JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 152 из 359And one reason for the success of the story in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie's revenge is something thatany student who ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumbrubbed in study hall could approve of. In Carrie's destruction of the gym (and her destructive walk back home in the book, a sequence left out of the movie because of tight budgeting) we see a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden.
8
Once upon a time there dwelt on the outskirts of a large forest a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children; the boy was called Hansel and the girl Grettel. He had always had little enough to live on, and once, when there was a great famine in the land, he couldn't even provide them with daily bread. One night, as he was tossing about in his bed, full of cares and worry, he sighed and said to his wife: "What's to become of us? how are we to support our poor children, now that we have nothing more for ourselves?" "I'll tell you what, husband," answered the woman, "early tomorrow morning we'll take the children into the thickest part of the wood; there we shall light a fire for them and give them each a piece of bread; then we'll go on to our work and leave them alone. They won't be able to find their way home and we shall thus be rid of them . . ."*
Previous to now, we have been discussing horror movies with subtexts which try to link real (if sometimes free-floating) anxieties to the nightmare fears of the horror film. But now, with this invocation from "Hansel and Grettel," that most cautionary of nursery tales, let us put out even this dim light of rationality and discuss a few of those films whose effects go considerably deeper, past the rational and into those fears which seem universal.
*From The Andrew Lang Fairy Tale Treasury , edited by Cary Wilkins (New York: Avenel Books, 1979), p. 91.
Here is where we cross into the taboo lands for sure, and it's best that I be frank with you up front. I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better-and maybe not all that much better, after all. We've all known people who talk to themselves; people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching; people who have some hysterical fear-of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground to play their part in the great Thanksgiving table of life: what once ate must eventually be eaten.
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.
Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious.
8
Once upon a time there dwelt on the outskirts of a large forest a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children; the boy was called Hansel and the girl Grettel. He had always had little enough to live on, and once, when there was a great famine in the land, he couldn't even provide them with daily bread. One night, as he was tossing about in his bed, full of cares and worry, he sighed and said to his wife: "What's to become of us? how are we to support our poor children, now that we have nothing more for ourselves?" "I'll tell you what, husband," answered the woman, "early tomorrow morning we'll take the children into the thickest part of the wood; there we shall light a fire for them and give them each a piece of bread; then we'll go on to our work and leave them alone. They won't be able to find their way home and we shall thus be rid of them . . ."*
Previous to now, we have been discussing horror movies with subtexts which try to link real (if sometimes free-floating) anxieties to the nightmare fears of the horror film. But now, with this invocation from "Hansel and Grettel," that most cautionary of nursery tales, let us put out even this dim light of rationality and discuss a few of those films whose effects go considerably deeper, past the rational and into those fears which seem universal.
*From The Andrew Lang Fairy Tale Treasury , edited by Cary Wilkins (New York: Avenel Books, 1979), p. 91.
Here is where we cross into the taboo lands for sure, and it's best that I be frank with you up front. I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better-and maybe not all that much better, after all. We've all known people who talk to themselves; people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching; people who have some hysterical fear-of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground to play their part in the great Thanksgiving table of life: what once ate must eventually be eaten.
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.
Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious.