JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 137 из 359These are nightmares for profit, granted, but nightmares is nightmares, and in the last analysis it is the profit motive that becomes unimportant and the nightmare itselfwhich remains of interest.
The producers of The Horror of Party Beach never sat down, I'm sure (just as I'm sure the producers of The China Syndrome did), and said to each other: "Look-we're going to warn the people of America about the dangers of nuclear reactors, and we will sugar-coat the pill of this vital message with an entertaining story line." No, the line of discussion would have been more apt to go like this: Because our target audience is young, we'll feature young people, and because our target audience is interested in sex, we'll site it on a sun-and-surf-type beach, which allows us to show all the flesh the censors will allow. And because our target audience likes grue, we'll give them these gross monsters. It must have looked like boffo box-office stuff: a hybrid of AIP's most consistently lucrative genre pictures-the monster movie and the beach-party movie.
But because any horror film (with the possible exception of the German expressionist films of the 1930s) has got to at least pay lip service to credibility, there had to be some reason for these monsters to suddenly come out of the ocean and start doing all these antisocial things (one of the film's highlights-maybe lowlights would be better-comes when the creatures invade a slumber party and kill ten or twenty nubile young things . . . talk about party -poopers!). What the producers decided upon was nuclear waste, leaking from those dumped cannisters. I'm sure it was one of the least important points in their preproduction discussions, and for that very reason it becomes very important to our discussions here.
The reason for the monsters most likely came about in a kind of freeassociation process, the sort of test psychiatrists use to discover points of anxiety in their patients. And although The Horror of Party Beach has long since been consigned to oblivion, that image of the canisters marked with radiation symbols sinking slowly to the bottom of the ocean lingers in the memory.
The producers of The Horror of Party Beach never sat down, I'm sure (just as I'm sure the producers of The China Syndrome did), and said to each other: "Look-we're going to warn the people of America about the dangers of nuclear reactors, and we will sugar-coat the pill of this vital message with an entertaining story line." No, the line of discussion would have been more apt to go like this: Because our target audience is young, we'll feature young people, and because our target audience is interested in sex, we'll site it on a sun-and-surf-type beach, which allows us to show all the flesh the censors will allow. And because our target audience likes grue, we'll give them these gross monsters. It must have looked like boffo box-office stuff: a hybrid of AIP's most consistently lucrative genre pictures-the monster movie and the beach-party movie.
But because any horror film (with the possible exception of the German expressionist films of the 1930s) has got to at least pay lip service to credibility, there had to be some reason for these monsters to suddenly come out of the ocean and start doing all these antisocial things (one of the film's highlights-maybe lowlights would be better-comes when the creatures invade a slumber party and kill ten or twenty nubile young things . . . talk about party -poopers!). What the producers decided upon was nuclear waste, leaking from those dumped cannisters. I'm sure it was one of the least important points in their preproduction discussions, and for that very reason it becomes very important to our discussions here.
The reason for the monsters most likely came about in a kind of freeassociation process, the sort of test psychiatrists use to discover points of anxiety in their patients. And although The Horror of Party Beach has long since been consigned to oblivion, that image of the canisters marked with radiation symbols sinking slowly to the bottom of the ocean lingers in the memory.