Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory and Dementia-13 were made on similar nothing budgets; here the difference is Francis Coppola, who created an almost unbearable atmosphere of mounting menace in the latter, a black-and-white, rapidly shot suspense movie (which was made on location in Ireland, for tax purposes).

It is, perhaps, too easy to become enamoured of bad films as "camp"; the great success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show may point to nothing so much as the degeneration of the average moviegoer's critical capacity. It might be well to go back to the basics and remember that the difference between bad movies and good (or between bad art-or nonart-and good or great art) is talent, and the inventive utilization of that talent. The worst movie sends its own message, which is simply to stay away from other movies done by these people; if you have seen one film by Wes Craven, for instance, it is safe enough, I think, to skip the others. The genre labors under enough critical disapproval and outright dislike; one need not make a bad situation worse by underwriting films of porno-violence and those which want to plunder our pocketbooks and no more. And there is no need to do it, because even in the movies there is no real pricetag on quality . . . not when Brian De Palma found it possible to make a fine, scary film like Sisters for something like $800,000.

The reason for seeing bad movies, I suppose, is that you don't know it's going to be bad until you've seen it for yourself-as previously pointed out, most movie critics cannot be trusted here. Pauline Kael writes well, and Gene Shalit demonstrates a certain rather tiresome surface wit, but when these two-and other critics-go to see a horror movie, they don't know what they are seeing.* The true fan does; he or she has developed his or her basis for comparison over a long and sometimes painful span of time. The real movie freak is as much an appreciator as the regular visitor to art galleries or museums, and this basis for comparison is the bedrock upon whatever theses or point (s) of view he or she may develop must stand. For the horror fan, films such as Exorcist II form the setting for the occasional bright gemstone that is discovered in the darkness of a sleazy second-run moviehouse: Kirby McCauley's Rituals or my own low-budget favorite, Tourist Trap.

You don't appreciate cream unless you've drunk a lot of milk, and maybe you don't even appreciate milk unless you've drunk some that's gone sour. Bad films may sometimes be amusing, sometimes even successful, but their only real usefulness is to form that basis of comparison: to define positive values in terms of their own negative charm. They show us what to look for because it is missing in themselves.