Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

4

There are any number of places where we could begin our discussionof "real" fears, but just for the fun of it, let's begin with something fairly off the wall: the horror movie as economic nightmare.

Fiction is full of economic horror stories, although very few of them are supernatural; The Crash of '79 comes to mind, as well as The Money Wolves, The Big Company Look , and the wonderful Frank Norris novel, McTeague . I only want to discuss one movie in this context, The Amityville Horror . There may be others, but this one example will serve, I think, to illustrate another idea: that the horror genre is extremely limber, extremely adaptable, extremely useful ; the author or filmmaker can use it as a crowbar to lever open locked doors or as a small, slim pick to tease the tumblers into giving. The genre can thus be used to open almost any lock on the fears which lie behind the door, and The Amityville Horror is a dollars-and-cents case in point.

There may be someone in some backwater of America who doesn't know that this film, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder, is supposedly based on a true story (set down in a book of the same name by the late Jay Anson). I say "supposedly" because there have been several cries of "hoax!" in the news media since the book was published, and these cries have been renewed since the movie was released-and almost unanimously panned by the critics.

Despite the critics, The Amityville Horror went serenely on to become one of 1979's top-grossing movies.

If it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon not go into the story's validity or nonvalidity here, although I hold definite views on the subject. Within the context of our discussion, whether the Lutzes' house was really haunted or whether the whole thing was a put-up job matters very little. All movies, after all, are pure fiction, even the true ones. The fine film version of Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field begins with a title card which reads simply This is a True Story , but it's not; the very medium fictionalizes, and there is no way to stop this from happening. We know that a police officer named Ian Campbell really was killed in that onion field, and we know that his partner, Karl Hettinger, escaped; if we have doubts, let us look it up in the library and stare at the cold print there on the screen of the microfilm reader. Let us look at the police photographs of Campbell's body; let us talk to the witnesses. And yet we know there were no cameras there, grinding away, when those two small-time hoods blew Ian Campbell away, nor was there a camera present when Hettinger began hooking things from department stores and removing them from the premises via armpit express.