JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 127 из 359and I found myself wondering not if the Lutz clan would get out alive but if they had adequate homeowner's insurance.
Here is a movie for every woman who ever wept over a plugged-up toilet or a spreading water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs shower; for every man who ever did a slow burn when the weight of the snow caused his gutters to give way; for every child who ever jammed his fingers and felt that the door or window which did the jamming was out to get him. As horror goes, Amityville is pretty pedestrian. So's beer, but you can get drunk on it.
"Think of the bills," a woman sitting behind me in the theater moaned at one point . . . but I suspect it was her own bills she was thinking about. It was impossible to make a silk purse out of this particular sow's ear, but Rosenberg at least manages to give us Qiana, and the main reason that people went to see it, I think, is that The Amityville Horror , beneath its ghost-story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby.
Think of the bills, indeed.
5
The horror film as political polemic, then.
We've mentioned a couple of films of this stripe already- Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the Siegel version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , both from the fifties. All the best films of this political type seem to come from that period-although we may be coming full circle again; The Changeling, which at this writing seems on its way to become the big "sleeper" of the spring of 1980, is an odd combination of ghosts and Watergate.
If movies are the dreams of the mass culture-one film critic, in fact, has called watching a movie "dreaming with one's eyes open"-and if horror movies are the nightmares of the mass culture, then many of these fifties horrors express America's coming-to-terms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation over political differences.
We ought to eliminate the horror movies of that period that sprang from technological unease (the so-called "big bug" movies are among these) and also those "nuclear showdown” movies such as Fail-Safe and Ray Milland's intermittently interesting Panic in the Year Zero .
These movies are not political in the sense that Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is political; that was a film where you could see the political enemy of your choice around every corner, symbolized in those ominous pods from space.
The political horror films of the period we're discussing here begin, I think, with The Thing (1951), directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks (who also had a hand in the direction, one suspects). It starred Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, and James Arness as the blood-drinking human carrot from Planet X.
Here is a movie for every woman who ever wept over a plugged-up toilet or a spreading water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs shower; for every man who ever did a slow burn when the weight of the snow caused his gutters to give way; for every child who ever jammed his fingers and felt that the door or window which did the jamming was out to get him. As horror goes, Amityville is pretty pedestrian. So's beer, but you can get drunk on it.
"Think of the bills," a woman sitting behind me in the theater moaned at one point . . . but I suspect it was her own bills she was thinking about. It was impossible to make a silk purse out of this particular sow's ear, but Rosenberg at least manages to give us Qiana, and the main reason that people went to see it, I think, is that The Amityville Horror , beneath its ghost-story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby.
Think of the bills, indeed.
5
The horror film as political polemic, then.
We've mentioned a couple of films of this stripe already- Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the Siegel version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , both from the fifties. All the best films of this political type seem to come from that period-although we may be coming full circle again; The Changeling, which at this writing seems on its way to become the big "sleeper" of the spring of 1980, is an odd combination of ghosts and Watergate.
If movies are the dreams of the mass culture-one film critic, in fact, has called watching a movie "dreaming with one's eyes open"-and if horror movies are the nightmares of the mass culture, then many of these fifties horrors express America's coming-to-terms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation over political differences.
We ought to eliminate the horror movies of that period that sprang from technological unease (the so-called "big bug" movies are among these) and also those "nuclear showdown” movies such as Fail-Safe and Ray Milland's intermittently interesting Panic in the Year Zero .
These movies are not political in the sense that Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is political; that was a film where you could see the political enemy of your choice around every corner, symbolized in those ominous pods from space.
The political horror films of the period we're discussing here begin, I think, with The Thing (1951), directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks (who also had a hand in the direction, one suspects). It starred Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, and James Arness as the blood-drinking human carrot from Planet X.