fear of the dark is the most childlike fear. Tales of terror are customarily told "around the campfire" or at least after sundown, because what is laughable in the sunshine is often tougher to smile at by starlight. This is a fact that every maker of horror films and writer of horror tales recognizes and uses-it is one of those unfailing pressure points where the grip of horror fiction is surest. * This is particularly true of the filmmakers, of course, and of all the tools that the filmmaker can bring to bear, it is perhaps this fear of the dark that seems the most natural, since movies must, by their very nature, be viewed in the dark.

  It was Michael Cantalupo, an assistant editor at Everest House (whose imprint you will find on the spine of this very volume) who reminded me of a gimmick used in the first-run engagements of Wait Until Dark, and in this context it bears an affectionate mention. The last fifteen or twenty minutes of that film are utterly terrifying, partially due to virtuoso performances turned in by Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin (and in my view, Arkin's performance as Harry Roat, Jr., from Scarsdale may be the greatest evocation of screen villainy ever, rivalling and perhaps surpassing Peter Lorre's in M), partially due to the brilliant gimmick on which Frederick Knott's story turns.

  Hepburn, in a final desperate effort to save her life, breaks every damned lightbulb in the apartment and hallway, so that she and the sighted Arkin will be on even terms. Trouble is, she forgets one light . . . but you and I probably would have forgotten it, too. It's the bulb inside the refrigerator.

  Anyway, the in-theater gimmick was to turn out every damn light in the auditorium except for the EXIT lights over the doors. I never realized until the last ten minutes of Wait Until Dark how much light there is in most theaters, even when the movie's playing. There are those tiny "dim-bulbs" set into the ceiling if the theater is one of the new breed, those gauche but somehow lovely electric flambeaux glowing along the walls in the older ones. In a pinch, you can always find your way back to your seat after using the bathroom by the light being thrown from the screen itself. Except that the climactic few minutes of Wait Until Dark are set entirely in that black apartment. You have only your ears, and what they hear-Miss Hepburn screaming, Arkin's tortured breathing (he's been stabbed a bit earlier on, and we're allowed to relax a little, to think he might even be dead, when he pops out again like a malefic jack-in-the-box)-isn't very comforting. So there you sit. Your big old Boeing-747 brain is cranked up like a kid's jalopy with the pedal to the metal, and it has very little concrete input to work on. So you sit. there, sweating it out, hoping the lights will eventually come on again . . . and sooner or later, they do. Mike Cantalupo told me he saw Wait Until Dark in a theater so sleazy that even the EXIT lights were broken.

  *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.

  Man, that must have been bad.

  Mike's recollection of that took me fondly back to another film-William Castle's The Tingler, which had a similar (if, in the Castle style, infinitely more crass) gimmick. Castle, whom I've already mentioned in connection with Macabre-known to all us WASPy little kids as McBare, you'll remember-was the king of the gimmicks; he originated the $100,000 "fright insurance” policy, for instance; if you dropped dead during the film, your heirs got the money. Then there was the great "Nurse on Duty at All Performances" gimmick; there was the "You Must Have Your Blood Pressure Taken in the Lobby Before Viewing This Horrifying Film" gimmick (that one was used as part of The House on Haunted Hill promo), and all sorts of other gimmicks.

  The exact plot specifics of The Tingler, a film so exquisitely low budget that it probably made back its prod
uction costs after a thousand people had seen it, now escape me, but there was this monster (the Tingler, natch) that lived on fear. When its victims were so scared they couldn't even scream, it attached itself to their spines and sorta . . . well . . . tingled them to death. I know that must sound pretty fucking stupid, but in the film, it worked (although it probably helped to be eleven years old when you saw it). As I remember, one sexy miss got it in the bathtub. Bad news.

  But never mind the plot; let's get on to the gimmick. At one point the Tingler got into a movie theater, killed the projectionist, and somehow shorted out the electricity. At that moment in the theater where you were watching the movie, all the lights went out and the screen went dark.

  Now as it happened, the only thing that could get the Tingler to let go of your spine once it had attached itself was a good loud scream, which changed the quality of the adrenaline it fed on.

  And at this point, a narrator on the soundtrack cried out, "The Tingler is now in this theater! It may be under your seat! So scream! Scream! Scream for your lives!!" The audience was of course happy to oblige, and in the next scene we see the Tingler fleeing for its life, vanquished for the time being by all those screaming people. *

  Besides the movies which raise the scary concept of the dark in their titles, almost every other film listed in the little quiz I gave you uses that fear of the dark heavily. All but approximately eighteen minutes of John Carpenter's Halloween are set after nightfall. The major scare scenes in Psycho all take place after dark. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the final horrible sequence (my wife ran for the women's room, believing she was going to toss her cookies), where Tom Berenger stabs Diane Keaton to death, is shot in her dark apartment, with only a flickering strobe-light for illumination. In Alien, that constant motif of the dark barely needs mentioning. "In space, no one can hear you scream," the ad copy read; it also could have said, "In space, it is always one minute after midnight." Dawn never comes in that Lovecraftian gulf between the stars.