Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

In the Charlton Heston film The Omega Man (adapted from what David Chute calls "Richard Matheson's tough-minded, peculiarly practical vampire novel I Am Legend "), we see exactly the same sort of thing; the vampires become almost cartoon Gestapo agents in their black clothes and their sunglasses. Ironically, an earlier film version of that same novel ( The Last Man on Earth , starring Vincent Price in a rare nonvillain role as Matheson's Robert Neville) proposes a political idea which raises a different sort of horror. This film is more faithful to Matheson's novel, and as a result it offers a subtext which tells us that politics themselves are not immutable, that times change, and that Neville's very success as a vampire-hunter (his peculiarly practical success, to paraphrase Chute), has turned him into the monster, the outlaw, the Gestapo agent who strikes at the helpless as they sleep. For a nation whose political nightmares perhaps still include visions of Kent State and My Lai, this is a particularly apt idea. The Last Man on Earth is perhaps an example of the ultimate political horror film, because it offers us the Walt Kelly thesis: We have met the enemy and he is us.

All of which brings us to an interesting borderline that I want to point out but not step over- this is the point at which the country of the horror film touches the country of the black comedy.

Stanley Kubrick has been a resident of this borderline area for quite some time. A perfectly good case could be made for classing Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as a political horror film without monsters (a guy needs a dime to phone Washington and stop World War III before it can get started; Keenan Wynn grudgingly obliges by blowing a Coke machine to smithereens with his burpgun so our hero can get at the change; but he tells this would-be savior of the human race that "you're going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company of America for this"); for A Clockwork Orange as a political horror film with human monsters (Malcolm McDowell stomping a hapless passerby to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain"); and for 2001: A Space Odyssey as a political horror film with an inhuman monster ("Please don't turn me off," the murderous computer HAL 9000 begs as the Jupiter probe's one remaining crewman pulls its memory modules one by one) that ends its cybernetic life by singing "A Bicycle Built for Two." Kubrick has consistently been the only American film director to understand that stepping over the borderline into taboo country is as often apt to cause wild laughter as it is horror, but any ten-year-old who ever laughed hysterically at a traveling-salesman joke would agree that it is so. Or it may simply be that only Kubrick has been smart enough (or brave enough) to go back to this country more than once.