by Стивен Кинг
But there is a third level-that of revulsion. This seems to be where the "chest-burster" from Alien fits.
Better, let's take another example from the E.C. file as an example of the Revolting Story-Jack Davis's "Foul Play" from The Crypt of Terror will serve nicely, I think. And if you're sitting in your living room right now, putting away some chips and dip or maybe some sliced pepperoni on crackers as you read this, maybe you'd just better put the munchies away for awhile, because this one makes the chest-burster from Alien look like a scene from The Sound of Music, You'll note that the story lacks any real logic, motivation, or character development, but, as in the tale of The Hook, the story itself is little more than the means to an end, a way of getting to those last three panels.
"Foul Play" is the story of Herbie Satten, pitcher for Bayville's minor league baseball team. Herbie is the apotheosis of the E.C. villain. He's a totally black character, with absolutely no redeeming qualities, the Compleat Monster. He's murderous, conceited, egocentric, willing to go to any lengths to win. He brings out the Mob Man or Mob Woman in each of us; we would gladly see Herbie lynched from the nearest apple tree, and never mind the Civil Liberties Union.
With his team leading by a single run in the top of the ninth, Herbie gets first base by deliberately allowing himself to be hit by an inside pitch. Although he is big and lumbering, he takes off for second on the very next pitch. Covering second in Central City's saintly slugger, Jerry Deegan. Deegan, we are told, is "sure to win the game for the home team in the bottom of the ninth." The evil Herbie Satten slides into second with his spikes up, but saintly Jerry hangs in there and tags Satten out.
Jerry is spiked, but his wounds are minor . . . or so they appear. In fact, Herbie has painted his spikes with a deadly, fast-acting poison. In Central City's half of the ninth, Jerry comes to the plate with two out and a man in scoring position. It looks pretty good for the home team guys; unfortunately, Jerry drops dead at home plate even as the umpire calls strike three. Exit the malefic Herbie Satten, smirking.
The Central City team doctor discovers that Jerry has been poisoned. One of the Central City players says grimly: "This is a job for the police!" Another responds ominously, "No! Wait! Let's take care of him ourselves . . . our way.” The team sends Herbie a letter, inviting him to the ballpark one night to be presented with a plaque honoring his achievements in baseball. Herbie, apparently as stupid as he is evil, falls for it, and in the next scene we see the Central City nine on the field. The team doctor is tricked out in umpire's regalia. He is whisking off home plate . . . which happens to be a human heart. The base paths are intestines. The bases are chunks of the unfortunate Herbie Satten's body. In the penultimate panel we see that the batter is standing in the box and that instead of a Louisville Slugger he is swinging one of Herbie's severed legs. The pitcher is holding a grotesquely mangled human head and preparing to throw it. The head, from which one eyeball dangles on its stalk, looks as though it's already been hit over the fence for a couple of home runs, although as Davis has drawn it ( "Jolly Jack Davis," as the fans of the day called him; he now sometimes does covers for TV Guide), one would not expect it to carry so far. It is, in the parlance of baseball players, "a dead ball.” The Old Witch followed this helping of mayhem with her own conclusions, beginning with the immortal E. C. Chuckle: "Heh, heh! So that's my yelp-yarn for this issue, kiddies. Herbie, the pitcher, went to pieces that night and was taken out . . . of existence, that is . . . “ As you can see, both "The Monkey's Paw" and "Foul Play" are horror stories, but their mode of attack and their ultimate effect are light-years apart. You may also have an idea of why the comic publishers of America cleaned their own house in the early fifties . . . before the U.S. Senate decided to do it for them.
So: terror on top, horror below it, and lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion. My own philosophy as a sometime writer of horror fiction is to recognize these distinctions because they are sometimes useful, but to avoid any preference for one over the other on the grounds that one effect is somehow better than another. The problem with definitions is that they have a way of turning into critical tools-and this sort of criticism, which I would call criticism-by-rote, seems to me needlessly restricting and even dangerous. I recognize terror as the finest emotion (used to almost quintessential effect in Robert Wises film The Haunting, where, as in "The Monkey's Paw," we are never allowed to see what is behind the door), and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
When I conceived of the vampire novel which became 'Salem's Lot, I decided I Ranted to try to use the book partially as a form of literary homage (as Peter Straub has done in Ghost Story, working in the tradition of such "classical" ghost story writers as Henry James, M. R. James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne). So my novel bears an intentional similarity to Bram Stoker's Dracula, and after awhile it began to seem to me what I was doing was playing an interesting-to me, at least-game of literary racquet-ball: 'Salem's Lot itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watching to see how and where it would bounce, so I could hit it again. As a matter of fact, it took some pretty interesting bounces, and I ascribe this mostly to the fact that, while my ball existed in the twentieth century, my wall was very much a product of the nineteenth. At the same time, because the vampire story was so much a staple of the E.C. comics I grew up with, I decided that I would also try to bring in that aspect of the horror story. *
*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.
Some of the scenes from 'Salem's Lot which run parallel to scenes from Dracula are the staking of Susan Norton (corresponding to the staking of Lucy Westenra in Stoker's book), the drinking of the vampire's blood by the priest, Father Callahan (in Dracula it is Mina Murray Harker who is forced to take the Count's perverse communion as he croons those memorable, chilling lines, "My bountiful wine-press for a little while . . ." ), the burning of Callahan's hand as he tries to enter his church to receive absolution (when, in Dracula, Van Helsing touches Mina's forehead with a piece of the Host to cleanse her of the Count's unclean touch, it flashes into fire, leaving a terrible scar), and, of course, the band of Fearless Vampire Hunters which forms in each book.
The scenes from Dracula which I chose to retool for my own book were the ones which impressed me the most deeply, the ones Stoker seemed to have written at fever pitch. There are others, but the one "bounce" that never made it into the finished book was a play on Stoker's use of rats in Dracula.
In Stoker's novel, the Fearless Vampire Hunters-Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, Lord Godalming, and Quincey Morris-enter the basement of Carfax, the Count's English house. The Count himself has long since split the scene, but he has left some of his traveling coffins (boxes full of his native earth), and another nasty surprise. Very shortly after the F.V.H.s enter, the basement is crawling with rats. According to the lore (and in his long novel, Stoker martials a formidable amount of vampire lore), a vampire has the ability to command the lesser animals-cats, rats, weasels ( and possibly Republicans, ha-ha). It is Dracula who has sent these rats to give our heroes a hard time.
Lord Godalming is ready for this, however. He lets a couple of terriers out of a bag, and they make short work of the Count's rats. I decided I would let Barlow-my version of Count Dracula-also use the rats, and to that end I gave the town of Jerusalem's Lot an open dump, where there are lots of rats. I played on the presence of the rats th
ere several times in the first couple of hundred pages of the novel, and to this day I sometimes get letters asking if I just forgot about the rats, or tried to use them to create atmosphere, or what.
Actually, I used them to create a scene so revolting that my editor at Doubleday (the same Bill Thompson mentioned in the forenote to this volume) suggested strongly that I remove it and substitute something else. After some grousing, I complied with his wishes. In the Doubleday/New American Library editions of 'Salem's Lot, Jimmy Cody, a local doctor, and Mark Petrie, the boy accompanying him, discover that the king vampire-to use Van Helsing's pungent term-is almost certainly denning in the basement of a local boarding house. Jimmy begins to go downstairs, but the stairs have been cut away and the floor beneath littered with knives pounded through boards. Jimmy Cody dies impaled upon these knives in a scene of what I would call "horror"-as opposed to "terror” or "revulsion," the scene is a middle-of-the-roader.
In the first draft manuscript, however, I had Jimmy go down the stairs and discover-too late-that Barlow had called all the rats from the dump to the cellar of Eva Miller's boarding house. There was a regular HoJo for rats down there, and Jimmy Cody became the main course. They attack Jimmy in their hundreds, and we are treated (if that is the word) to a picture of the good doctor struggling back up the stairs, covered with rats. They are down his shirt, crawling in his hair, biting his neck and arms.
When he opens his mouth to yell Mark a warning, one of them runs into his mouth and lodges there, squirming.
I was delighted with the scene as written because it gave me a chance to combine Dracula-lore and E.C.-lore into one. My editor felt that it was, to put it frankly, out to lunch, and I was eventually persuaded to see it his way. Perhaps he was even right*.
*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 selfplagiarism. 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.
I've tried here to delineate some of the differences between science fiction and horror, science fiction and fantasy, terror and horror, horror and revulsion, more by example than by definition. All of which is very well, but perhaps we ought to examine the emotion of horror a little more closely-not in terms of definition but in terms of effect. What does horror do? Why do people want to be horrified . . . why do they pay to be horrified? Why an Exorcist? A Jaws? An Alien?
But before we talk about why people crave the effect, maybe we ought to spend a little time thinking about components-and if we do not choose to define horror itself, we can at least examine the elements and perhaps draw some conclusions from them.
2
Horror movies and horror novels have always been popular, but every ten or twenty years they seem to enjoy a cycle of increased popularity and visibility. These periods almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic and/or political strain, and the books and films seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties (for want of a better term) which accompany such serious but not mortal dislocations. They have done less well in periods when the American people have been faced with outright examples of horror in their own lives.
Horror went through a boom period in the 1930s, When people hardpressed by the Depression weren't ponying up at the box office to see a hundred Busby Berkeley girls dancing to the tune of "We're in the Money," they were perhaps releasing their anxieties in another way-by watching Boris Karloff shamble across the moors in Frankenstein or Bela Lugosi creep through the dark with his cape up over his mouth in Dracula. The '30s also marked the rise of the so-called "Shudder Pulps," which encompassed everything from Weird Tales to Black Mark.
We find few horror movies or novels of note in the 1940s, and the one great magazine of fantasy which debuted in that decade, Unknown, did not survive for long. The great Universal Studios monsters of the Depression days-Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Count-were dying in that particularly messy and embarrassing way that the movies seem to reserve for the terminally ill; instead of being retired with honors and decently interred in the mouldy soil of their European churchyards, Hollywood decided to play them for laughs, squeezing every last quarter and dime admission possible out of the poor old things before letting them go. Hence, Abbott &
Costello met the monsters, as did the Bowery Boys, not to mention those lovable eyeboinkers and head-knockers, the Three Stooges. In the '40s, the monsters themselves became stooges. Years later, in another postwar period, Mel Brooks would give us his version of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein-starring Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman instead of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.
The eclipse of horror in fiction that began in 1940 lasted for twenty-five years. Oh, an occasional novel such as Richard Matheson's Shrinking Man or William Sloane's Edge of Running Water would pop up, reminding us that the genre was still there (although even Matheson's grim man-against-giant-spider tale, a horror story if there ever was one, was touted as science fiction), but the idea of a best-selling horror novel would have been laughed out of court along Publisher's Row.
As with the movies, the golden age of weird fiction had passed in the '30s, when Weird Tales was at the peak of its influence and quality ( not to mention its circulation), publishing the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, the young Robert Block, Dr. David H. Keller, and, of course, the twentieth-century horror story's dark and baroque prince, H. P. Lovecraft. I will not offend those who have followed weird fiction over a span of fifty years by suggesting that horror disappeared in the 1940s; indeed it did not. Arkham House had then been founded by the late August Derleth, and Arkham published what I regard as its most important works in the period 1939-1950-works including Lovecraft's The Outrider and Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Henry S. Whitehead's Jumbee, The Opener of the Way and Pleasant Dreams, by Robert Bloch . . . and Ray Bradbury's Dark Carnival, a marvelous and terrifying collection of a darker world just beyond the threshold of this one.
But Lovecraft was dead before Pearl Harbor; Bradbury would turn his hand more and more often to his own lyric blend of science fiction and fantasy (and it was only after he did so that his work began to be accepted by such mainstream magazines as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post) ; Robert Bloch had begun to write his suspense stories, using what he had learned in his first two decades as a writer to create a powerful series of offbeat novels, which are only surpassed by the novels of Cornell Woolrich.
During and after the war years, horror fiction was in decline. The age did not like it. It was a period of rapid scientific development and rationalism-they grow very well in a war atmosphere, thanks- and it became a period which is now thought of by fans and writers alike as "the golden age of science fiction." While Weird Tales plugged grimly along, holding its own but hardly reaping millions (it would fold in the mid-fifties after a down-sizing from its original gaudy pulp size to a digest form failed to effect a cure for its ailing circulation), the sf market boomed, spawning a dozen well-remembered pulps and making names such as Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell, and del Rey, if not household words, at least familiar and exciting to an ever-growing community of fans dedicated to the proposition of the rocket ship, the space station, and the ever-popular death ray.
So horror languished in the dungeon until 1955 or so, rattling its chains once in a while but causing no great stir. It was around that time that two men named Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson stumbled downstairs and discovered a money machine rusting away unn
oticed in that particular dungeon. Originally film distributors, Arkoff and Nicholson decided that, since there was an acute shortage of B-pictures in the early fifties, they would make their own.
Insiders predicted speedy economic ruin for the entrepreneurs. They were told they were setting to sea in a lead sailboat; this was the age of TV. The insiders had seen the future and it belonged to Dagmar and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. The consensus among those who cared at all ( and there weren't many) was that Arkoff and Nichols-on would lose their shirts very quickly.
But during the twenty-five years that the company they formed, American-International Pictures, has been around (it's now Arkoff alone; James Nicholson died several years ago), it has been the only major American film company to show a consistent profit, year in and year out. AIP has made a great variety of films, but all of them have taken dead aim on the youth market; the company's pictures include such dubious classics as Boxcar Bertha, Bloody Mama, Dragstrip Girl, The Trip, Dillinger, and the immortal Beach Blanket Bingo. But their greatest success was with horror films.
What elements made these AIP films shlock classics? They were simple, shot in a hurry, and so amateurish that one can sometimes see the shadow of a boom mike in the shot or catch the gleam of an air tank inside the monster suit of an underwater creature ( as in The Attack o f the Giant Leeches). Arkoff himself recalls that they rarely began with a completed script or even a coherent screen treatment; often money was committed to projects on the basis of a title that sounded commercial, such as Terror from the Year 5000 or The Brain Eaters, something that would make an eye-catching poster.