Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Probably more of a summer coolerthan a tall glass of iced tea . . . if you can get rid of that visual set for forty minutes or so.



CHAPTER VI

The Modern American Horror Movie -Text and ,Subtext

RIGHT NOW you could be thinking to yourself: this guy must have one hell of a nerve if he thinks he's gonna cover all the horror movies released between 1950 and 1980-everything from The Exorcist to the less-than-immortal The Navy vs. the Night Monsters -in a single chapter.

Well, actually it's going to be two chapters, and no, I don't expect to be able to cover them all, as much as I would like to; but yes, I must have some kind of nerve to be tackling the subject at all. Luckily for me, there are several fairly traditional ways of handling the subject so that at least an illusion of order and coherence emerges. The path I've chosen is that of the horror movie as text and subtext.

The place to start, I think, would be with a swift recap of those points already made on the subject of the horror movie as art. If we say "art" is any piece of creative work from which an audience receives more than it gives (a liberal definition of art, sure, but in this field it doesn't pay to be too picky), then I believe that the artistic value the horror movie most frequently offers is its ability to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and our real fears. I've said and will reemphasize here that few horror movies are conceived with "art" in mind; most are conceived only with "profit" in mind. The art is not consciously created but rather thrown off, as an atomic pile throws off radiation.

I do not contend by saying the above that every exploitation horror flick is "art," however.

You could walk down Forty-second Street in Times Square on any given afternoon or evening and discover films with names like The Bloody Mutilators , The Female Butcher , or The Ghastly Ones -a 1972 film we are treated to the charming sight of a woman being cut open with a two-handed bucksaw; the camera lingers as her intestines spew out onto the floor. These are squalid little films with no whiff of art in them, and only the most decadent filmgoer would try to argue otherwise. They are the staged equivalent of those 8- and 16- millimeter "snuff" movies which have reputedly oozed out of South America from time to time.

Another point worth mentioning is the great risk a filmmaker takes when he/she decides to make a horror picture.