Danse Macabre

by Стивен Кинг

  Once you've seen the film industry's workings from the inside, you realize that it is a creative nightmare. It becomes difficult to understand how anything of quality-an Alien, a Place in the Sun, a Breaking Away-can be made. As in the Army, the first rule of studio filmmaking is CYA: Cover Your Ass. On any critical decision, it is well to consult at least half a dozen people, so that someone else's butt will go up in that fabled sling if the film drops dead and twenty million dollars goes swirling down the toilet. And if your butt must go up, it then becomes possible to make sure it doesn't go up alone.

  There are, of course, filmmakers who either don't know this kind of fear or whose particular visions are so clear and fierce that such fear of failure never becomes a factor in the equation.

  Brian De Palma comes to mind, and Francis Coppola (who teetered on the edge of being fired from The Godfather shoot for months, and yet persisted in his own particular vision of the film), Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Steven Spielberg. * This factor of vision is so real and apparent that even when a director such as Stanley Kubrick makes such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as The Shining, it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable; it is simply there.

  The real danger inherent in studio films is mediocrity. A clinker like Myra Breckinridge has its own horrid fascination-it is like watching slow-motion footage of a head-on collision between a Cadillac and a Lincoln Continental. But what are we to make of films like Nightwing, Capricorn One, Players, or The Cassandra Crossing? These are not bad films-not the way that Robot Monster or Teenage Monster are bad, certainly-but they are mediocre. They're blah. You leave the theater after one of these films with no taste in your mouth but the popcorn you ate. They are films where, halfway through the second reel, you begin wishing for a cigarette.

  As the cost of production balloons up and up, the risks of going for all of it become greater and greater, and even a Roger Maris looked pretty stupid when he was badly fooled, totally overswung the ball, and fell on his ass. The same obtains in films, and I would predict-with some hesitation, because the film industry is such a crazy place-that we will never again see such a colossal risk as the one Coppola took with Apocalypse Now or the one Cimino was allowed to take with Heaven's Gate. If anyone tries, that dry, dusty snapping sound you'll hear coming from the West Coast will be the accountants of every major studio out there snapping the corporate checkbooks closed.

  But the indies . . . what about the indies? There is less to lose here, certainly; in fact Chris Steinbrunner, an amusing guy and an astute follower of the films, likes to call many of these flicks "backyard movies." By his definition, The Horror of Party Beach was a backyard film; so were The Flesh Eaters and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (Night of the Living Dead, which was made by an existing film company with access to TV studio facilities in Pittsburgh, doesn't qualify as "backyard.") It's a good term for those films made by amateurs, gifted or otherwise, on a shoestring budget with no major distribution guaranteed-these films are the much more expensive equivalent of the unsolicited manuscript. These are guys who are shooting with nothing to lose, shooting for the moon. And yet most of these films are just awful.

  *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.

  Why?

  Exploitation, that's why.

  It was exploitation that caused Lugosi to put finish to his career by creeping around a suburban tract development in his Dracula cape; it was exploitation that prompted the making of Invasion of the Star Creatures and Don't Look in the Basement (and believe me, I didn't have to keep telling myself it was only a movie; I knew what it was-in a word, wretched). After sex, low-budget moviemakers are attracted to horror because it seems to be a genre which is easily exploited-an easy lay, like the sort of girl every guy wanted to date (at least once) in high school. Even good horror can sometimes have a tawdry carnival freak-show feel . . . but it's a feel that can be deceptive.

  And if it is courtesy of the indies that we have seen the greatest failures (the Ro-Man's war-surplus shortwave/ bubble machine), then it is also courtesy of them that we have seen some of the most unlikely triumphs. The Horror of Party Beach and Night of the Living Dead were made on similar budgets; the difference is George Romero and his vision of what the horror movie is and what the horror movie is supposed to do. In the former we have the monsters attacking a slumber party in a scene which becomes hilarious; in the latter we have an old woman peering nearsightedly at a bug on a tree and then munching it up. You hear your mouth trying to laugh and scream at the same time, and that is Romero's remarkable achievement.

  Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory and Dementia-13 were made on similar nothing budgets; here the difference is Francis Coppola, who created an almost unbearable atmosphere of mounting menace in the latter, a black-and-white, rapidly shot suspense movie (which was made on location in Ireland, for tax purposes).

  It is, perhaps, too easy to become enamoured of bad films as "camp"; the great success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show may point to nothing so much as the degeneration of the average moviegoer's critical capacity. It might be well to go back to the basics and remember that the difference between bad movies and good (or between bad art-or nonart-and good or great art) is talent, and the inventive utilization of that talent. The worst movie sends its own message, which is simply to stay away from other movies done by these people; if you have seen one film by Wes Craven, for instance, it is safe enough, I think, to skip the others. The genre labors under enough critical disapproval and outright dislike; one need not make a bad situation worse by underwriting films of porno-violence and those which want to plunder our pocketbooks and no more. And there is no need to do it, because even in the movies there is no real pricetag on quality . . . not when Brian De Palma found it possible to make a fine, scary film like Sisters for something like $800,000.

  The reason for seeing bad movies, I suppose, is that you don't know it's going to be bad until you've seen it for yourself-as previously pointed out, most movie critics cannot be trusted here. Pauline Kael writes well, and Gene Shalit demonstrates a certain rather tiresome surface wit, but when these two-and other critics-go to see a horror movie, they don't know what they are seeing.* The true fan does; he or she has developed his or her basis for comparison over a long and sometimes painful span of time. The real movie freak is as much an appreciator as the regular visitor to art galleries or museums, and this basis for comparison is the bedrock upon whatever theses or point (s) of view he or she may develop must stand. For the horror fan, films such as Exorcist II form the setting for the occasional bright gemstone that is discovered in the darkness of a sleazy second-run moviehouse: Kirby McCauley's Rituals or my own low-budget favorite, Tourist Trap.

  You don't appreciate cream unless you've drunk a lot of milk, and maybe you don't even appreciate milk unless you've drunk some that's gone sour. Bad films may sometimes be amusing, sometimes even successful, but their only real usefulness is to form that basis of comparison: to define positive values in terms of their own negative charm. They show us what to look for because it is missing in themselves. After that has been determined, it becomes, I think, actively dangerous to hold on to these bad films . . . and they must be discarded. **

  *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.

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

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Glass Teat, or, This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers

  ALL THOSE OF YOU out there among the great unwashed who ever believed that TV sucks were dead wrong, you see; as Harlan Ellison point
ed out in his sometimes amusing, sometimes scathing essays on television, TV does not suck; it is sucked. Ellison called his two-volume diatribe on the subject The Glass Teat, and if you've not read it, be aware that it comes recommended as a kind of compass with this particular stretch of the territory. I read the book with amazed absorption three years ago, the fact that Ellison had devoted valuable time and space to such forgettable series of yesteryear as Alias Smith and Jones barely obtruding on a total volcanic effect that made me suspect I was experiencing something roughly similar to a six-hour rant delivered by Fidel Castro. Always assuming that Fidel was really on that day.

  Ellison circles back and back to television in his work, like a man held in thrall by a snake he knows to be ultimately deadly. For no apparent reason, the longish introduction to Strange Wine (a book we'll discuss at some length next chapter), Ellison's 1978 collection of short stories, is a diatribe on TV titled "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself.” When you strip Ellison's TV-rap to its core, it is simple enough and not blazingly original (for blazing originality, you have to read how he says it) : TV is a spoiler, Ellison says. It spoils story; it spoils those who make the stories; eventually it spoils those who watch the stories; the milk from this particular teat is poisoned. This is a thesis I would agree with completely, but let me point out two facts.

  Harlan has a TV. A big one.

  I have a TV which is even bigger than Harlan's. It is, in fact, a Panasonic CinemaVision which dominates one whole corner of my living room.

  Mea culpa, all right.

  I can rationalize Harlan's TV and my own monster, although I cannot completely excuse either of us-and I should add that Ellison is a bachelor, and he can watch the thing twenty hours a day if he wants and hurt nobody but himself. I, on the other hand, have three young children in the house-ten, eight, and four-who are exposed to this gadget; to its possible radiation, its untrue colors, and its magic window on a vulgar, tawdry world where cameras ogle the butts of Playboy bunnies and linger over endless visions of an upper-upper-upper-middle-class materialism that, for most Americans, has never existed and never will. Mass starvation is a way of life in Biafra; in Cambodia, dying children are shitting out their own collapsed intestines; in the Middle East a kind of messianic madness is in danger of swallowing up all rationality; and here at home we sit mesmerized by Richard Dawson on Family Feud and watch Buddy Ebsen as Barnaby Jones. I think my own three kids have a better fix on the reality of Gilligan, the Skipper, and Mr. Howell than they do on the reality of what happened at Three Mile Island in March of 1979. In fact, I know they do.

  Horror has not fared particularly well on TV, if you except something like the six o'clock news, where footage of black GIs with their legs blown off, villages and kids on fire, bodies in trenches, and whole swatches of jungle being coated with good old Agent Orange sent kids into the streets, where they would march and light candles and say dopey, talismanic "in” things to each other until we withdrew, the North Vietnamese took over, and more starvation on mass levels resulted-not to mention opening the way for such really upstanding, humanitarian personages as Cambodia's Pol Pot. The whole sour stew sure wasn't much like a TV show, was it? Just ask yourself if any chain of events so ridiculous could ever have happened on Hawaii Five-O. The answer is of course not. If Steve McGarrett had been President from 1968 to 1976, the whole abortion could have been avoided. Steve, Danny, and Chin Ho would have cleared the mess up.

  The sort of horrors we have been discussing in this book labor under the very fact of their unreality (a fact which Harlan Ellison himself recognizes well; he refuses to allow the word fantasy to be printed on book covers as a descriptive term for the stories inside). We have treated the question "Why do you want to write horror stories in a world that is so full of real horrors?"; I am now suggesting that the reason horror has done so poorly, by and large, on TV, is a statement which is closely related to that question, to wit: "It is very difficult to write a successful horror story in a world which is so full of real horrors." A ghost in the turret room of a Scottish castle just cannot compete with thousand-megaton warheads, CBW bugs, or nuclear power plants that have apparently been put together from Aurora model kits by ten-year-olds with poor eye-hand coordination. Even Old Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre pales beside those dead sheep in Utah, killed by one of Our Finer Nerve Gases. If the wind had been blowing the other way when that happened, Salt Lake City might have gotten a really good dose of what killed the sheep. And, my good friends, someday the wind is not going to be blowing the right way. You may count on it; tell your Congressman I said so. Sooner or later the wind always changes.

  Well, horror can be done. That emotion can still be triggered by people who are dedicated to doing it, and there's something optimistic in the fact that people can still, in spite of all the world's real horrors, be brought to the point of the scream by something that is patently impossible. It can be done by the writer or the director . . . if their hands are untied.

  For the writer, the most galling thing about TV must be that he or she is forbidden from bringing all of his or her powers to bear; the predicament of the TV writer is strikingly similar to the predicament of the human race as envisioned in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," where bright people are fitted with electro-shock caps to disrupt their thinking periodically, agile people are fitted with weights, and people with great artistic talent are forced to wear heavy, distorting glasses to destroy their clearer perception of the world around them.

  As a result, a perfect state of equality has been achieved . . . but at what a price.

  The ideal writer for the TV medium is a fella or a gal with a smidgen of talent, a lot of gall, and the soul of a drone. In Hollywood's current and exquisitely vulgar parlance, he or she must "give good meeting." Let any of these qualifications be tampered with, and the writer is apt to start feeling like poor old Harrison Bergeron. It has made Ellison, who wrote for Star Trek, The Outer Limits, and The Young Lawyers, to name just a few, a little bit crazy, I think. But if he weren't, it would be impossible to respect him. His craziness is a kind of Purple Heart, like Joseph (Police Story) Wambaugh's ulcers. There is no reason why a writer cannot make a living doing TV on a constant week-in-week-out basis; all that writer really needs is a low Alpha-wave pattern and a perception of writing as the mental equivalent of bucking crates of soda up onto a Coca-Cola truck.

  Part of this is the result of federal regulation and part of it is proof of the maxim which states that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. TV is in almost every American home, and the financial stakes are enormous. As a result, television has become more and more cautious over the years. It has become like a fat old spayed tomcat dedicated to the preservation of the status quo and to the concept of LOP-Least Objectionable Programming.

  Television is, in fact, like that fat, wimpy kid who most of us can remember from our childhood neighborhoods, the big, slack kid who would cry if you gave him two-for-flinching, the kid who always looked guilty when the teacher asked who put the mouse in her drawer, the kid who was always picked on because he was always afraid of being picked on.

  Now the simple fact of horror fiction in whatever medium you choose . . . the bedrock of horror fiction, we might say, is simply this: you gotta scare the audience. Sooner or later you gotta put on the gruesome mask and go booga-booga. I can remember an official in the fledgling New York Mets organization worrying about the improbable crowds that gang of happy-go-lucky schmucks was drawing. "Sooner or later we're going to have to sell these people some steak along with the sizzle," was how this fellow expressed it. The same is true with horror. The reader will not feed forever on innuendo and vapors; sooner or later even the great H. P. Lovecraft had to produce whatever was lurking in the crypt or in the steeple.

  Most of the great film directors in the field have chosen to get the horror up front; to cram a large block of it down the viewer's throat unti
l he almost chokes on it and then lead the viewer on, teasing him, drawing every cent of the psychological interest due on that original scare.

  The primer that every would-be horror director studies in this matter is, of course, the definitive horror film of the period we're discussing-Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Here is a movie where blood was kept to a minimum and terror was kept to a maximum. In the famous shower scene we see Janet Leigh; we see the knife; but we never see the knife in Janet Leigh.

  You may think you saw it, but you did not. Your imagination saw it, and that is Hitchcock's great triumph. All the blood we see in the shower is swirling down the drain. *

  Psycho has never been shown during prime time as a network movie, but once that forty-five seconds in the shower has been removed, the film could almost be a made-for-TV movie (in content, anyway; in terms of style, it is light-years from the run-of-the-tube TV flick).

  In effect, what Hitchcock does is serve us a big raw steak of terror not even a quarter of the way through his film. The rest, even the climax, is really only sizzle. And without that forty-five seconds, the film becomes nearly humdrum. In spite of its reputation, Psycho is an admirably restrained horror movie; Hitchcock even elected to shoot in black and white so that the blood in the shower scene would not look like blood at all, and one oft-told tale-almost surely apocryphal-is that Hitch toyed with shooting the movie in color-except for the shower scene, which would be in black and white.

  *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.

  As we enter upon our discussion of horror on television, always keep this fact somewhere near to hand: television has really asked the impossible of its handful of horror programs-to terrify without really terrifying, to horrify without really horrifying, to sell audiences a lot of sizzle and no steak.