JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 170 из 359Death becomes myth in the horror movies, but let's be clear on the fact that horror movies mythicize death on the simplest level: death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you.
We fans of the horror movies have seen people clubbed, burned at the stake (Vincent Price, as the Witchfinder General in AIP's The Conqueror Worm , surely one of the most revolting horror pictures to be released by a major studio in the sixties, had a regular cookout at the climax of this one), shot, crucified, stabbed through the eyes with needles, eaten alive by grasshoppers, by ants, by dinosaurs, and even by cockroaches; we have seen people beheaded ( The Omen, Friday the 13th, Maniac ), sucked dry of their blood, gobbled up by sharks (who could forget the little kid's torn and bloodstained rubber float nudging gently against the shoreline in Jaws ?) and pirahna fish; we have seen bad guys go down screaming in pools of quicksand and pools of acid; we have seen our fellow humans squashed, stretched, and bloated to death; at the end of Brian De Palma's The Fury , John Cassavetes literally explodes.
Again, liberal critics, whose concepts of civilization, life, and death are usually more complex, are apt to frown on this sort of gratuitous slaughter, to see it (at best) as the moral equivalent of pulling wings off flies, and, at worst, as that symbolic lynch mob in action. But there is something in that wing-pulling simile that bears examination. There are few children who have not pulled the wings off a few flies at some point in their development, or squatted patiently on the sidewalk to see how a bug dies. In the opening scene of The Wild Bunch a group of happy, giggling children burn a scorpion to death-a scene indicative of what people who care little (or know little) about children often erroneously call "the cruelty of childhood.” Children are rarely cruel on purpose, and they even more rarely torture, as they understand the concept; * they may, however, kill in the spirit of experimentation, watching the death struggles of the bug on the sidewalk in the same clinical way that a biologist would watch a guinea pig die after inhaling a whiff of nerve gas. Tom Sawyer, we'll remember, just about broke his neck in his hurry to get a look at Huck's dead cat, and one of the payments he accepts for the "privilege" of whitewashing his fence is a dead rat "and a string to swing it on.” Or consider this: Bing Crosby is said to have told a story about one of his sons at the age of six or so who was inconsolable when his pet turtle died. To distract the boy, Bing suggested that they have a funeral, and his son, seeming only slightly consoled, agreed.
We fans of the horror movies have seen people clubbed, burned at the stake (Vincent Price, as the Witchfinder General in AIP's The Conqueror Worm , surely one of the most revolting horror pictures to be released by a major studio in the sixties, had a regular cookout at the climax of this one), shot, crucified, stabbed through the eyes with needles, eaten alive by grasshoppers, by ants, by dinosaurs, and even by cockroaches; we have seen people beheaded ( The Omen, Friday the 13th, Maniac ), sucked dry of their blood, gobbled up by sharks (who could forget the little kid's torn and bloodstained rubber float nudging gently against the shoreline in Jaws ?) and pirahna fish; we have seen bad guys go down screaming in pools of quicksand and pools of acid; we have seen our fellow humans squashed, stretched, and bloated to death; at the end of Brian De Palma's The Fury , John Cassavetes literally explodes.
Again, liberal critics, whose concepts of civilization, life, and death are usually more complex, are apt to frown on this sort of gratuitous slaughter, to see it (at best) as the moral equivalent of pulling wings off flies, and, at worst, as that symbolic lynch mob in action. But there is something in that wing-pulling simile that bears examination. There are few children who have not pulled the wings off a few flies at some point in their development, or squatted patiently on the sidewalk to see how a bug dies. In the opening scene of The Wild Bunch a group of happy, giggling children burn a scorpion to death-a scene indicative of what people who care little (or know little) about children often erroneously call "the cruelty of childhood.” Children are rarely cruel on purpose, and they even more rarely torture, as they understand the concept; * they may, however, kill in the spirit of experimentation, watching the death struggles of the bug on the sidewalk in the same clinical way that a biologist would watch a guinea pig die after inhaling a whiff of nerve gas. Tom Sawyer, we'll remember, just about broke his neck in his hurry to get a look at Huck's dead cat, and one of the payments he accepts for the "privilege" of whitewashing his fence is a dead rat "and a string to swing it on.” Or consider this: Bing Crosby is said to have told a story about one of his sons at the age of six or so who was inconsolable when his pet turtle died. To distract the boy, Bing suggested that they have a funeral, and his son, seeming only slightly consoled, agreed.