Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

6

"We have opened adoor on an unimaginable power," the old scientists says gloomily at the conclusion of Them! , "and there will be no closing it now.” At the end of D. F. Jones's novel Colossus (filmed as The Forbin Project ), the computer which has taken over everything tells Forbin, its creator, that people will do more than learn to accept its rule; they will come to accept it as a god. "Never!" Forbin responds in ringing tones that would do the hero of a Robert Heinlein space opera proud. But it is Jones himself who has the final word-and it's not a reassuring one. "Never?" reads the final paragraph of his cautionary tale. *

In the Richard Egan film Gog (directed by Mr. Flipper himself, Ivan Toss), the equipment of an entire space-research station seems to go mad. A solar mirror twirls erratically, pursuing the heroine with what amounts to a lethal heat ray; a centrifuge designed to test would-be astronauts for their responses to heavy g-loads speeds up until the two test subjects are literally accelerated to death; and at the conclusion, the two BEM-like robots, Gog and Magog, go totally out of control, snapping their Waldo-like pincers and making weird Geiger-counter-like sounds as they roll forward on various errands of destruction ("I can control him," the cold-fish scientist says confidently only moments before Magog crushes his neck with one of those pincers).

"We grow them big out here," the old Indian in Prophecy says complacently to Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire as a tadpole as big as a salmon jumps out of a lake in northern Maine and flops around on the shore. Indeed they do; Foxworth also sees a salmon as big as a porpoise, and by the conclusion of the film, one is grateful that whales are not fresh-water mammals.

*D. F. Jones could hardly be classed as the Pollyanna of the science fiction world; in his followup to Colossus , a newly developed birth control pill that you only have to take once results in worldwide sterility and the slow death of the human race. Cheery stuff, but Jones is not alone in his gloomy distrust of a technological world; there is J. G. Ballard, author of such grim tales as Crash, Concrete Island, and High-Rise ; not to mention Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (whom my wife fondly calls "Father Kurt"), who has given us such novels as Cat's Cradle and Player Piano .

All of the foregoing are examples of the horror film with a technological subtext… sometimes referred to as the "nature run amok" sort of horror picture (not that there's much natural about Gog and Magog, with their tractor treads and their forests of radio aerials).