Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Stripped of its distractingelements (a puking nun, Rod Steiger shamelessly overacting as a priest who is just discovering the devil after forty years or so as a man of the cloth, and Margot Kidder-not too tacky!-doing calisthenics in a pair of bikini panties and one white stocking), The Amityville Horror is a perfect example of the Tale to be Told around the Campfire. All the teller really has to do is to keep the catalogue of inexplicable events in their correct order, so that unease escalates into outright fear. If this is done, the story will do its work . . . just as the bread will rise if the yeast is added at the right moment to ingredients which are at the correct temperature.

I don't think I realized how well the film was working on this level until I saw it for the second time at a small theater in western Maine. There was little laughter during the film, no hooting ... and not much screaming, either. The audience did not seem to be just watching this film; it seemed to be studying it. The audience simply sat there in a kind of absorbed silence, taking it all in. When the lights went on at the end of the film, I saw that the audience was a much older one than I am accustomed to see at horror films; I'd put the average age between thirtyeight and forty-two. And there was a light on their faces-an excitement, a glow. Leaving, they discussed the film animatedly with one another. It was this reaction-which seemed to me markedly peculiar in terms of what the film had to offer-that started me thinking that a reevaluation of the film was in order.

Two things apply here: first, The Amityville Horror allows people to touch the unknown in a simple, uncomplicated way; it is as effective in this way as other "fads" have been before it, beginning, let us say, with the hypnosis/ reincarnation vogue that followed The Search for Bridey Murphy and encompassing the flying-saucer flaps of the fifties, sixties, and seventies; Raymond Moody's Life After Life ; and a lively interest in such wild talents as telepathy, precognition, and the various colorful pronouncements of Castenada's Don Juan. Simplicity may not always make great artistic sense, but it often makes the greatest impact on minds which have little imaginative capacity or upon minds in which the imaginative capability has been little exercised. The Amityville Horror is the primal haunted house story . . . and haunted houses are a concept which even the dullest mind has surely turned over at one time or another, if only around a childhood campfire or two.