Danse Macabre

by Стивен Кинг

  His celebrity, unfortunately, was every bit as lasting as Vaughan Meader's (and if you don't remember Vaughan Meader, send me a stamped, self-addressed postcard and I will enlighten you).

  One turned in to Dark Shadows every day, convinced that things could become no more lunatic . . . and yet somehow they did. At one point the entire cast of characters was transported back into the seventeenth century for a six -week turn in fancy dress. Barnabas had a cousin who was a werewolf. Another cousin was a combination witch-succubus. Other soap operas have always, of course, practiced their own bemusing forms of madness; my own favorite has always been the Kid Trick. The way the Kid Trick works is this: one of the characters on a soap opera will have a baby in March. By July it will be two; in November it will be six; the following February it will be lying in the hospital, comatose, after being hit by a car while returning home from the sixth, grade; and by the March following its birth, the child will be eighteen and ready to begin really joining in the fun by getting the girl next door pregnant, or turning suicidal, or possibly by announcing to his horrified parents that he's a homosexual. The Kid Trick is worthy of a Robert Sheckley alternate-world story, but at least the characters on most soap operas stay dead once their life-support machinery is turned off (following which there will be a four-month trial with the turner-offer in the dock for mercy killing). The actors and actresses who "died" picked up their final checks and went job hunting again. Not so on Dark Shadows. The dead simply came back as ghosts. It was better than the Kid Trick.

  Dan Curtis went on to make two theatrical films based on the Dark Shadows plot and using its cast of undead characters-such a jump from TV to the movies is not unheard-of (The Lone Ranger is a case where it also happened), but it's rare, and the films, while not great, were certainly viewable. They were done with style, wit, and all those buckets of gore Curtis couldn't use on TV. They were also made with tremendous energy . . . a trait which helped to make The Night Stalker film the highest-rated made-for-TV movie ever telecast up until that time. (It has since been surpassed in the ratings eight or nine times, and one of the films that has outpointed it was the pilot film for-choke!-The Love Boat.) Curtis himself is a remarkable, almost hypnotic man, friendly in a brusque, almost abrasive way, apt to hog the credit for his enterprises, but in such an engaging way that nobody really seems to mind. A throwback to an older and perhaps tougher breed of Hollywood filmmakers, Curtis has never had any noticable problems in deciding where to plant his feet. If he likes you, he stands up for you. If he doesn't, you're a "no-talent sonofabitch" (a phrase that has always pleased me a great deal, and after reading this passage, Curtis may well call me up and use it on me). He would be notable if for no other reason than he may be the only producer in Hollywood effectively able to make a picture as frankly scary as The Night Stalker. The film was scripted by Richard Matheson, who has written for TV with better pace and more dramatic flair than anyone since Reginald Rose, perhaps. Curtis went on to make another picture with Matheson and William F. Nolan which fans still talk about-Trilogy of Terror, with Karen Black.

  The segment of this trio of stories most frequently mentioned was the final one, based on Matheson's short story "Prey." In it, Ms. Black gives a tour-de-force solo performance as a woman pursued by a tiny devil-doll with a spear. It is a bloody, gripping, scary fifteen minutes, and it perhaps most clearly sums up what I'm trying to say about Dan Curtis: he has an unerring, crude talent for finding the terror place inside you and squeezing it with a cold hand.

  The Night Stalker dealt with a pragmatic reporter named Carl Kolchak who works the Las Vegas beat. Played by Darren McGavin, his face somehow simultaneously tired, awed, cynical, and wiseacre beneath his battered straw fedora, Kolchak is a believable enough character, more Lew Archer than Clark Kent, dedicated above all else to making a buck in Casino City.

  He stumbles upon a string of murders that have apparently been committed by a vampire, and follows a series of leads deeper and deeper into the supernatural, engaging at the same time in a war of words with the Powers That Be in Vegas. In the end he tracks the vampire to the old house which has become its abode and drives a stake through its heart. The final twist is predictable but nonetheless satisfying: Kolchak is discredited and fired, cut loose from an establishment that has no room for vampires in either its philosophy or its public relations; he is able to dispatch the bloodsucker (Barry Atwater), but the final victor is Las Vegas boosterism.

  McGavin, a talented actor, has rarely been as good-as believable-as he was in The Night Stalker movie.* It is his very pragmatism that enables us to believe in the vampire; if a hardnose like Carl Kolchak can believe it, the film suggests convincingly, then it must be so.

  The success of The Night Stalker did not go unnoticed at ABC, which was perennially hit-hungry in those days before Mork, the Fonz, and all those other great characters made their way into the lineup. So a sequel, The Night Strangler, quickly followed. This time the murders were being committed by a doctor who had discovered the secret of eternal life-always provided he could slay five victims every five years or so to make up a new batch of elixir. In this one (set in Seattle), pathologists were covering up the fact that bits of decayed human flesh had been found on the necks of the strangulation victims-the doctor, you see, always began to get a little ripe as his five-year cycle neared its end.

  *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.

  Kolchak uncovered the cover-up and tracked the monster to its lair in Seattle's so-called "secret city," an underground section of old Seattle which Matheson visited on a vacation trip in 1970.* And, needless to say, Kolchak managed to dispatch the zombie medico.

  ABC decided it wanted to make a series out of Kolchak's continuing adventures, and such a series, predictably titled Kolchak: The Night Stalker, premiered on Friday, September 13th, 1974. The series limped through one season, and it was an abysmal flop. There were production problems from the beginning; Dan Curtis, who had been the guiding force behind the two successful TV-movies, had nothing to do with the series (no one I queried seems to really know why). Matheson, who had written the two original movies, never turned in a single script for the series. Paul Playden, the original producer, resigned his post before the series began its run and was replaced by Cy Chermak. Most of the directors were forgettable; special effects were done on a shoestring. One of my favorite effects, which at least comes close to the fur-covered VW in The Giant Spider Invasion, was on view in an episode entitled "The Spanish Moss Murders." In this one, Richard Kiel-who would become famous as jaws in the last two James Bond pictures-cavorted through a number of Chicago back alleys with a not-very-well-concealed zipper running up the back of his Swamp Monster suit.

  *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.

  But the basic problem with the Night Stalker series was the problem which dogs any nonanthology series dealing with the supernatural or the occult: a complete breakdown in the ability to suspend disbelief. We could believe Kolchak once, as he tracked the vampire down in Vegas; with some added effort we could even believe in him twice, tracking down the undead doc in Seattle. Once the series got going, it was harder. Kolchak goes out to cover the last cruise of a fine old luxury liner and discovers that one of his fellow passengers is a werewolf.

  He sets out to cover an up-and-coming politician's campaign for the Senate and discovers the candidate has sold his soul to the devil (and considering Watergate and Abscam, I hardly find this supernatural or unusual). Kolchak
also stumbles across a prehistoric reptile in Chicago's sewer system ("The Sentry"); a succubus ("Legacy of Terror") ; a coven of witches ("The Trevi Collection"); and in one of the most tasteless programs ever done for network TV, a headless motorcyclist ("Chopper" ) . Eventually, suspension of disbelief becomes utterly impossible- even, one suspects, for the production staff, which began to play poor Kolchak more and more for laughs. In a sense, what we saw in this series was a speeded-up version of the Universal Syndrome: from horror to humor. But it took the Universal Pictures monsters some eighteen years to get from one state to the other; it only took The Night Stalker twenty episodes.

  As Berthe Roeger points out, Kolchak: The Night Stalker enjoyed a brief and quite successful revival when the series was rerun as part of CBS's late-night program of oldies.

  Roeger's conclusion, however, that its success was due to any merit in the series itself seems off the mark to me. If the tune-in was large, I suspect it was for the same reason that the theater always fills up at midnight for Reefer Madness. I've mentioned the siren song of crap before, and here it is again. I suspect that people tuned in once, couldn't believe how bad this thing was, and kept tuning in on successive nights to make sure that their eyes had not deceived them.

  They hadn't; perhaps only Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the launching pad for that apostle of disaster, Irwin Allen, can compete with Kolchak for total collapse. Yet we should remember that not even Seabury Quinn, with his Jules de Grandin series in Weird Tales, was able to keep the continuing-character format rolling very successfully, and Quinn was one of the most talented writers of the pulp era. Kolchak: The Night Stalker (which became known during its run to some pundits as Kolchak's Monster of the Week) nonetheless holds a certain warm spot in my heart-a small warm spot, it is true-and in the hearts of a great many fans.

  There is something childlike and unsophisticated in its very awfulness.

  5

  "There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. It is the dimension of the imagination. It is an area we call . . . The Twilight Zone.” With this rather purple invocation-which did not sound purple at all in Rod Serling's measured and almost matter-of-fact delivery-viewers were invited to enter a queerly boundless other world . . . and enter they did. The Twilight Zone ran on CBS from October of 1959 through the summer of 1965-from the torpor of the Eisenhower administration to LBJ's escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, the first of the long hot summers in American cities, and the advent of the Beatles.

  Of all the dramatic programs which have ever run on American TV, it is the one which comes closest to defying any overall analysis. It was not a western or a cop show (although some of the stories had western formats or featured cops 'n' robbers); it was not really a science fiction show (although The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows categorizes it as such); not a sitcom (although some of the episodes were funny) ; not really occult (although it did occult stories frequently-in its own peculiar fashion), not really supernatural. It was its own thing, and in a large part that fact alone seems to account for the fact that a whole generation is able to associate the Serling program with the budding of the sixties . . . at least, as the sixties are remembered.

  Rod Serling, the program's creator, came to prominence in what has been referred to as television's "golden age"-although those who have termed it so because they remember fondly such anthology programs as Studio One, Playhouse 90, and Climax have somehow managed to forget such chestnuts as Mr. Arsenic, Hands of Mystery, Doorway to Danger, and Doodle Weaver-programs which ran during the same period, and which by comparison make such current TV programs as Vega$ and That's Incredible! look like great American theater. Television never really has had a golden age; only successive seasons of sounding brass which vary slightly as to the trueness of the tone.

  Nevertheless, television has produced isolated spasms of quality, and three of Serling's early teleplays-Patterns, The Comedian, and Requiem for a Heavyweight-form a large part of what television viewers mean when they speak of a "golden age" . . . although Serling was by no means alone. There were others, including Paddy Chayefsky (Marty) and Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men) who contributed to that illusion of gold.

  Serling was the son of a Binghamton, New York, butcher, a Golden Gloves champ (at approximately five feet four, Serling's class was flyweight), and a paratrooper during World War II. He began to write (unsuccessfully) in college and went on to write (unsuccessfully) for a radio station in Cincinnati. "That experience proved frustrating," Ed Naha relates in his fond reprise of Serling's career. "His introspective characters came under attack by . . . executives who wanted their `people to get their teeth into the soil'! Serling recalled the period years later: `What those guys wanted wasn't a writer, but a plow.' " *

  Serling quit radio and began to freelance. His first success came in 1955 (Patterns, starring Van Heflin and Everett Sloane, the story of a dirty corporate power play and the resulting moral squeeze on one executive-the teleplay won Serling his first Emmy), and he never looked back . . . but he somehow never really moved on, either. He wrote a number of feature films- Assault on a Queen was maybe the worst of them; Planet of the Apes and Seven Day in May were two of the good ones-but television was his home, and Serling never really outgrew it, as did Chayefsky (Hospital, Network). Television was his home, where he lived most comfortably, and after a five-year hiatus following the cancellation of The Twilight Zone, he turned up on the tube again, this time as the host of Night Gallery. Serling himself expressed feelings of doubt and depression about his deep involvement in this mediocre medium. "But God knows," he said in his last interview, "when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important." **

  Serling apparently saw The Twilight Zone as a way of going underground and keeping his ideals alive in television following the cancellation of the prestige drama programs in the late fifties and early sixties. And to an extent, I suppose he succeeded. Under the comforting guise of "it's only make-believe," The Twilight Zone was able to deal with questions of fascism ("He Lives," starring Dennis Hopper as a young neo-Nazi guided by the shadowy figure of Adolf Hitler), ugly mass hysteria ("The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"), and even Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness-rarely has any television program dared to present human nature in such an ugly, revealing light as that used in "The Shelter," in which a number of suburban neighbors along Your Street, U.S.A., are reduced to animals squabbling over a fallout shelter during a nuclear crisis.

  *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.

  **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' Yearbook.

  Other episodes generated a kind of existential weirdness that no other series has been able to match. There was, for instance, "Time Enough at Last," starring Burgess Meredith* as a myopic bank clerk who can never find time enough to read. He survives an H-bomb attack, in fact, because he is reading in the vault when the bombs fall. Meredith is delighted with the holocaust; he finally has all the time to read that a man could want. Unfortunately, he breaks his glasses shortly after reaching the library. One of the guiding moral precepts of The Twilight Zone seems to have been that a little irony is good for your blood.

  If The Twilight Zone had bowed on TV as we have found it in the period 1976-1980, it would have undoubtedly disappeared after an in
itial run of six to nine episodes. Its ratings were low to begin with . . . like in the cellar. It was up against a fairly popular Robert Taylor cops 'n’ robbers meller, The Detectives, on ABC, and the immensely popular Gillette Cavalcade of Sports on NBC-this was the show that invited you to put your feet up and watch such fighters as Carmen Basilio and Sugar Ray Robinson get their faces changed.

  But television moved more slowly in those days, and scheduling was less anarchistic. The Twilight Zone's first season consisted of thirty-six half-hour episodes, and by the season's midpoint the ratings had begun to pick up, helped by good word-of-mouth and glowing reviews.

  The reviews played their part by helping CBS decide that they had that potentially valuable commodity, a "prestige program." ** Nevertheless, problems continued. The program had problems finding a steady sponsor (this was back in the days, you must remember, when dinosaurs walked the earth and TV time was cheap enough to allow a single sponsor to pay for an entire program-hence GE Theater, Alcoa Playhouse, The Voice of Firestone, The Lux Show, Coke Time, and a host of others; to this writer's knowledge, the last program to be wholly sponsored by one company was Bonanza, sponsored by GM), and CBS began to wake up to the fact that Sterling had put none of his cudgels away but was now wielding them in the name of fantasy.