JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 69 из 359Certainly Janet Leigh sees no reason to fear him in the closing moments of her life.
But Norman is the Werewolf. Only instead of growing hair, his change is effected by donning his dead mother's panties, slip, and dress-and hacking up the guests instead of biting them.
As Dr. Jekyll keeps secret rooms in Soho and has his own "Mr. Hyde door" at home, so we discover that Norman has his own secret place where his two personae meet: in this case it is a loophole behind a picture, which he uses to watch the ladies undress.
Psycho is effective because it brings the Werewolf myth home. It is not outside evil, predestination; the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. We know that Norman is only outwardly the Werewolf when he's wearing Mom's duds and speaking in Mom's voice; but we have the uneasy suspicion that inside he's the Werewolf all the time.
Psycho spawned a score of imitators, most of them immediately recognizable by their titles, which suggested more than a few toys in the attic: Straitjacket (Joan Crawford does the ax-wielding honors in this gritty if somewhat overplotted film, made from a Bloch script), Dementia-13 (Francis Coppola's first feature film), Nightmare (a Hammer picture), Repulsion.
These are only a few of the children of Hitchcock's film, which was adapted for the screen by Joseph Stefano. Stefano went on to pilot television's Outer Limits, which we will get to eventually.
10
It would be ridiculous for me to suggest that all modern horror fiction, both in print and on celluloid, can be boiled down to these three archetypes. It would simplify things enormously, but it would be a false simplification, even with the Tarot card of the Ghost thrown in for good measure. It doesn't end with the Thing, the Vampire, and the Werewolf; there are other bogeys out there in the shadows as well. But these three account for a large bloc of modern horror fiction. We can see the blurry shape of the Thing Without a Name in Howard Hawks's The Thing (it turns out-rather disappointingly, I always thought-to be big Jim Arness tricked out as a vegetable from space) ; the Werewolf raises its shaggy head as Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage and as Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; and we can see the shadow of the Vampire in such diverse films as Them! and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead . . . although in these latter two, the symbolic act of blood-drinking has been replaced by the act of cannibalism itself as the dead chomp into the flesh of their living victims.*
*Romero's Martin is a classy and visually sensuous rendering of the Vampire myth, and one of the few examples of
But Norman is the Werewolf. Only instead of growing hair, his change is effected by donning his dead mother's panties, slip, and dress-and hacking up the guests instead of biting them.
As Dr. Jekyll keeps secret rooms in Soho and has his own "Mr. Hyde door" at home, so we discover that Norman has his own secret place where his two personae meet: in this case it is a loophole behind a picture, which he uses to watch the ladies undress.
Psycho is effective because it brings the Werewolf myth home. It is not outside evil, predestination; the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. We know that Norman is only outwardly the Werewolf when he's wearing Mom's duds and speaking in Mom's voice; but we have the uneasy suspicion that inside he's the Werewolf all the time.
Psycho spawned a score of imitators, most of them immediately recognizable by their titles, which suggested more than a few toys in the attic: Straitjacket (Joan Crawford does the ax-wielding honors in this gritty if somewhat overplotted film, made from a Bloch script), Dementia-13 (Francis Coppola's first feature film), Nightmare (a Hammer picture), Repulsion.
These are only a few of the children of Hitchcock's film, which was adapted for the screen by Joseph Stefano. Stefano went on to pilot television's Outer Limits, which we will get to eventually.
10
It would be ridiculous for me to suggest that all modern horror fiction, both in print and on celluloid, can be boiled down to these three archetypes. It would simplify things enormously, but it would be a false simplification, even with the Tarot card of the Ghost thrown in for good measure. It doesn't end with the Thing, the Vampire, and the Werewolf; there are other bogeys out there in the shadows as well. But these three account for a large bloc of modern horror fiction. We can see the blurry shape of the Thing Without a Name in Howard Hawks's The Thing (it turns out-rather disappointingly, I always thought-to be big Jim Arness tricked out as a vegetable from space) ; the Werewolf raises its shaggy head as Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage and as Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; and we can see the shadow of the Vampire in such diverse films as Them! and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead . . . although in these latter two, the symbolic act of blood-drinking has been replaced by the act of cannibalism itself as the dead chomp into the flesh of their living victims.*
*Romero's Martin is a classy and visually sensuous rendering of the Vampire myth, and one of the few examples of