Danse Macabre (24 page)

I said all of that to say this: the opposite also applies. The ear which is constantly attuned to the "fine" sound—the decorous strains of chamber music, for instance—may hear nothing but horrid cacophony when exposed to bluegrass fiddle . . . but bluegrass music is mighty fine all the same. The point is that the fan of movies in general and horror movies in particular may find it easy—too easy—to overlook the crude charms of a film like
The Amityville Horror
after he or she has experienced films such as
Repulsion, The Haunting, Fahrenheit 451
(which may have seemed to be science fiction to some, but which is nevertheless a reader's nightmare), or
Phase IV
. In a real appreciation of horror films, a taste for junk food applies . . . an idea we'll take up more fully in the next chapter. For now, let it suffice to say that the fan loses his taste for junk food at his or her own peril, and when I hear by way of the grapevine that New York film audiences are laughing at a horror movie, I rush out to see it. In most cases I am disappointed, but every now and then I hear me some mighty good bluegrass fiddle, eat me some pretty good fried chicken, and get so excited that I mix me some metaphors, as I've done here.

All of which brings us around to the real watchspring of
The Amityville Horror
, and the reason it works as well as it does: the picture's subtext is one of economic unease, and this 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 dollar forty a gallon—
The
Amityville Horror
, like
The Exorcist
, could not have come along at a more opportune moment. This comes out most clearly in a scene which is the film's only moment of true and honest drama; a brief little vignette that breaks through the clouds of hokum like a sunray on a drizzly afternoon. The Lutz family is preparing to go to the wedding of Cathy Lutz's younger brother (who looks, in the film, as if he might be all of seventeen). They are, of course, in the Bad House when the scene takes place. The younger brother has lost the fifteen hundred dollars that is due the caterer, and he is in an understandable agony of panic and embarrassment. Brolin says he'll write a covering check, which he does, and later he stands off the angry caterer, who has specified only cash, in a halfwhispered 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 didn't really have the money any more than his hapless brother-in-law did, regardless. 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 which
The Amityville Horror
does well is summed up in that scene. Its implications touch on everything about the Bad House's most obvious effect-and also the only one which 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 Cathy 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 dear. 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.

Here 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 which 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 . . . but 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.

5

The horror film as political polemic, then.

We've mentioned a couple of films of this stripe already—
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
and the Siegel version of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, both from the fifties. All the best films of this political type seem to come from that period—although we may be coming full circle again; The Changeling, which at this writing seems on its way to become the

big "sleeper" of the spring of 1980, is an odd combination of ghosts and Watergate. 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 of these fifties horrors express America's coming-to-terms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation over political differences.

We ought to eliminate the horror movies of that period that sprang from technological unease (the so-called "big bug" movies are among these) and also those "nuclear showdown" movies such as
Fail-Safe
and Ray Milland's intermittently interesting
Panic in the Year Zero
. These movies are not political in the sense that Siegel's
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
is political; that was a film where you could see the political enemy of your choice around every corner, symbolized in those ominous pods from space.

The political horror films of the period we're discussing here 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 starred Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, and James Arness as the blood-drinking human carrot from Planet X.

Briefly: 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 their electronic gadgets and gizmos off whack. Further, a camera designed to start shooting pictures when and if the normal radiation background count suddenly goes up has taken photos of an object which 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 tailfin 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 sixty 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 reports the news of humankind's first victory over invaders from space to a presumably grateful world, and the film fades out, like
The Blob
seven years later, not with a THE END title card, but with a question mark.

The Thing
is a small movie (in
An Illustrated History of the Horror Film
, Carlos Clarens quite rightly calls it "intimate") done on a low budget and as obviously done "on-set" as Lewton's
The
Cat People
. Like
Alien
, which would come more than a quarter-century later, it achieves its best effects from feelings of claustrophobia and xenophobia, both of them feelings we're saving for those films with mythic, "fairy-tale" subtexts,* but as pointed out 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

*Some would say that feelings of xenophobia are in themselves political, and there's an argument there to be made—but I would rather discuss it as a universal feeling, which I believe it to be, and exclude it (for now, at least) from the sort of subliminal propaganda we're discussing here.

liberals; in the early fifties you could have put an equals sign between the two) who would indulge in the crime of appeasement.

The very presence of Kenneth Tobey and his squad of soldiers gives the film a militaristic, and thus political, patina. We're never under any illusions that this Arctic base has been set up just for the eggheads, who want to study such useless things as the aurora borealis and the formation of glaciers. No, this base is also spending the taxpayers' money in
important
ways: it is a part of the Distant Early Warning line, part of America's Vigilant and Unceasing Etc., Etc., Etc. In the chain of command, the scientists are very much under Tobey. After all, the film whispers to the audience, we know what these ivory-tower eggheads are like, don't we? Full of big ideas but not worth much in a situation calling for a practical man. Really, it says, when you get right down to it, those bigdome ideas make most scientists as responsible as a child with a box of matches. They may be great with their microscopes and telescopes, but it takes a man like Kenneth Tobey to understand about America's Vigilant and Unceasing Etc., Etc., Etc.
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, let us 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, although the end results are the same). That scientists should be so constantly vilified in the techno-horror 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 which opened those same gates so that the atomic bomb could be brought into Eden—first by itself and then trundled on missile carriers. The average Jane or Joe on the street 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, there was their pal, that neat little all-around guy, Reddy Kilowatt; on the other hand, before getting into the first reel of
The Thing
down at your local theater, you could watch newsreel footage as an Army mockup of a town
just like yours
was vaporized in a nuclear furnace.