Most of us can remember the narrative "bridges" used in the early TV dramas (there was, for instance, that peculiarlooking individual Truman Bradley, who gave us a miniscience lesson at the beginning of each week's episode of Science Fiction Theater and a minimoral at the end of each episode; the last but perhaps the best example of the convention were the voiceovers done by the late Walter Winchell each week for The Untouchables). But if we look at those early talking pictures, we can also find these same dialogueasdescription and narration devices used. There is no real need for it, because we can see what's happening, but they remained for awhile just the same, a kind of useless appendix, present simply because evolution had not removed them. My favorite example of this comes from the otherwise innovative Max Fleischer Superman cartoons of the early forties. Each began with the narrator explaining solemnly to the audience that once there was a planet called Krypton "which glowed like a great green jewel in the heavens." And there it is, by George, glowing like a great green jewel in the heavens, right before our eyes. A moment later it blows to smithereens in a blinding flash of light. "Krypton exploded," the narrator informs us helpfully as the pieces fly away into space. Just in case we missed it.  Oboler used a third mental trick in creating his radio dramas, and this goes back to Bill Nolan and his closed door. When it's thrown open, he says, we see a tenfoot bug, and the mind, whose capacity to visualize far outruns any state of the art, feels relief. The mind, although obedient (what is insanity conceived of by the sane, after all, if not a kind of mental disobedience?), is curiously pessimistic, and more often than not, downright morbid. Because he rarely overdid the dialogueasdescription device (as did the creators of The Shadow and Inner Sanctum), Oboler was able to use this natural turn of the mind toward the morbid and the pessimistic to create some of the most outrageous effects ever paraded before the quaking ears of a mass audience. Today, violence on television has been roundly condemned (and largely exterminated, at least by the Untouchables, Peter Gunn, and Thriller standards of the bad old sixties)  "Staging" was another convention that both the early talkies and early TV leaned upon heavily until they found their own more fluid methods of storytelling. Check out some TV kinescopes from the fifties sometime, or an early talking film like It Happened One Night, The Jazz Singer, or Frankenstein, and notice how often the scenes are played out from one stationary camera location, as if the camera was in reality a representative playgoer with a frontrow seat. Speaking of the pioneering director of silents, Georges Mlis, in his fine book Caligari's Children, S. S. Prawer makes the same observation "The double exposures, jumpcuts, and other technical tricks which Mlis played with the shots he had taken from a fixed position corresponding to a fixed seat in the stalls of a theatrethese amused rather than frightened their audiences, and, in the end, wearied them sufficiently to ensure Mlis's bankruptcy." In regard to the early talkies, which came nearly forty years after Mlis pioneered the fantasy film and the idea of "special effects," audio limitations dictated the stationary camera to some extent; the camera made a loud clacking noise as it operated, and the only way to beat it was to put it in a soundproof room with a glass window. Moving the camera meant moving the room, and that was expensive in terms of time as well as money. But it was more than camera noise, a factor Mlis certainly didn't have to contend with. A lot of it was simply that mental set thing again. Bound by stage conventions, many early directors simply found themselves creatively unable to innovate. because so much of it is explicitwe see the blood flowing; that is the nature of the medium and part of the set of reality. Oboler used gore and violence by the bucketload, but a good deal of it was implicit; the real horror didn't come alive in front of a camera but on the screen of the mind. Perhaps the best example of this comes from an Oboler piece with the Don Martinlike title, "A Day at the Dentist's." As the story opens, the play's "hero," a dentist, is just closing up shop for the day. His nurse says he has one more patient, a man named Fred Houseman. "He says it's an emergency," she tells him. "Houseman?" the dentist barks. "Yes." "Fred?" "Yes. . . do you know him?" "No . . . oh, no," the dentist says casually. Houseman, it turns out, has come because Dr. Charles, the dentist who owned the practice previously, advertised himself as a "painless dentist"and Houseman, although an exwrestler and footballer, is terrified of the dentist (as so many of us are . . . and Oboler damned well knows it). Houseman's first uneasy moment comes when the doctor straps him into the dentist's chair. He protests. The dentist tells him in a low, perfectly reasonable voice (and oh, how we suspect the reason in that voice! After all, who sounds more sane than a dangerous lunatic?) that "In order to keep this painless, there must be absolutely no movement." There is a pause, and then the sound of straps being buckled. Tightly. "There," the dentist says soothingly. "Snug as a bug in a rug . . . that's a curious thin[, to call you, isn't it? You're no bug, are you? You're more the loverboy type . . . aren't you?" Ohoh, the morbid little guy inside speaks up. This looks bad for old Fred Houseman. Yes indeedy. It is bad indeed. The dentist, still speaking in that low, pleasant, and ohsorational voice, continues to call Houseman "loverboy." It turns out that Houseman ruined the girl who later became the dentist's wife; Houseman slandered her name from one end of town to the other. The dentist found out that Houseman's regular dentist was Dr. Charles, and so he bought out Charles's practice, figuring that sooner or later Houseman would come back . . . come back to "the painless dentist." And while he was waiting, the new dentist installed restraint straps on his chair. Just for Fred Houseman. All of this, of course, has parted company with any semblance of reality early on (but then, the same can be said of The Tempesthow's that for an impudent comparison?); yet the mind cares not a fig for that at this crucial juncture, and Oboler, of course, never cared at all; like the best writers of horror fiction, he is interested in effect above all else, preferably one that will wallop the listener like a twentypound chunk of slate. He achieves that quite nicely in "A Day at the Dentist's." "WWhat are you going to do?" Houseman asks fearfully, echoing the very question that has been troubling our own minds almost since the moment we were foolish enough to turn on this piece of coldblooded grue. The dentist's answer is simple and utterly terrifyingmore terrifying because of the unpleasant seminar it convenes in our own minds, a seminar in which Oboler ultimately refuses to take part, thus leaving the question to hang for as long as we want to consider it. Under the circumstances, we may not want to consider it long at all. "Nothing important," the dentist replies as he flicks a switch and the drill begins to whine. "Just going to drill a little hole . . . and let out some of loverboy." As Houseman gasps and slobbers with fear in the background, the sound of the drill comes up . . . and up . . . and up . . . and finally, out. The end. The question, of course, is where exactly did the demon dentist drill the hole to "let out some of loverboy"? It is a question that only radio, by the very nature of the medium, can pose really convincingly and leave unanswered so uneasily. We hate Oboler a little for not telling us, mostly because our minds are suggesting the most outrageously nasty possibilities. My first thought was that the dentist had almost surely used the drill on one of Houseman's temples, murdering him with a little impromptu brain surgery. But later, as I grew up and grew into a better comprehension of just what the nature of Houseman's crime had been, another possibility began to suggest itself. An even nastier one. Even today, as I write this, I wonder exactly where did that crazy man use his drill? 4 Well, enough is enough; it is time to move on from the ear to the eye. But before we go, I'd like to remind you of something that you probably already know. Many of the old radio programs, from Inner Sanctum to Gangbusters to the sudsy Our Gal Sal have been preserved on record and tape, and the quality of these recordings is actually better in most cases than the quality of the TV kinescopes that are broadcast on nostalgia programs from time to time. If you're interested in seeing how your own ability to suspend disbelief and to circumnavigate that visual set engendered by TV and the movies is holding up, you can get a start at almost any wellstocked record store. A Schwann's Catalogue of spokenword records can be even more helpful; what your friendly neighborhood Record Mart doesn't have, they'll be glad to order. And if your interest in Arch Oboler has been at all piqued by the foregoing, let me whisper a little secret in your ear Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horrorproduced, written, and directed by Arch Oboler, available for your delectation on Capitol Records (Capitol SM1763). Probably more of a summer cooler than a tall glass of iced tea . . . if you can get rid of that visual set for forty minutes or so. CHAPTER VI The Modern American Horror Movie Text and ,Subtext RIGHT NOW you could be thinking to yourself this guy must have one hell of a nerve if he thinks he's gonna cover all the horror movies released between 1950 and 1980everything from The Exorcist to the lessthanimmortal The Navy vs. the Night Monstersin a single chapter. Well, actually it's going to be two chapters, and no, I don't expect to be able to cover them all, as much as I would like to; but yes, I must have some kind of nerve to be tackling the subject at all. Luckily for me, there are several fairly traditional ways of handling the subject so that at least an illusion of order and coherence emerges. The path I've chosen is that of the horror movie as text and subtext. The place to start, I think, would be with a swift recap of those points already made on the subject of the horror movie as art. If we say "art" is any piece of creative work from which an audience receives more than it gives (a liberal definition of art, sure, but in this field it doesn't pay to be too picky), then I believe that the artistic value the horror movie most frequently offers is its ability to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and our real fears. I've said and will reemphasize here that few horror movies are conceived with "art" in mind; most are conceived only with "profit" in mind. The art is not consciously created but rather thrown off, as an atomic pile throws off radiation. I do not contend by saying the above that every exploitation horror flick is "art," however. You could walk down Fortysecond Street in Times Square on any given afternoon or evening and discover films with names like The Bloody Mutilators, The Female Butcher, or The Ghastly Onesa 1972 film we are treated to the charming sight of a woman being cut open with a twohanded bucksaw; the camera lingers as her intestines spew out onto the floor. These are squalid little films with no whiff of art in them, and only the most decadent filmgoer would try to argue otherwise. They are the staged equivalent of those 8and 16millimeter "snuff" movies which have reputedly oozed out of South America from time to time. Another point worth mentioning is the great risk a filmmaker takes when heshe decides to make a horror picture. In other creative fields, the only risk is failurewe can say, for instance, that the Mike Nichols film of The Day of the Dolphin "fails," but there is no public outcry, no mothers picketing the movie theaters. But when a horror movie fails, it often fails into painful absurdity or squalid pornoviolence. There are films which skate right up to the border where "art" ceases to exist in any form and exploitation begins, and these films are often the field's most striking successes. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of these; in the hands of Tobe Hooper, the film satisfies that definition of art which I have offered, and I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country. I would not do so for The Ghastly Ones. The difference is more than the difference between a chainsaw and a bucksaw; the difference is something like seventy million lightyears. Hooper works in Chainsaw Massacre, in his own queerly apt way, with taste and conscience. The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras.  So, if I'm going to keep this discussion in order, I'll keep coming back to the concept of valueof art, of social merit. If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unrealto provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these subtexts are often culturewide. In many casesparticularly in the fifties and then again in the early seventiesthe 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 hatsthe Bpicture as tabloid editorialthey often serve as an One success in skating over this thin ice does not necessarily guarantee that the filmmaker will be able to repeat such a success; while his innate talent saves Hooper's second film, Eaten Alive, from descending to The Bloody Mutilators category, it is still a disappointment. The only director I can think of who has explored this gray land between art and pornoexhibitionism successfullyeven brilliantlyagain and again with never a misstep is the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things which trouble the nightthoughts of a whole society. But horror movies don't always wear a hat which identifies them as disguised comments on the social or political scene (as Cronenberg's The Brood comments on the disintegration of the generational family or as his They Came from Within treats of the more cannibalistic sideeffects of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck"). More often the horror movie points even further inward, looking for those deepseated personal fearsthose pressure pointswe all must cope with. This adds an element of universality to the proceedings, and may produce an even truer sort of art. It also explains, I think, why The Exorcist (a social horror film if there ever was one) did only soso business when it was released in West Germany, a country which had an entirely different set of social fears at the time (they were a lot more worried about bombthrowing radicals than about foultalking young people), and why Dawn of the Dead went through the roof there. This second sort of horror film has more in common with the Brothers Grimm than with the oped page in a tabloid paper. It Is the Bpicture as fairy tale. This sort of picture doesn't want to score political points but 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 to better understand what those taboos and fears are, and why it feels so uneasy about them. A good example of this second type of horror picture is RKO's The Body Snatcher (1945) , liberally adaptedand that's putting it kindlyfrom a Robert Louis Stevenson story and starring Karloff and Lugosi. And by the way, the picture was produced by our friend Val Lewton. As an example of the art, The Body Snatcher is one of the forties' best. And as an example of this second artistic "purpose"that of breaking taboosit positively shines. I think we'd all agree that one of the great fears which all of us must deal with 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 age eighty (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, where Phibes dispatches his victims one at a time using the Twelve Plagues of Egypt, slightly updated, a gimmick worthy of the Batman comics during their palmiest days). Who can forget the lethal binoculars in Horrors of the Black Museum, for instance? They came equipped with springloaded sixinch 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 which follows death. In a society where such a great store is placed in the fragile commodities of youth, health, and beauty (and the latter, it seems to me, is very often defined in terms of the former two), 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 McDonaldsone can imagine, or I can in my more morbid moments, the mortuary and McDonalds combined; the highlights 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 these 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 highand 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 which 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 SHRIEKANDSHUDDER 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 very specifically to mark out the exact location of the taboo line and to suggest that not everyone may be adventurous enough to transgress this 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? 2 These "areas of unease"the politicalsocialcultural and those of the more mythic, fairytale varietyhave 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, we might look at a couple of films where this particular area of unease has been used well. The prime example, of course, is Night of the Living Dead, where our horror of these final states is exploited to a point where many audiences found the film wellnigh 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 taboobreaking? Yet the film circles around to its startingpoint 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 mother'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, weeksold 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 singlemindedness of the hungry dead. The film is violent, as is its sequel, Dawn of the Deadbut the violence has its own logic, and I submit to you that in the horror genre, logic goes a long way toward proving morality. The crowning horror in Hitchcock's Psycho comes when Vera Miles touches that chair in the cellar and it spins lazily around to reveal Norman's mother at lasta wizened, shriveled corpse from which hollow eyesockets stare up blankly. She is not only dead; she has been stuffed like one of the birds which decorate Norman's office. Norman's subsequent entrance in dress and makeup is almost an anticlimax. In AIP's The Pit and the Pendulum we see another facet of the bad deathperhaps 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 late wife, has indeed been buried 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. Following the Hammer films, this becomes, I think, the most important moment in the post1960 horror film, signaling a return to an allout effort to terrify the audience . . . and a willingness to use any means at hand to do it. Other examples abound. No vampire movie can be complete without a midnight creep through the tombstones and the jimmying of a crypt door. The John Badham remake of Dracula has disappointingly few fine moments, but one rather good sequence occurs when Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier) discovers his daughter Mina's grave empty . . . and an opening at its bottom leading deeper into the earth. This is English Van Helsing's daughter? I hear you saying with justifiable dismay. Yes indeed. Readers familiar with Stoker's novel will see that Badham's film (and the stage play from which it was drawn) has rung any number of changes on the novel. In terms of the tale's interior logic, these changes of plot and relationship seem to work, but to what purpose? The changes don't cause Badham to say anything new about either the Count or the vampire myth in general, and to my mind there was no coherent reason for them at all. As we have to far too often, we can only shrug and say, "That's showbiz." mining country, and we're told that the hillside where the cemetery has been laid out is honeycombed with old tunnels. Van Helsing nevertheless descends, and the movie's best passage followscrawling, claustrophobic, and reminiscent of that classic Henry Kuttner story, "The Graveyard Rats." Van Helsing pauses at a pool for a moment, and his daughter's voice comes from behind him, begging for a kiss. Her eyes glitter unnaturally; she is still dressed in the cerements of the grave. Her flesh has decayed to a sick green color and she stands, swaying, in this passage under the earth like something from a painting of the Apocalypse. In this one moment Badham has not merely asked us to cross the taboo line with him; he has quite literally pushed us across it and into the arms of this rotting corpsea corpse made more horrible because in life it conformed so perfectly to those conventional American standards of beauty youth and health. It's only a moment, and the movie holds no other moment comparable to it, but it is a fine effect while it lasts. 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 19501980, 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 themselvesfor 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 Englishteacher fashion and pull on a pair of hipwaders. 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 dollarsandcents 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 releasedand almost unanimously panned by the critics. Despite the critics, The Amityville Horror went serenely on to become one of 1979's topgrossing 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 putup 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 smalltime 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 "makebelieve." 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 kindin 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 Kiddernot 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 fortytwo. And there was a light on their facesan excitement, a glow. Leaving, they discussed the film animatedly with one another. It was this reactionwhich seemed to me markedly peculiar in terms of what the film had to offerthat 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 flyingsaucer 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 smartan idea perhaps inspired by science fiction writer Poul Anderson's short novel, Brain Wave, and then crosspollinated 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 scifi and '70s ecodisaster 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 boxoffice business, and I finally caught it at the drivein 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 IVthat 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. I said all of that to say this the opposite also applies. The ear which is constantly attuned to the "fine" soundthe decorous strains of chamber music, for instancemay 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 easytoo easyto 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 times18percent 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, purplepouched eyes we see a man who didn't really have the money any more than his hapless brotherinlaw 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 moneyband 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 trueor, 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 effectand 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 hauntedhouse stories start. "It's on the market for a song," the realtor says with a big eggsucking 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 momentall too shortwhen 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 pluggedup 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 ghoststory 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 periodalthough 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 cultureone 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 comingtoterms 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 socalled "big bug" movies are among these) and also those "nuclear showdown" movies such as FailSafe 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 blooddrinking 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 speedsstrange 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 specialeffects corps of a potentially bigbudget 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. Heit 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 mediumrare 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 "onset" as Lewton's The Cat People. Like Alien, which would come more than a quartercentury later, it achieves its best effects from feelings of claustrophobia and xenophobia, both of them feelings we're saving for those films with mythic, "fairytale" 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 kneejerk Some would say that feelings of xenophobia are in themselves political, and there's an argument there to be madebut 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 ivorytower 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 outa major distinction, although the end results are the same). That scientists should be so constantly vilified in the technohorror films of the fiftiesa decade that was apparently dedicated to the idea of turning out a whole marching corps of men and women in white lab coatsis 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 Edenfirst 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 scientistsrecognizing 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 allaround 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. 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" Only scientists, Cornthwaite says, are capable of studying this creature from another world, and it must be studied; it must be debriefed; we gotta find out what heats up his rocket tubes. Never mind the fact that the creature has exhibited nothing but murderous tendencies, laying low a couple of huskies (it loses a hand in the process, but not to worry, it grows back) and living on blood instead of Green Thumb Plant Food. 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 mediumrare roasting on the electric sidewalk follows. Now I'm only a journeyman writer and I will not presume to teach history here (too much like trying to teach your grammy to suck eggs). 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 twelve years prior to The Thing's release, and even Americans who were just turning twentyone in 1951 could remember it all very clearly. The moral was simplesuch 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). The Chamberlain lesson to Americans of the early fifties was that there can be no peace at any price, and never appeasement. Although the Korean police action would mark the beginning of the end for the idea, in 1951 the idea of America as world policeman (a kind of international Clancy growling. "Whaddye think yes doin' there, boyo?" at such geopolitical burglars as North Korea) was still quite respectable, and many Americans undoubtedly saw the idea in even stronger terms the United States not just as policeman, but as the gunslinger of the free world, the Texas Ranger who had pushed his way into the brawling saloon of AsianEuropean politics in 1941 and who had cleaned house in a mere three and a half years. So that moment comes in The Thing when Cornthwaite faces the creatureand is slammed roughly aside. It is a purely political moment, and audiences applauded the creature's destruction fervently when it came moments later. In the confrontation between Cornthwaite and the hulking Arness, there is a subtext which suggests Chamberlain and Hitler; in the destruction of the creature moments later by Tobey and his soldiers, audiences may have seen (and applauded) the quick, nononsense destruction of their favorite geopolitical villain North Korea perhaps; more likely the dastardly Russians, who had so quickly replaced Hitler as the man in the black hat. If all this seems much too heavy a cargo for a modest little fright flick like The Thing to bear, please remind yourself that a man's point of view is shaped by the events he experiences, and that a man's politics are shaped by his point of view. I am only suggesting that, given the political temper of the times and the cataclysmic world events which had occurred only a few years before, the viewpoint of this movie is almost preordained. What do you do with a blooddrinking carrot from outer space? Simple. Cut him if he stands and shoot him if he runs. And if you're an Appeasing Scientist like Robert Cornthwaite (with a yellow streak up your back as wide as the nopassing line on a highway, that subtext whispers), you simply get bulldozed under. Carlos Clarens points out how remarkably the creature of this film resembles Universal's Frankenstein monster from twenty years before, but there is really nothing so remarkable about it, surely; this particular card from the Tarot should be familiar to us by now, and if it's not, the title helpfully informs us that we're again dealing with the Thing Without a Name. It perhaps strikes more modern viewers as strange that a creature intelligent enough to conquer space should be presented in the film as an outandout monster (as opposed, let us say, to the saucerians in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, who speak English with a moderate warble but with the grammatical poise of an Oxford don; Hawks's Thing can only grunt like a pig getting its back scratched with a wire brush). One wonders why he came to Earth at all. My own suspicion is that heit got offcourse and that the original plan was for him to seed all of Nebraska or perhaps the Nile delta with little bits of himself. Just thinka homegrown invasion force (get in their way and they kill you, but smoke them and . . . real mellow, manoooh, the colors!). Yet even this is not much of an inconsistency when we put ourselves into the temper of the times again. The people of those times saw both Hitler and Stalin as creatures possessed of a certain low animal cunningHitler, after all, was first with the jet fighter and the offensive missile. But they were animals for all that, mouthing political ideas that were little more than grunts. Hitler grunted in German; Stalin in Russian, but a grunt is a grunt, for all that. And perhaps the creature in The Thing is saying something, after all, which is perfectly harmless "The people of my star system wish to know if the Get Out of Jail Free card may be sold to another player," perhapsbut it sounds bad. Real bad. By contrast, consider the other end of this telescope. The children of World War II produced The Thing; twentysix years later a child of Vietnam and the selfproclaimed Love Generation, Steven Spielberg, gives us a fitting balance weight to The Thing in a film called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1951, the soldier standing sentry duty (the one who has foolishly covered the block of ice in which the Thing has been entombed with an electric blanket, you will remember) empties his automatic into the alien when he hears it coming; in 1977, a young guy with a happy, spacedout smile holds up a sign reading STOP AND BE FRIENDLY. Somewhere in between the two, John Foster Dulles evolved into Henry Kissinger, and the pugnacious politics of confrontation became dtente. In The Thing, Kenneth Tobey occupies himself with building an electric boardwalk to kill the creature; in Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfuss occupies himself with building a mockup of Devil's Tower, the creatures' landing place, in his living room. And he would be just as happy, we feel, to run around up there placing those landing lights. The Thing is a big, hulking brute; the creatures from the stars in Spielberg's film are small, delicate, childlike. They do not speak, but their mothership plays lovely harmonic tonesthe 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 M1's and while Hendrix and Joplin were playing the Fillmore West. Neither am I saying that Howard Hawks, Christian Nyby, Charles Lederer (who wrote the screenplay for The Thing), or John W. Campbell (whose novella formed the basis for the film) fought their way up the beaches of Anzio or helped to 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 lessthanstartling record in Vietnam, or even in 1980 (when CE3K was rereleased with additional footage), the year when American military personnel lost the battle for our hostages to the Iranians following three hours of mechanical fuckups. Political horror films are by no means common, but other examples come to mind. The hawkish ones, like The Thing, usually extol the virtues of preparedness and deplore the vices of laxness, and achieve a goodly amount of their horror by positing a society which is politically antithetical to ours and yet possesses a great deal of powereither technological or magical, it matters not which; as Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out, when you reach a certain point, there is absolutely no difference between the two. There is a wonderful moment near the begining of George Pal's adaptation of The War of the Worlds when three men, one of whom is waving a white flag, approach the first of the alien spacecraft to land. Each of the three appears to come from a different class and a different race, but they are united, not just by their common humanity, but by a pervasive sense of Americanness which I don't believe was accidental. As they approach the smoking crater with their white flag, they evoke that Revolutionary War image we all grew up in school with the drummer, the fifer, the flagbearer. Thus their destruction by the Martians' heat ray becomes a symbolic act, calling up all the ideals Americans have ever fought for. The film 1984 makes a similar statement, only here (the film being largely stripped of the rich resonance George Orwell brought to his novel) Big Brother has replaced the Martians. In the Charlton Heston film The Omega Man (adapted from what David Chute calls "Richard Matheson's toughminded, peculiarly practical vampire novel I Am Legend"), we see exactly the same sort of thing; the vampires become almost cartoon Gestapo agents in their black clothes and their sunglasses. Ironically, an earlier film version of that same novel ( The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price in a rare nonvillain role as Matheson's Robert Neville) proposes a political idea which raises a different sort of horror. This film is more faithful to Matheson's novel, and as a result it offers a subtext which tells us that politics themselves are not immutable, that times change, and that Neville's very success as a vampirehunter (his peculiarly practical success, to paraphrase Chute), has turned him into the monster, the outlaw, the Gestapo agent who strikes at the helpless as they sleep. For a nation whose political nightmares perhaps still include visions of Kent State and My Lai, this is a particularly apt idea. The Last Man on Earth is perhaps an example of the ultimate political horror film, because it offers us the Walt Kelly thesis We have met the enemy and he is us. All of which brings us to an interesting borderline that I want to point out but not step overthis is the point at which the country of the horror film touches the country of the black comedy. Stanley Kubrick has been a resident of this borderline area for quite some time. A perfectly good case could be made for classing Stanley Kubrick's Dr.


Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as a political horror film without monsters (a guy needs a dime to phone Washington and stop World War III before it can get started; Keenan Wynn grudgingly obliges by blowing a Coke machine to smithereens with his burpgun so our hero can get at the change; but he tells this wouldbe savior of the human race that "you're going to have to answer to the CocaCola Company of America for this"); for A Clockwork Orange as a political horror film with human monsters (Malcolm McDowell stomping a hapless passerby to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain"); and for 2001 A Space Odyssey as a political horror film with an inhuman monster ("Please don't turn me off," the murderous computer HAL 9000 begs as the Jupiter probe's one remaining crewman pulls its memory modules one by one) that ends its cybernetic life by singing "A Bicycle Built for Two." Kubrick has consistently been the only American film director to understand that stepping over the borderline into taboo country is as often apt to cause wild laughter as it is horror, but any tenyearold who ever laughed hysterically at a travelingsalesman joke would agree that it is so. Or it may simply be that only Kubrick has been smart enough (or brave enough) to go back to this country more than once. 6 "We have opened a door on an unimaginable power," the old scientists says gloomily at the conclusion of Them! , "and there will be no closing it now." At the end of D. F. Jones's novel Colossus (filmed as The Forbin Project), the computer which has taken over everything tells Forbin, its creator, that people will do more than learn to accept its rule; they will come to accept it as a god. "Never!" Forbin responds in ringing tones that would do the hero of a Robert Heinlein space opera proud. But it is Jones himself who has the final wordand it's not a reassuring one. "Never?" reads the final paragraph of his cautionary tale.  In the Richard Egan film Gog (directed by Mr. Flipper himself, Ivan Toss), the equipment of an entire spaceresearch station seems to go mad. A solar mirror twirls erratically, pursuing the heroine with what amounts to a lethal heat ray; a centrifuge designed to test wouldbe astronauts for their responses to heavy gloads speeds up until the two test subjects are literally accelerated to death; and at the conclusion, the two BEMlike robots, Gog and Magog, go totally out of control, snapping their Waldolike pincers and making weird Geigercounterlike sounds as they roll forward on various errands of destruction ("I can control him," the coldfish scientist says confidently only moments before Magog crushes his neck with one of those pincers). "We grow them big out here," the old Indian in Prophecy says complacently to Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire as a tadpole as big as a D. F. Jones could hardly be classed as the Pollyanna of the science fiction world; in his followup to Colossus, a newly developed birth control pill that you only have to take once results in worldwide sterility and the slow death of the human race. Cheery stuff, but Jones is not alone in his gloomy distrust of a technological world; there is J. G. Ballard, author of such grim tales as Crash, Concrete Island, and HighRise; not to mention Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (whom my wife fondly calls "Father Kurt"), who has given us such novels as Cat's Cradle and Player Piano. salmon jumps out of a lake in northern Maine and flops around on the shore. Indeed they do; Foxworth also sees a salmon as big as a porpoise, and by the conclusion of the film, one is grateful that whales are not freshwater mammals. All of the foregoing are examples of the horror film with a technological subtext . . . sometimes referred to as the "nature run amok" sort of horror picture (not that there's much natural about Gog and Magog, with their tractor treads and their forests of radio aerials). In all of them, it is mankind and mankind's technology which 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. In Them! it is nuclear testing at White Sands that has produced the giant ants; the Cold War has spawned dat ole binary debbil Colossus; ditto the machines that have gone nuts in Gog; and it's mercury in the water, a sideeffect of a papermaking process, that has produced the giant tadpoles and the mutant monstrosities in the John Frankenheimer film Prophecy. 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 horrorfilm corral where even such an abysmal little wet fart of a picture as The Horror of Party Beach will yield a technological aspect upon analysisyou see, all those beach blanket boppers in their bikinis and ballhuggers 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. Once more, these things happen only rarely because directors, writers, and producers want them to happen; they happen on their own. The producers of The Horror of Party Beach, for example, were two Connecticut drivein owners who saw a chance to turn a quick buck in the lowbudget horrormovie game (the reasoning seeming to be that if Nicholson and Arkoff of AIP could make X amount of dollars churning out Bpictures, then they might be able to make X2 amount of dollars by turning out Zpictures). The fact that they created a film which foresaw a problem that would become very real ten years down the road was only an accident . . . but an accident, like Three Mile Island, that perhaps had to happen, sooner or later. I find it quite amusing that this grainy, lowbudget rock 'n' roll horror picture arrived at ground zero with its Geiger counters clicking long before The China Syndrome was even a twinkle in anyone's eye. By now it must be obvious that all of these circles intersect, that sooner or later we always arrive back at the same terminusthe terminus which gives upon the land of the mass American nightmare. These are nightmares for profit, granted, but nightmares is nightmares, and in the last analysis it is the profit motive that becomes unimportant and the nightmare itself which remains of interest. The producers of The Horror of Party Beach never sat down, I'm sure (just as I'm sure the producers of The China Syndrome did), and said to each other "Lookwe're going to warn the people of America about the dangers of nuclear reactors, and we will sugarcoat the pill of this vital message with an entertaining story line." No, the line of discussion would have been more apt to go like this Because our target audience is young, we'll feature young people, and because our target audience is interested in sex, we'll site it on a sunandsurftype beach, which allows us to show all the flesh the censors will allow. And because our target audience likes grue, we'll give them these gross monsters. It must have looked like boffo boxoffice stuff a hybrid of AIP's most consistently lucrative genre picturesthe monster movie and the beachparty movie. But because any horror film (with the possible exception of the German expressionist films of the 1930s) has got to at least pay lip service to credibility, there had to be some reason for these monsters to suddenly come out of the ocean and start doing all these antisocial things (one of the film's highlightsmaybe lowlights would be bettercomes when the creatures invade a slumber party and kill ten or twenty nubile young things . . . talk about party poopers!). What the producers decided upon was nuclear waste, leaking from those dumped cannisters. I'm sure it was one of the least important points in their preproduction discussions, and for that very reason it becomes very important to our discussions here. The reason for the monsters most likely came about in a kind of freeassociation process, the sort of test psychiatrists use to discover points of anxiety in their patients. And although The Horror of Party Beach has long since been consigned to oblivion, that image of the canisters marked with radiation symbols sinking slowly to the bottom of the ocean lingers in the memory. What in Christ's name are we really doing with all that nuclear sludge? the mind enquires uneasilythe burnoff, the dreck, the used plutonium slugs, and the wornout parts that are as hot as a nickelplated revolver and apt to stay that way for the next six hundred years or so? Does anybody know what in Christ's name we're doing with those things? Any thoughtful consideration of technohorror filmsthose films whose subtexts suggest that we have been betrayed by our own machines and processes of mass productionreveals very quickly another face in that dark Tarot hand we dealt out earlier this time it's the face of the Werewolf. In talking about the Werewolf in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde I used the terms Apollonian (to suggest reason and the power of the mind) and Dionysian (to suggest emotion, sensuality, and chaotic action). Most films which express technological fears have a similar dual nature. Grasshoppers, Beginning of the End suggests, are Apollonian creatures, going about their business of hopping, eating, spitting tobacco juice, and making little grasshoppers. But following an infusion of nuclear wolfsbane, they grow to the size of Cadillacs, become Dionysian and disruptive, and attack Chicago. It is their very Dionysian tendenciesin this case, their sex drivethat spells the end for them. Peter Graves (as the Brave Young Scientist) rigs up a matingcall tape that is broadcast through loudspeakers from a number of boats circling on Lake Michigan, and the grasshoppers all rush to their deaths, believing themselves to be on their way to a really good fuck. A bit of a cautionary tale, you understand. I bet D. F. Jones loved it. Even Night of the Living Dead has a technohorror aspect, a fact that may be overlooked as the zombies move in on the lonely Pennsylvania farmhouse where the "good guys" are holed up. There is nothing really supernatural about all those dead folks getting up and walking; it happened because a space probe to Venus picked up some weird corpsereviving radiation on its way back home. One suspects that chunks of such a satellite would be eagerly soughtafter artifacts in Palm Springs and Fort Lauderdale. The barometer effect of the subtexts of technohorror films can be seen by comparing films of this type from the fifties, sixties, and seventies. In the fifties, the terror of the Bomb and of fallout was a real and terrifying thing, and it left a scar on those children who wanted to be good just as the depression of the thirties left a scar on their elders. A newer generationnow still teenagers, with no memory of either the Cuban missile crisis or of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, raised on the milk of dtentemay 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 which lie ahead . . . and the movies will be there to give their vague fears concrete focusing points in the horror movies yet to come. It may be that nothing in the world is so hard to comprehend as a terror whose time has come and gonewhich may be why parents can scold their children for their fear of the boogeyman, 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. I can remember, for instance, that in 1968, when I was twentyone, 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 called the Stardust 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? And so on, as Father Kurt so rightly says. 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 cystremoval operation that occurred when I was twelve. 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 1960s' time setting because all of that seems, like the pulling of that surgical dressing, very distant to me nowalmost 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 only need review that quintessential sixties counterculture horror film, Easy Rider, where 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 All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) " on the soundtrack. Similarly, it is difficult to remember in any gut way the fears that came with those boom years of atomic technology twentyfive years ago. The technology itself was strictly Apollonian; as Apollonian as niceguy 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 runestruck 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 goddam crabgrass on the lawn. 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 businessasusual basis. People understood this and could live with it (fifties science books extolled the wonderful world the Friendly Atom would produce, a world refueled 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. These feelings of deep unease came out in movies such as The Beginning of the End, Them!, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man (where radiation combined with a pesticide causes a very personal horror for one man, Scott Carey), The HMen, and FourD Man. The entire cycle reaches its supreme pinnacle of absurdity in Night of the Lepus, where the world is menaced by sixtyfoot bunnies. 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 And a host of others, many of them Japanese imports, all linked by either longterm radiation or nuclear blast as first cause Godzilla, Gorgo, Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidrah, the ThreeHeaded Monster. The idea was even played for laughs once before Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, in an odd little fifties picture called The Atomic Kid, starring Mickey Rooney. (The Software that Conquered the World) and 2001, which both 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, which is laboriously produced in Demon Seed and Saturn 3. In the sixties, horror proceeds from a vision of technology as an octopusperhaps sentientburying us alive in red tape and informationretrieval systems which 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 Frankenheimer's notverygood but certainly wellmeant 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 which synthesizes all three of these major technological fears fears of radiation, fears for the ecology, fears of the machinery gone out of control, run wild. Before leaving this all too brief look at pictures which depend on some mass unease over matters technological to provide the equivalent of The Hook (pictures which appeal to the Luddite hiding inside all of us), we should mention some of the films dealing with space travel which fall into this category . . . but we'll exclude such xenophobic pictures as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The Mysterians from our view. Pictures which focus on the possible Dionysian side of space exploration (such as The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead, where satellites bring back dangerous but nonsentient organisms from the void) ought to be differentiated from those purely xenophobic movies dealing with invasion from outer spacefilms where the human race is viewed in an essentially passive role, attacked by the equivalent of muggers from the stars. In pictures of this type, technology is often seen as the savior (as it is in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, where Hugh Marlowe uses his sonic gun to interrupt the saucers' electromagnetic drive, or in The Thing, where Tobey and his men use electricity to barbecue the interstellar vegetable)Apollonian science vanquishing the Dionysian bad guys from Planet X. Although both The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead present space travel itself as an active danger, perhaps the best example of that idea combined with the brilliant mind dangerously hypnotized by the siren song of technology comes in The Creeping Unknown, a film that predates both of the former. In that film, the first of the critically acclaimed Quatermass series, the viewer is originally presented with one of the creepiest lockedroom mysteries ever posited three scientistastronauts are sent into space, but only one returns . . . and he is catatonic. Telemetry and the presence of all three spacesuits seem to prove that the two missing spacemen never left the ship. So where did they go? What happened, apparently, is that they picked up an interstellar hitchhiker, a plot device we see again in It.! The Terror from Beyond Space and, of course, in Alien. This hitchhiker has consumed the survivor's two mates, leaving only a mass of sludgy gray stuff behind . . . and, of course, the hitchhiker (a kind of space spore) is now busily at work in the body of the survivor, Victor Carune, who is played with skulllike, spooky believability by Richard Wordsworth. Poor Carune ends up degenerating into a spongy, manytentacled horror which is finally spotted clinging to a scaffolding in Westminster Abbey and dispatched (just in the nick of time; it is about to sporulate and create billions of these things) by a big jolt of electricity which sets it on fire. All of this is fairly standard monstermovie fare. What elevates The Creeping Unknown to levels undreamed of in the philosophies of the creators of The Horror of Party Beach is Val Guest's somber, atmospheric direction, and the character of Quatermass himself, played by Brian Donlevy (other actors have since played Quatermass in other films, softening the interpretation a bit). Quatermass is a scientist who may or may not be mad, depending on your own views of technology. Certainly if he is nuts, there is enough Apollonian method in his madness to make him every bit as scary (and every bit as dangerous) as that blob of tentaclewaving goo that was once Victor Carune. "I'm a scientist, not a fortuneteller," Quatermass grunts contemptuously at a timid doctor who asks him what he thinks might happen next; when a fellow scientist tells him that if he tries to open the hatch of the crashed rocket he will roast the space travelers inside, Quatermass storms at him "Don't tell me what I can and can't do!" His attitude toward Carune himself is the coldblooded attitude which a biologist might adopt toward a hamster or a Rhesus monkey. "He's coming along fine," Quatermass says of the catatonic Carune, who is sitting in something which vaguely resembles a dentist's chair and staring out at the world with eyes as black and dead as cinders coughed up from hell. "He knows we're trying to help him." Yet in the end it is Quatermass triumphantif only through blind luck. After the monster is destroyed, Quatermass brushes rudely by a police officer who is trying to tell him in a halting way that he prayed they would be successful. "One world at a time is enough for me," the policeman says; Quatermass ignores him. At the door, his young assistant finds his way to him. "I only just heard, sir," he says. "Is there anything I can do?" "Yes, Morris," Quatermass replies. "I'm going to need some help." "Help, sir?" "Going to start again," Quatermass amplifiesit is the film's last line of dialogue. It fades to a scene of yet another rocket blasting off into outer space. Guest seems ambivalent about his ending and about the character of Quatermass, and it's that ambivalence which gives this early Hammer film its resonance and real power. Quatermass seems somehow closer to those very real Oak Ridge scientists of the postwar period than he does to the gibbering Mad Labs scientists of the thirties; he is no Dr. Cyclops in a white lab coat, chuckling evilly as he stares through his bottlethick glasses at his creations. Au contraire, he is not only fairly goodlooking and fearsomely intelligent, he is charismatic and impossible to turn from his purpose. If you are an optimist, you can see the coda of The Creeping Unknown as a testament to the glorious stubbornness of the human spirit, its determination to advance the store of knowledge at any cost. If, on the other hand, you are a pessimist, then Quatermass becomes the ultimate symbol of mankind's builtin limiting factor, and the high priest of the technohorror film. The return of his first manned space probe has almost resulted in the end of the human race; Quatermass's response to this niggling little reversal is to launch another as quickly as he can. Footdragging politicians are apparently no match for the man's charisma, and as we see that rocket going up at the end of the picture, we're left with a question What will this one bring back? Even such a muchloved American institution as the motor vehicle has not entirely escaped the troubled dreams of Hollywood; a few years before being run out of his mortgaged house in Amityville, James Brolin had to face the terrors of The Car (1977) , a customized somethingorother that looked like a squatty airport limo from one of hell's used car lots. The movie degenerates into a hohum piece of hackwork before the end of the second reel (the sort of movie where 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 where the car chases two bicyclists through Utah's Zion State Park, its horn blatting arrhythmically as it gains on them and finally runs them down. There's something working in that opening sequence, something that calls up a deep, almost primitive unease about the cars we zip ourselves up in, thereby becoming anonymous . . . and perhaps homicidal. A better film is the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Richard Matheson's short story Duel, a film which originally appeared as part of ABC's Movie of the Week series and went on to become something of a cult film. In this film, a psychotic trucker in a big tenwheeler pursues Dennis Weaver over what seems to be at least a million miles of California highways. We never actually see the trucker (although we do see a beefy arm cocked out of the cab window once, and at another point we see a pair of pointytoed cowboy boots on the far side of the truck), and ultimately it is the truck itself, with its huge wheels, its dirty windshield like an idiot's stare, and its somehow hungry bumpers, which becomes the monsterand when Weaver is finally able to lead it to an embankment and lure it over the edge, the noise of its "death" becomes a series of chilling Jurassic roars . . . the sound, we think, a tyrannosaurus rex would make going slowly down into a tar pit. And Weaver's response is that of any selfrespecting caveman he screams, shrieks, cuts capers, literally dances for joy. Duel is a gripping, almost painfully suspenseful rocket ride of a movie; perhaps not Spielberg's best workthat must almost certainly wait for the eighties and ninetiesbut surely one of the half dozen best movies ever made for TV. We could uncover other interesting tales of automotive horror, but they would be stories and novels, mostly; such turkeys as Death Race 2000 and Mad Max hardly count. Modern Hollywood has apparently decided that, as the day of the privately owned gasoline vehicle enters its late afternoon, the automobile in most cases must be reserved for funny car chases (as in Foul Play and the cheerfully mindcroggling Grand Theft Auto) or a kind of sappy reverence ( The Driver). The interested reader might enjoy an anthology (now available in paperback) edited by Bill Pronzini and titled Car Sinister. Fritz Leiber's contribution alone, a funnysinister tale of Car Future titled "X Marks the Pedwalk," is worth the price of admission. 7 Social horror films. We've already discussed a few films with social implicationspimples and the heartbreak of psoriasis in the fifties, not to mention Michael Landon drooling shaving cream all over his high school jacket. But there have been other films which tackle more serious social subjects. In some cases ( Rollerball, Wild in the Streets), these films feature a logical or satirical extrapolation of current social trends and thus become science fiction. We'll restrict these, if you don't mind, on the grounds that they constitute another dancea bit different from this dark cotillion we're currently engaged in. There have been a few films which have tried to walk the borderline between horror and social satire; one of those which seems to me to tread this borderline 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, which we'll talk about in some depth when we finally arrive at our discussion of the horror novel. For now we'll stick to The Stepford Wives, which has some witty things to say about Women's Liberation, and some disquieting things to say about the American male's response to it. I spent some time trying to decide if the film, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss, really belonged in this book. It is as satiric as the best of Kubrick's work (although a good deal less elegant), and I defy an audience not to laugh when Ross and Prentiss step into the home of a neighbor (he's the local druggist, and a Walter Mitty type if ever there was 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 them and to reappear (loaded, more likely than not) in time for their dinner to be served them. I'm including it hereas social horror rather than social satirebecause the film, after some uneasy backing and filling where it seems unsure of just what it does want to bebecomes just that a social horror story. But the credit for this particular scene belongs to neither Forbes nor Levin, but with the film's screenwriter, William Goldman, who is a very funny fellow. If you doubt, see his wonderful sendup of fantasy and fairy tales, The Princess Bride. I can think of no other satire, with the possible exception of Alice in Wonderland, which is so clearly an expression of love and humor and good temper. 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 kids wait goodhumoredly 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, spacey. 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 which 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 fenderbender; 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 comes clear immediately. Freud, in a tone which sounds suspiciously like despair, asked "Woman . . . what does she want?" 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 (besides the aforementioned "Frank, you're the champ" sequence); my own favorite comes when, at a women's "bitch session" Ross and Prentiss have arranged, the weird Stepford wives begin discussing cleaning products and laundry soaps with a slow and yet earnest intensity; everyone seems to have walked right out of one of those commercials male Madison Avenue execs sometimes refer to as "Two C's 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 Paula Prentiss, then around Katharine Ross.