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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 7 из 359If some kid has had a Black Cat firecracker in his pocket since the last Fourth of July, he will take this opportunity to remove it, pass it around to his friends for their approval and admiration, and then light it and toss it over the balcony.
None of these things happened on that October day. The film hadn't broken; the projector had simply been turned off. And then the houselights began to come up, a totally unheard-of occurrence.
We sat there looking around, blinking in the light like moles.
The manager walked out into the middle of the stage and held his hands up-quite unnecessarily-for quiet. Six years later, in 1963, I flashed on that moment when, one Friday afternoon in November, the guy who drove us home from school told us that the President had been shot in Dallas.
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If there is any truth or worth to the danse macabre, it is simply that novels, movies, TV and radio programs-even the comic books-dealing with horror always do their work on two levels.
On top is the "gross-out" level-when Regan vomits in the priest's face or masturbates with a crucifix in The Exorcist , or when the rawlooking, terribly inside-out monster in John Frankenheimer's Prophecy crunches off the helicopter pilot's head like a Tootsie-Pop. The gross-out can be done with varying degrees of artistic finesse, but it's always there.
But on another, more potent level, the work of horror really is a dance-a moving, rhythmic search.
And what it's looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level. The work of horror is not interested in the civilized furniture of our lives. Such a work dances through these rooms which we have fitted out one piece at a time, each piece expressing-we hope!-our socially acceptable and pleasantly enlightened character. It is in search of another place, a room which may sometimes resemble the secret den of a Victorian gentleman, sometimes the torture chamber of the Spanish Inquisition . . . but perhaps most frequently and most successfully, the simple and brutally plain hole of a Stone Age cave-dweller.
Is horror art? On this second level, the work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art: it is looking for what I would call phobic pressure points. The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of-as both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out, The Stranger makes us nervous . . . but we love to try on his face in secret.
Do spiders give you the horrors? Fine. We'll have spiders, as in Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man , and Kingdom of the, Spiders .
None of these things happened on that October day. The film hadn't broken; the projector had simply been turned off. And then the houselights began to come up, a totally unheard-of occurrence.
We sat there looking around, blinking in the light like moles.
The manager walked out into the middle of the stage and held his hands up-quite unnecessarily-for quiet. Six years later, in 1963, I flashed on that moment when, one Friday afternoon in November, the guy who drove us home from school told us that the President had been shot in Dallas.
2
If there is any truth or worth to the danse macabre, it is simply that novels, movies, TV and radio programs-even the comic books-dealing with horror always do their work on two levels.
On top is the "gross-out" level-when Regan vomits in the priest's face or masturbates with a crucifix in The Exorcist , or when the rawlooking, terribly inside-out monster in John Frankenheimer's Prophecy crunches off the helicopter pilot's head like a Tootsie-Pop. The gross-out can be done with varying degrees of artistic finesse, but it's always there.
But on another, more potent level, the work of horror really is a dance-a moving, rhythmic search.
And what it's looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level. The work of horror is not interested in the civilized furniture of our lives. Such a work dances through these rooms which we have fitted out one piece at a time, each piece expressing-we hope!-our socially acceptable and pleasantly enlightened character. It is in search of another place, a room which may sometimes resemble the secret den of a Victorian gentleman, sometimes the torture chamber of the Spanish Inquisition . . . but perhaps most frequently and most successfully, the simple and brutally plain hole of a Stone Age cave-dweller.
Is horror art? On this second level, the work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art: it is looking for what I would call phobic pressure points. The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of-as both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out, The Stranger makes us nervous . . . but we love to try on his face in secret.
Do spiders give you the horrors? Fine. We'll have spiders, as in Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man , and Kingdom of the, Spiders .