JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 158 из 359What a mean thing to do! But lucky mommy! Because she died soon after, she didn't have to do the sequel!
20. Once upon a time some friends went on a canoe trip down a magic river, and some bad men saw that they were having fun and decided to fix them for it. That was because the bad men didn't want those other fellows, who came from the city, to have a good time in their woods.
Okay, did you write down all of your answers? If you find you have four or more blanks-not even an educated guess to plug in there-you have been spending far too much time seeing "quality" films like Julia, Manhattan , and Breaking Away . And while you've been watching Woody Allen give his imitation of an ingrown hair (a liberal ingrown hair, of course), you missed some of the scariest films ever made. For the record, the answers are:
1.Wait Until Dark2.Halloween 3. Psycho 4.Coma 5. Looking for Mr. Goodbar 6. Alien 7. The Haunting 8. Midnight Express 9. The Bad Seed 10. The Night of the Hunter 11. Night Watch 12. Night of the Living Dead 13. The Birds 14. Dementia-13 15. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?16. I Bury the Living 17. Macabre * 18. X-the Man with the X-Ray Eyes 19. The Omen 20. Deliverance
The first thing we can note about this list of films is that, of the twenty (which I would call the basic coursework in films of gut-level horror in the period we're discussing here), fully fourteen have nothing supernatural going on in them . . . fifteen if you count Alien , which is at least nominally science fiction (I do count it as a supernatural tale, however; I think of it as Lovecraft in outer space, mankind finally going to the Elder Gods rather than they coming to us). So we might be able to say, paradox or not, that movies of fairy-tale horror demand a heavy dose of reality to get them rolling. Such reality frees the imagination of excess baggage and makes the weight of unbelief easier to lift. The audience is propelled into the movie by the feeling that, under the right set of circumstances, this could happen.
The second thing we could note is that a quarter of them bear a reference either to "night" or "the dark" in their titles. The dark, it goes almost without saying, provides the basis for our most primordial fears. As spiritual as we may believe our natures to be, our physiology is similar to that of all the rest of the mammals that creep, crawl, trot, or walk; we must make do with the same five senses. There are many mammals whose eyesight is keen, but we are not among them.
20. Once upon a time some friends went on a canoe trip down a magic river, and some bad men saw that they were having fun and decided to fix them for it. That was because the bad men didn't want those other fellows, who came from the city, to have a good time in their woods.
Okay, did you write down all of your answers? If you find you have four or more blanks-not even an educated guess to plug in there-you have been spending far too much time seeing "quality" films like Julia, Manhattan , and Breaking Away . And while you've been watching Woody Allen give his imitation of an ingrown hair (a liberal ingrown hair, of course), you missed some of the scariest films ever made. For the record, the answers are:
1.Wait Until Dark2.Halloween 3. Psycho 4.Coma 5. Looking for Mr. Goodbar 6. Alien 7. The Haunting 8. Midnight Express 9. The Bad Seed 10. The Night of the Hunter 11. Night Watch 12. Night of the Living Dead 13. The Birds 14. Dementia-13 15. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?16. I Bury the Living 17. Macabre * 18. X-the Man with the X-Ray Eyes 19. The Omen 20. Deliverance
The first thing we can note about this list of films is that, of the twenty (which I would call the basic coursework in films of gut-level horror in the period we're discussing here), fully fourteen have nothing supernatural going on in them . . . fifteen if you count Alien , which is at least nominally science fiction (I do count it as a supernatural tale, however; I think of it as Lovecraft in outer space, mankind finally going to the Elder Gods rather than they coming to us). So we might be able to say, paradox or not, that movies of fairy-tale horror demand a heavy dose of reality to get them rolling. Such reality frees the imagination of excess baggage and makes the weight of unbelief easier to lift. The audience is propelled into the movie by the feeling that, under the right set of circumstances, this could happen.
The second thing we could note is that a quarter of them bear a reference either to "night" or "the dark" in their titles. The dark, it goes almost without saying, provides the basis for our most primordial fears. As spiritual as we may believe our natures to be, our physiology is similar to that of all the rest of the mammals that creep, crawl, trot, or walk; we must make do with the same five senses. There are many mammals whose eyesight is keen, but we are not among them.