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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 232 из 359The House Next Door is a frame story, the sort of thing one likes to speculate, that Chaucer might have done if hehad written for Weird Tales . It is a form of horror tale that the movies have tried more often than novelists or short-story writers. In fact, the movemakers seem to have tried a good many times to put a dictum that critics of the genre have handed down for years into actual practice: that the horror tale works best when it is brief and comes directly to the point (most people associate that dictum with Poe, but Coleridge stated it before him, and in fact Poe was offering a guideline for the writer of all short stories, not just those dealing with the supernatural and the occult). Interestingly enough, the dictum seems to fail in actual practice. Most horror movies employing the frame-story device to tell three or four short tales work unevenly or not at all. *
*But there are exceptions to every rule, obviously. While two adaptations of old EC-comics horror yarns, Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror , are miserable failures, Robert Bloch did two "frame-story" films for the British Amicus production company, The House that Dripped Blood and Asylum . The stories in both of these were adapted from Bloch's own short stories, and both are good fun. Of course, the champ is still Dead of Night , the 1946 British film starring Michael Redgrave and directed by Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Basil Dearden.
Does The House Next Door work? I think it does. It doesn't work as well as it could work, and the reader is left with what may be the wrong set of ambiguities about Walter and Colquitt Kennedy, but still, it works.
"[ The House Next Door ] came about, I suspect," Ms. Siddons writes, "because I have always been fond of the horror or occult genre, or whatever you may call it. It seemed to me that most of my favorite writers had tackled the ghost story at one time or another: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dickens, et al., and I have enjoyed the more contemporary writers in the genre as much as I have the old classicists. Shirley Jackson's Hill House is as nearly perfect a haunted-house tale as I have ever read . . . and {my favorite of all time, I think is} M. F. K. Fisher's enchanting little The Lost, Strayed, Stolen .
"The point would seem to be that, as every foreword to every anthology of horror stories you ever read assures you, the ghost story is timeless; it cuts across all lines of culture and class and all levels of sophistication; it communicates immediately somewhere in the vicinity of the base of your spine, and touches that crouching thing in all of us that still peers in abject terror past the fire into the dark beyond the cave door.
*But there are exceptions to every rule, obviously. While two adaptations of old EC-comics horror yarns, Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror , are miserable failures, Robert Bloch did two "frame-story" films for the British Amicus production company, The House that Dripped Blood and Asylum . The stories in both of these were adapted from Bloch's own short stories, and both are good fun. Of course, the champ is still Dead of Night , the 1946 British film starring Michael Redgrave and directed by Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Basil Dearden.
Does The House Next Door work? I think it does. It doesn't work as well as it could work, and the reader is left with what may be the wrong set of ambiguities about Walter and Colquitt Kennedy, but still, it works.
"[ The House Next Door ] came about, I suspect," Ms. Siddons writes, "because I have always been fond of the horror or occult genre, or whatever you may call it. It seemed to me that most of my favorite writers had tackled the ghost story at one time or another: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dickens, et al., and I have enjoyed the more contemporary writers in the genre as much as I have the old classicists. Shirley Jackson's Hill House is as nearly perfect a haunted-house tale as I have ever read . . . and {my favorite of all time, I think is} M. F. K. Fisher's enchanting little The Lost, Strayed, Stolen .
"The point would seem to be that, as every foreword to every anthology of horror stories you ever read assures you, the ghost story is timeless; it cuts across all lines of culture and class and all levels of sophistication; it communicates immediately somewhere in the vicinity of the base of your spine, and touches that crouching thing in all of us that still peers in abject terror past the fire into the dark beyond the cave door.