Danse Macabre (63 page)

10

Los Angeles, 1969. Janis Joplin, who will later die of a drug overdose, it belting out "Ball and
Chain." Jim Morrison, who will die of a heart attack in a bathtub, is chanting "Kill, kill, kill, kill" at
the end of song titled "The End"—Francis Ford Coppola will use the song ten years later to
fade in the prologue of Apocalypse Now. Newsweek publishes a picture of a shyly-smiling U.S.
soldier holding up a revered human ear. And in a Los Angeles suburb, a young boy puts out
his brother's eyes with his fingers. He was, he explained, only trying to imitate the old Three
Stooges two-fingered boinnng! When they do it on TV, the weeping child explains, no one gets
hurt.

11

Television's make-believe violence rolled on nevertheless, through the sixties, past Charles Whitman up on the Texas Tower ("There was a rumor/about a tumor," Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys sang gleefully, "nestled at the base of his braiyyyyn . . .") , and what finally killed it and ushered in the Sitcom Seventies was a seemingly unimportant event when compared to the deaths of a President, a Senator, a great civil rights leader. Television execs were finally forced to rethink their position because a young girl ran out of gas in Roxbury. She had a gas can in her trunk, unfortunately. She got it filled at a gas station, and while walking back to her beached car, she was set upon by a gang of black youths who took her gas can away from her, doused her with the gas, and then-like the woman and her mother trying to drive the demon out of the baby-lit her on fire. Days later she died. The youths were caught, and someone finally asked them the sixty-fourdollar question: Where did you get such a horrible idea?

From TV, came the response. From
The ABC Movie of the Week
. Near the end of the sixties, Ed McBain (in reality novelist Evan Hunter) wrote one of his finest 87th Precinct novels of the policeman's lot. It was called Fuzz, and dealt in part with a gang of teenagers who went around dousing winos with gasoline and lighting them up. The film version, which is described by Steven Scheuer in his invaluable tubeside companion
Movies on TV
as a "scatterbrained comedy," starring Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch. The biggest yocks in the movie come when several cops on stakeout dress up as nuns and then chase after a suspect, holding their habits up to reveal big, clunky workshoes. Pretty funny, right, gang? A real gut-buster.

McBain's novel isn't a gut-buster. It's grim and almost beautiful. Certainly he has never come any closer to defining exactly what the policeman's lot may be than near the end of the novel when Steve Carella, masquerading as a wino, is lit on fire himself. The producers of the movie apparently saw something between
M*A*S*H
and
Naked City
in this, and the misbegotten result is in most respects as forgettable as a Tracy Stallard fastball . . . except that one of Stallard's fastballs went out of Fenway Park to become Roger Maris's record-breaking sixty-first home run. And
Fuzz
, a poorly executed comedy-drama, effectively ended TV violence.

The message? You are responsible. And network TV accepted the message. 

12

"How do you justify the violence of the shower scene in Psycho?" A critic once asked Sir
Alfred Hitchcock.

"How do you Justify the opening scene in Hiroshima, Mon Amour?" Hitchcock is reputed to
have replied. In that opening scene, which was certainly scandalous by American standards in
1959, we see Emmanuele Riva and Eliji Okada in a naked embrace.

"The opening scene was necessary to the integrity of the film," the critic answered.

"So was the shower scene in Psycho," Hitchcock said
. 

13

What sort of burden does the writer—particularly the writer of horror fiction—have to bear in all of this? Certainly there has never been a writer in the field (with the possible exception of Shirley Jackson) who has not been regarded with more than a degree of critical caution. The morality of horror fiction has been called into question for a hundred years. One of the blood-spattered forerunners of
Dracula
,
Varney the Vampyre
, was referred to as a "penny dreadful." Later on, inflation turned the penny dreadfuls into dime dreadfuls. In the 1930s there were cries that pulps such as
Weird Tales
and
Spicy Stories
(which regularly served up lip-smacking S & M covers on which lovely ladies were tied down, always in their "small clothes," and menaced by some beastly—but identifiably male—creature of the night) were ruining the morals of the youth of America. Similarly in the fifties, the comics industry choked off such outlaw growths as E.C.'s
Tales from the Crypt
and instituted a Comics Code when it became clear that Congress intended to clean their house for them if they would not clean it for themselves. There would be no more tales of dismemberment, corpses come back from the dead, and premature burials—or at least not for the next ten years. The return was signalled by the unpretentious birth of
Creepy
, a Warren Group magazine which was a complete throwback to the salad days of Bill Gaines's E.C. horror comics. Uncle Creepy, and his buddy Cousin Eerie, who came along two years or so later, were really interchangeable with the Old Witch and the Crypt-Keeper. Even some of the old artists were back—Joe Orlando, who made his debut as an E.C. artist, was also represented in the premiere issue of
Creepy
, if memory serves.

I would suggest that there has always been a great tendency, particularly when it comes to such popular forms as movies, television, and mainstream fiction, to kill the messenger for the message. I do not now and never have doubted that the youths who burned the lady in Roxbury got the idea from the telecast of
Fuzz
one Sunday night on ABC; if it had not been shown, stupidity and lack of imagination might well have reduced them to murdering her in some more mundane way. The same holds true with many of the other cases mentioned here. The danse macabre is a waltz with death. This is a truth we cannot afford to shy away from. Like the rides in the amusement park which mimic violent death, the tale of horror is a chance to examine what's going on behind doors which we usually keep double-locked. Yet the human imagination is not content with locked doors. Somewhere there is another dancing partner, the imagination whispers in the night—a partner in a rotting ball gown, a partner with empty eyesockets, green mold growing on her elbow-length gloves, maggots squirming in the thin remains of her hair. To hold such a creature in our arms? Who, you ask me, would be so mad?

Well . . . ?

"You will not want to open this door," Bluebeard tells his wife in that most horrible of all horror stories, "because your husband has forbidden it." But this, of course, only makes her all the more curious . . . . and at last, her curiosity is satisfied.

"You may go anywhere you wish in the castle," Count Dracula tells Jonathan Harker, "except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go." But Harker goes soon enough.

And so do we all. Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or window willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not . . . and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever.

14

Baltimore, 1980. The woman is reading a book and waiting for her bus to arrive. The
demobbed soldier who approaches her is a Vietnam vet, a sometime dope addict. He has a
history of mental problems which seem to date from his period of service. The woman has
noticed him on the bus before, sometimes weaving, sometimes staggering, sometimes calling
loudly and wildly to people who are not there. "That's right, Captain!" she has heard him say.

"That's right, that's right!"

He attacks the woman as she waits for her bus; later, the police will theorize he was after
drug money. No matter. He will be just as dead, no matter what he was after. The
neighborhood is a tough one. The woman has a knife secreted upon her person. In the
struggle, she uses it. When the bus comer, the black ex-soldier lies dying in the gutter.
What were you reading? a reporter asks her later; she shows him
The Stand
, by Stephen King.
 

15

With its disguise of semantics carefully removed and laid aside, what those who criticize the tale of horror (or who simply feel uneasy about it and their liking for it) seem to be saying is this: you are selling death and disfigurement and monstrosity; you are trading upon hate and violence, morbidity and loathing; you are just another representative of those forces of chaos which so endanger the world today.

You are, in short, immoral.

A critic asked George Romero, following the release of
Dawn of the Dead
, if he felt such a movie, with its scenes of gore, cannibalism, and gaudy pop violence, was a sign of a healthy society. Romero's reply, worthy of the Hitchcock anecdote related earlier, was to ask the critic if he felt the DC-10 engine-mount assembly was a healthy thing for society. His response was dismissed as a quibble ("You get the impression Romero likes this kind of sparring," I can almost hear the critic thinking).

Well, lets see if the quibble really is a quibble—and lets go one layer deeper than we have yet gone. The hour has grown late, the last waltz is playing, and if we don't say certain things now, I suppose we never will.

I've tried to suggest throughout this book that the horror story, beneath its fangs and fright wig, is really as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a three-piece pinstriped suit; that its main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands. Within the framework of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile. In the old E.C. comics, adulterers inevitably came to bad ends and murderers suffered fates that would make the rack and the boot look like kiddy rides at the carnival. * Modern horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get right down to it. The horror story most generally not only stands foursquare for the Ten Commandments, it blows them up to tabloid size. We have the comforting knowledge when the lights go down in the theater or when we open the book that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure.

Further, I've used one pompously academic metaphor, suggesting that the horror tale generally details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence, and that the horror will continue until the Dionysian forces have been repelled and the Apollonian norm restored again. Excluding a powerful if puzzling prologue set in Iraq, William Friedkin's film
The
Exorcist
actually begins in Georgetown, an Apollonian suburb if ever there was one. In the first scene, Ellen Burstyn is awakened by a crashing, roaring sound in the attic—it sounds like maybe someone let a lion loose up there. It is the first crack in the Apollonian world; soon everything else will pour through in a night

*My all-time favorite (he said affectionately): A crazed husband stuffs the hose of an air compressor down his skinny wife's throat and blows her up like a balloon until she bursts. "Fat at last," he tells her happily just moments before the pop. But later on the husband, who is roughly the size of Jackie Gleason, trips a booby-trap she has set for him and is squashed to a shadow when a huge safe falls on him. This ingenious reworking of the old story of Jack Sprat and his wife is not only gruesomely funny; it offers us a delicious example of the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye theory. Or, as the Spanish say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold. mare torrent. But this disturbing crack between our normal world and a chaos where demons are allowed to prey on innocent children is finally closed again at the end of the film. When Burstyn leads the pallid but obviously okay Linda Blair to the car in the film's final scene, we understand that the nightmare is over. Steady state has been restored. We have watched for the mutant and repulsed it. Equilibrium never felt so good.

Those are some of the things we've talked about in this book . . . but suppose all of that is only a sham and a false front? I don't say that it is, but perhaps (since this
is
the last dance) we ought to discuss the possibility, at least.

In our discussion of archetypes, we've had occasion to discuss the Werewolf, that fellow who is sometimes hairy and who is sometimes deceptively smooth. Suppose there was a double werewolf? Suppose that the creator of the horror story was, under his/her fright wig and plastic fangs, a Republican in a three-button suit, as we have said . . . ah, but suppose below
that
there is a
real
monster, with real fangs and a squirming Medusa-tangle of snakes for hair?

Suppose it's all a selfserving lie and that when the creator of horror is finally stripped all the way to his or her core of being we find not an agent of the norm but a friend-a capering, gleeful, red-eyed agent of chaos?

What about
that
possibility, friends and neighbors?

16

About five years ago I finished
The Shining
, took a month off, and then set about writing a new novel, the working title of which was
The House on Value Street
. It was going to be a
roman à clef
about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, her brainwashing (or her sociopolitical awakening, depending on your point of view, I guess), her participation in the bank robbery, the shootout at the SLA hideout in Los Angeles—in my book, the hideout was on Value Street, natch—the fugitive run across the country, the whole ball of wax. It seemed to me to be a highly potent subject, and while I was aware that lots of nonfiction books were sure to be written on the subject, it seemed to me that only a novel might really succeed in explaining all the contradictions. The novelist is, after all, God's liar, and if he does his job well, keeps his head and his courage, he can sometimes find the truth that lives at the center of the lie. Well, I never wrote that book. I gathered my research materials, such as they were, to hand (Patty was still at large then, which was another attraction the idea had for me; I could make up my own ending), and then I attacked the novel. I attacked it from one side and nothing happened. I tried it from another side and felt it was going pretty well until I discovered all my characters sounded as if they had just stepped whole and sweaty from the dance marathon in Horace McCoy's
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
I tried it
in medias res
. I tried to imagine it as a stage play, a trick that sometimes works for me when I'm badly stuck. It didn't work this time. In his marvelous novel
The Hair of Harold Roux
, Thomas Williams tells us that writing a long work of fiction is like gathering characters together on a great black plain. They stand around the small fire of the writer's invention, warming their hands at the blaze, hoping the fire will grow into a blaze which will provide light as well as heat. But often it goes out, all light is extinguished, and the characters are smothered in black. It's a lovely metaphor for the fiction-making process, but it's not mine . . . maybe it's too gentle to be mine. I've always seen the novel as a large black castle to be attacked, a bastion to be taken by force or by trick. The thing about this castle is, it appears to be open. It doesn't look buttoned up for siege at all. The drawbridge is down. The gates are open. There are no bowmen on the turrets. Trouble is, there's really only one safe way in; every other attempt at entry results in sudden annihilation from some hidden source.