JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 62 из 359What better news to those on the threshold of the sexual sphere, most of whom have been taught (ascertainly they have been, not in the least by the movies themselves) that successful sexual relationships are based upon man's domination and woman's submission? The joker in this deck is that most fourteen-year-old boys who have only recently discovered their own sexual potential feel capable of dominating only the centerfold in Playboy with total success. Sex makes young adolescent boys feel many things, but one of them, quite frankly, is scared. The horror film in general and the Vampire film in particular confirms the feeling. Yes, it says; sex is scary; sex is dangerous. And I can prove it to you right here and now. Siddown, kid. Grab your popcorn. I want to tell you a story . . . .
7
Enough of sexual portents, at least for the time being. Let's flip up the third card in this uneasy Tarot hand. Forget Michael Landon and AIP for the time being. Gaze, if you dare, on the face of the real Werewolf. His name, gentle reader, is Edward Hyde.
Robert Louis Stevenson conceived Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a shocker, pure and simple, a potboiler and, hopefully, a money machine. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the first draft and rewrote it, injecting a little moral uplift to please his spouse. Of the three books under discussion here, Jekyll and Hyde is the shortest (it runs about seventy pages in close type) and undoubtedly the most stylish. If Bram Stoker serves us great whacks of horror in Dracula, leaving us, after Harker's confrontation with Dracula in Transylvania, the staking of Lucy Westenra, the death of Renfield and the branding of Mina, feeling as if we have been hit square in the chops by a two-by-four, then Stevenson's brief and cautionary tale is like the quick, mortal stab of an icepick.
Like a police-court trial (to which the critic G. K. Chesterton compared it), we get the narrative through a series of different voices, and it is through the testimony of those involved that Dr. Jekyll's unhappy tale unfolds.
It begins as Jekyll's lawyer, Mr. Utterson, and a distant cousin, one Richard Enfield, stroll through London one morning. As they pass "a certain sinister block of building" with "a blind forehead of discoloured wall" and a door which is "blistered and distained," Enfield is moved to tell Utterson a story about that particular door. He was on the scene one early morning, he says, when he observed two people approaching the corner from opposite directions-a man and a little girl. They collide. The girl is knocked flat and the man-Edward Hyde-simply goes on walking, trampling the screaming child underfoot.
7
Enough of sexual portents, at least for the time being. Let's flip up the third card in this uneasy Tarot hand. Forget Michael Landon and AIP for the time being. Gaze, if you dare, on the face of the real Werewolf. His name, gentle reader, is Edward Hyde.
Robert Louis Stevenson conceived Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a shocker, pure and simple, a potboiler and, hopefully, a money machine. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the first draft and rewrote it, injecting a little moral uplift to please his spouse. Of the three books under discussion here, Jekyll and Hyde is the shortest (it runs about seventy pages in close type) and undoubtedly the most stylish. If Bram Stoker serves us great whacks of horror in Dracula, leaving us, after Harker's confrontation with Dracula in Transylvania, the staking of Lucy Westenra, the death of Renfield and the branding of Mina, feeling as if we have been hit square in the chops by a two-by-four, then Stevenson's brief and cautionary tale is like the quick, mortal stab of an icepick.
Like a police-court trial (to which the critic G. K. Chesterton compared it), we get the narrative through a series of different voices, and it is through the testimony of those involved that Dr. Jekyll's unhappy tale unfolds.
It begins as Jekyll's lawyer, Mr. Utterson, and a distant cousin, one Richard Enfield, stroll through London one morning. As they pass "a certain sinister block of building" with "a blind forehead of discoloured wall" and a door which is "blistered and distained," Enfield is moved to tell Utterson a story about that particular door. He was on the scene one early morning, he says, when he observed two people approaching the corner from opposite directions-a man and a little girl. They collide. The girl is knocked flat and the man-Edward Hyde-simply goes on walking, trampling the screaming child underfoot.