Danse Macabre (31 page)

But never mind the plot; let's get on to the gimmick. At one point the Tingler got into a movie theater, killed the projectionist, and somehow shorted out the electricity. At that moment in the theater where you were watching the movie, all the lights went out and the screen went dark. Now as it happened, the only thing that could get the Tingler to let go of your spine once it had attached itself was a good loud scream, which changed the quality of the adrenaline it fed on. And at this point, a narrator on the soundtrack cried out, "The Tingler is now in this theater! It may be under
your
seat! So scream! Scream!
Scream for your lives!!
" The audience was of course happy to oblige, and in the next scene we see the Tingler fleeing for
its
life, vanquished for the time being by all those screaming people. *

Besides the movies which raise the scary concept of the dark in their titles, almost every other film listed in the little quiz I gave you uses that fear of the dark heavily. All but approximately eighteen minutes of John Carpenter's
Halloween
are set after nightfall. The major scare scenes in
Psycho
all take place after dark. In
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
, the final horrible sequence (my wife ran for the women's room, believing she was going to toss her cookies), where Tom Berenger stabs Diane Keaton to death, is shot in her dark apartment, with only a flickering strobe-light for illumination. In
Alien
, that constant motif of the dark barely needs mentioning. "In space, no one can hear you scream," the ad copy read; it also could have said, "In space, it is always one minute after midnight." Dawn never comes in that Lovecraftian gulf between the stars.

Hill House is always spooky, but it saves its really big effects—the face in the wall, the bulging doors, the booming noises, the thing that held Eleanor's hand (she thought it was Theo, but—gulp!—it wasn't)—for well past sunset. It was another Everest House editor, Bill Thompson (who has been my editor for about a thousand years; perhaps in a previous life I was
his
editor and now he's having his revenge), who reminded me of
The Night of the
Hunter
—and mea culpa that I should have needed reminding—and told me that one of the scenes of horror

*God, it's fun to think about some of the desperate gimmicks that have been used to sell bad horror movies—like those Dish Nights and Bank Nights used to lure people into the movie houses dring the thirties, they linger pleasantly in the memory. During one imported Italian turkey,
The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave
(nifty title!), the theaters advertised "bloodcorn," which was ordinary popcorn with a red food dye added. During
Jack
the Ripper
, a 1960 example of "Hammer horror" written by Jimmy Sangster, the black and white film turned to gruesome color during the last five minutes, when the Ripper, who has unwisely chosen to hide in an elevator shaft, is squished under a descending car.

which has remained with him over the years was the sight of Shelley Winters's hair floating in the water after the homicidal preacher has disposed of her in the river. It happens, naturally, after dark.

There is an interesting similarity between the scene in which the little girl kills her mother with a garden trowel in
Night of the Living Dead
and the climactic scene in
The Birds
, where Tippi Hedren is trapped in the attic and attacked by crows, sparrows, and gulls. Both of these scenes are classic examples of how dark and light can be used selectively. We will remember, most of us, from our own childhoods that a lot of light had the power to vanquish imagined evils and fears, but sometimes a little light only made them worse. It was the streetlight outside that made the branches of a nearby tree look like witch fingers, or it was the moonlight streaming in the window that made the jumble of toys pushed away in the closet take on the aspect of a crouching. Thing ready to shamble in and attack at any moment. During the matricide scene in
Night of the Living Dead
(which, like the shower scene in
Psycho
, seems almost endless to our shocked eyes the first time we see it), the little girl's arm strikes a hanging lightbulb, and the cellar becomes a nightmare dreamscape of shifting, swinging shadows—revealing, concealing, revealing again. During the attack of the birds in the attic, it is the big flashlight Ms. Hedren carries which provides this strobe effect (also mentioned in connection with
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
and used again—more irritatingly and pointlessly—during Marlon Brando's incoherent monologue near the end of
Apocalypse Now
) and also provides the scene with a pulse, a beat-at first the flashlight beam moves rapidly as Ms. Hedren uses the light to ward off the birds . . . but as she is gradually sapped of strength and lapses first into shock and then into unconsciousness, the light moves more and more slowly, sinking to the floor. Until there is only dark . . . and in that dark, the tenebrous, whirring flutter of many wings.

I'll not belabor the point by analyzing the "darkness quotient" in all these films, but will close this aspect of the discussion by pointing out that even in those few movies that achieve that feeling of "sunlit horror," there are often feary moments in the dark—Genevieve Bujold's climb up the service ladder and over the operating room in
Coma
takes place in the dark, as does Ed's (Jon Voight) climb up the bluff near the end of
Deliverance
. . . not to mention digging up the grave containing the jackal bones in
The Omen
, and Luana Anders's creepy discovery of the underwater "memorial" to the long-dead little sister in Francis Coppola's first feature film (made for AIP),
Dementia-13
.

Still, before leaving the subject entirely, here's a further sampling:
Night Must Fall, Night of
the Lepus, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, The Black Pit of Dr. M., The Black Sleep, Black
Sunday, The Black Room, Black Sabbath, Dark Eyes of London, The Dark, Dead of Night,
Night of Terror, Night of the Demon, Nightwing, Night of the Eagle . . .
Well, you get it. If there had been no such thing as darkness, the makers of horror movies would have needed to invent it.

10

I have held out mention of one of the films from the quiz, partially because it's the antithesis of many of those we've already discussed—it depends for its horror not upon darkness but upon light—and also because it leads naturally into a brief discussion of something else that the mythic, or "fairy-tale" horror movie will do to us if it can. We all understand about the "gross-out," which is fairly easy to achieve,* but it is only in the horror movies that the gross-out—that most childish of emotional impulses-sometimes achieves the level of art. Now, I can hear some of you say that there is nothing artistic about grossing somebody out—all you really have to do is chew your food and then hang your open mouth in your table-mate's face—but what about the works of Goya? Or Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and soup cans, for that matter?

Even the very worst horror movies sometimes achieve a moment or two of success on this level. Dennis Etchison, a fine writer in the genre, reminisced fondly with me on the phone one day not too long ago about a brief sequence in
The Giant Spider Invasion
where a lady drinks her morning hi-potency vitamin cocktail, all unknowing that a rather plump spider fell into the blender just before she turned it on. Yum yum. In the eminently forgettable film
Squirm
, there is that one unforgettable moment (for all two hundred of us who saw the picture) when the lady taking a shower looks up to see why the water stopped coming and sees a showerhead clogged with dangling nightcrawlers. In Dario Argento's
Suspiria
, a bunch of schoolgirls are subjected to a rain of maggots . . . while sitting at the dinner table, no less. All of it has nothing to do with the film's plot, but it is vaguely interesting, in a repulsive sort of way. In
Maniac
, directed by former soft-core filmmaker William Lustig, there is the incredible moment when the homicidal ding-dung (Joe Spinell) carefully scalps one of his victims;

*I can remember, as a kid, one of my fellow kids asking me to imagine sliding down a long, polished bannister which suddenly and without warning turns into a razorblade. Man, I was
days
getting over that. the camera does not even leer at this—it merely stares at it with a kind of dead, contemplative eye that makes the scene well-nigh impossible to watch.

As noted previously, good horror movies often operate most powerfully on this "wanna-look-at-my-chewed-up-food?" level—a primitive, childish level. I would call it the "YUCH factor" . . . sometimes also known as the "Oh my God, was that
gross!
" factor. This is the point at which most good liberal film critics and most good reactionary film critics part company on the subject of the horror film (see, for instance, the difference between Lynn Minton's review of
Dawn of the Dead
in
McCall
's—she left after two reels or so—and the cover story in the Arts section of
The Boston Phoenix
on the same film). Like punk rock music, the horror movie capable of delivering the good gross-out wallop finds its art in childish acts of anarchy—the moment in
The Omen
where the photographer is decapitated by a falling pane of glass is art of the most peculiar sort, and one cannot blame critics who find it easier to respond to Jane Fonda as a wholly unbelievable screen incarnation of Lillian Hellman in
Julia
than to stuff like this.

But the gross-out
is
art, and it is important that we have an understanding of this. Blood can fly everywhere and the audience will remain largely unimpressed. If, on the other hand, the audience has come to like and understand—or even just to appreciate—the characters they are watching as real people, if some artistic link has been formed there, blood can fly everywhere and the audience
cannot
remain unimpressed. I can't remember, for instance, anyone who walked out of Arthur Penn's
Bonnie and Clyde
or Peckinpah's
The Wild Bunch
who didn't look as if he or she had been hit on the head with a very large board. Yet people walk out of other Peckinpah films—
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Cross of Iron
—yawning. That vital linkage just never happens.

That's all fine, and there is little argument about the virtues of
Bonnie and Clyde
as art, but let us return momentarily to the pureed arachnid in
The Giant Spider Invasion
. This doesn't qualify as art in respect to that idea of linkage between audience and character at all. Believe me, we don't care very much about the lady who drinks the spider (or anyone else in this movie, for that matter), but all the same there is that moment of
frisson
, that one moment when the groping fingers of the filmmaker find a chink in our defenses, shoot through it, and squeeze down on one of those psychic pressure points. We identify with the woman who is unknowingly

drinking the spider on a level that has nothing to do with her character; we identify with her solely as a human being in a situation which has suddenly turned rotten-in other words, the gross-out serves as the means of a last-ditch sort of identification when the more conventional and noble means of characterization have failed. When she drinks the drink, we shudderand reaffirm our own humanity. *

Having said all that, let's turn to
X—The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
, one of the most interesting and offbeat little horror movies ever made, and one that ends with one of the most shuddery gross-out scenes ever filmed.

This 1963 movie was produced and directed by Roger Corman, who at that time was in the process of metamorphosing from the dull caterpillar who had produced such meatloaf movies as
Attack of the Crab Monsters
and
The Little Shop of Horror
(not even notable for what may have been Jack Nicholson's screen debut) and into the butterfly who was responsible for such interesting and rather beautiful horror films as
The Masque of the Red Death
and
The Terror
.
The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
marks the point where this strange two-step creature came out of its cocoon, I think. The screenplay was written by Ray Russell, the author of
Sardonicus
and a number of other novelsamong them the rather overripe
Incubus
and the much more successful
Princess Pamela
.

In
The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
, Ray Milland plays a scientist who develops eyedrops which enable him to see through walls, clothing, playing-cards, you name it; a kind of super-Murine, if you will. But once the process begins, there is no slowing it down. Milland's eyes begin to undergo a physical change, first becoming thickly bloodshot and then taking on a queer yellow cast. It is at this point that we begin to feel rather nervous—perhaps we sense the gross-out coming, and in a very real sense it's already arrived. Our eyes are one of those vulnerable chinks in the armor, one of those places where we can be had. Imagine, for instance, jamming your thumb into someone's wide-open eye, feeling the squish, seeing it sorta squirt out at you. Nasty, right? Immoral to even consider such a thing. But surely you remember that