Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

What in Christ's name are we really doing with all that nuclear sludge? the mind enquires uneasily-the burnoff, the dreck, the used plutonium slugs, and the worn-out parts that are as hot as a nickelplated revolver and apt to stay that way for the next six hundred years or so?

Does anybody know what in Christ's name we're doing with those things?

Any thoughtful consideration of techno-horror films-those films whose subtexts suggest that we have been betrayed by our own machines and processes of mass production-reveals very quickly another face in that dark Tarot hand we dealt out earlier: this time it's the face of the Werewolf. In talking about the Werewolf in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde I used the terms Apollonian (to suggest reason and the power of the mind) and Dionysian (to suggest emotion, sensuality, and chaotic action). Most films which express technological fears have a similar dual nature. Grasshoppers, Beginning of the End suggests, are Apollonian creatures, going about their business of hopping, eating, spitting tobacco juice, and making little grasshoppers.

But following an infusion of nuclear wolfsbane, they grow to the size of Cadillacs, become Dionysian and disruptive, and attack Chicago. It is their very Dionysian tendencies-in this case, their sex drive-that spells the end for them. Peter Graves (as the Brave Young Scientist) rigs up a mating-call tape that is broadcast through loudspeakers from a number of boats circling on Lake Michigan, and the grasshoppers all rush to their deaths, believing themselves to be on their way to a really good fuck. A bit of a cautionary tale, you understand. I bet D. F. Jones loved it.

Even Night of the Living Dead has a techno-horror aspect, a fact that may be overlooked as the zombies move in on the lonely Pennsylvania farmhouse where the "good guys" are holed up. There is nothing really supernatural about all those dead folks getting up and walking; it hap pened because a space probe to Venus picked up some weird corpsereviving radiation on its way back home. One suspects that chunks of such a satellite would be eagerly sought-after artifacts in Palm Springs and Fort Lauderdale.

The barometer effect of the subtexts of techno-horror films can be seen by comparing films of this type from the fifties, sixties, and seventies. In the fifties, the terror of the Bomb and of fallout was a real and terrifying thing, and it left a scar on those children who wanted to be good just as the depression of the thirties left a scar on their elders. A newer generation-now still teenagers, with no memory of either the Cuban missile crisis or of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, raised on the milk of détente-may find it hard to comprehend the terror of these things, but they will undoubtedly have a chance to discover it in the years of tightening belts and heightening tensions which lie ahead . . . and the movies will be there to give their vague fears concrete focusing points in the horror movies yet to come.