Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

But as there turned out to be fewer Communists and fifth columnists than was at first suspected, the Shadow of the Dread JD also proved to be rather overrated. In the last analysis, the war babies wanted what their parents wanted. They wanted driver's licences; jobs in the cities and homes in the suburbs; wives and husbands; insurance; underarm protection; kids; time payments which they would meet; clean streets; clear consciences. They wanted to be good. Years and miles between Senior Glee Club and the SLA; years and miles between Our Town and the Mekong Delta; and the only known fuzz-tone guitar track in existence was a technical mistake on a Marty Robbins country and western record. They adhered happily to school dress codes. Long sideburns were laughed at in most quarters, and a guy wearing stacked heels or bikini briefs would have been hounded unmercifully as a faggot. Eddie Cochran could sing about "those crazy pink pegged slacks" and kids would buy the records . . , but not the pants themselves. For the war babies, the norm was blessed.

They wanted to be good. They watched for the mutant.

Only one aberration per picture was allowed in the early youthcult horror films of the fifties, one mutation. It was the parents who would never believe. It was the kids-who wanted to be good-who stood watch (most often from those lonely bluffs which overlook Our Town from the ends of lovers' lanes); it was the kids who stamped the mutant out, once more making the world safe for country club dances and Hamilton Beach blenders.

Horrors in the fifties, for the war babies, were mostly-except maybe for the psychic strain of waiting for The Bomb to fall-mundane horrors. And perhaps a conception of real horror is impossible for people whose bellies are full. The horrors the war babies felt were scale-model horrors, and in that light the movies that really caused AIP to take off, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein , become mildly interesting.

In Werewolf , Michael Landon plays an attractive but moody high school student with a quick temper. He's basically a good kid, but he's involved in one fight after another ( like David Banner, the Hulk's alter-ego on TV, the Landon character actually provokes none of these fights) until it looks as though he will be suspended from school. He goes to see a psychiatrist ( Whit Bissell, who also plays the mad descendant of Victor Frankenstein in Teenage Frankenstein ) who turns out to be totally evil.