Why We Crave Horror Movies

by the author of "Carrie" and "The Shining"

If you're a Genuine fan of horror films, you develop the same sort of sophistication that a follower o£ the ballet develops; you get a feeling for the depth and the texture of the genre. Your ear develops with your eye, and the sound of quality always comes through to the keen ear. There is fine Waterford crystal that rings delicately when struck, no matter how thick and chunky it may look; and then there are Flintstone jelly glasses. You can drink your Dom Perignon out of either one, but, friends, there is a difference.

The difference here is between horror for horror's sake and art. There is art in a horror film when the audience gets more than it gives. Not when our fears are milked just to drive us crazy but when an actual liaison is found between our fantasy fears and our real fears.

Few horror movies are conceived with art in mind; most are conceived for profit. The art is not consciously created but, rather, is thrown off, as an atomic pile throws off radiation. There are films that skate right up to the border where art ceases to be thrown off and exploitation begins, and those films are often the field's most striking successes.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of those. I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country. I would not do so for The Gory Ones, a 1972 film in which we are treated to the charming sight of a woman being cut open with a two-handed bucksaw; the camera lingers as her intestines spew out onto the floor. The difference is more than the difference between a chain saw and a bucksaw; it is something like 70,000,000 light-years. The Chainsaw Massacre is done with taste and conscience. The Gory Ones is the work of morons with cameras.

If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and the unreal. In many cases--particularly in the Fifties and then again in the early Seventies--the fears expressed are sociopolitical in nature, a fact that gives such disparate pictures as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and William Friedkin's The Exorcist a crazily convincing documentary feel. When the horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hats--the B picture as tabloid editorial--they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things that trouble the night thoughts of a whole society.

But horror movies don't always wear a hat that identifies them as disguised comments on the social or political scene (as David Cronenberg's The Brood comments on the disintegration of the generational family, or as his They Came from Within deals with the more cannibalistic side effects of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck"). More often the horror movie points farther inward, looking for those deep-seated personal fears, those pressure points we all must cope with. This adds an element of universality to the proceedings and may produce an even truer sort of art.

This second kind of horror film has more in common with the Brothers Grimm than with the op-ed pages of tabloid newspapers. It is the B picture as fairy tale. It doesn't want to score political points but, rather, to scare the hell out of us by crossing certain taboo lines.

So if my idea about art is correct (it giveth more than it receiveth), this sort of film is of value to the audience by helping it better understand what those taboos and fears are, and why it feels so uneasy about them.

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I think we'd all agree that one of the great fears with which all of us must deal on a purely personal level is the fear of dying; without good old death to fall back on, the horror movies would be in bad shape.

A corollary to this is that there are "good" deaths and "bad" deaths; most of us would like to die peacefully in our beds at the age of 80 (preferably after a good meal, a bottle of really fine vino and a really super lay), but very few of us are interested in finding out how it might feel to get slowly crushed under an automobile lift while crankcase oil drips slowly onto our foreheads.

Lots of horror films derive their best effects from this fear of the bad death (as in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, in which Phibes dispatches his victims one at a time using the 12 plagues of Egypt, slightly updated, a gimmick worthy of the Batman comics during their palmiest days). Who can forget the lethal binoculars in The Black Zoo, for instance? They came equipped with spring-loaded six-inch prongs, so that when the victim put them to her eyes and then attempted to adjust the field of focus....

Others derive their horror simply from the fact of death itself and the decay that follows death. In a society in which such a great store is placed in the fragile commodities of youth, health and beauty, death and decay become inevitably horrible--and inevitably taboo. If you don't think so, ask yourself why the second grade doesn't get to tour the local mortuary along with the police department, the fire department and the nearest McDonald's. One can imagine--or I can in my more morbid moments--the mortuary and McDonald's combined; the highlight of the tour, of course, would be a viewing of the McCorpse.

No, the funeral parlor is taboo. Morticians are modern priests, working their arcane magic of cosmetics and preservation in rooms that are clearly marked off limits. Who washes the corpse's hair? Are the fingernails and toenails of the dear departed clipped one final time? Is it true that the dead are encoffined sans shoes? Who dresses them for their final star turn in the mortuary viewing room? How is a bullet hole plugged and concealed? How are strangulation bruises hidden?

The answers to all those questions are available, but they are not common knowledge. And if you try to make the answers part of your store of knowledge, people are going to think you a bit peculiar. I know: In the process of researching a forthcoming novel about a father who tries to bring his son back from the dead, I collected a stack of funeral literature a foot high--and any number of peculiar glances from folks who wondered why I was reading The Funeral: Vestige or Value?

But this is not to say that people don't have a certain occasional interest in what lies behind the locked door in the basement of the mortuary, or what may transpire in the local graveyard after the mourners have left ... or at the dark of the moon. The Body Snatcher is not really a tale of the supernatural, nor was it pitched that way to its audience; it was pitched as a film (as was that notorious Sixties documentary Mondo Cane) that would take us beyond the pale, over that line that marks the edge of taboo ground:

Cemeteries raided, children slain for bodies to dissect! the movie poster drooled, Unthinkable realities and unbelievable facts of the dark days of early surgical research exposed in the most daring Shriek-and-Shudder shock sensation ever brought to the screen! (All of this printed on a leaning tombstone.)

But the poster does not stop there; it goes on specifically to mark out the exact location of the taboo line and to suggest that not everyone may be adventurous enough to transgress that forbidden ground: If you can take it, see graves raided! Coffins robbed! Corpses carved! Midnight murder! Body blackmail! Stalking ghouls! Mad revenge! Macabre mystery! and don't say we didn't warn you!

All of it has sort of a pleasant, alliterative ring, doesn't it?

These areas of unease--the political-social-cultural and those of the more mythic, fairy-tale variety--have a tendency to overlap, of course; a good horror picture will put the pressure on at as many points as it can. They Came from Within, for instance, is about sexual promiscuity on one level; on another level, it's asking you how you'd like to have a leech jump out of a letter slot and fasten itself onto your face. These are not the same areas of unease at all.

But since we're on the subject of death and decay (a very grave matter, heh-heh-heh), we might look at a couple of films in which this particular area of unease has been used well. The prime example, of course, is Night of the Living Dead, in which our horror of these final states is exploited to a point where many audiences found the film well-nigh unbearable. Other taboos are also broken by the film; at one point, a little girl kills her mother with a garden trowel ... and then begins to eat her. How's that for taboo breaking? Yet the film circles around to its starting point again and again, and the key word in the film's title is not living but dead.

At an early point, the film's female lead, who has barely escaped being killed by a zombie in a graveyard where she and her brother have come to put flowers on their dead father's grave (the brother is not so lucky), stumbles into a lonely farmhouse. As she explores, she hears something dripping ... dripping ... dripping. She goes upstairs, sees something, screams ... and the camera zooms in on the rotting, weeks-old head of a corpse. It is a shocking, memorable moment. Later, a government official tells the watching, beleaguered populace that, although they may not like it (i.e., they will have to cross that taboo line to do it), they must burn their dead; simply soak them with gasoline and light them up. Later still, a local sheriff expresses our own uneasy shock at having come so far over the taboo line. He answers a reporter's question by saying, "Ah, they're dead ... they're all messed up."

The good horror director must have a clear sense of where the taboo line lies if he is not to lapse into unconscious absurdity, and a gut understanding of what the countryside is like on the far side of it. In Night of the Living Dead, George Romero plays a number of instruments, and he plays them like a virtuoso. A lot has been made of this film's graphic violence, but one of the film's most frightening moments comes near the climax, when the heroine's brother makes his reappearance--still wearing his driving gloves and clutching for his sister with the idiotic, implacable single-mindedness of the hungry dead. The film is violent--as is its sequel, Dawn of the Dead--but the violence has its own logic, and in the horror genre, logic goes a long way toward proving morality.

The crowning horror in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho comes when Vera Miles touches that chair in the cellar and it spins lazily around to reveal Norman's mother at last--a wizened, shriveled corpse from which hollow eye sockets stare up blankly. She is not only dead; she has been stuffed like one of the birds that decorate Norman's office. Norman's subsequent entrance in dress and make-up is almost an anticlimax.

In A.I.P.'s The Pit and the Pendulum, we see another facet of the bad death--perhaps the absolute worst. Vincent Price and his cohorts break into a tomb through its brickwork, using pick and shovel. They discover that the lady, his wife, has, indeed, been entombed alive; for just a moment, the camera shows us her tortured face, frozen in a rictus of terror, her bulging eyes, her clawlike fingers, the skin stretched tight and gray. This is, I think, the most important moment in the post-1960 horror film, signaling a return to an all-out effort to terrify the audience ... and a willingness to use any means at hand to do it.

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Fiction is full of economic horror stories, though very few of them are supernatural; The Crash of '79 comes to mind, as well as The Money Wolves, The Big Company Look and the wonderful Frank Norris novel McTeague. I want to discuss only one movie in this context, The Amityville Horror. There may be others, but this one example will serve, I think, to illustrate another idea: that the horror genre is extremely limber, extremely adaptable, extremely useful; the author or film maker can use it as a crowbar to lever open locked doors ... or as a small, slim pick to tease the tumblers into giving. The genre can thus be used to open almost any lock on the fears that lie behind the door, and The Amityville Horror is a dollars-and-cents case in point.

It is simple and straightforward, as most horror tales are. The Lutzes, a young married couple with two or three kids (Kathleen Lutz's by a previous marriage), buy a house in Amityville. Previous to their tenancy, a young man has murdered his whole family at the direction of "voices." For this reason, the Lutzes get the house cheaply.

But they soon discover that it wouldn't have been cheap at half the price, because it's haunted. Manifestations include black goop that comes bubbling out of the toilets (and before the festivities are over, it comes oozing out of the walls and the stairs as well), a roomful of flies, a rocking chair that rocks by itself and something in the cellar that causes the dog to dig everlastingly at the wall. A window crashes down on the little boy's fingers. The little girl develops an "invisible friend" who is apparently really there. Eyes glow outside the window at three in the morning. And so on.

Worst of all, from the audience's (continued on page 237)Horror Movies(continued from page 154) standpoint, Lutz himself (James Brolin) apparently falls out of love with his wife (Margot Kidder) and begins to develop a meaningful relationship with his ax. Before things are done, we are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that he is tuning up for something more than splitting wood.

Stripped of its distracting elements (a puking nun, Rod Steiger shamelessly overacting as a priest who is just discovering the Devil after 40 years or so as a man of the cloth, and Margot Kidder doing calisthenics in a pair of bikini panties and one white stocking), The Amityville Horror is a perfect example of the tale to be told around the campfire. All the teller really has to do is to keep the catalog of inexplicable events in the correct order, so that unease escalates into outright fear.

All of which brings us around to the real watchspring of Amityville and the reason it works as well as it does: The picture's subtext is one of economic unease, and that is a theme that director Stuart Rosenberg plays on constantly. In terms of the times--18 percent inflation, mortgage rates out of sight, gasoline selling at a cool $1.40 a gallon--The Amityville Horror, like The Exorcist, could not have come along at a more opportune moment.

This breaks through most clearly in a scene that is the film's only moment of true and honest drama, a brief vignette that parts the clouds of hokum like a sunray on a drizzly afternoon. The Lutz family is preparing to go to the wedding of Kathleen Lutz's younger brother (who looks as if he might be all of 17). They are, of course, in the Bad House when the scene takes place. The younger brother has lost the $1500 that is due the caterer and is in an understandable agony of panic and embarrassment.

Brolin says he'll write the caterer a check, which he does, and later he stands off the angry caterer, who has specified cash only in a half-whispered washroom argument while the wedding party whoops it up outside. After the wedding, Lutz turns the living room of the Bad House upside down looking for the lost money, which has now become his money, and the only way of backing up the bank paper he has issued the caterer. Brolin's check may not have been 100 percent Goodyear rubber, but in his sunken, purple-pouched eyes, we see a man who doesn't really have the money any more than his hapless brother-in-law does. Here is a man tottering on the brink of his own financial crash.

He finds the only trace under the couch: a bank money band with the numerals $500 stamped on it. The band lies there on the rug, tauntingly empty. "Where is it?" Brolin screams, his voice vibrating with anger, frustration and fear. At that one moment, we hear the ring of Waterford, clear and true--or, if you like, we hear that one quiet phrase of pure music in a film that is otherwise all crash and bash.

Everything that The Amityville Horror does well is summed up in that scene. Its implications touch on everything about the house's most obvious and insidious effect--and also the only one that seems empirically undeniable: Little by little, it is ruining the Lutz family financially. The movie might as well have been subtitled "The Horror of the Shrinking Bank Account." It's the more prosaic fallout of the place where so many haunted-house stories start. "It's on the market for a song," the realtor says with a big egg-sucking grin. "It's supposed to be haunted."

Well, the house that the Lutzes buy is, indeed, on the market for a song (and there's another good moment--all too short--when Kathleen tells her husband that she will be the first person in her large Catholic family to actually own her own home; "We've always been renters," she says), but it ends up costing them dearly. At the conclusion, the house seems to literally tear itself apart. Windows crash in, black goop comes dribbling out of the walls, the cellar stairs cave in ... and I found myself wondering not if the Lutz clan would get out alive but if they had adequate homeowner's insurance.

This is a movie for every woman who ever wept over a plugged-up toilet or a spreading water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs shower; for every man who ever did a slow burn when the weight of the snow caused his gutters to give way; for every child who ever jammed his fingers and felt that the door or window that did the jamming was out to get him. As horror goes, Amityville is pretty pedestrian. So's beer, but you can get drunk on it.

"Think of the bills," a woman sitting behind me in the theater moaned at one point. I suspect it was her own bills she was thinking about. It was impossible to make a silk purse out of this particular sow's ear, but Rosenberg at least manages to give us Qiana, and the main reason that people went to see it, I think, is that The Amityville Horror, beneath its ghost-story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby.

Think of the bills, indeed.

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If movies are the dreams of the mass culture--one film critic, in fact, has called watching a movie "dreaming with one's eyes open"--and if horror movies are the nightmares of the mass culture, then many horror movies of recent times express America's coming to terms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation over political differences.

The contemporary political horror films begin. I think, with The Thing (1951), directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks (who also had a hand in the direction, one suspects). It stars Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey and James Arness as the blood-drinking human carrot from Planet X.

A polar encampment of soldiers and scientists discovers a strong magnetic field emanating from an area where there has been a recent meteor fall; the field is strong enough to throw all the electronic gadgets and gizmos off whack. Further, a camera designed to start shooting pictures when and if the normal background-radiation count suddenly goes up has taken photos of an object that dips, swoops and turns at high speeds--strange behavior for a meteor.

An expedition is dispatched to the spot, and it discovers a flying saucer buried in the ice. The saucer, superhot on touchdown, melted its way into the ice, which then refroze, leaving only the tail fin sticking out (thus relieving the special-effects corps of a potentially big-budget item). The Army guys, who demonstrate frostbite of the brain throughout most of the film, promptly destroy the extraterrestrial ship while trying to burn it out of the ice with thermite.

The occupant (Arness) is saved, however, and carted back to the experimental station in a block of ice. He/it is placed in a storage shed, under guard. One of the guards is so freaked out by the thing that he throws a blanket over it. Unlucky man! Quite obviously, all his good stars are in retrograde, his biorhythms low and his mental magnetic poles temporarily reversed. The blanket he's used is of the electric variety, and it miraculously melts the ice without shorting out. The Thing escapes and the fun begins.

The fun ends about 60 minutes later with the creature being roasted medium rare on an electric-sidewalk sort of thing that the scientists have set up. A reporter on the scene sends back the news of humankind's first victory over invaders from space, and the film fades out, not with a the end title card but with a question mark.

The Thing is a small movie done on a low budget. Like Alien, which would come more than a quarter century later, it achieves its best effects from feelings of claustrophobia and xenophobia. But, as I said before, the best horror movies will try to get at you on many different levels, and The Thing is also operating on a political level. It has grim things to say about eggheads (and knee-jerk liberals--in the early Fifties, you could have put an equal-sign between the two) who would indulge in the crime of appeasement.

The Thing is the first movie of the Fifties to offer us the scientist in the role of The Appeaser, that creature who for reasons either craven or misguided would open the gates to the Garden of Eden and let all the evils fly in (as opposed, say, to those mad labs proprietors of the Thirties, who were more than willing to open Pandora's box and let all the evils fly out--a major distinction, though the results are the same). That scientists should be so constantly vilified in the technohorror films of the Fifties--a decade that was apparently dedicated to the idea of turning out a whole marching corps of men and women in white lab coats--is perhaps not so surprising when we remember that it was science that opened those same gates so that the atomic bomb could be brought into Eden: first by itself and then trundled on missiles.

The average Jane or Joe during those spooky eight or nine years that followed the surrender of Japan had extremely schizoid feelings about science and scientists--recognizing the need for them and, at the same time, loathing the things they had let in forever. On the one hand, the average Jane or Joe had found a new pal, that neat little all-round guy, Reddy Kilowatt; on the other hand, before getting into the first reel of The Thing, they had to watch newsreel footage as an Army mock-up of a town just like theirs was vaporized in a nuclear furnace.

Robert Cornthwaite plays the appeasing scientist in The Thing, and we hear from his lips the first verse of a psalm that any filmgoer who grew up in the Fifties and Sixties became familiar with very quickly: "We must preserve this creature for science." The second verse goes: "If it comes from a society more advanced than ours, it must come in peace. If we can only establish communications with it, and find out what it wants----"

Twice, near the film's conclusion, Cornthwaite is hauled away by soldiers; at the climax, he breaks free of his guards and faces the creature with his hands open and empty. He begs it to communicate with him and to see that he means it no harm. The creature stares at him for a long, pregnant moment ... and then bats him casually aside, as you or I might swat a mosquito. The medium-rare roasting on the electric sidewalk follows.

Now, I'm only a journeyman writer and I will not presume to teach history here. I will point out that the Americans of that time were perhaps more paranoid about the idea of appeasement than at any other time before or since. The dreadful humiliation of Neville Chamberlain and England's resulting close squeak at the beginning of Hitler's war was still very much with those Americans, and why not? It had all happened only 12 years prior to The Thing's release, and even Americans who were just turning 21 in 1951 could remember it all very clearly. The moral was simple--such appeasement doesn't work; you gotta cut 'em if they stand and shoot 'em if they run. Otherwise, they'll take you over a bite at a time (and in the case of the Thing, you could take that literally).

If all this seems much too heavy a cargo for a modest little fright flick like The Thing to bear, remember that a man's point of view is shaped by the events he experiences and that his politics is shaped by his point of view. I am only suggesting that, given the political temper of the times and the cataclysmic world events that had occurred only a few years before, the viewpoint of this movie is almost preordained. What do you do with a blood-drinking carrot from outer space? Simple. Cut him if he stands and shoot him if he runs. And if you're an appeasing scientist like Cornthwaite (with a yellow streak up your back as wide as the no-passing line on a highway), you simply get bulldozed under.

By contrast, consider the other end of this telescope. The children of World War Two produced The Thing; 26 years later, a child of Vietnam and the self-proclaimed Love Generation, Steven Spielberg, gives us a fitting balance weight to The Thing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1951, the soldier standing sentry duty (the one who has foolishly covered the block of ice with an electric blanket) empties his automatic into the alien when he hears it coming; in 1977, a young guy with a happy, spaced-out smile holds up a sign reading Stop and be Friendly. Somewhere between the two, John Foster Dulles evolved into Henry Kissinger and the pugnacious politics of confrontation became détente.

In The Thing, Tobey occupies himself with building an electric boardwalk to kill the creature; in Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfuss occupies himself with building a mock-up of Devil's Butte, the creatures' landing place, in his living room. The Thing is a big, hulking brute who grunts; the creatures from the stars in Spielberg's film are small, delicate, childlike. They do not speak, but their mother ship plays lovely harmonic tones--the music of the spheres, we assume. And Dreyfuss, far from wanting to murder these emissaries from space, goes with them.

I'm not saying that Spielberg is or would think of himself as a member of the Love Generation simply because he came to his majority while students were putting daisies in the muzzles of M-1s and Jimmi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were playing at Fillmore West. Neither am I saying that Hawks, Nyby, Charles Lederer (who wrote the screenplay for The Thing) and John W. Campbell (whose novella Who Goes There? formed the basis for the film) fought their way up the beaches of Anzio or helped raise the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. But events determine point of view and point of view determines politics, and CE3K seems to me every bit as preordained as The Thing. We can understand that the latter's "Let the military handle this" thesis was a perfectly acceptable one in 1951, because the military had handled the Japs and the Nazis perfectly well in Duke Wayne's Big One, and we can also understand that the former's attitude of "Don't let the military handle this" was a perfectly acceptable one in 1977, following the military's less-than-startling record in Vietnam, or even in 1980 (when CE3K was released with additional footage), the year American military personnel lost the chance to free our hostages in Iran following three hours of mechanical fuck-ups.

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It may be that nothing in the world is so hard to comprehend as a terror whose time has come and gone--which may be why parents can scold their children for their fear of the bogeyman, when as children themselves, they had to cope with exactly the same fears (and the same sympathetic but uncomprehending parents). That may be why one generation's nightmare becomes the next generation's sociology, and even those who have walked through the fire have trouble remembering exactly what those burning coals felt like.

In the Fifties, the terror of the bomb and of fallout was real, and it left a scar on those children who wanted to be good, just as the Depression of the Thirties had left a scar on their elders. A newer generation--now teenagers, with no memory of either the Cuban Missile Crisis or of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, raised on the milk of détente--may find it hard to comprehend the terror of these things, but they will undoubtedly have a chance to discover it in the years of tightening belts and heightening tensions that lie ahead ... and the movies will be there to give their vague fears concrete focusing points in the horror movies yet to come.

I can remember, for instance, that in 1968, when I was 21, the issue of long hair was an extremely nasty, extremely explosive one. That seems as hard to believe now as the idea of people killing each other over whether the sun went around the earth or the earth went around the sun, but that happened, too.

I was thrown out of a bar in Brewer, Maine, by a construction worker back in that happy year of 1968. The guy had muscles on his muscles and told me I could come back and finish my beer "after you get a haircut, you faggot fairy." There were the standard catcalls thrown from passing cars (usually old cars with fins and cancer of the rocker panels): Are you a boy or are you a girl? Do you give head, honey? When was the last time you had a bath?

I can remember such things in an intellectual, even analytical way, as I can remember having a dressing that had actually grown into the tissue yanked from the site of a cyst-removal operation that occurred when I was 12. I screamed from the pain and then fainted dead away. I can remember the pulling sensation as the gauze tore free of the new, healthy tissue (the dressing removal was performed by a nurse's aide who apparently had no idea what she was doing), I can remember the scream and I can remember the faint. What I can't remember is the pain itself. It's the same with the hair thing and, in a larger sense, all the other pains associated with coming of age in the decade of napalm and the Nehru jacket.

I've purposely avoided writing a novel with a Sixties time setting because all of that seems, like the pulling of that surgical dressing, very distant to me now--almost as if it had happened to another person. But those things did happen; the hate, paranoia and fear on both sides were all too real. If we doubt it, we need only review that quintessential Sixties counterculture horror film, Easy Rider, in which Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper end up being blown away by a couple of rednecks in a pickup truck as Roger McGuinn sings Bob Dylan's It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) on the sound track.

Similarly, it is difficult to remember in any gut way the fears that came with those boom years of atomic technology 25 years ago. The technology itself was strictly Apollonian; as Apollonian as nice guy Larry Talbot, who "said his prayers at night." The atom was not split by a gibbering Colin Clive or Boris Karloff in some eastern European mad lab; it was not done by alchemy and moonlight in the center of a rune-struck circle; it was done by a lot of little guys at Oak Ridge and White Sands who wore tweed jackets and smoked Luckies, guys who worried about dandruff and psoriasis and whether or not they could afford a new car and how to get rid of the goddamn crab grass. Splitting the atom, producing fission, opening that door on a new world that the old scientist speaks of at the end of Them!--these things were accomplished on a business-as-usual basis.

People understood this and could live with it (Fifties science books extolled the wonderful world the friendly atom would produce, a world fueled by nice safe nuclear reactors, and grammar school kids got free comic books produced by the power companies), but they suspected and feared the hairy, simian face on the other side of the coin as well; They feared that the atom might be, for a number of reasons both technological and political, essentially uncontrollable. Those feelings of deep unease came out in movies such as The Beginning of the End, Them!, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man (in which radiation combined with a pesticide causes a very personal horror for one man, Scott Carey), The H-Men and The Four-D Man. The entire cycle reaches its supreme pinnacle of absurdity with The Night of the Lepus, in which the world is menaced by giant bunnies.

All of the foregoing are examples of the horror film with a technological subtext ... sometimes referred to as the "nature run amuck" sort of horror picture. In all of them, it is mankind and mankind's technology that must bear the blame. "You brought it on yourselves," they all say; a fitting epitaph for the mass grave of mankind, I think, when the big balloon finally goes up and the ICBMs start to fly. It is here, in the technohorror film, that we really strike the mother lode. No more panning for the occasional nugget, as in the case of the economic horror film or the political horror film; pard, we could dig the gold right out of the ground with our bare hands here, if we wanted to. Here is a corner of the old horror-film corral where even such an abysmal little wet fart of a picture as The Horror of Party Beach will yield a technological aspect upon analysis--you see, all those beach-blanket boppers in their bikinis and ball huggers are being menaced by monsters that were created when drums of radioactive waste leaked. But not to worry; although a few girls get carved up, all comes right in the end in time for one last wiener roast before school starts again.

The concerns of the technohorror films of the Sixties and Seventies change with the concerns of the people who lived through those times; the Big Bug movies give way to pictures such as The Forbin Project ("The Software That Conquered the World") and 2001, which offer us the possibility of the computer as God, or the even nastier idea (ludicrously executed, I'll readily admit) of the computer as satyr that is laboriously produced in Demon Seed and Saturn 3. In the Sixties, horror proceeds from a vision of technology as an octopus--perhaps sentient--burying us alive in red tape and information-retrieval systems that are terrible when they work (The Forbin Project) and even more terrible when they don't: In The Andromeda Strain, for instance, a small scrap of paper gets caught in the striker of a teletype machine, keeps the bell from ringing and thereby (in a fashion Rube Goldberg certainly would have approved of) nearly causes the end of the world.

Finally, there are the Seventies, culminating in John Frankenheimer's not-very-good but certainly well-meant film Prophecy, which is so strikingly similar to those Fifties Big Bug movies (only the first cause has changed), and The China Syndrome, a horror movie that synthesizes all three of these major technological fears: fear of radiation, fear for the ecology, fear of the machinery gone out of control.

Even such a much-loved American institution as the motor vehicle has not entirely escaped the troubled dreams of Hollywood; before being run out of his mortgaged house in Amityville, James Brolin had to face the terrors of The Car (1977), a customized something or other that looked like a squatty airport limo from one of hell's used-car lots. The movie degenerates into a ho-hum piece of hackwork before the end of the second reel (the sort of movie in which you can safely go out for a popcorn refill at certain intervals because you know the car isn't going to strike again for ten minutes or so), but there is a marvelous opening sequence in which the car chases two bicyclists through Utah's Zion National Park, its horn blatting arrhythmically as it gains on them and finally runs them down. There's something working in that opening that calls up a deep, almost primitive unease about the cars we zip ourselves into, thereby becoming anonymous ... and perhaps homicidal.

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There have been a few films that have tried to walk the border line between horror and social satire; one of those that seems to me to tread this border line most successfully is The Stepford Wives. The film is based on the novel by Ira Levin, and Levin has actually been able to pull this difficult trick off twice, the other case being that of Rosemary's Baby. The Stepford Wives has some witty things to say about women's liberation and some disquieting things to say about the American male's response to it.

It is as satiric as the best of Stanley Kubrick's work (though a good deal less elegant), and I defy an audience not to laugh when Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss step into the home o£ a neighbor (he's the local druggist, and a Walter Mitty type if ever there were one) and hear his wife moaning upstairs, "Oh, Frank, you're the greatest ... Frank, you're the best ... you're the champ...."

The original Levin story avoided the label "horror novel" (something like the label "pariah dog" in the more exalted circles of literary criticism) because most critics saw it as Levin's sly poke at the women's movement. But the scarier implications of Levin's jape are not directed at women at all; they are aimed unerringly at those men who consider it only their due to leave for the golf course on Saturday morning after breakfast has been served to them and to reappear (loaded, more likely than not) in time for their dinner to be served to them. After some uneasy backing and filling--during which it seems unsure of just what it does want to be--the film does, indeed, become a social horror story.

Katharine Ross and her husband (played by Peter Masterson) move from New York City to Stepford, a Connecticut suburb, because they feel it will be better for the children, and themselves as well. Stepford is a perfect little village where children wait good-humoredly for the school bus, where you can see two or three fellows washing their cars on any given day, where (you feel) the yearly United Fund quota is not only met but exceeded.

Yet there's a strangeness in Stepford. A lot of the wives seem a little, well, spacy. Pretty, always attired in flowing dresses that are almost gowns (a place where the movie slips, I think; as a labeling device, it's pretty crude. These women might as well be wearing stickers pasted to their foreheads that read I am One of the weird Stepford Wives), they all drive station wagons, discuss housework with an inordinate degree of enthusiasm and seem to spend any spare time at the supermarket.

One of the Stepford wives (one of the weird ones) cracks her head in a minor parking-lot fender bender; later, we see her at a lawn party, repeating over and over again, "I simply must get that recipe ... I simply must get that recipe ... I simply must ...." The secret of Stepford becomes clear immediately: These women are robots. Freud, in a tone that sounded suspiciously like despair, asked, "Woman ... what does she want?" Bryan Forbes and company ask the opposite question and come up with a stinging answer. Men, the film says, do not want women; they want robots with sex organs.

There are several funny scenes in the movie; my own favorite comes when, at a women's bitch session that Ross and Prentiss have arranged, the Stepford wives begin discussing cleaning products and laundry soaps with a slow and yet earnest intensity; everyone seems to have walked right into one of those commercials Madison Avenue male execs sometimes refer to as "two Cs in a K"--meaning two cunts in a kitchen.

But the movie waltzes slowly out of this brightly lit room of social satire and into a darker chamber by far. We feel the ring closing, first around Prentiss, then around Ross.

Stepford, a bedroom community serving a number of high-technology software companies, is exactly the wrong place for New Women such as Prentiss and Ross to have landed, we find. Instead of playing poker and drinking beer at the local Men's Association, the Stepford Husbands are creating counterfeit women; the final sellout in which the real women are replaced with their Malibu Barbie counterparts is left for the viewer to grapple with. The fact that we don't actually know the answers to how some of these things are done, or where the bodies are being buried--if there are, indeed, bodies once the change-over is complete--gives the film a grim, surrealist feel that is almost unique in the annals of modern horror films.

The movie reserves its ultimate horror and its most telling social shot for its closing moments when the "new" Ross walks in on the old one ... perhaps, we think, to murder her. Under her flowing negligee, which might have come from Frederick's of Hollywood, we see Ross's rather small breasts built up to the size of what men discussing women over beers sometimes refer to as "knockers." And, of course, they are no longer the woman's breasts at all; they now belong solely to her husband. The dummy is not quite complete, however; there are two horrible black pools where the eyes should be. The best social horror movies achieve their effect by implication, and The Stepford Wives, by showing us only the surface of things and never troubling to explain exactly how these things are done, implies plenty.

Another film that relies on the unease generated by changing mores is William Friedkin's The Exorcist, and I'll not bore you by rehashing the plot; I'll simply assume that if your interest in the genre has been sufficient to sustain you this far, you've probably seen it.

If the late Fifties and early Sixties were the curtain raiser on the generation gap, the seven years from 1966 to 1972 were the play itself. Little Richard, who had horrified parents in the Fifties when he leaped atop his piano and began boogieing on it in his lizardskin loafers, looked tame next to John Lennon, who proclaimed that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus--a statement that set off a rash of fundamentalist record burnings.

It was more than a generation gap. The two generations seemed, like the San Andreas Fault, to be moving along opposing plates of social and cultural conscience, commitment and definitions of civilized behavior itself. And with all of this young-vs.-old nuttiness as a backdrop, Friedkin's film appeared and became a social phenomenon in itself. Lines stretched around the block in every major city where it played, and even in towns that normally rolled up their sidewalks promptly at 7:30 p.m., midnight shows were scheduled. Church groups picketed; sociologists pontificated; newscasters did back-of-the-book segments for their programs on slow nights. The country, in fact, went on a two-month possession jag.

The movie (and the novel) is nominally about the attempts of two priests to cast a demon out of young Regan MacNeil, of course, a pretty little subteen played by Linda Blair (who later went on to a High Noon showdown with a bathroom plunger in the infamous NBC movie Born Innocent). Substantively, however, it is a film about explosive social change, a finely honed focusing point for that entire youth explosion that occurred in the late Sixties and early Seventies. It was a movie for all those parents who felt, in a kind of agony and terror, that they were losing their children and could not understand why or how it was happening. It's the face of the Werewolf, a Jekyll-and-Hyde tale in which sweet, lovely and loving Regan turns into a foul-talking monster strapped into her bed and croaking (in the voice of Mercedes McCambridge) such charming homilies as "You're going to let Jesus fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." Religious trappings aside, every adult in America understood what the film's powerful subtext was saying; they understood that the demon in Regan would have responded enthusiastically to the Fish Cheer at Woodstock.

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A Warner Bros. executive told me recently that movie surveys show the average filmgoer to be 15 years of age, which may be the biggest reason the movies so often seem afflicted with a terminal case of arrested development. For every film like Julia or The Turning Point, there are a dozen like Roller Boogie and if You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind. But it is worth noting that when the infrequent blockbusters that every film producer hopes for finally come along--pictures like Star Wars. Jaws, American Graffiti, The Godfather, Gone, with the Wind and, of course The Exorcist--they always break the demographic hammer lock that is the enemy of intelligent film making. It is comparatively rare for horror movies to do this, but The Exorcist is a case in point (and we have already spoken of The Amityville Horror, another film that has enjoyed a surprisingly old audience).

A film that appealed directly to the 15-year-olds who provide the spike point for moviegoing audiences--and one with a subtext tailored to match--was the Brian De Palma adaptation of my novel, Carrie. While I believe that both the book and the film depend on largely the same social situations to provide a text and a subtext of horror, there's enough difference to make interesting observations on De Palma's film version.

Both novel and movie have a pleasant High School Confidential feel, and while there are some superficial changes from the book in the film (Carrie's mother, for instance, seems to be presented in the film as a kind of weird renegade Roman Catholic), the basic story skeleton is pretty much the same. The story deals with a girl named Carrie White, the browbeaten daughter of a religious fanatic. Because of her strange clothes and shy mannerisms, Carrie is the butt of every class joke, the social outsider in every situation. She also has a mild telekinetic ability that intensifies after her first menstrual period, and she finally uses that power to "bring down the house" following a terrible social disaster at her high school prom.

De Palma's approach to the material is lighter and more deft than my own--and a good deal more artistic; the book tries to deal with the loneliness of one girl, her desperate effort to become a part of the peer society in which she must exist, and the failure of that effort. If this deliberate updating of High School Confidential has any thesis to offer, it is that high school is a place of almost bottomless conservatism and bigotry, a place where adolescents are no more allowed to rise above their station than a Hindu would be allowed to rise above his caste.

But there's a little more subtext to the book than that--at least, I hope so. If The Stepford Wives concerns itself with what men want from women, then Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power and what men fear about women and women's sexuality--which is only to say that, writing the book in 1973 and out of college only three years, I was fully aware of what women's liberation implied for me and others of my sex. The book is, in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality. For me. Carrie is a sadly misused teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of man-and woman-eaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she's also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time, and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.

Heavy, turgid stuff--but in the novel, it's there only if you want to take it. If you don't, that's OK with me. A subtext works well only if it's unobtrusive (in that, I perhaps succeeded too well; in her review of De Palma's film, Pauline Kael dismissed my novel as "an unassuming potboiler"--as depressing a description as one could imagine but not completely inaccurate).

De Palma's film is up to more ambitious things. As in The Stepford Wives, humor and horror exist side by side in Carrie, playing off each other, and it is only as the film nears its conclusion that horror takes over completely. We see Billy Nolan (well played by John Travolta) giving the cops a big aw-shucks grin as he hides a beer against his crotch early on; it is a moment reminiscent of American Graffiti. Not long after, however, we see him swinging a sledge hammer at the head of a pig in a stockyard--the aw-shucks grin has crossed the line into madness, somehow, and that line crossing is what the film as a whole is about.

We see three boys (one of them the film's nominal hero, played by William Katt) trying on tuxedos for the prom in a kind of Gas House Kids routine that includes Donald Duck talk and speeded-up action. We see the girls who have humiliated Carrie in the shower room, by throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her, doing penance on the exercise field to tootling, lumbering music that is reminiscent of Baby Elephant Walk. And yet beyond all these sophomoric and mildly amusing high school cutups, we sense a vacuous, almost unfocused hate, the almost unplanned revenge upon a girl who is trying to rise above her station. Much of De Palma's film is surprisingly jolly, but we sense that his jocoseness is dangerous: Behind it lurks the aw-shucks grin becoming a frozen rictus, and the girls laboring over their calisthenics are the same girls who shouted "Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up!" at Carrie not long before. Most of all, there is that bucket of pig's blood poised on the beam above the place where Carrie and Tommy will eventually be crowned ... only waiting its time.

The film came along at a time when movie critics were bewailing the fact that there were no movies being made with good, meaty roles for women in them ... but none of those critics seems to have noticed that in its film incarnation, Carrie belongs almost entirely to the ladies. Billy Nolan, a major--and frightening--character in the book, has been reduced to a semisupporting role in the movie. Tommy, the boy who takes Carrie to the prom, is presented in the novel as a boy who is honestly trying to do something manly--in his own way, he is trying to opt out of the caste system. In the film, however, he becomes little more than his girlfriend's cat's-paw, her tool of atonement for her part in the shower-room scene.

"I don't go around with anyone I don't want to," Tommy says patiently. "I'm asking because I want to ask you." Ultimately, he knew this to be the truth.

In the film, however, when Carrie asks Tommy why he is favoring her with an invitation to the prom, he offers her a dizzy sun-'n'-surf grin and says, "Because you liked my poem." Which, by the way, his girlfriend had written.

The novel views high school in a fairly common way: as that pit of man-and woman-eaters already mentioned. De Palma's social stance is more original; he sees this suburban white kids' high school as a kind of matriarchy. No matter where you look, there are girls behind the scenes, pulling invisible wires, rigging elections, using their boyfriends as stalking horses. Against such a backdrop, Carrie becomes doubly pitiful, because she is unable to do any of those things--she can only wait to be saved or damned by the actions of others. Her only power is her telekinetic ability, and both book and movie eventually arrive at the same point: Carrie uses her "wild talent" to pull down the whole rotten society. And one reason for the success of the story in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie's revenge is something that any student who ever had his gym shorts pulled down in phys ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of. In Carrie's destruction of the gym (and her destructive walk back home in the book, a sequence left out of the movie because of tight budgeting), we see a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden.

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The movies I have been discussing are those that try to link real (if sometimes free-floating) anxieties to the nightmare fears of the horror film. But now, let me put out even this dim light of rationality and discuss a few of those films whose effects go considerably deeper, past the rational and into those fears that seem universal.

Here is where we cross into the taboo lands for sure, and it's best to be frank up front. I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better--and maybe not all that much better, after all. We've all known people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching, people who have some hysterical fear--of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop ... and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground.

When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.

Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one's appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may be considerably depleted.

We also go to re-establish our feeling of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.

And we go to have fun.

Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn't it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun, indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced--sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur's version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version of the public lynching.

It is true that the mythic, "fairy-tale" horror film intends to take away the shades of gray (which is one reason When a Stranger Calls doesn't work; the psycho, well and honestly played by Tony Beckley, is a poor schmuck beset by the miseries of his own psychosis; our unwilling sympathy for him dilutes the film's success as surely as water dilutes Scotch); it urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein ... or no rein at all.

If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you're under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business ... though it is doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.

The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding saints, past and present; but then, most saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then, he has to be let loose to scream and roll around in the grass. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we recognize that it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional muscles are accepted--even exalted--in civilized society; they are, of course, the emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness--these are all the emotions that we applaud, emotions that have been immortalized in the couplets of Hallmark cards and in the verses (I don't dare call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy.

When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, "Isn't he the sweetest little thing?" Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow. But if we deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister's fingers in the door, sanctions follow--angry remonstrance from parents, aunts and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking.

But anticivilization emotions don't go away, and they demand periodic exercise. We have such "sick" jokes as, "What's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?" (You can't unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork ... a joke, by the way, that I heard originally from a ten-year-old). Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out of us even as we recoil, a possibility that confirms the thesis: If we share a brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic and revolutionary all at the same time.

The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized ... and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them--Dawn of the Dead, for instance--as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.

Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that.

As long as you keep the gators fed.

"If movies are the dreams of the mass culture, then horror movies are the nightmares."