Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

The Elder Gods, Lovecraft told us, are out there, and their one desire is to somehow get back in-and there are lines of power accessible to them, Lovecraft intimates, which are so powerful that one look at the sources of these lines of power would drive mortal men to madness; forces so powerful that a whole galaxy aflame could not equal its thousandth part.

It is one of these power sources, I think, that Ray Milland begins to glimpse as his sight continues to improve at a steady, inexorable pace. He sees it first as a prismatic, shifting light somewhere out in the darkness-the trippy sort of thing you might see at the top of an LSD high. Corman, you'll remember, also gave us Peter Fonda in The Trip (co-written by Jack Nicholson), not to mention The Wild Angels , which contains that wonderful moment when a dying Bruce Dern croaks out, "Somebody gimme a straight cigarette." Anyway, this bright core of light Milland sometimes sees gradually grows larger and clearer. Worse still, it may be alive .. . and aware it's being watched. Milland has seen through everything to the very edges of the universe and beyond, and what he has found there is driving him crazy.

This force eventually becomes so clear to him that it fills the whole screen during the point-of-view shots: a bright, shifting, monstrous thing that won't quite come into focus. At last Milland can stand it no longer. He drives his car to a deserted spot (that bright Presence hanging before his eyes all the time) and whips off his shades to reveal eyes which have gone an utter, glistening black. He pauses for a moment . . . and then rips his own eyes out. Corman freezes the frame on those staring, bloody sockets. But I have heard rumors-they may or may not be true-that the final line of dialogue was cut from the film as too horrifying. If true, it was the only possible capper for what has already happened. According to the rumor, Milland screams: I can still see!

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This is only to dip our fingers in that deep, deep pool of common human experience and fears which form the myth-pool. It would be possible to go on with dozens of other specifics; with phobias such as the fear of heights (Vertigo), fear of snakes (Sssssss) , of cats (Eye of the Cat), of rats (Willard, Ben) -and all those movies which depend on the gross-out for their ultimate effect. Beyond these there are even wider vistas of myth . . . but we have to save something for later, right?

And no matter how many specifics we cover, we'll always find ourselves returning to that idea of phobic pressure points . . . just as the most lovely waltz relies, at bottom, on the simplicity of the box-step.