JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 115 из 359In other creative fields, the only risk is failure-we can say, for instance, that the Mike Nichols film of The Day of the Dolphin "fails," but there is no public outcry, no mothers picketing themovie theaters. But when a horror movie fails, it often fails into painful absurdity or squalid porno-violence.
There are films which skate right up to the border where "art" ceases to exist in any form and exploitation begins, and these films are often the field's most striking successes. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of these; in the hands of Tobe Hooper, the film satisfies that definition of art which I have offered, and I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country. I would not do so for The Ghastly Ones . The difference is more than the difference between a chainsaw and a bucksaw; the difference is something like seventy million light-years. Hooper works in Chainsaw Massacre , in his own queerly apt way, with taste and conscience. The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras. *
So, if I'm going to keep this discussion in order, I'll keep coming back to the concept of value-of art, of social merit. If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unreal-to provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these subtexts are often culture-wide.
In many cases-particularly in the fifties and then again in the early seventies-the fears expressed are sociopolitical in nature, a fact that gives such disparate pictures as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and William Friedkin's The Exorcist a crazily convincing documentary feel. When the horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hats-the B-picture as tabloid editorial-they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things which trouble the night-thoughts of a whole society.
*One success in skating over this thin ice does not necessarily guarantee that the filmmaker will be able to repeat such a success; while his innate talent saves Hooper's second film, Eaten Alive , from descending to The Bloody Mutilators category, it is still a disappointment. The only director I can think of who has explored this gray land between art and porno-exhibitionism successfully-even brilliantly-again and again with never a misstep is the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg.
But horror movies don't always wear a hat which identifies them as disguised comments on the social or political scene (as Cronenberg's The Brood comments on the disintegration of the generational family or as his They Came from Within treats of the more cannibalistic sideeffects of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck").
There are films which skate right up to the border where "art" ceases to exist in any form and exploitation begins, and these films are often the field's most striking successes. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of these; in the hands of Tobe Hooper, the film satisfies that definition of art which I have offered, and I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country. I would not do so for The Ghastly Ones . The difference is more than the difference between a chainsaw and a bucksaw; the difference is something like seventy million light-years. Hooper works in Chainsaw Massacre , in his own queerly apt way, with taste and conscience. The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras. *
So, if I'm going to keep this discussion in order, I'll keep coming back to the concept of value-of art, of social merit. If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unreal-to provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these subtexts are often culture-wide.
In many cases-particularly in the fifties and then again in the early seventies-the fears expressed are sociopolitical in nature, a fact that gives such disparate pictures as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and William Friedkin's The Exorcist a crazily convincing documentary feel. When the horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hats-the B-picture as tabloid editorial-they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things which trouble the night-thoughts of a whole society.
*One success in skating over this thin ice does not necessarily guarantee that the filmmaker will be able to repeat such a success; while his innate talent saves Hooper's second film, Eaten Alive , from descending to The Bloody Mutilators category, it is still a disappointment. The only director I can think of who has explored this gray land between art and porno-exhibitionism successfully-even brilliantly-again and again with never a misstep is the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg.
But horror movies don't always wear a hat which identifies them as disguised comments on the social or political scene (as Cronenberg's The Brood comments on the disintegration of the generational family or as his They Came from Within treats of the more cannibalistic sideeffects of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck").