JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 161 из 359Troubleis, she forgets one light . . . but you and I probably would have forgotten it, too. It's the bulb inside the refrigerator.
Anyway, the in-theater gimmick was to turn out every damn light in the auditorium except for the EXIT lights over the doors. I never realized until the last ten minutes of Wait Until Dark how much light there is in most theaters, even when the movie's playing. There are those tiny "dim-bulbs" set into the ceiling if the theater is one of the new breed, those gauche but somehow lovely electric flambeaux glowing along the walls in the older ones. In a pinch, you can always find your way back to your seat after using the bathroom by the light being thrown from the screen itself. Except that the climactic few minutes of Wait Until Dark are set entirely in that black apartment. You have only your ears, and what they hear-Miss Hepburn screaming, Arkin's tortured breathing (he's been stabbed a bit earlier on, and we're allowed to relax a little, to think he might even be dead, when he pops out again like a malefic jack-in-the-box)-isn't very comforting. So there you sit. Your big old Boeing-747 brain is cranked up like a kid's jalopy with the pedal to the metal, and it has very little concrete input to work on. So you sit. there, sweating it out, hoping the lights will eventually come on again . . . and sooner or later, they do. Mike Cantalupo told me he saw Wait Until Dark in a theater so sleazy that even the EXIT lights were broken.
*Now and then someone will run brilliantly counter to the tradition and produce a piece of what is sometimes called "sunlit horror." Ramsey Campbell does this particularly well; see his aptly named collection of short stories Demons by Daylight , for instance.
Man, that must have been bad.
Mike's recollection of that took me fondly back to another film-William Castle's The Tingler , which had a similar (if, in the Castle style, infinitely more crass) gimmick. Castle, whom I've already mentioned in connection with Macabre -known to all us WASPy little kids as McBare , you'll remember-was the king of the gimmicks; he originated the $100,000 "fright insurance” policy, for instance; if you dropped dead during the film, your heirs got the money. Then there was the great "Nurse on Duty at All Performances" gimmick; there was the "You Must Have Your Blood Pressure Taken in the Lobby Before Viewing This Horrifying Film" gimmick (that one was used as part of The House on Haunted Hill promo), and all sorts of other gimmicks.
Anyway, the in-theater gimmick was to turn out every damn light in the auditorium except for the EXIT lights over the doors. I never realized until the last ten minutes of Wait Until Dark how much light there is in most theaters, even when the movie's playing. There are those tiny "dim-bulbs" set into the ceiling if the theater is one of the new breed, those gauche but somehow lovely electric flambeaux glowing along the walls in the older ones. In a pinch, you can always find your way back to your seat after using the bathroom by the light being thrown from the screen itself. Except that the climactic few minutes of Wait Until Dark are set entirely in that black apartment. You have only your ears, and what they hear-Miss Hepburn screaming, Arkin's tortured breathing (he's been stabbed a bit earlier on, and we're allowed to relax a little, to think he might even be dead, when he pops out again like a malefic jack-in-the-box)-isn't very comforting. So there you sit. Your big old Boeing-747 brain is cranked up like a kid's jalopy with the pedal to the metal, and it has very little concrete input to work on. So you sit. there, sweating it out, hoping the lights will eventually come on again . . . and sooner or later, they do. Mike Cantalupo told me he saw Wait Until Dark in a theater so sleazy that even the EXIT lights were broken.
*Now and then someone will run brilliantly counter to the tradition and produce a piece of what is sometimes called "sunlit horror." Ramsey Campbell does this particularly well; see his aptly named collection of short stories Demons by Daylight , for instance.
Man, that must have been bad.
Mike's recollection of that took me fondly back to another film-William Castle's The Tingler , which had a similar (if, in the Castle style, infinitely more crass) gimmick. Castle, whom I've already mentioned in connection with Macabre -known to all us WASPy little kids as McBare , you'll remember-was the king of the gimmicks; he originated the $100,000 "fright insurance” policy, for instance; if you dropped dead during the film, your heirs got the money. Then there was the great "Nurse on Duty at All Performances" gimmick; there was the "You Must Have Your Blood Pressure Taken in the Lobby Before Viewing This Horrifying Film" gimmick (that one was used as part of The House on Haunted Hill promo), and all sorts of other gimmicks.