Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

A better film is the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Richard Matheson's short story Duel , a film which originally appeared as part of ABC's Movie of the Week series and went on to become something of a cult film. In this film, a psychotic trucker in a big ten-wheeler pursues Dennis Weaver over what seems to be at least a million miles of California highways. We never actually see the trucker (although we do see a beefy arm cocked out of the cab window once, and at another point we see a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots on the far side of the truck), and ultimately it is the truck itself, with its huge wheels, its dirty windshield like an idiot's stare, and its somehow hungry bumpers, which becomes the monster-and when Weaver is finally able to lead it to an embankment and lure it over the edge, the noise of its "death” becomes a series of chilling Jurassic roars . . . the sound, we think, a tyrannosaurus rex would make going slowly down into a tar pit. And Weaver's response is that of any self-respecting caveman: he screams, shrieks, cuts capers, literally dances for joy. Duel is a gripping, almost painfully suspenseful rocket ride of a movie; perhaps not Spielberg's best work-that must almost certainly wait for the eighties and nineties-but surely one of the half -dozen best movies ever made for TV.

We could uncover other interesting tales of automotive horror, but they would be stories and novels, mostly; such turkeys as Death Race 2000 and Mad Max hardly count. Modern Hollywood has apparently decided that, as the day of the privately owned gasoline vehicle enters its late afternoon, the automobile in most cases must be reserved for funny car chases (as in Foul Play and the cheerfully mind-croggling Grand Theft Auto ) or a kind of sappy reverence ( The Driver ). The interested reader might enjoy an anthology (now available in paperback) edited by Bill Pronzini and titled Car Sinister . Fritz Leiber's contribution alone, a funny/sinister tale of Car Future titled "X Marks the Pedwalk," is worth the price of admission.

7

Social horror films.

We've already discussed a few films with social implications-pimples and the heartbreak of psoriasis in the fifties, not to mention Michael Landon drooling shaving cream all over his high school jacket. But there have been other films which tackle more serious social subjects. In some cases ( Rollerball, Wild in the Streets ), these films feature a logical or satirical extrapolation of current social trends and thus become science fiction. We'll restrict these, if you don't mind, on the grounds that they constitute another dance-a bit different from this dark cotillion we're currently engaged in.