JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 169 из 359The horror movie is a closed box with a crank on the side, and in the last analysis it all comes back to turning that crank until Jack jumps out into our faces, holding his ax and grinning his murderous grin. Like sex, the experience is infinitely desirable, but a discussion of specific effect takes on a certain sameness.
Rather than going on and on over what is essentially the same plot of ground, let's close our brief discussion of the horror movie as myth and fairy tale with what is, after all, the Big Cassino: death itself. Here is the trump card which all horror movies hold. But they do not hold this card as a veteran bridge-player would hold it, understanding all its implications and possibilities for gain; they hold it, rather, as a child would hold the card which will make the winning pair in a game of Old Maid. In that fact lies both the limiting factor of the horror movie as art and its endless, morbidly captivating charm.
"Death," the boy Mark Petrie thinks at one point in 'Salem's Lot , "is when the monsters get you." And if I had to restrict everything I have ever said or written about the horror genre to one statement (and many critics will say I should have done, ha-ha), it would be that one. It is not the way adults look at death; it is a crude metaphor which leaves little room for the possibility of heaven, hell, Nirvana, or that old wheeze about how the great wheel of Karma turns and we'll get 'em next life, gang. It is a view which-like most horror movies-addresses itself not to any philosophical speculation about "the afterlife" but which speaks only of the moment when we finally have to shine off this mortal coil. That instant of death is the only truly universal rite of passage, and the only one for which we have no psychological or sociological input to explain what changes we may expect as a result of having passed through. All we know is that we go; and while we have some rules of-etiquette, would it be called?-which bear on the subject, that actual moment has a way of catching folks unprepared. People pass away while making love, while standing in elevators, while putting dimes in parking meters. Some go in midsneeze. Some die in restaurants, some in cheap one-night hotels, and a few while sitting on the john. We cannot count on dying in bed or with our boots on. So it would be remarkable indeed if we did not fear death a little. It's just sort of there, isn't it, the great irreducible x-factor of our lives, faceless father of a hundred religions, so seamless and ungraspable that it usually isn't even discussed at cocktail parties.
Rather than going on and on over what is essentially the same plot of ground, let's close our brief discussion of the horror movie as myth and fairy tale with what is, after all, the Big Cassino: death itself. Here is the trump card which all horror movies hold. But they do not hold this card as a veteran bridge-player would hold it, understanding all its implications and possibilities for gain; they hold it, rather, as a child would hold the card which will make the winning pair in a game of Old Maid. In that fact lies both the limiting factor of the horror movie as art and its endless, morbidly captivating charm.
"Death," the boy Mark Petrie thinks at one point in 'Salem's Lot , "is when the monsters get you." And if I had to restrict everything I have ever said or written about the horror genre to one statement (and many critics will say I should have done, ha-ha), it would be that one. It is not the way adults look at death; it is a crude metaphor which leaves little room for the possibility of heaven, hell, Nirvana, or that old wheeze about how the great wheel of Karma turns and we'll get 'em next life, gang. It is a view which-like most horror movies-addresses itself not to any philosophical speculation about "the afterlife" but which speaks only of the moment when we finally have to shine off this mortal coil. That instant of death is the only truly universal rite of passage, and the only one for which we have no psychological or sociological input to explain what changes we may expect as a result of having passed through. All we know is that we go; and while we have some rules of-etiquette, would it be called?-which bear on the subject, that actual moment has a way of catching folks unprepared. People pass away while making love, while standing in elevators, while putting dimes in parking meters. Some go in midsneeze. Some die in restaurants, some in cheap one-night hotels, and a few while sitting on the john. We cannot count on dying in bed or with our boots on. So it would be remarkable indeed if we did not fear death a little. It's just sort of there, isn't it, the great irreducible x-factor of our lives, faceless father of a hundred religions, so seamless and ungraspable that it usually isn't even discussed at cocktail parties.