Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Sophisticated movies demand sophisticated reactions from theiraudiences-that is, they demand that we react to them as adults. Horror movies are not sophisticated, and because they are not, they allow us to regain our childish perspective on death-perhaps not such a bad thing. I'll not descend to the romantic oversimplification that suggests we see things more clearly as children, but I will suggest that children see more intensely. The greens of lawns are, to the child's eye, the color of lost emeralds in H. Rider Haggard's conception of King Solomon's Mines, the blue of the winter sky is as sharp as an icepick, the white of new snow is a dream-blast of energy. And black . . . is blacker. Much blacker indeed.

Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber's leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety . . . for a little while, anyway.

The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat (or the shape under the sheet, to use a metaphor from the introduction to my short story collection) . . . but not as an adult would look at it. Never mind the philosophical implications of death or the religious possibilities inherent in the idea of survival; the horror film suggests we just have a good close look at the physical artifact of death. Let us be children masquerading as pathologists. We will, perhaps, link hands like children in a circle, and sing the song we all know in our hearts: time is short, no one is really okay, life is quick and dead is dead.

Omega, the horror film sings in those children's voices. Here is the end. Yet the ultimate subtext that underlies all good horror films is, But not yet. Not this time . Because in the final sense, the horror movie is the celebration of those who feel they can examine death because it does not yet live in their own hearts.



CHAPTER VII

The Horror Movie as Junk Food

BY NOW, serious horror fans may be wondering uneasily if I have lost my wits-always assuming I had any to begin with. I've found a few (very few, it's true, but still a few) good things to say about The Amityville Horror , and have even mentioned Prophecy , generally agreed to be a terrible horror movie, in a light not exactly unfavorable.