Danse Macabre (6 page)

*The scene in
'Salem's Lot
which works best in the E.C. tradition—at least, as far as I'm concerned—is when the bus driver, Charlie Rhodes (who is a typical E.C.-type rotter in the best Herbie Satten tradition), awakes at midnight and hears someone blowing the horn of his bus. He discovers, after the bus doors have swung shut forever behind him, that his bus is loaded with children, as if for a school run . . . but they're all vampires. Charlie begins to scream, and perhaps the reader wonders why; after all, they only stopped by for a drink.

Heh, heh.

Some of the scenes from
'Salem's Lot
which run parallel to scenes from
Dracula
are the staking of Susan Norton (corresponding to the staking of Lucy Westenra in Stoker's book), the drinking of the vampire's blood by the priest, Father Callahan (in
Dracula
it is Mina Murray Harker who is forced to take the Count's perverse communion as he croons those memorable, chilling lines, "My bountiful wine-press for a little while . . ." ), the burning of Callahan's hand as he tries to enter his church to receive absolution (when, in
Dracula
, Van Helsing touches Mina's forehead with a piece of the Host to cleanse her of the Count's unclean touch, it flashes into fire, leaving a terrible scar), and, of course, the band of Fearless Vampire Hunters which forms in each book.

The scenes from
Dracula
which I chose to retool for my own book were the ones which impressed me the most deeply, the ones Stoker seemed to have written at fever pitch. There are others, but the one "bounce" that never made it into the finished book was a play on Stoker's use of rats in
Dracula
. In Stoker's novel, the Fearless Vampire Hunters—Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, Lord Godalming, and Quincey Morris—enter the basement of Carfax, the Count's English house. The Count himself has long since split the scene, but he has left some of his traveling coffins (boxes full of his native earth), and another nasty surprise. Very shortly after the F.V.H.s enter, the basement is crawling with rats. According to the lore (and in his long novel, Stoker martials a formidable amount of vampire lore), a vampire has the ability to command the lesser animals—cats, rats, weasels ( and possibly Republicans, ha-ha). It is Dracula who has sent these rats to give our heroes a hard time. Lord Godalming is ready for this, however. He lets a couple of terriers out of a bag, and they make short work of the Count's rats. I decided I would let Barlow—my version of Count Dracula—also use the rats, and to that end I gave the town of Jerusalem's Lot an open dump, where there are lots of rats. I played on the presence of the rats there several times in the first couple of hundred pages of the novel, and to this day I sometimes get letters asking if I just forgot about the rats, or tried to use them to create atmosphere, or what.

Actually, I used them to create a scene so revolting that my editor at Doubleday (the same Bill Thompson mentioned in the forenote to this volume) suggested strongly that I remove it and substitute something else. After some grousing, I complied with his wishes. In the Doubleday/New American Library editions of
'Salem's Lot
, Jimmy Cody, a local doctor, and Mark Petrie, the boy accompanying him, discover that the king vampire—to use Van Helsing's pungent term—is almost certainly denning in the basement of a local boarding house. Jimmy begins to go downstairs, but the stairs have been cut away and the floor beneath littered with knives pounded through boards. Jimmy Cody dies impaled upon these knives in a scene of what I would call "horror"—as opposed to "terror" or "revulsion," the scene is a middle-of-the-roader.

In the first draft manuscript, however, I had Jimmy go down the stairs and discover—too late—that Barlow had called all the rats from the dump to the cellar of Eva Miller's boarding house. There was a regular HoJo for rats down there, and Jimmy Cody became the main course. They attack Jimmy in their hundreds, and we are treated (if that is the word) to a picture of the good doctor struggling back up the stairs, covered with rats. They are down his shirt, crawling in his hair, biting his neck and arms. When he opens his mouth to yell Mark a warning, one of them runs into his mouth and lodges there, squirming.

I was delighted with the scene as written because it gave me a chance to combine
Dracula
-lore and E.C.-lore into one. My editor felt that it was, to put it frankly, out to lunch, and I was eventually persuaded to see it his way. Perhaps he was even right*.

*Rats are nasty little buggers, aren't they? I wrote and published a rat story called "Graveyard Shift" in
Cavalier
magazine four years prior to
'Salem's Lot
—it was, in fact, the third short story I ever published—and I was uneasy about the similarity between the rats under the old mill in "Graveyard Shift" and those in the basement of the boarding house in
'Salem's Lot
. As writers near the end of a book, I suspect that they cope with weariness in all sorts of ways—and my response as I neared the end of
'Salem's Lot
was to indulge in this bit of selfplagiarism. And so, even though I suspect there's a disappointed rat-fan or two out there, I've got to say I believe Bill Thompson's judgment that the rats in
'Salem's
Lot
should simply fade from the scene was the right one.

I've tried here to delineate some of the differences between science fiction and horror, science fiction and fantasy, terror and horror, horror and revulsion, more by example than by definition. All of which is very well, but perhaps we ought to examine the emotion of horror a little more closely-not in terms of definition but in terms of effect. What does horror do? Why do people want to be horrified . . . why do they
pay
to be horrified? Why an
Exorcist
? A
Jaws
? An
Alien
?

But before we talk about why people crave the effect, maybe we ought to spend a little time thinking about components-and if we do not choose to define horror itself, we can at least examine the elements and perhaps draw some conclusions from them.

2

Horror movies and horror novels have always been popular, but every ten or twenty years they seem to enjoy a cycle of increased popularity and visibility. These periods almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic and/or political strain, and the books and films seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties (for want of a better term) which accompany such serious but not mortal dislocations. They have done less well in periods when the American people have been faced with outright examples of horror in their own lives.

Horror went through a boom period in the 1930s, When people hardpressed by the Depression weren't ponying up at the box office to see a hundred Busby Berkeley girls dancing to the tune of "We're in the Money," they were perhaps releasing their anxieties in another way—by watching Boris Karloff shamble across the moors in
Frankenstein
or Bela Lugosi creep through the dark with his cape up over his mouth in
Dracula
. The '30s also marked the rise of the so-called "Shudder Pulps," which encompassed everything from
Weird Tales
to
Black Mark
. We find few horror movies or novels of note in the 1940s, and the one great magazine of fantasy which debuted in that decade, Unknown, did not survive for long. The great Universal Studios monsters of the Depression days—Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Count—were dying in that particularly messy and embarrassing way that the movies seem to reserve for the terminally ill; instead of being retired with honors and decently interred in the mouldy soil of their European churchyards, Hollywood decided to play them for laughs, squeezing every last quarter and dime admission possible out of the poor old things before letting them go. Hence, Abbott & Costello met the monsters, as did the Bowery Boys, not to mention those lovable eyeboinkers and head-knockers, the Three Stooges. In the '40s, the monsters themselves became stooges. Years later, in another postwar period, Mel Brooks would give us his version of
Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein
—starring Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman instead of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

The eclipse of horror in fiction that began in 1940 lasted for twenty-five years. Oh, an occasional novel such as Richard Matheson's
Shrinking Man
or William Sloane's
Edge of Running Water
would pop up, reminding us that the genre was still there (although even Matheson's grim man-against-giant-spider tale, a horror story if there ever was one, was touted as science fiction), but the idea of a best-selling horror novel would have been laughed out of court along Publisher's Row. As with the movies, the golden age of weird fiction had passed in the '30s, when
Weird Tales
was at the peak of its influence and quality ( not to mention its circulation), publishing the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, the young Robert Block, Dr. David H. Keller, and, of course, the twentieth-century horror story's dark and baroque prince, H. P. Lovecraft. I will not offend those who have followed weird fiction over a span of fifty years by suggesting that horror disappeared in the 1940s; indeed it did not. Arkham House had then been founded by the late August Derleth, and Arkham published what I regard as its most important works in the period 1939-1950—works including Lovecraft's
The
Outrider
and Beyond the Wall of Sleep
, Henry S. Whitehead's Jumbee, The Opener of the Way and
Pleasant Dreams
, by Robert Bloch . . . and Ray Bradbury's
Dark Carnival
, a marvelous and terrifying collection of a darker world just beyond the threshold of this one.

But Lovecraft was dead before Pearl Harbor; Bradbury would turn his hand more and more often to his own lyric blend of science fiction and fantasy (and it was only after he did so that his work began to be accepted by such mainstream magazines as
Collier's
and the
Saturday Evening Post
) ; Robert Bloch had begun to write his suspense stories, using what he had learned in his first two decades as a writer to create a powerful series of offbeat novels, which are only surpassed by the novels of Cornell Woolrich.

During and after the war years, horror fiction was in decline. The age did not like it. It was a period of rapid scientific development and rationalism—they grow very well in a war atmosphere, thanks—

and it became a period which is now thought of by fans and writers alike as "the golden age of science fiction." While
Weird Tales
plugged grimly along, holding its own but hardly reaping millions (it would fold in the mid-fifties after a down-sizing from its original gaudy pulp size to a digest form failed to effect a cure for its ailing circulation), the sf market boomed, spawning a dozen well-remembered pulps and making names such as Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell, and del Rey, if not household words, at least familiar and exciting to an ever-growing community of fans dedicated to the proposition of the rocket ship, the space station, and the ever-popular death ray.

So horror languished in the dungeon until 1955 or so, rattling its chains once in a while but causing no great stir. It was around that time that two men named Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson stumbled downstairs and discovered a money machine rusting away unnoticed in that particular dungeon. Originally film distributors, Arkoff and Nicholson decided that, since there was an acute shortage of B-pictures in the early fifties, they would make their own. Insiders predicted speedy economic ruin for the entrepreneurs. They were told they were setting to sea in a lead sailboat; this was the age of TV. The insiders had seen the future and it belonged to Dagmar and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. The consensus among those who cared at all ( and there weren't many) was that Arkoff and Nichols-on would lose their shirts very quickly. But during the twenty-five years that the company they formed, American-International Pictures, has been around (it's now Arkoff alone; James Nicholson died several years ago), it has been the only major American film company to show a consistent profit, year in and year out. AIP has made a great variety of films, but all of them have taken dead aim on the youth market; the company's pictures include such dubious classics as
Boxcar Bertha, Bloody Mama, Dragstrip Girl, The Trip,
Dillinger
, and the immortal
Beach Blanket Bingo
. But their greatest success was with horror films. What elements made these AIP films shlock classics? They were simple, shot in a hurry, and so amateurish that one can sometimes see the shadow of a boom mike in the shot or catch the gleam of an air tank inside the monster suit of an underwater creature ( as in
The Attack o f the Giant
Leeches
). Arkoff himself recalls that they rarely began with a completed script or even a coherent screen treatment; often money was committed to projects on the basis of a title that sounded commercial, such as
Terror from the Year 5000
or
The Brain Eaters
, something that would make an eye-catching poster.

Whatever the elements were, they worked.

3

Well, let all that go for the moment. Let's talk monsters.

Exactly what is a monster?

Begin by assuming that the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by its very nature; that it is symbolic. Assume that it is talking to us, like a patient on a psychoanalyst's couch, about one thing while it means another. I am not saying that horror is
consciously
allegorical or symbolic; that is to suggest an artfulness that few writers of horror fiction or directors of horror films aspire to. There has recently been a retrospective of AIP movies in New York (1979), and the idea of a retrospective suggests art, but at most they are trash art. The pictures have great nostalgia value, but those searching for culture may look elsewhere. To suggest that Roger Corman was unconsciously creating art while on a twelve-day shooting schedule and a budget of $80,000 is to suggest the absurd. The element of allegory is there only because it is built-in, a given, impossible to escape. Horror appeals to us because it says, in a symbolic way, things we would be afraid to say right out straight, with the bark still on; it offers us a chance to exercise (that's right; not
exorcise
but
exercise
) emotions which society demands we keep closely in hand. The horror film is an invitation to indulge in deviant, antisocial behavior by proxy—to commit gratuitous acts of violence, indulge our puerile dreams of power, to give in to our most craven fears. Perhaps more than anything else, the horror story or horror movie says it's okay to join the mob, to become the total tribal being, to destroy the outsider. It has never been done better or more literally than in Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery," where the entire concept of the outsider is symbolic, created by nothing more than a black circle colored on a slip of paper. But there is no symbolism in the rain of stones which ends the story; the victim's own child pitches in as the mother dies, screaming "It's not fair! It's not fair!" Nor is it an accident that the horror story ends so often with an O. Henry twist that leads straight down a mine shaft. When we turn to the creepy movie or the crawly book, we are not wearing our "Everything works out for the best" hats. We're waiting to be told what we so often suspect—that everything is turning to shit. In most cases the horror story provides ample proof that such is indeed the case, and I don't believe, when Katharine Ross falls prey to the Stepford Men's Association at the conclusion of
The Stepford Wives
or when the heroic black man is shot dead by the numbnuts sheriff's posse at the end of
Night of the Living Dead
, that anyone is really surprised. It is, as they say, a part of the game.