JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 242 из 359Critics of Stanley Kubrick's film version would do well to remember that it was these elements, consciously or unconsciously, which Kubrick chose to accentuate.
This may sound like a lot of academic bullshit, but it's really not. The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternative might be. Like the scariest bad dreams, the good creepshow often does its work by turning the status quo inside out-what scares us the most about Mr. Hyde, perhaps, is the fact that he was a part of Dr. Jekyll all along. And in an American society that has become more and more entranced by the cult of me-ism, it should not be surprising that the horror genre has turned more and more to trying to show us a reflection we won't like-our own.
While looking at The House Next Door , we find we can lay the Tarot card of the Ghost aside-there are no ghosts per se in the house which is owned by the Harralsons, the Sheehans, and the Greenes. The card which seems to fit better here is the card that always seems to come up when we deal with narcissism: the card of the Werewolf. More traditional werewolf stories almost always-knowingly or unknowingly-mimic the classic story of Narcissus; in the Lon Chaney, Jr., version, we observe Chaney observing himself in the Ever-Popular Pool of Water as he undergoes the transformation back from monster to Larry Talbot. We see the exact same scene occur in the original TV film of The Incredible Hulk as the Hulk returns to his David Banner form. In Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf , the scene is repeated yet again, only this time it's Oliver Reed who's watching himself undergo the change.
The real problem with the house next door, we see, is that it changes people into the very things they most abhor. The real secret of the house next door is that it is a dressing-room for werewolves.
"Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic," Park sums up, "in one form or another, weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality." This sums up Colquitt Kennedy, I think; and it also sums up Eleanor, the protagonist of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House ; and Eleanor Vance is surely the finest character to come out of this new American gothic tradition.
"The inspiration to write a ghost story," Lenemaja Friedman writes in her study of Jackson's work, "came to Miss Jackson . . .
This may sound like a lot of academic bullshit, but it's really not. The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternative might be. Like the scariest bad dreams, the good creepshow often does its work by turning the status quo inside out-what scares us the most about Mr. Hyde, perhaps, is the fact that he was a part of Dr. Jekyll all along. And in an American society that has become more and more entranced by the cult of me-ism, it should not be surprising that the horror genre has turned more and more to trying to show us a reflection we won't like-our own.
While looking at The House Next Door , we find we can lay the Tarot card of the Ghost aside-there are no ghosts per se in the house which is owned by the Harralsons, the Sheehans, and the Greenes. The card which seems to fit better here is the card that always seems to come up when we deal with narcissism: the card of the Werewolf. More traditional werewolf stories almost always-knowingly or unknowingly-mimic the classic story of Narcissus; in the Lon Chaney, Jr., version, we observe Chaney observing himself in the Ever-Popular Pool of Water as he undergoes the transformation back from monster to Larry Talbot. We see the exact same scene occur in the original TV film of The Incredible Hulk as the Hulk returns to his David Banner form. In Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf , the scene is repeated yet again, only this time it's Oliver Reed who's watching himself undergo the change.
The real problem with the house next door, we see, is that it changes people into the very things they most abhor. The real secret of the house next door is that it is a dressing-room for werewolves.
"Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic," Park sums up, "in one form or another, weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality." This sums up Colquitt Kennedy, I think; and it also sums up Eleanor, the protagonist of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House ; and Eleanor Vance is surely the finest character to come out of this new American gothic tradition.
"The inspiration to write a ghost story," Lenemaja Friedman writes in her study of Jackson's work, "came to Miss Jackson . . .