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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 21 из 359But none of these sf conventions would turn the story of The Hook into science fiction. It's a flesh-crawler pure and simple, and in its direct point-to-point progress, its brevity, and its use of story only as a means to get to the effect in the last sentence, it is remarkably similar to John Carpenter's Halloween ( "It was the boogeyman," Jamie Lee Curtis says at the end of that film. "Yes," Donald Pleasance agrees softly.
"As a matter of fact, it was.") or The Fog . Both of these movies are extremely frightening, but the story of The Hook was there first.
The point seems to be that horror simply is , exclusive of definition or rationalization. In a Newsweek cover story titled "Hollywood's Scary Summer" (referring to the summer of 1979-the summer of Phantasm, Prophecy, Dawn o f the Dead, Nightwing, and Alien ) the writer said that, during Alien's big, scary scenes, the audience seemed more apt to moan with revulsion than to scream with terror. The truth of this can't be argued; it's bad enough to see a gelatinous crab-thing spread over some fellow's face, but the infamous "chest-burster" scene which follows is a quantum leap in grue . . . and it happens at the dinner table, yet. It's enough to put you off your popcorn.
The closest I want to come to definition or rationalization is to suggest that the genre exists on three more or less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it. The finest emotion is terror, that emotion which is called up in the tale of The Hook and also in that hoary old classic, "The Monkey's Paw." We actually see nothing outright nasty in either story; in one we have the hook and in the other there is the paw, which, dried and mummified, can surely be no worse than those plastic dogturds on sale at any novelty shop. It's what the mind sees that makes these stories such quintessential tales of terror. It is the unpleasant speculation called to mind when the knocking on the door begins in the latter story and the grief-stricken old woman rushes to answer it. Nothing is there but the wind when she finally throws the door open . . . but what, the mind wonders, might have been there if her husband had been a little slower on the draw with that third wish?
As a kid, I cut my teeth on William B. Gainer's horror comics- Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Vault -plus all the Gaines imitators (but like a good Elvis record, the Gaines magazines were often imitated, never duplicated).
"As a matter of fact, it was.") or The Fog . Both of these movies are extremely frightening, but the story of The Hook was there first.
The point seems to be that horror simply is , exclusive of definition or rationalization. In a Newsweek cover story titled "Hollywood's Scary Summer" (referring to the summer of 1979-the summer of Phantasm, Prophecy, Dawn o f the Dead, Nightwing, and Alien ) the writer said that, during Alien's big, scary scenes, the audience seemed more apt to moan with revulsion than to scream with terror. The truth of this can't be argued; it's bad enough to see a gelatinous crab-thing spread over some fellow's face, but the infamous "chest-burster" scene which follows is a quantum leap in grue . . . and it happens at the dinner table, yet. It's enough to put you off your popcorn.
The closest I want to come to definition or rationalization is to suggest that the genre exists on three more or less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it. The finest emotion is terror, that emotion which is called up in the tale of The Hook and also in that hoary old classic, "The Monkey's Paw." We actually see nothing outright nasty in either story; in one we have the hook and in the other there is the paw, which, dried and mummified, can surely be no worse than those plastic dogturds on sale at any novelty shop. It's what the mind sees that makes these stories such quintessential tales of terror. It is the unpleasant speculation called to mind when the knocking on the door begins in the latter story and the grief-stricken old woman rushes to answer it. Nothing is there but the wind when she finally throws the door open . . . but what, the mind wonders, might have been there if her husband had been a little slower on the draw with that third wish?
As a kid, I cut my teeth on William B. Gainer's horror comics- Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Vault -plus all the Gaines imitators (but like a good Elvis record, the Gaines magazines were often imitated, never duplicated).