Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

But it is worth noting that when the infrequent blockbusters which every film producer hopes for finally come along-pictures like Star Wars, Jaws, American Graffiti, The Godfather, Gone With theWind , and of course The Exorcist -they always break the demographic hammerlock which is the enemy of intelligent filmmaking. It is comparatively rare for horror movies to do this, but The Exorcist is a case in point (and we have already spoken of The Amityville Horror , another film which has enjoyed a surprisingly old audience).

A film which appealed directly to the fifteen-year-olds that provide the spike point for movie-going audiences-and one with a subtext tailored to match-was the Brian De Palma adaptation of my novel Carrie . While I believe that both the book and the film depend on largely the same social situations to provide a text and subtext of horror, there's maybe enough difference to make a few interesting observations on De Palma's film version.

Both novel and movie have a pleasant High School Confidential feel, and while there are some superficial changes from the book in the film (Carrie's mother, for instance, seems to be presented in the film as a kind of weird renegade Roman Catholic), the basic story skeleton is pretty much the same. The story deals with a girl named Carrie White, the browbeaten daughter of a religious fanatic. Because of her strange clothes and shy mannerisms, Carrie is the butt of every class joke; the social outsider in every situation. She also has a mild telekinetic ability which intensifies after her first menstrual period, and she finally uses this power to "bring down the house" following a terrible social disaster at her high school prom.

De Palma's approach to the material was lighter and more deft than my own-and a good deal more artistic; the book tries to deal with the loneliness of one girl, her desperate effort to become a part of the peer society in which she must exist, and how her effort fails. If it had any thesis to offer, this deliberate updating of High School Confidential , it was that high school is a place of almost bottomless conservatism and bigotry, a place where the adolescents who attend are no more allowed to rise "above their station" than a Hindu would be allowed to rise above his or her caste.

But there's a little more subtext to the book than that, I think-at least, I hope so. If The Stepford Wives concerns itself with what men want from women, then Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, and what men fear about women and women's sexuality . . . which is only to say that, writing the book in 1973 and only out of college three years, I was fully aware of what Women's Liberation implied for me and others of my sex.