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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 197 из 359Purists will scream nonsense and blasphemy; that not even Thriller could compete with the immortal Twilight Zone . That The Twilight Zone is damn near immortal is something I will not argue with; in big city markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco it seems to run eternally, hallelujah, world without end, sandwiched into its own twilight zone just after the late evening news and just before the PTL Club. Perhaps only such ancient sitcoms as I Love Lucy and My Little Margie can compete with The Twilight Zone for that sort of fuzzy, black-and-white, vampiristic life which syndication allows.
But, with a dozen or so notable exceptions, The Twilight Zone had very little to do with the sort of horror fiction we're dealing with here. It was a program which specialized in moral tales, many of them smarmy (such as the one where Barry Morse buys a player piano which causes his guests to reveal their true selves; the piano ends up causing him to admit that he is a selfish little sonofabitch) ; many others well meant but simplistic and almost painfully corny (as in the one where the sun does not rise because the atmosphere of human injustice has just gotten too black, folks, too black-the radio announcer gravely reports that things are particularly black over Dallas and Selma, Alabama . . . . Get it, guys? Get it?). Other episodes of The Twilight Zone were really little more than sentimental riffs on old supernatural themes: Art Carney discovers he really is Santa Claus after all; the tired commuter (James Daly) finds peace in an idyllic, bucolic little town called Willoughby.
The Twilight Zone did occasionally strike notes of horror-the best of these vibrate in the back teeth years later-and we will discuss some of these before we finish with the Magic Box.
But for sheer hard-edged clarity of concept, The Twilight Zone really could not match The Outer Limits , which ran from September of 1963 until January of 1965. The program's executive producer was Leslie Stevens; its line-producer was Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Psycho and an eerie little exercise in terror called Eye of the Cat a year or two later. Stefano's vision of what the program was about was an extraordinarily clear one. Each episode, he insisted, had to have a "bear"-some sort of monstrous creature that would make an appearance before the station break at the half-hour. In some cases the bear was not harmful in and of itself, but you could bet that before the end of the show, some outside force-usually a villainous mad scientist-would cause it to go on a rampage.
But, with a dozen or so notable exceptions, The Twilight Zone had very little to do with the sort of horror fiction we're dealing with here. It was a program which specialized in moral tales, many of them smarmy (such as the one where Barry Morse buys a player piano which causes his guests to reveal their true selves; the piano ends up causing him to admit that he is a selfish little sonofabitch) ; many others well meant but simplistic and almost painfully corny (as in the one where the sun does not rise because the atmosphere of human injustice has just gotten too black, folks, too black-the radio announcer gravely reports that things are particularly black over Dallas and Selma, Alabama . . . . Get it, guys? Get it?). Other episodes of The Twilight Zone were really little more than sentimental riffs on old supernatural themes: Art Carney discovers he really is Santa Claus after all; the tired commuter (James Daly) finds peace in an idyllic, bucolic little town called Willoughby.
The Twilight Zone did occasionally strike notes of horror-the best of these vibrate in the back teeth years later-and we will discuss some of these before we finish with the Magic Box.
But for sheer hard-edged clarity of concept, The Twilight Zone really could not match The Outer Limits , which ran from September of 1963 until January of 1965. The program's executive producer was Leslie Stevens; its line-producer was Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Psycho and an eerie little exercise in terror called Eye of the Cat a year or two later. Stefano's vision of what the program was about was an extraordinarily clear one. Each episode, he insisted, had to have a "bear"-some sort of monstrous creature that would make an appearance before the station break at the half-hour. In some cases the bear was not harmful in and of itself, but you could bet that before the end of the show, some outside force-usually a villainous mad scientist-would cause it to go on a rampage.