Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Most parents think they understand this openness better than, in many cases, they actually do, and try to keep their children away from anything that smacks too much of horror and terror-"Rated PG (or G in the case of The Andromeda Strain ), but may be too intense for younger children," the ads for Jaws read-believing, I suppose, that to allow their kids to go to a real horror movie would be tantamount to rolling a live hand grenade into a nursery school.

But one of the odd Doppler effects that seems to occur during the selective forgetting that is so much a part of "growing up" is the fact that almost everything has a scare potential. for the child under eight. Children are literally afraid of their own shadows at the right time and place.

There is the story of the four-year-old who refused to go to bed at night without a light on in his closet. His parents at last discovered he was frightened of a creature he had heard his father speak of often; this creature, which had grown large and dreadful in the child's imagination, was the "twi-night double-header.” Seen in this light, even Disney movies are minefields of terror, and the animated caroons, which will apparently be released and rereleased even unto the end of the world, * are usually the worst offenders. There are adults today, who, when questioned, will tell you that the most frightening thing they saw at the movies as children was Bambi's father shot by the hunter, or Bambi and his mother running before the forest fire. Other Disney memories which are right up there with the batrachian horror inhabiting the Black Lagoon include the marching brooms that have gone totally out of control in Fantasia (and for the small child, the real horror inherent in the situation is probably buried in the implied father-son relationship between Mickey Mouse and the old sorcerer; those brooms are making a terrible mess, and when the sorcerer/ father gets home, there may be PUNISHMENT . . . . This sequence might well send the child of strict parents into an ecstasy of terror) ; the night on Bald Mountain from the same film; the witches in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty , one with her enticingly red poisoned apple (and what small child is not taught early to fear the idea of POISON?), the other with her deadly spinning wheel; this holds all the way up to the relatively innocuous One Hundred and One Dalmatians , which features the logical granddaughter of those Disney witches from the thirties and forties-the evil Cruella DeVille, with her scrawny, nasty face, her loud voice (grownups sometimes forget how terrified young children are of loud voices, which come from the giants of their world, the adults), and her plan to kill all the dalmatian puppies (read "children," if you're a little person) and turn them into dogskin coats.

Yet it is the parents, of course, who continue to underwrite the Disney procedure of release and rerelease, often discovering goosebumps on their own arms as they rediscover what terrified them as children . . .