Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Although they came along at the same time rock and roll broke the race barrier, and although they appealed to the same fledgling hoppers, it's interesting to notice the sort of things that are altogether absent . . . at least in terms of "real" monstrosity.

We've noted already that the AIP pictures, and those of the other independent film companies that began to imitate AIP, gave the movie industry a much-needed shot in the arm during the ho-hum fifties. They gave millions of young viewers something they couldn't get at home on TV, and it nave them a place where they could go and make out in relative comfort. And it was the "indies," as Variety calls them, that gave a whole generation of war babies an insatiable Jones for the movies, and perhaps prepared the way for the success of such disparate movies as Easy Rider, Jaws, Rocky, The Godfather , and The Exorcist .

But where are the monsters?

Oh, we've got fake ones by the score: saucer-men, giant leeches, werewolves, mole people ( in a Universal picture), and dozens more. But what AIP didn't show as they tested these interesting new waters was anything that smacked of real horror . . . at least as those war babies understood the term emotionally . That is an important qualification, and I hope you'll come to agree with me that it warrants its italics.

These were-we were-children who knew about the psychic distress that came with The Bomb, but who had never known any real physical want or deprivation. None of the kids who went to these movies were starving or dying of internal parasites. A few had lost fathers or uncles in the war. Not many.

And in the movies themselves, there were no fat kids; no kids with warts or tics; no kids with pimples; no kids picking their noses and then wiping it on the sun visors of their hot rods; no kids with sexual problems; no kids with any visible physical deformity (not even such a minor one as vision that had been corrected by glasses-all the kids in the AIP horror and beach pictures had 20/20 vision).

There might be an endearingly wacky teenager on view-of the sort often played by Nick Adams-a kid who was a bit shorter or did daring, kooky things such as wearing his hat backwards like a baseball catcher (and who had a name like Weirdo or Scooter or Crazy), but that was as far as it ever went.

The setting for most of these films was small-town America, the scene the audience could best identify with . . .