JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 167 из 359It is at this point that we begin to feel rather nervous-perhaps we sense the gross-out coming, and in a very real sense it's already arrived. Our eyes are one of those vulnerable chinks in the armor, one of those places where we can be had. Imagine, for instance, jamming your thumb into someone's wide-open eye, feeling the squish, seeing it sorta squirt out at you. Nasty, right? Immoral to even consider such a thing. But surely you remember that time-honored Halloween party game Dead Man, where peeled grapes are passed from hand to hand to hand in the dark, to the solemn intonation of "These are the dead man's eyes"? Ulp, right? Yuck, right? Or as my kids say, Guh-ROSS!
*Now, don't get me wrong or misinterpret what I'm saying. Kids can be mean and unlovely, and when you see them at their worst, they can make you think black thoughts about the future of the human race. But meanness and cruelty, although related, are not the same thing at all. A cruel action is a studied action; it requires a bit of thought. Meanness, on the other hand, is unpremeditated and unthinking. The results may be similar for the person-usually another child-who gets the butt end, but it seems to me that in a moral society, intent or lack of it is pretty important.
**This might lead to the accusation that my definition of the horror movie as art is much too wide-that I just let in everything. That is not true at all-movies like Massacre at Central High and Bloody Mutilators work on no level. And if my ideas concerning the boundaries of art seem rather lenient, that's too bad. I'm no snob. and if you are, that's your problem. In my business, if you lose your taste for good baloney, it's time you got into some other line of work.
Like our other facial equipment, eyes are something we all have in common-even that old poop the Ayatullah Khomeini has a pair. But to the best of my knowledge, no horror movie has ever been made about a nose out of control, and while there has never been a film called The Crawling Ear , there was one called The Crawling Eye . We all understand that eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft . Maybe that's the worst . . . So when Milland dons shades for the second half of the movie, we become increasingly nervous about what might be going on behind those shades. In addition, something else is happening-something that elevates The Man with the X-Ray Eyes to a rather higher plateau of art. It becomes a kind of Lovecraftian horror movie, but in a sense that is different-and somehow purer-than the sort of Lovecraftiness used in Alien .
*Now, don't get me wrong or misinterpret what I'm saying. Kids can be mean and unlovely, and when you see them at their worst, they can make you think black thoughts about the future of the human race. But meanness and cruelty, although related, are not the same thing at all. A cruel action is a studied action; it requires a bit of thought. Meanness, on the other hand, is unpremeditated and unthinking. The results may be similar for the person-usually another child-who gets the butt end, but it seems to me that in a moral society, intent or lack of it is pretty important.
**This might lead to the accusation that my definition of the horror movie as art is much too wide-that I just let in everything. That is not true at all-movies like Massacre at Central High and Bloody Mutilators work on no level. And if my ideas concerning the boundaries of art seem rather lenient, that's too bad. I'm no snob. and if you are, that's your problem. In my business, if you lose your taste for good baloney, it's time you got into some other line of work.
Like our other facial equipment, eyes are something we all have in common-even that old poop the Ayatullah Khomeini has a pair. But to the best of my knowledge, no horror movie has ever been made about a nose out of control, and while there has never been a film called The Crawling Ear , there was one called The Crawling Eye . We all understand that eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft . Maybe that's the worst . . . So when Milland dons shades for the second half of the movie, we become increasingly nervous about what might be going on behind those shades. In addition, something else is happening-something that elevates The Man with the X-Ray Eyes to a rather higher plateau of art. It becomes a kind of Lovecraftian horror movie, but in a sense that is different-and somehow purer-than the sort of Lovecraftiness used in Alien .