Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

The exact plot specifics of The Tingler , a film so exquisitely low budget that it probably made back its production costs after a thousand people had seen it, now escape me, but there was this monster (the Tingler, natch) that lived on fear. When its victims were so scared they couldn't even scream, it attached itself to their spines and sorta . . . well . . . tingled them to death. I know that must sound pretty fucking stupid, but in the film, it worked (although it probably helped to be eleven years old when you saw it). As I remember, one sexy miss got it in the bathtub. Bad news.

But never mind the plot; let's get on to the gimmick. At one point the Tingler got into a movie theater, killed the projectionist, and somehow shorted out the electricity. At that moment in the theater where you were watching the movie, all the lights went out and the screen went dark.

Now as it happened, the only thing that could get the Tingler to let go of your spine once it had attached itself was a good loud scream, which changed the quality of the adrenaline it fed on.

And at this point, a narrator on the soundtrack cried out, "The Tingler is now in this theater! It may be under your seat! So scream! Scream! Scream for your lives!! " The audience was of course happy to oblige, and in the next scene we see the Tingler fleeing for its life, vanquished for the time being by all those screaming people. *

Besides the movies which raise the scary concept of the dark in their titles, almost every other film listed in the little quiz I gave you uses that fear of the dark heavily. All but approximately eighteen minutes of John Carpenter's Halloween are set after nightfall. The major scare scenes in Psycho all take place after dark. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar , the final horrible sequence (my wife ran for the women's room, believing she was going to toss her cookies), where Tom Berenger stabs Diane Keaton to death, is shot in her dark apartment, with only a flickering strobe-light for illumination. In Alien , that constant motif of the dark barely needs mentioning. "In space, no one can hear you scream," the ad copy read; it also could have said, "In space, it is always one minute after midnight." Dawn never comes in that Lovecraftian gulf between the stars.

Hill House is always spooky, but it saves its really big effects-the face in the wall, the bulging doors, the booming noises, the thing that held Eleanor's hand (she thought it was Theo, but-gulp!-it wasn't)-for well past sunset.