Danse Macabre (23 page)

3

"Thou shall not read the Bible for its prose," W. H. Auden says in one of his own finer moments, and I hope I can avoid a similar flaw in this informal little discussion of horror movies. For the next little while, I intend to discuss several groups of films from the period 1950-1980, concentrating on some of those liaison points already discussed. We will discuss some of those movies which seem to speak in their subtexts to our more concrete fears (social, economic, cultural, political), and then some of those which seem to express universal fears which cut across all cultures, changing only slightly from place to place. Later we'll examine some books and stories in about the same way . . . but hopefully we can go on from there together and appreciate some of the books and movies in this wonderful genre just for themselves-for what they are rather than for what they do. We'll try not to cut the goose open to see how it laid the golden eggs (a surgical crime which you can lay at the door of every high school English teacher and college English prof that ever put you to sleep in class) or to read the Bible for its prose.

Analysis is a wonderful tool in matters of intellectual appreciation, but if I start talking about the cultural ethos of Roger Corman or the social implications of
The Day Mars Invaded the
Earth
, you have my cheerful permission to pop this book into a mailer, return it to the publisher, and demand your money back. In other words, when the shit starts getting too deep, I intend to leave the area rather than perform in accepted English-teacher fashion and pull on a pair of hip-waders.

Onward.

4

There are any number of places where we could begin our discussion of "real" fears, but just for the fun of it, let's begin with something fairly off the wall: the horror movie as economic nightmare.

Fiction is full of economic horror stories, although 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 only want to discuss 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 filmmaker 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 which lie behind the door, and
The Amityville Horror
is a dollars-and-cents case in point.

There may be someone in some backwater of America who doesn't know that this film, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder, is supposedly based on a true story (set down in a book of the same name by the late Jay Anson). I say "supposedly" because there have been several cries of "hoax!" in the news media since the book was published, and these cries have been renewed since the movie was released-and almost unanimously panned by the critics. Despite the critics,
The Amityville Horror
went serenely on to become one of 1979's top-grossing movies.

If it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon not go into the story's validity or nonvalidity here, although I hold definite views on the subject. Within the context of our discussion, whether the Lutzes' house was really haunted or whether the whole thing was a put-up job matters very little. All movies, after all, are pure fiction, even the true ones. The fine film version of Joseph Wambaugh's
The Onion Field
begins with a title card which reads simply
This is a True Story
, but it's not; the very medium fictionalizes, and there is no way to stop this from happening. We know that a police officer named Ian Campbell really was killed in that onion field, and we know that his partner, Karl Hettinger, escaped; if we have doubts, let us look it up in the library and stare at the cold print there on the screen of the microfilm reader. Let us look at the

police photographs of Campbell's body; let us talk to the witnesses. And yet we know there were no cameras there, grinding away, when those two small-time hoods blew Ian Campbell away, nor was there a camera present when Hettinger began hooking things from department stores and removing them from the premises via armpit express. Movies produce fiction as a byproduct the same way that boiling water produces steam . . . or as horror movies produce art.

If we were going to discuss the book version of
The Amityville Horror
(we're not, so relax) it would be important for us to first decide if we were talking about a fiction or a nonfiction work. But as far as the movie is concerned, it just doesn't matter; either way it's fiction. So let us see The Amityville Horror only as a story, unmodified either by "true" or "make-believe." It is simple and straightforward, as most horror tales are. The Lutzes, a young married couple with two or three kids (Cathy 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 cheap. But it wouldn't have been cheap at half the price, they soon discover, because the house is 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 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 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.

It's probably bad form for a writer to recant something he's already written, but I'm going to nevertheless. I did an article on movies for
Rolling Stone
in late 1979, and I now think I was needlessly hard on
The Amityville Horror
in that piece. I called it a stupid sort of story, which it is; I called it simplistic and transparent, which it also is (David Chute, a film critic for
The
Boston Phoenix
, quite rightly called it "The Amityville Nonsense"), but these canards really miss the point, and as a lifelong horror fan, I should have known it.
Stupid, simplistic
, and
transparent
are also perfectly good words to describe the tale of The Hook, but that doesn't change the fact that the story is an enduring classic of its kind—in fact, those words probably go a long way toward explaining why it
is
a classic of its kind. Stripped of its distracting elements (a puking nun, Rod Steiger shamelessly overacting as a priest who is just discovering the devil after forty years or so as a man of the cloth, and Margot Kidder—not too tacky!—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 catalogue of inexplicable events in their correct order, so that unease escalates into outright fear. If this is done, the story will do its work . . . just as the bread will rise if the yeast is added at the right moment to ingredients which are at the correct temperature.

I don't think I realized how well the film was working on this level until I saw it for the second time at a small theater in western Maine. There was little laughter during the film, no hooting . . . and not much screaming, either. The audience did not seem to be just watching this film; it seemed to be
studying
it. The audience simply sat there in a kind of absorbed silence, taking it all in. When the lights went on at the end of the film, I saw that the audience was a much older one than I am accustomed to see at horror films; I'd put the average age between thirtyeight and forty-two. And there was a light on their faces—an excitement, a glow. Leaving, they discussed the film animatedly with one another. It was this reaction—which seemed to me markedly peculiar in terms of what the film had to offer—that started me thinking that a reevaluation of the film was in order.

Two things apply here: first,
The Amityville Horror
allows people to touch the unknown in a simple, uncomplicated way; it is as effective in this way as other "fads" have been before it, beginning, let us say, with the hypnosis/ reincarnation vogue that followed
The Search for
Bridey Murphy
and encompassing the flying-saucer flaps of the fifties, sixties, and seventies; Raymond Moody's
Life After Life
; and a lively interest in such wild talents as telepathy, precognition, and the various colorful pronouncements of Castenada's Don Juan. Simplicity may not always make great artistic sense, but it often makes the greatest impact on minds which have little imaginative capacity or upon minds in which the imaginative capability has been little exercised.
The Amityville Horror
is the primal haunted house story . . . and haunted houses are a concept which even the dullest mind has surely turned over at one time or another, if only around a childhood campfire or two.

Before going on to the second point (and I promise not to belabor you much more with
The
Amityville Horror
), let's look at a section of a review of a 1974 horror film,
Phase IV. Phase IV
was a modest Paramount release starring Nigel Davenport and Michael Murphy. It dealt with ants taking over the world following a burst of solar radiation that made them smart—an idea perhaps inspired by science fiction writer Poul Anderson's short novel,
Brain Wave
, and then cross-pollinated with the 1954 picture
Them!
Both
Them!
and
Phase IV
share the same desert setting, although
Them!
shifts to the storm drains of Los Angeles for its slambang climax. It should be added that, similar settings or not, the two movies are a million miles away from each other in matters of tone and mood. The review of
Phase IV
I want to quote from was written by Paul Roen and published in
Castle of Frankenstein
, #24. It's heartening to learn that Saul Bass, the imaginative graphics artist who designed the opening titles for Hitchcock's three greatest thrillers, has himself now taken to directing suspense movies. His initial enterprise is
Phase IV
, a blend of '50s sci-fi and '70s eco-disaster survival . . . . The narrative isn't always developed with logic and coherence, but
Phase
is, nevertheless, a grueling suspense exercise. Davenport is a delight to watch; his cool detachment crumbles by degrees, while his mellifluous British accent remains dignified throughout . . . . Bass's visuals are as sophisticated as one might expect, though often luridly colored; amber and green predominate [sic] the production. This was the sort of fairly sophisticated reviewing one learned to expect from
Castle of
Frankenstein
, the best of the "monster mags" and one that died much too soon. The point the review makes is that here we have a horror movie which stands in direct contrast to
The
Amityville Horror
. Bass's ants aren't even big. They're just little buggers who have all decided to pull together. The movie did no great box-office business, and I finally caught it at the drive-in back in 1976, filling out the bottom half of a double bill with a picture that was much inferior to it.

If you're a genuine horror fan, you develop the same sort of sophistication that a follower of the ballet develops; you get a feeling for the depth and 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, which 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.

Anyway,
Phase IV
did poorly at the box office because for all those people out there who are not fans, who find it hard to suspend their disbelief, not much appears to be happening. There are no "big moments," such as Linda Blair puking pea soup on Max von Sydow in
The
Exorcist
. . . or James Brolin dreaming that he is axing his family to death in
The Amityville
Horror
. But as Roen points out, a person who loves the genre's genuine Waterford (and there isn't enough of it . . . but then, there never is enough of the good stuff in any field, is there?) find a great deal happening in
Phase IV
—that delicate ring of the real stuff is there, it can be perceived; it ranges from the music to the silent and eerie desert vistas to Bass's fluid camera and Michael Murphy's quiet, understated narration. The ear detects that true ringing sound . . . and the heart responds.