Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Seeing Landon as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development-like back to the Alley Oop stage-Bissell uses hypnosis to regress Landon totally, in effect deliberately making the problem worse instead of tryingto cure it. This plot twist seems cribbed from the then-current and fabulously successful Search for Bridey Murphy , the story (purportedly factual but later declared a hoax) of a woman who, under hypnosis, revealed memories of a previous life.

Bissell's experiments succeed beyond his wildest dreams-or worst nightmares-and Landon becomes a ravening werewolf. For a 1957 high school or junior high school kid watching the transformation for the first time, this was baaad shit. Landon becomes the fascinating embodiment of everything you're not supposed to do if you want to be good . . . if you want to get along in school, join the National Honor Society, get your letter, and be accepted by a good college where you can join a frat and drink beer like your old man did. Landon grows hair all over his face, produces long fangs, and begins to drool a substance that looks suspiciously like Burma-Shave. He peeks at a girl doing exercises on the balance beam all by herself in the gymnasium, and one imagines him smelling like a randy polecat who just rolled in a nice fresh pile of coyote shit. No button-down Ivy League shirt with the fruit loop on the back here; here's a fellow who doesn't give a fart in a high wind for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. He has gone absolutely, not apeshit, but wolfshit.

Undoubtedly part of the reason for the movie's meteoric takeoff at the box office had to do with the liberating, vicarious feelings the movie allowed these war babies who wanted to be good. When Landon attacks the pretty gymnast in the leotard, he is making a social statement on behalf of those watching. But those watching also react in horror, because on the psychological level, the picture is a series of object lessons on how to get along-everything from "shave before you go to school" to "never exercise in a deserted gym.” After all, there are beasts everywhere.

6

If I Was a Teenage Werewolf is, psychologically, that old dream of having your pants fall down when you stand up during homeroom period to salute the flag, taken to its most nightmarish extreme-the ultimate hirsute outsider menacing the peer groups at Our Town High-then I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is a sick parable of total glandular breakdown. It is a movie for every fifteen-year-old who ever stood in front of her or his mirror in the morning looking nervously at the fresh pimple that surfaced in the night and realizing glumly that even StriDex Medicated Pads weren't going to solve the whole problem no matter what Dick Clark said.

I keep coming back to pimples, you may say. You are right.