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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 192 из 359The rest, even the climax, isreally only sizzle. And without that forty-five seconds, the film becomes nearly humdrum. In spite of its reputation, Psycho is an admirably restrained horror movie; Hitchcock even elected to shoot in black and white so that the blood in the shower scene would not look like blood at all, and one oft-told tale-almost surely apocryphal-is that Hitch toyed with shooting the movie in color-except for the shower scene, which would be in black and white.
*I would date the more overtly violent horror movies not from Psycho but from two nonhorror movies, shot in living, bloody color: Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde .
As we enter upon our discussion of horror on television, always keep this fact somewhere near to hand: television has really asked the impossible of its handful of horror programs-to terrify without really terrifying, to horrify without really horrifying, to sell audiences a lot of sizzle and no steak.
Earlier on I said I could rationalize if not excuse the fact of Ellison's TV and my own, and the rationalization goes back to what I've already said about really awful movies. Of course, TV is far too homogenized to cough up anything as charmingly awful as The Giant Spider Invasion with its fur-covered Volkswagen, but every now and then talent shines through and something good turns up . . . and even if the something is not out-and-out good, like Spielberg's Duel or John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Me , the viewer may find at least some cause for hope.
More child than adult in pursuit of his particular taste, hope springs eternal in the breast of the fantasy-horror fan. You tune in, knowing almost certainly that it's going to be bad yet hoping against hope-irrationally-that it is going to be good. Excellence occurs rarely, but every now and then a program will come along which at least bucks the odds enough to produce something interesting, such as the late1979 NBC-TV movie The Aliens Are Coming . Every now and then we are given some cause for hope.
And with that hope to guard us against the dreck like a magic talisman, let us go and make our visit. Just close your eyes while we dance through the cathode tube here; it has a bad habit of first hypnotizing and then anesthetizing.
Just ask Harlan.
2
Probably the best horror series ever put on TV was Thriller , which ran on NBC from September of 1960 until the summer of 1962-really only two seasons plus reruns.
*I would date the more overtly violent horror movies not from Psycho but from two nonhorror movies, shot in living, bloody color: Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde .
As we enter upon our discussion of horror on television, always keep this fact somewhere near to hand: television has really asked the impossible of its handful of horror programs-to terrify without really terrifying, to horrify without really horrifying, to sell audiences a lot of sizzle and no steak.
Earlier on I said I could rationalize if not excuse the fact of Ellison's TV and my own, and the rationalization goes back to what I've already said about really awful movies. Of course, TV is far too homogenized to cough up anything as charmingly awful as The Giant Spider Invasion with its fur-covered Volkswagen, but every now and then talent shines through and something good turns up . . . and even if the something is not out-and-out good, like Spielberg's Duel or John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Me , the viewer may find at least some cause for hope.
More child than adult in pursuit of his particular taste, hope springs eternal in the breast of the fantasy-horror fan. You tune in, knowing almost certainly that it's going to be bad yet hoping against hope-irrationally-that it is going to be good. Excellence occurs rarely, but every now and then a program will come along which at least bucks the odds enough to produce something interesting, such as the late1979 NBC-TV movie The Aliens Are Coming . Every now and then we are given some cause for hope.
And with that hope to guard us against the dreck like a magic talisman, let us go and make our visit. Just close your eyes while we dance through the cathode tube here; it has a bad habit of first hypnotizing and then anesthetizing.
Just ask Harlan.
2
Probably the best horror series ever put on TV was Thriller , which ran on NBC from September of 1960 until the summer of 1962-really only two seasons plus reruns.