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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 141 из 359The idea was even played for laughs once before Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, in an odd little fifties picture called The Atomic Kid, starring Mickey Rooney.
Finally there are the seventies, culminating in Frankenheimer's notvery-good but certainly well-meant film Prophecy , which is so strikingly similar to those fifties big bug movies (only the first cause has changed), and The China Syndrome , a horror movie which synthesizes all three of these major technological fears: fears of radiation, fears for the ecology, fears of the machinery gone out of control, run wild.
Before leaving this all too brief look at pictures which depend on some mass unease over matters technological to provide the equivalent of The Hook (pictures which appeal to the Luddite hiding inside all of us), we should mention some of the films dealing with space travel which fall into this category . . . but we'll exclude such xenophobic pictures as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The Mysterians from our view. Pictures which focus on the possible Dionysian side of space exploration (such as The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead , where satellites bring back dangerous but nonsentient organisms from the void) ought to be differentiated from those purely xenophobic movies dealing with invasion from outer space-films where the human race is viewed in an essentially passive role, attacked by the equivalent of muggers from the stars. In pictures of this type, technology is often seen as the savior (as it is in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers , where Hugh Marlowe uses his sonic gun to interrupt the saucers' electromagnetic drive, or in The Thing , where Tobey and his men use electricity to barbecue the interstellar vegetable)-Apollonian science vanquishing the Dionysian bad guys from Planet X.
Although both The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead present space travel itself as an active danger, perhaps the best example of that idea combined with the brilliant mind dangerously hypnotized by the siren song of technology comes in The Creeping Unknown , a film that predates both of the former. In that film, the first of the critically acclaimed Quatermass series, the viewer is originally presented with one of the creepiest locked-room mysteries ever posited: three scientist-astronauts are sent into space, but only one returns . . . and he is catatonic. Telemetry and the presence of all three spacesuits seem to prove that the two missing spacemen never left the ship. So where did they go?
What happened, apparently, is that they picked up an interstellar hitchhiker, a plot device we see again in It.
Finally there are the seventies, culminating in Frankenheimer's notvery-good but certainly well-meant film Prophecy , which is so strikingly similar to those fifties big bug movies (only the first cause has changed), and The China Syndrome , a horror movie which synthesizes all three of these major technological fears: fears of radiation, fears for the ecology, fears of the machinery gone out of control, run wild.
Before leaving this all too brief look at pictures which depend on some mass unease over matters technological to provide the equivalent of The Hook (pictures which appeal to the Luddite hiding inside all of us), we should mention some of the films dealing with space travel which fall into this category . . . but we'll exclude such xenophobic pictures as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The Mysterians from our view. Pictures which focus on the possible Dionysian side of space exploration (such as The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead , where satellites bring back dangerous but nonsentient organisms from the void) ought to be differentiated from those purely xenophobic movies dealing with invasion from outer space-films where the human race is viewed in an essentially passive role, attacked by the equivalent of muggers from the stars. In pictures of this type, technology is often seen as the savior (as it is in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers , where Hugh Marlowe uses his sonic gun to interrupt the saucers' electromagnetic drive, or in The Thing , where Tobey and his men use electricity to barbecue the interstellar vegetable)-Apollonian science vanquishing the Dionysian bad guys from Planet X.
Although both The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead present space travel itself as an active danger, perhaps the best example of that idea combined with the brilliant mind dangerously hypnotized by the siren song of technology comes in The Creeping Unknown , a film that predates both of the former. In that film, the first of the critically acclaimed Quatermass series, the viewer is originally presented with one of the creepiest locked-room mysteries ever posited: three scientist-astronauts are sent into space, but only one returns . . . and he is catatonic. Telemetry and the presence of all three spacesuits seem to prove that the two missing spacemen never left the ship. So where did they go?
What happened, apparently, is that they picked up an interstellar hitchhiker, a plot device we see again in It.