A series of plaques in the home of the novel's young protagonist offer stern counsel ONLY THE IMAGE OF GOD IS MAN; KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD; IN PURITY OUR SALVATION; BLESSED IS THE NORM; and most telling of all WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT! After all, when we discuss monstrosity, we are expressing our faith and belief in the norm and watching for the mutant. The writer of horror fiction is neither more nor less than an agent of the status quo. 5 Having said all that, let's now return to the AmericanInternational pictures of the 1950s. In a little while we'll tally about the allegorical qualities of these films (you there in the back row, stop laughing or leave the room), but for now let's stick to the idea of monstrosity . . . and if we touch allegory at all, we'll touch it only lightly, by suggesting some of the things films were not. Although they came along at the same time rock and roll broke the race barrier, and although they appealed to the same fledgling hoppers, it's interesting to notice the sort of things that are altogether absent . . . at least in terms of "real" monstrosity. We've noted already that the AIP pictures, and those of the other independent film companies that began to imitate AIP, gave the movie industry a muchneeded shot in the arm during the hohum fifties. They gave millions of young viewers something they couldn't get at home on TV, and it nave them a place where they could go and make out in relative comfort. And it was the "indies," as Variety calls them, that gave a whole generation of war babies an insatiable Jones for the movies, and perhaps prepared the way for the success of such disparate movies as Easy Rider, Jaws, Rocky, The Godfather, and The Exorcist. But where are the monsters? Oh, we've got fake ones by the score saucermen, giant leeches, werewolves, mole people ( in a Universal picture), and dozens more. But what AIP didn't show as they tested these interesting new waters was anything that smacked of real horror . . . at least as those war babies understood the term emotionally. That is an important qualification, and I hope you'll come to agree with me that it warrants its italics. These werewe werechildren who knew about the psychic distress that came with The Bomb, but who had never known any real physical want or deprivation. None of the kids who went to these movies were starving or dying of internal parasites. A few had lost fathers or uncles in the war. Not many. And in the movies themselves, there were no fat kids; no kids with warts or tics; no kids with pimples; no kids picking their noses and then wiping it on the sun visors of their hot rods; no kids with sexual problems; no kids with any visible physical deformity (not even such a minor one as vision that had been corrected by glassesall the kids in the AIP horror and beach pictures had 2020 vision). There might be an endearingly wacky teenager on viewof the sort often played by Nick Adamsa kid who was a bit shorter or did daring, kooky things such as wearing his hat backwards like a baseball catcher (and who had a name like Weirdo or Scooter or Crazy), but that was as far as it ever went. The setting for most of these films was smalltown America, the scene the audience could best identify with . . . but all of these Our Towns looked eerily as if a eugenics squad had gone by the day before production actually began, removing everyone with a lisp, birthmark, limp, or potbellyeveryone, in short, who did not look like Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Robert Young, or Jane Wyatt. Of course Elisha Cook, Jr., who appeared in a great many of these films, has always looked a bit weird, but he always got killed in the first reel, so I feel he really doesn't count. Although both rock and roll and the new youth movies ( everything from I Was a Teenage Werewolf to Rebel Without a Cause) burst upon an older generation, just beginning to relax enough to translate "their war" into myth, with all the unpleasant surprise of a mugger leaping out of a privet hedge, both the music and the movies were only preshocks of a genuine youthquake to come. Little Richard was certainly unsettling, and Michael Landonwho didn't even have enough school spirit to at least take off his high school jacket before turning into a manwolfwas also unsettling, but it would still be miles and years to the Fish Cheer at Woodstock and Old Leatherface doing impromptu surgery with his McCulloch in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was a decade when every parent trembled at the spectre of juvenile delinquency the mythic teenaged hood leaning in the doorway of the candy store there in Our Town, his hair bejeweled with Vitalis or Brylcreem, a pack of Luckies tucked under the epaulet of his motorcycle jacket, a fresh zit at one corner of his mouth and a brandnew switchblade in his back pocket, waiting for a kid to beat up, a parent to harass and embarrass, a girl to assault, or possibly a dog to rape and then kill . . . or maybe viceversa. It is a oncedread image which has now undergone its own mythmaking, homogenizing process; pop in James Dean andor Vic Morrow here, wait twenty years, and heypresto! out pops Arthur Fonzarelli. But during the period, the newspapers and magazines of the popular press saw young jd's everywhere, just as these same organs of the fourth estate had seen Commies everywhere a few years before. Their chaindecked engineer boots and pegged Levis could be seen or imagined on the streets of Oakdale and Pineview and Centerville; in Mundamian, Iowa, and in Lewiston, Maine. The shadow of the dreaded jd stretched long. Marlon Brando had been first to give this emptyheaded nihilist a voice, in a picture called The Wild One. "What are you rebelling against?" the pretty girl asks him. Answers Marlon "What have you got?" To some fellow in Asher Heights, North Carolina, who had somehow survived fortyone missions over Germany in the belly of a bomber and who now only wanted to sell a lot of Buicks with PowerFlite transmissions, that sounded like very bad news indeed; here was a fellow for whom the Jaycees held no charms. But as there turned out to be fewer Communists and fifth columnists than was at first suspected, the Shadow of the Dread JD also proved to be rather overrated. In the last analysis, the war babies wanted what their parents wanted. They wanted driver's licences; jobs in the cities and homes in the suburbs; wives and husbands; insurance; underarm protection; kids; time payments which they would meet; clean streets; clear consciences. They wanted to be good. Years and miles between Senior Glee Club and the SLA; years and miles between Our Town and the Mekong Delta; and the only known fuzztone guitar track in existence was a technical mistake on a Marty Robbins country and western record. They adhered happily to school dress codes. Long sideburns were laughed at in most quarters, and a guy wearing stacked heels or bikini briefs would have been hounded unmercifully as a faggot. Eddie Cochran could sing about "those crazy pink pegged slacks" and kids would buy the records . . , but not the pants themselves. For the war babies, the norm was blessed. They wanted to be good. They watched for the mutant. Only one aberration per picture was allowed in the early youthcult horror films of the fifties, one mutation. It was the parents who would never believe. It was the kidswho wanted to be goodwho stood watch (most often from those lonely bluffs which overlook Our Town from the ends of lovers' lanes); it was the kids who stamped the mutant out, once more making the world safe for country club dances and Hamilton Beach blenders. Horrors in the fifties, for the war babies, were mostlyexcept maybe for the psychic strain of waiting for The Bomb to fallmundane horrors. And perhaps a conception of real horror is impossible for people whose bellies are full. The horrors the war babies felt were scalemodel horrors, and in that light the movies that really caused AIP to take off, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, become mildly interesting. In Werewolf, Michael Landon plays an attractive but moody high school student with a quick temper. He's basically a good kid, but he's involved in one fight after another ( like David Banner, the Hulk's alterego on TV, the Landon character actually provokes none of these fights) until it looks as though he will be suspended from school. He goes to see a psychiatrist ( Whit Bissell, who also plays the mad descendant of Victor Frankenstein in Teenage Frankenstein) who turns out to be totally evil. Seeing Landon as a throwback to an earlier stage of human developmentlike back to the Alley Oop stageBissell uses hypnosis to regress Landon totally, in effect deliberately making the problem worse instead of trying to cure it. This plot twist seems cribbed from the thencurrent and fabulously successful Search for Bridey Murphy, the story (purportedly factual but later declared a hoax) of a woman who, under hypnosis, revealed memories of a previous life. Bissell's experiments succeed beyond his wildest dreamsor worst nightmaresand Landon becomes a ravening werewolf. For a 1957 high school or junior high school kid watching the transformation for the first time, this was baaad shit. Landon becomes the fascinating embodiment of everything you're not supposed to do if you want to be good . . . if you want to get along in school, join the National Honor Society, get your letter, and be accepted by a good college where you can join a frat and drink beer like your old man did. Landon grows hair all over his face, produces long fangs, and begins to drool a substance that looks suspiciously like BurmaShave. He peeks at a girl doing exercises on the balance beam all by herself in the gymnasium, and one imagines him smelling like a randy polecat who just rolled in a nice fresh pile of coyote shit. No buttondown Ivy League shirt with the fruit loop on the back here; here's a fellow who doesn't give a fart in a high wind for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. He has gone absolutely, not apeshit, but wolfshit. Undoubtedly part of the reason for the movie's meteoric takeoff at the box office had to do with the liberating, vicarious feelings the movie allowed these war babies who wanted to be good. When Landon attacks the pretty gymnast in the leotard, he is making a social statement on behalf of those watching. But those watching also react in horror, because on the psychological level, the picture is a series of object lessons on how to get alongeverything from "shave before you go to school" to "never exercise in a deserted gym." After all, there are beasts everywhere. 6 If I Was a Teenage Werewolf is, psychologically, that old dream of having your pants fall down when you stand up during homeroom period to salute the flag, taken to its most nightmarish extremethe ultimate hirsute outsider menacing the peer groups at Our Town Highthen I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is a sick parable of total glandular breakdown. It is a movie for every fifteenyearold who ever stood in front of her or his mirror in the morning looking nervously at the fresh pimple that surfaced in the night and realizing glumly that even StriDex Medicated Pads weren't going to solve the whole problem no matter what Dick Clark said. I keep coming back to pimples, you may say. You are right. In many ways I see the horror films of the late fifties and early sixtiesup until Psycho, let us sayas paeans to the congested pore. I've suggested that it may be impossible for a people whose bellies are full to feel real horror. Similarly, Americans have had to severely limit their conceptions of physical deformityand that is why the pimple has played such an important part in the developing psyche of the American teenager. Of course, there's probably a guy out there, a guy born with a congenital birth defect, who's muttering to himself don't talk to me about deformity, you asshole . . . and it is certainly true that there are Americans with club feet, Americans without noses, amputee Americans, blind Americans ( I've always wondered if the blind of America felt discriminated against by that McDonald's jingle that goes, "Keep your eyes on your fries . . ."). Beside such cataclysmic physical fuckups of God, man, and nature, a few pimples look about as serious as a hangnail. But I should also point out that in America, cataclysmic physical fuckups are (so far, at least) the exception rather than the rule. Walk down any ordinary street in America and count the serious physical defects you see. If you can walk three miles and come up with more than half a dozen, you're beating the average by a good country mile. Look for people under forty whose teeth have rotted right down to the gum line, children with the bloated bellies of oncoming starvation, folks with smallpox scars, and you will look in vain. You'll not find folks in the A  P with running sores on their faces or untreated ulcers on their arms and legs; if you set up a Head Inspection Station at the corner of Broad and Main, you could check a hundred heads and come up with only four or five really lively colonies of head lice. Incidence of these and other ailments rise in. white rural areas and in the inner cities, but in the towns and suburbs of America, most people are looking good. The proliferation of selfhelp courses, the growing cult of personal development "I'm going to be more assertive, if that's all right with you," as Erma Bombeck says), and the increasingly widespread hobby of navelcontemplation are all signs that, for the time being, great numbers of Americans have taken care of the nittygritty realities of life as it is for most of the worldthe survival trip. I can't imagine anyone with a severe nutritional deficiency caring much about I'm OKYou're OK, or anyone trying to scratch out a subsistencelevel existence for himself, his wife, and his eight kids giving much of a toot about Werner Erhard's est course or Rolfing. Such things are for rich folks. Recently Joan Didion wrote a book about her own odyssey through the sixties, The White Album. For rich folks, I suppose it's a pretty interesting book the story of a wealthy white woman who could afford to have her nervous breakdown in Hawaiithe seventies equivalent of worrying over pimples. When the horizons of human experience shrink to HO scale, perspective changes. For the war babies, secure (except for The Bomb) in a world of sixmonth checkups, penicillin, and eternal orthodontics, the pimple became the primary physical deformity with which you were seen on the street or in the halls of your school; most of the other deformities had been taken care of. And say, having mentioned orthodontics, I'll add that many kids who had to wear braces during dose years of heavy, almost suffocating peer pressure saw them as a kind of deformityevery now and then you would hear the cry of "Hey, metalmouth!" in the halls. But most people saw them only as a form of treatment, no more remarkable than a girl with her arm in a sling or a football player wearing an Ace bandage on his knee. But for the pimple there was no cure. And here comes I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. In this film, Whit Bissell assembles the creature, played by Gary Conway, from the bodies of dead hotrodders. The leftover pieces are fed to the alligators under the houseof course we have an idea early on that Bissell himself will end up being munched by the gators, and we are not disappointed. Bissell is a total fiend in this movie, reaching existential heights of villainy "He's crying, even the tear ducts work! . . . Answer me, you have a civil tongue in your head. I know, I sewed it there."  But it is Quoted in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, by Carlos Clarens (New York Capricorn Books, 1967). the unfortunate Conway who catches the eye and mainsprings the film. Like the villainy of Bissell, the physical deformity of Conway is so awful it becomes almost absurd . . . and he looks like nothing so much as a high school kid whose acne has run totally wild. His face is a lumpy basrelief map of mountainous terrain from which one shattered eye bugs madly. And yet . . . and yet . . . somehow this shambling creature still manages to dig rock and roll, so he can't be all bad, can he? We have met the monster, and, as Peter Straub points out in Ghost Story, he is us. We'll have more to say about monstrosity as we go along, and hopefully something of a more profound nature than is contained in the ore we can mine from I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, but I think it's important first to establish the fact that, even on their simplest level, these Tales of the Hook do a number of things without even trying to. Allegory and catharsis are both provided, but only because the creator of horror fiction is above all else an agent of the norm. This is true of horror's more physical side, and we'll find it's also true of works which are more consciously artistic, although when we turn our discussion to the mythic qualities of horror and terror, we may find some rather more disturbing and puzzling associations. But to reach that point, we need to turn our discussion away from film, at least for awhile, and to three novels which form most of the base on which the modern horror genre stands. CHAPTER III Tales of the Tarot ONE OF THE most common themes in fantastic literature is that of immortality. "The thing that would not die" has been a staple of the field from Beowulf to Poe's tales of M. Valdemar and of the telltale heart, to the works of Lovecraft (such as "Cool Air"), Blatty, and even, God save us, John Saul. The three novels I want to discuss in this chapter seem to have actually achieved that immortality, and I believe it's impossible to discuss horror in the years 19501980 with any real fullness of understanding unless we begin with these three books. All three live a kind of halflife outside the bright circle of English literature's acknowledged "classics," and perhaps with good reason. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written at white heat by Robert Louis Stevenson in three days. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the manuscript in his fireplace . . . and then wrote it again from scratch in another three days. Dracula is a frankly palpitating melodrama couched in the frame of the epistolary novela convention that had been breathing its last gasps twenty years before when Wilkie Collins was writing the last of his great mysterysuspense novels. Frankenstein, the most notorious of the three, was penned by a nineteenyearold girl, and although it is the best written of the three, it is the least read, and its author would never again write so quickly, so well, so successfully . . . or so audaciously. In the most unkind of critical lights, all three can be seen as no more than popular novels of their day, with little to distinguish them from novels roughly similarThe Monk, by M. G. Lewis, for instance, or Collins's Armadalebooks largely forgotten except by teachers of Gothic fiction who occasionally pass them on to students, who approach them warily . . . and then gulp them down. But these three are something special. They stand at the foundation of a huge skyscraper of books and filmsthose twentiethcentury gothics which have become known as "the modern horror story." More than that, at the center of each stands (or slouches) a monster that has come to join and enlarge what Burt Hatlen calls "the mythpool"that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to the films, have communally bathed. Like an almost perfect Tarot hand representing our lusher concepts of evil, they can be neatly laid out the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name. One great novel of supernatural terror, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, has been excluded from this Tarot hand, although it would complete the grouping by supplying the bestknown mythic figure of the supernatural, that of the Ghost. I have excluded it for two reasons first, because The Turn of the Screw, with its elegant drawingroom prose and its tightly woven psychological logic, has had very little influence on the mainstream of the American masscult. We would do better discussing Casper the Friendly Ghost in terms of the archetype. Secondly, the Ghost is an archetype (unlike those represented by Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, or Edward Hyde) which spreads across too broad an area to be limited to a single novel, no matter how great. The archetype of the Ghost is, after all, the Mississippi of supernatural fiction, and although we will discuss it when the time comes, we'll not limit its summingup to a single book. All of these books (including The Turn of the Screw) have certain things in common, and all of them deal with the very basis of the horror story secrets best left untold and things best left unsaid. And yet Stevenson, Shelley, and Stoker (James, too) all promise to tell us the secret. They do so with varying degrees of effect and success . . . and none of them can be said to have really failed. Maybe that's what's kept the novels alive and vital. At any rate, there they stand, and it seems to me impossible to write a book of this sort without doing something with them. It's a matter of roots. It may not do you any good to know that your grandfather liked to sit on the stoop of his building with his sleeves rolled up and smoke a pipe after supper, but it may help to know that he emigrated from Poland in 1888, that he came to New York and helped to build the subway system. If it does nothing else, it may give you a new perspective on your own morning subway ride. In the same way, it is hard to fully understand Christopher Lee as Dracula without talking about that redheaded Irishman Abraham Stoker. So . . . a few roots. 2 Frankenstein has probably been the subject of more films than any other literary work in history, including the Bible. The pictures include Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the WolfMan, The Revenge of Frankenstein, Blackenstein, and Frankenstein 1980, to name just a handful. In light of this, summary would seem almost unnecessary, but as previously pointed out, Frankenstein is not much read. Millions of Americans know the name (not as many as know the name of Ronald McDonald, granted; now there is a real culture hero), but most of them don't realize that Frankenstein is the name of the monster's creator, not the monster itself, a fact which enhances the idea that the book has become a part of Hatlen's American mythpool rather than detracting from it. It's like pointing out that Billy the Kid was in reality a tenderfoot from New York who wore a derby hat, had syphilis, and probably backshot most of his victims. People are interested in such facts, but understand intuitively that they aren't what's really important now . . . if indeed they ever were. One of the things that makes art a force to be reckoned with even by those who don't care for it is the regularity with which myth swallows truth . . . and without so much as a burp of indigestion. Mary Shelley's novel is a rather slow and talky melodrama, its theme drawn in large, careful, and rather crude strokes. It is developed the way a bright but naive debate student might develop his line of argument. Unlike the films based upon it, there are few scenes of violence, and unlike the inarticulate monster of the Universal days ("the Karloff films," as Forry Ackerman so charmingly calls them), Shelley's creature speaks with the orotund, balanced phrases of peer in the House of Lords or William F. Buckley disputing politely with Dick Cavett on a TV talk show. He is a cerebral creature, the direct opposite of Karloff's physically overbearing monster with the shovel forel,ead and the sunken, stupidly crafty eyes; and in all the book's pages there is nothing as chilling as Karloff's line in The Bride of Frankenstein, spoken in that dull, dead, and dragging tenor "Yes . . . dead . . . I love . . . dead." Ms. Shelley's novel is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus," and the Prometheus in question is Victor Frankenstein. He leaves hearth and home to go to university in Ingolstadt (and already we can hear the whirr of the author's grindstone as she prepares to sharpen one of the horror genre's most famous axes There Are Some Things Mankind Was Not Meant To Know), where he gets a lot of crazyand dangerousideas put into his head about galvanism and alchemy. The inevitable result, of course, is the creation of a monster with more parts than a J. C. Whitney automotive catalogue. Trankenstein accomplishes this creation in one long, delirious burst of activityand it is in these scenes that Shelley offers us her most vivid prose. On the grave robbery necessary to the task at hand Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance . . . . I collected bones from charnelhouses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame . . . . I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. On the dream which follows the completion of the experiment I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the street of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretchthe miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. Victor responds to this vision as any sane man would; he runs shrieking into the night. The remainder of Shelley's story is a Shakespearean tragedy, its classical unity broken only by Ms. Shelley's uncertainty as to where the fatal flaw liesis it in Victor's hubris (usurping a power that belongs only to God) or in his failure to take responsibility for his creation after endowing it with the lifespark? The monster begins its revenge against its creator by killing Frankenstein's little brother, William. We are not terribly sorry to see William go, by the way; when the monster tries to befriend the boy, William replies "Hideous monster! Let me go. My papa is a syndiche is M. Frankensteinhe will punish you. You dare not keep me." This piece of richkid snottiness is Willy's last; when the monster hears the name of its creator on the boy's lips, he wrings the kid's bratty little neck. A blameless servant in the Frankenstein household, Justine Moritz, is accused of the crime and is promptly hanged for itthus doubling the unfortunate Frankenstein's load of guilt. The monster approaches his creator soon after and tells him the story. The upshot of the matter is that he wants a mate. He tells Frankenstein that if his wish is granted, he will take his lady and the two of them will live out their span in some desolate wasteland (South America is suggested, as New Jersey had not yet been invented), removed from the eye and mind of man forever. The alternative, the monster threatens, is a reign of terror. He voices his existential credobetter to do evil than do nothing at allby saying, "I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you, my archenemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care; I will work at your destruction . . . . I will desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth." Much of the story is unintentionally hilarious. The monster hides in a shed adjacent to a peasant hut. One of the peasants, Felix, just happens to be teaching his girlfriend, a runaway Arabian noblewoman named Safie, his language; thus the monster learns how to talk. His reading primers are Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Werter sic, books he has discovered in a castoff trunk lying in a ditch. This baroque talewithinatale is only rivaled in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe strips naked, swims out to the foundering ship that has marooned him, and then, according to Defoe, fills his pockets with all sorts of goodies. My admiration for such invention knows no bounds. At length, Victor agrees, and actually does make the woman. He accomplishes this second act of creation on a desolate island in the Orkney chain, and in these pages Mary Shelley creates an intensity of mood and atmosphere that nearly rivals the creation of the original. Doubts assail Frankenstein moments before he is to imbue the creature with life. He imagines the world desolated by the pair of them. Even worse, he imagines them as a hideous Adam and Eve of an entire race of monsters. A child of her times, Shelley apparently never considered the idea that for a man capable of creating life from moldering spare parts, it would be child's play to create a woman without the capacity for conceiving a child. The monster turns up immediately after Frankenstein has destroyed its mate, of course; he has several words for Victor Frankenstein and none of them are "happy birthday." The reign of terror he has promised takes place like a chain of exploding firecrackers (although in Ms. Shelley's sedate prose they are more like a roll of caps). Frankenstein's boyhood friend, Henry Clerval, is strangled by the monster for openers. Shortly thereafter the monster utters the book's most horrible innuendo; he promises Frankenstein, "I will be with you on your wedding night." The implications of this threat, for readers of Mary Shelley's time as well as our own, go beyond murder. Frankenstein responds to this threat by almost immediately marrying his childhood sweetheart, Elizabethnot one of the book's more believable moments, although hardly in a class with the abandoned trunk in the ditch or the runaway Arabian noblewoman. On their wedding night, Victor goes out to confront the creature, having naively assumed that the monster's threat is against himself. Meanwhile, the monster has broken into the small but Victor and Elizabeth have taken for the night. Exit Elizabeth. Frankenstein's father goes next, a victim of shock and heartbreak. Frankenstein pursues his demon creation relentlessly north, into the Arctic wastes, where lie dies aboard the Polebound ship of Robert Walton, another scientist determined to crack open the mysteries of God and Nature . . . and the circle neatly closes. 3 So the question arises How did it happen that this modest gothic tale, which was only about a hundred pages long in its first draft (Ms. Shelley's husband, Percy, encouraged her to flesh it out), became caught in a kind of cultural echo chamber, amplifying through the years until, a hundred and sixtyfour years later, we have a cereal called Frankenberry (closely related to those two other favorites of the breakfast table, Count Chocula and Booberry) ; an old TV series called The Munsters, which has apparently gone into terminal syndication; Aurora Frankenstein model kits, which, when completed, delight the happy young modelmaker with a glowinthedark creature lurching through a glowinthedark graveyard; and a saying such as "He looked like Frankenstein" as a kind of apotheosis of ugly? The most obvious answer to this question is, the movies. The movies did it.


And this is a true answer, as far as it goes. As has been pointed out in film books ad infinitum (and possibly ad nauseam), the movies have been very good at providing that cultural echo chamber . . . perhaps because, in terms of ideas as well as acoustics, the best place to create an echo is in a large empty space. In place of the ideas that books and novels give us, the movies often substitute large helpings of gut emotion. To this American movies have added a fierce sense of image, and the two together create a dazzling show. Take Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, for instance. In terms of ideas, the film is an idiotic mishmash. In terms of image and emotionthe young kidnap victim being pulled from the cistern at dawn, the bad guy terrorizing the busload of children, the granite face of Dirty Harry Callahan himselfthe film is brilliant. Even the best of liberals walk out of a film like Dirty Harry or Peckinpah's Straw Dogs looking as if they have been clopped over the head . . . or run over by a train. There are films of ideas, of course, ranging all the way from Birth of a Nation to Annie Hall. But until a few years ago these were largely the province of foreign filmmakers (the cinema "new wave" that broke in Europe from 1946 until about 1965 ), and these movies have always been chancy in America, playing at your neighborhood "art house" with subtitles, if they play at all. I think it's easy to misread the success of Woody Allen's later films in this regard. In America's urban areas, his filmsand films such as Cousin, Cousinegenerate long lines at the box office, and they certainly get what George (Night of the Lining Dead, Dawn of the Dead) Romero calls "good ink," but in the sticksthe quad cinema in Davenport, Iowa, or the twin in Portsmouth, New Hampshirethese pictures play a fast week or two and then disappear. It is Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit that Americans really seem to take to; when Americans go to the films, they seem to want billboards rather than ideas; they want to check their brains at the box office and watch car crashes, custard pies, and monsters on the prowl. Ironically, it took a foreign director, the Italian Sergio Leone, to somehow frame the archetypal American movie; to define and typify what most American filmgoers seem to want. What Leone did in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and most grandiosely in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly cannot even properly be called satire. T.G.T.B.A.T.U. in particular is a huge and wonderfully vulgar overstatement of the already overstated archetypes of American film westerns. In this movie gunshots seem as loud as atomic blasts; closeups seem to go on for minutes at a stretch, gunfights for hours; and the streets of Leone's peculiar little Western towns all seem as wide as freeways. So when one asks who or what turned Mary Shelley's wellspoken monster with his education from The Sorrows of Young Werther and Paradise Lost into a pop archetype, the movies are a perfectly good answer. God knows the movies have turned unlikelier subjects into archetypesscuzzy mountainmen matted with dirt and crawling with lice become proud and handsome symbols of the frontier (Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson, or pick the Sunn International picture of your choice), halfwitted killers become representatives of American's dying free spirit (Beatty and Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde), and even incompetency becomes myth and archetype, as in the Blake EdwardsPeter Sellers pictures starring the late Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Seen in the context of such archetypes, the American movies have created their own Tarot deck, and most of us are familiar with the cards, cards such as the War Hero (Audie Murphy, John Wayne), the Strong and Silent Peace Officer (Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood), the Whore with the Heart of Gold, the Crazed Hoodlum ("Top of the world, ma!"), the Ineffectual but Amusing Dad, the CanDo Mom, the Kid from the Gutter Who Is On His Way Up, and a dozen others. That all of these creations are stereotypes developed with varying degrees of cleverness goes without saying, but even in the most inept hands, that reverberation, that cultural echo, seems to be there. But we're not discussing the War Hero or the Strong, Silent Peace Officer here; we are discussing that everpopular archetype, the Thing Without a Name. For surely if any novel spans the entire period of bookintofilmintomyth, Frankenstein is that book. It was the subject of one of the first "story" films ever made, a onereeler starring Charles Ogle as the creature. Ogle's conception of the monster caused him to tease his hair and to apparently cover his face with partially dried Bisquick. That film was produced by Thomas Edison. The same archetype is on view today as the subject of the CBS television series The Incredible Hulk, which has managed to combine two of the archetypes we are discussing here . . . and to do so with a fair amount of success (The Incredible Hulk can be seen as a Werewolf story as well as a Thing story). Although I have to say that each transformation from David Banner into the Hulk leaves me wondering where the hell the guy's shoes go to and how he gets them back.  "Ole greenskin is back," my sevenyearold son Joe is apt to say comfortably when David Banner begins his shirtripping, pantsshredding transformation. Joe quite rightly sees the Hulk not as a frightening agent of chaos but as a blind force of nature fated only to do good. Oddly enough, the comforting lesson that many horror movies seem to teach the young is that fate is kind. Not a bad lesson at all for the little people, who so rightly see themselves as hostages to forces larger than themselves. So we begin with the moviesbut what has turned Frankenstein into a movie not just once but again and again and again? One possibility is that the storyline, although constantly changed (perverted, one is tempted to say) by the filmmakers who have used (and abused) it, usually contains the wonderful dichotomy that Mary Shelley built into her story on one hand the horror writer is an agent of the norm, he or she wants us to watch for the mutant, and we feel Victor Frankenstein's horror and disgust at the relentless, charnel creature he has made. But on the other hand, we grasp the fact of the creature's innocence and the author's infatuation with the tabula rasa idea. The monster strangles Henry Clerval and promises Frankenstein he will "be with him on his wedding night," but the monster is also a creature of childlike pleasure and wonder, who beholds the "radiant form" of the moon rising above the trees; he brings wood to the poor peasant family like a good spirit in the night; he seizes the hand of the old blind man, falls on his knees, and begs him "Now is the time! Save and protect me! . . . Do not desert me in the hour of trial!" The creature who strangles snotty William is also the creature who saves a little girl from drowning . . . and is rewarded with a charge of buckshot in the ass for his pains. Mary Shelley islet us bite the bullet and tell the truthnot a particularly strong writer of emotional prose (which is why students who come to the book with great expectations of a fast, gory readexpectations formed by the moviesusually come away feeling puzzled and let down). She's at her best when Victor and his creation argue the pros and cons of the monster's request for a mate like Harvard debatersthat is to say, she is at her best in the realm of pure ideas. So it's perhaps ironic that the facet of the book which seems to have insured its long attractiveness to the movies is Shelley's splitting of the reader into two people of opposing minds the reader who wants to stone the mutation and the reader who feels the stones and cries out at the injustice of it. Even so, no moviemaker has gotten all of this idea; probably James Whale came the closest in his stylish Bride of Frankenstein, where the monster's more existential sorrows (young Werther with bolts through his neck) are boiled down to a more mundane but emotionally powerful specific Victor Frankenstein goes ahead and makes the female . . . but she doesn't like the original monster. Elsa Lanchester, looking like a latterday Studio 54 disco queen, screams when he tries to touch her, and we are in perfect sympathy with the monster when he rips the whole rotten laboratory to pieces. A fellow named Jack Pierce did Boris Karloff's makeup in the original sound version of Frankenstein, creating a face as familiar to most of us (if slightly more ugly) as the uncles and cousins in a family photograph albumsthe square head, the deadwhite, slightly concave brow, the scars, the bolts, the heavy eyelids. Universal Pictures copyrighted Pierce's makeup, and so when Britain's Hammer Films made their series of Frankenstein movies in the late fifties and early sixties, a different concept was used. It is probably not as inspired or as original as the Pierce makeup (in most cases the Hammer Frankenstein bears a closer resemblance to the unfortunate Gary Conway in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein), but the two have one thing in common although in both cases the monster is horrible to look at, there is also something so sad, so miserable there that our hearts actually go out to the creature even as they are shrinking away from it in fear and disgust. The greatest of the Hammer Frankenstein monsters was probably Christopher Lee, who went on to nearly eclipse Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. Lee, a great actor, is the only man to approach Karloff's interpretation of the role, although Karloff was far more fortunate in matters of script and direction. All in all, Christopher Lee fared better as a vampire. As I've said, most directors who have tried their hands at a Frankenstein film (with the exception of those played exclusively for laughs) have sensed this dichotomy and tried to use it. Breathes there a moviegoer with soul so dead who never wished the monster would jump down from that burning windmill and stuff those torches right down the throats of those ignorant slobs so dedicated to ending its life? I doubt if there is such a moviegoer, and if there is, he must be hardhearted indeed. But I don't believe any director has caught the full pathos of the situation, and there is no Frankenstein movie that will bring tears to the eyes as readily as the final reel of King Kong, where the big ape straddles the top of the Empire State Building and tries to fight off those machinegunequipped biplanes as if they were the prehistoric birds of his native island. Like Eastwood in Leone's spaghetti westerns, Kong is the archetype of the archetype. We see the horror of being a monster in the eyes of Boris Karloff and, later, in those of Christopher Lee; in King Kong it is spread across the ape's entire face, due to the marvelous special effects of Willis O'Brien. The result is almost a cartoon of the friendless, dying outsider. It is one of the great fusions of love and horror, innocence and terror, the emotional reality which Mary Shelley only suggests in her novel. Even so, I suspect she would have understood and agreed with Dino De Laurentiis's remark on the great attraction of that dichotomy. De Laurentiis was speaking of his own forgettable remake of King Kong, but he could have been speaking about the hapless monster itself when he said, "Nobody cry when jaws die." Well, we don't exactly cry when Frankenstein's monster diesnot the way audiences weep when Kong, that shanghaied hostage of a simpler, more romantic world, topples from his perch atop the Empire Statebut we are, perhaps, disgusted at our own sense of relief. 4 Although the gathering which ultimately resulted in Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein took place on the shores of Lake Geneva, miles from British soil, it must still qualify as one of the maddest British tea parties of all time. And in a funny way, the gathering may have been responsible not only for Frankenstein, published that same year, but for Dracula as well, a novel written by a man who would not be born for another thirtyone years. It was June of 1816, and the band of travelersPercy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidorihad been confined to quarters by two weeks of torrential rains. They began a joint reading of German ghost stories from a book called Fantasmagoria, and the gathering began to get decidedly weird. Things really culminated when Percy Shelley threw a kind of fit. Dr. Polidori noted in his diary "After tea, 12 o'clock, really began to talk ghosts. Lord Byron read some verses of Coleridge's 'Christabel,' (the part about) the witch's breast; when silence ensued, Shelley, suddenly shrieking, and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. [I] Threw water in his face and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. Shelley, and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples; which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him." Leave it to the English. An agreement was made that each member of the party would try his or her hand at creating a new ghost story. It was Mary Shelley, whose work as a result of the gathering would alone endure, who had the most trouble in setting to work. She had no ideas at all, and several nights passed before her imagination was fired by a nightmare in which "a pale student of unhallowed arts created the awful phantom of a man." It is the creation scene presented in chapers four and five of her novel (quoted from earlier). Percy Bysshe Shelly produced a fragment entitled "The Assassins." George Gordon Byron produced an interesting macabre tale titled "The Burial." But it is John Polidori, the good doctor, who is sometimes mentioned as a possible link to Bram Stoker and Dracula. His short story was later expanded to novel length and became a great success. It was called "The Vampyre." In point of fact, Polidori's novel isn't very good . . . and it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to "The Burial," the short story written by his immeasurably more talented patient, Lord Byron. There is perhaps a breath of plagiarism there. We do know that Byron and Polidori argued violently shortly after the interlude at Lake Geneva, and that their friendship ended. It is not entirely beyond supposition that the similarity between the two tales was the cause. Polidori, who was twentyone at the time he wrote "The Vampyre," came to an unhappy end. The success of the novel he developed from his story encouraged him to retire from the doctoring profession and to become a fulltime writer. He had little success at writing, although he was quite good at piling up gambling debts. When he felt his reputation had become irredeemably impugned, he behaved as we would expect of an English gentleman of the day and shot himself. Stoker's turnofthecentury horror novel Dracula bears only a slight resemblance to Polidori's The Vampyrethe field is a narrow one, as we will point out again and again, and exclusive of any willful imitation, the family resemblance is always therebut we can be sure that Stoker was aware of Polidori's novel. One believes, after reading Dracula, that Stoker left no stone unturned as he researched the project. Is it so farfetched to believe that he might have read Polidori's novel, have been excited by the subject matter, and determined to write a better book? I like to believe this might be so, much as I like to believe that Polidori really did crib his idea from Lord Byron. That would make Byron the literary grandfather of the legendary Count, who boasts early on to Jonathan Harker that he drove the Turks from Transylvania . . . and Byron himself died while aiding the Greek insurgents against the Turks in 1824, eight years after the gathering with the Shelleys and Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was a death of which the Count himself would have greatly approved. 5 All tales of horror can be divided into two groups those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious willa conscious decision to do eviland those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from outside like a stroke of lightning. The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of job, who becomes the human AstroTurf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan. The stories of horror which are psychologicalthose which explore the terrain of the human heartalmost always revolve around the freewill concept; "inside evil," if you will, the sort we have no right laying off on God the Father. This is Victor Frankenstein creating a living being out of spare parts to satisfy his own hubris, and then compounding his sin by refusing to take the responsibility for what he has done. It is Dr. Henry Jekyll, who creates Mr. Hyde essentially out of Victorian hypocrisyhe wants to be able to carouse and partydown without anyone, even the lowliest Whitechapel drab, knowing that he is anything but saintly Dr. Jekyll whose feet are "ever treading the upward path." Perhaps the best tale of inside evil ever written is Poe's "The TellTale Heart," where murder is committed out of pure evil, with no mitigating circumstances whatever to tincture the brew. Poe suggests we will call his narrator mad because we must always believe that such perfect, motiveless evil is mad, for the sake of our own sanity. Novels and stories of horror which deal with "outside evil" are often harder to take seriously; they are apt to be no more than boys' adventure yarns in disguise, and in the end the nasty invaders from outer space are repelled; or at the last possible instant the Handsome Young Scientist comes up with the gimmick solution . . . as when, in Beginning of the End, Peter Graves creates a sonic gun which draws all the giant grasshoppers into Lake Michigan. And yet it is the concept of outside evil that is larger, more awesome. Lovecraft grasped this, and it is what makes his stories of stupendous, Cyclopean evil so effective when they are good. Many aren't, but when Lovecraft was on the moneyas in "The Dunwich Horror," "The Rats in the Walls," and best of all, "The Colour Out of Space"his stories packed an incredible wallop. The best of them make us feel the size of the universe we hang suspended in, and suggest shadowy forces that could destroy us all if they so much as grunted in their sleep. After all, what is the paltry inside evil of the Abomb when compared to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, or YogSothoth, the Goat with a Thousand Young? Bram Stoker's Dracula seems a remarkable achievement to me because it humanizes the outside evil concept; we grasp it in a familiar way Lovecraft never allowed, and we can feel its texture. It is an adventure story, but it never degenerates to the level of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Varney the Vampyre. Stoker achieves the effect to a large degree by keeping the evil literally outside for most of his long story. The Count is onstage almost constantly during the first four chapters, dueling with Jonathan Harker, pressing him slowly to the wall ( "Later there will be kisses for all of you," Harker hears him tell the three weird sisters as he [Harker] lies in a semiswoon) . . . and then he disappears for most of the book's three hundred or so remaining pages. It is one of English literature's most remarkable and engaging tricks, a trompe l'oeil that has rarely been matched. Stoker creates his fearsome, immortal monster much the way a child can create the shadow of a giant rabbit on the wall simply by wiggling his fingers in front of a light. The Count appears onstage another halfdozen times, most splendidly in Mina Murray Harker's bedroom. The men in her life burst into her room following the death of Renfield and are greeted with a scene worthy of Bosch the Count clutching Mina, his face slathered with her blood. In an obscene parody of the marriage sacrament, he opens a vein in his own chest with one dirty fingernail and forces her to drink. Other glimpses of the Count are less powerful. We glimpse him once strolling along an avenue in a foppish straw hat, and once ogling a pretty girl like any runofthemill dirty old man. The Count's evil seems totally predestinate; the fact that he comes to London with its "teeming millions" does not proceed from any mortal being's evil act. Harker's ordeal at Castle Dracula is not the result of any inner sin or weakness; he winds up on the Count's doorstep because his boss asked him to go. Similarly, the death of Lucy Westenra is not a deserved death. Her encounter with Dracula in the Whitby churchyard is the moral equivalent of being struck by lightning while playing golf. There is nothing in her life to justify the end she comes to at the hands of Van Helsing and her fianc, Arthur Holmwoodher heart burst apart by a stake, her head chopped off, her mouth stuffed with garlic. It is not that Stoker is ignorant of inside evil or the Biblical concept of free will; in Dracula the concept is embodied by that most engaging of maniacs, Mr. Renfield, who also symbolizes the root source of vampirismcannibalism. Renfield, who is working his way up to the big leagues the hard way (lie begins by snacking on flies, progresses to munching on spiders, then to dining on birds), invites the Count into Dr. Seward's madhouse knowing perfectly well what he is doingbut to suggest he is a large enough character to take responsibility for all the terrors that follow is to suggest the absurd. His character, though engaging, is just not strong enough to take that weight. We assume that if Dracula hadn't gotten in by using Renfield, he would have gotten in another way. In a way it was the mores of Stoker's day which dictated that the Count's evil should come from outside, because much of the evil embodied in the Count is a perverse sexual evil. Stoker revitalized the vampire legend largely by writing a novel which fairly pants with sexual energy. The Count doesn't ever attack Jonathan Harker; in fact he is promised to the weird sisters who live in the castle with him. Harker's one brush with these voluptuous but lethal harpies is a sexual one, and it is presented in his diary in terms that were, for turnofthecentury England, pretty graphic The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth . . . . Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck . . . . I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a langourous ecstacy and waitedwaited with beating heart. In the England of 1897, a girl who "went on her knees" was not the sort of girl you brought home to meet your mother; Harker is about to be orally raped. and he doesn't mind a bit. And it's all right, because he is not responsible. In matters of sex, a highly moralistic society can find a psychological escape valve in the concept of outside evil this thing is bigger than both of us, baby. Harker is a bit disappointed when the Count enters and breaks up this little ttette. Probably most of Stoker's wideeyed readers were, too. Similarly, the Count preys only on women first Lucy, then Mina. Lucy's reactions to the Count's bite are much the same as Jonathan's feelings about the weird sisters. To be perfectly vulgar, Stoker indicates in a fairly classy way that Lucy is coming her brains out. By day an evermorepallid but perfectly Apollonian Lucy conducts a proper and decorous courtship with her promised husband, Arthur Holmwood. By night she carouses in Dionysian abandon with her dark and bloody seducer. In real life at this same time, England was experiencing a mesmerism fad. Franz Mesmer, the father of what we now call hypnotism, was at that time giving demonstrations of the feat. Like the Count, Mesmer preferred young girls, and he would put them into a trance by stroking their bodies . . . all over. Many of his female subjects experienced "wonderful feelings that seemed to culminate in a burst of pleasure." It seems likely that these "culminating bursts of pleasure" were in fact orgasmsbut very few unmarried women of the day would have known an orgasm if it bit them on the nose, and the effect was simply seen as one of the pleasanter side effects of a scientific process. Many of these girls came to Mesmer and begged to be mesmerized again; "The men don't like it but the little girls understand," as the old rhythm and blues song goes. Anyway, the point made in regard to vampirism applies just as well to mesmerism the "culminating burst of pleasure" was all right because it came from outside; she experiencing the pleasure could not be held responsible. These strong sexual undertones are surely one reason why the movies have conducted such a long love affair with the Vampire, beginning with Max Schreck in Nosferatu, continuing through the Lugosi interpretation (1931), the Christopher Lee interpretation, right up to 'Salem's Lot (1979) , where Reggie Nalder's interpretation brings us full circle to Max Schreck's again. When all else is said and done, it's a chance to show women in scanty nightclothes, and guys giving the sleeping ladies some of the worst hickeys you ever saw, and to enact, over and over, a situation of which movie audiences never seem to tire the primal rape scene. But maybe there's even more going on here sexually than first meets the eye. Early on I mentioned my own. belief that much of the horror story's attraction for us is that it allows us to vicariously exercise those antisocial emotions and feelings which society demands we keep stoppered up under most circumstances, for society's good and our own. Anyway, Dracula sure isn't a book about "normal" sex; there's no Missionary Position going on here. Count Dracula (and the weird sisters as well) are apparently dead from the waist down; they make love with their mouths alone. The sexual basis of Dracula is an infantile oralism coupled with a strong interest in necrophilia (and pedophilia, some would say, considering Lucy in her role as the "bloofer lady"). It is also sex without responsibility, and in the unique and amusing term coined by Erica Jong, the sex in Dracula can be seen as the ultimate zipless fuck. This infantile, retentive attitude toward sex may be one reason why the vampire myth, which in Stoker's hands seems to say "I will rape you with my mouth and you will love it; instead of contributing potent fluid to your body, I will remove it," has always been so popular with adolescents still trying to come to grips with their own sexuality. The vampire appears to have found a shortcut through all the tribal mores of sex . . . and he lives forever, to boot. 6 There are other interesting elements in Stoker's book, all sorts of them, but it is the elements of outside evil and sexual invasion that seem to have powered the novel most strongly. We can see the legacy of Stoker's weird sisters in the wonderfully lush and voluptuous vampires in Hammer's 1960 film, Brides of Dracula (and also be assured in the best moralistic tradition of the horror movie that the wages of kinky sex are a stake through the heart while catching some z's in your coffin) and dozens of other movies both before and after. When I wrote my own vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot, I decided to largely jettison the sexual angle, feeling that in a society where homosexuality, group sex, oral sex, and even, God save us, water sports have become matters of public discussion (not to mention, if you believe the Forum column in Penthouse, sex with various fruits and vegetables), the sexual engine that powered much of Stoker's book might have run out of gas. To some degree that is probably true. Hazel Court constantly falling out of the top of her dress (well . . . almost) in AIP's The Raven (1963) looks nearly comic today, not to mention Bela Lugosi's corny Valentino imitation in Universal's Dracula, which even hardened horror aficionados and cinema buffs cannot help giggling over. But sex will almost certainly continue to be a driving force in the horror genre; sex that is sometimes presented in disguised, Freudian terms, such as Lovecraft's vaginal creation, Great Cthulhu. After viewing this manytentacled, slimy, gelid creature through Lovecraft's eyes, do we need to wonder why Lovecraft manifested "little interest" in sex? Much of the sex in horror fiction is deeply involved in power tripping; it's sex based upon relationships where one partner is largely under the control of the other; sex which almost inevitably leads to some bad end. I refer you, for instance, to Alien, where the two women crew members are presented in perfectly nonsexist terms until the climax, where Sigourney Weaver must battle the terrible interstellar hitchhiker that has even managed to board her tiny space lifeboat. During this final battle, Ms. Weaver is dressed in bikini panties and a thin Tshirt, every inch the woman, and at this point interchangeable with any of Dracula's victims in the Hammer cycle of films in the sixties. The point seems to be, "The girl was okay until she got undressed."  I thought there was another extremely sexist interlude in Alien, one that disappoints on a plot level no matter how you feel about women's ability as compared to men's. The Sigourney Weaver character, who is presented as toughminded and heroic up to this point, causes the destruction of the mothership Nostromo (and perhaps helps to cause the deaths of the two other remaining crew members) by going after the ship's cat. Enabling the males in the audience, of course, to relax, roll their eyes at each other, and say either aloud or telepathically, "Isn't that just like a woman?" It is a plot twist which depends upon a sexist idea for its believability, and we might well answer the question asked above by asking in turn, "Isn't that just like a male chauvinist pig of a Hollywood scriptwriter?" This gratuitous little twist doesn't spoil the movie, but it's still sort of a bummer. The business of creating horror is much the same as the business of paralyzing an opponent with the martial artsit is the business of finding vulnerable points and then applying pressure there. The most obvious psychological pressure point is the fact of our own mortality. Certainly it is the most universal. But in a society that sets such a great store by physical beauty (in a society, that is, where a few pimples become the cause of psychic agony) and sexual potency, a deepseated uneasiness and ambivalence about sex becomes another natural pressure point, one that the writer of the horror story or film gropes for instinctively. In the barechested swordandsorcery epics of Robert E. Howard, for instance, the female "heavies" are presented as monsters of sexual depravity, indulging in exhibitionism and sadism. As previously pointed out, one of the most triedandtrue movie poster concepts of all time shows the monsterwhether it be a BEM (bugeyed monster) from This Island Earth or the mummy for Hammer's 1959 remake of the Universal filmstriding through the darkness or the smoking ruins of some city with the body of an unconscious lovely in its arms. Beauty and the beast. You are in my power. Hehhehheh. It's that primal rape scene again. And the primal, perverse rapist is the Vampire, stealing not only sexual favors but life itself.


And best of all, perhaps, in the eyes of those millions of teenaged boys who have watched the Vampire take wing and then flutter down inside the bedroom of some sleeping young lady, is the fact that the Vampire doesn't even have to get it up to do it. What better news to those on the threshold of the sexual sphere, most of whom have been taught (as certainly they have been, not in the least by the movies themselves) that successful sexual relationships are based upon man's domination and woman's submission? The joker in this deck is that most fourteenyearold boys who have only recently discovered their own sexual potential feel capable of dominating only the centerfold in Playboy with total success. Sex makes young adolescent boys feel many things, but one of them, quite frankly, is scared. The horror film in general and the Vampire film in particular confirms the feeling. Yes, it says; sex is scary; sex is dangerous. And I can prove it to you right here and now. Siddown, kid. Grab your popcorn. I want to tell you a story . . . . 7 Enough of sexual portents, at least for the time being. Let's flip up the third card in this uneasy Tarot hand. Forget Michael Landon and AIP for the time being. Gaze, if you dare, on the face of the real Werewolf. His name, gentle reader, is Edward Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson conceived Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a shocker, pure and simple, a potboiler and, hopefully, a money machine. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the first draft and rewrote it, injecting a little moral uplift to please his spouse. Of the three books under discussion here, Jekyll and Hyde is the shortest (it runs about seventy pages in close type) and undoubtedly the most stylish. If Bram Stoker serves us great whacks of horror in Dracula, leaving us, after Harker's confrontation with Dracula in Transylvania, the staking of Lucy Westenra, the death of Renfield and the branding of Mina, feeling as if we have been hit square in the chops by a twobyfour, then Stevenson's brief and cautionary tale is like the quick, mortal stab of an icepick. Like a policecourt trial (to which the critic G. K. Chesterton compared it), we get the narrative through a series of different voices, and it is through the testimony of those involved that Dr. Jekyll's unhappy tale unfolds. It begins as Jekyll's lawyer, Mr. Utterson, and a distant cousin, one Richard Enfield, stroll through London one morning. As they pass "a certain sinister block of building" with "a blind forehead of discoloured wall" and a door which is "blistered and distained," Enfield is moved to tell Utterson a story about that particular door. He was on the scene one early morning, he says, when he observed two people approaching the corner from opposite directionsa man and a little girl. They collide. The girl is knocked flat and the manEdward Hydesimply goes on walking, trampling the screaming child underfoot. A crowd gathers (what all of these people are doing abroad at three A.M. of a cold winter's morning is never explained; perhaps they were all discussing what Robinson Crusoe used for pockets when he swam out to the foundering ship), and Enfield collars Mr. Hyde. Hyde is a man of so loathsome a countenance that Enfield is actually obliged to protect him from the mob, which seems on the verge of tearing him apart "We were keeping the women off as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies," Enfield tells Utterson. Moreover, the doctor who was summoned "turn[ed] sick and white with desire to kill him." Once again we see the horror writer as an agent of the norm; the crowd that has gathered is watching faithfully for the mutant, and in the loathsome Mr. Hyde they seem to have found the genuine articlealthough Stevenson is quick to tell us, through Enfield, that outwardly there appears to be nothing much wrong with Hyde. Although he's no John Travolta, he's certainly no Michael Landon sporting a pelt above his high school jacket, either. Hyde, Enfield admits to Utterson, "carried it off like Satan." When Enfield demands compensation in the name of the little girl, Hyde disappears through the door under discussion and returns a short time later with a hundred pounds, ten in gold and a check for the balance. Although Enfield won't tell, we find out in due course that the signature on the check was that of Henry Jekyll. Enfield closes his account with one of the most telling descriptions of the Werewolf in all of horror fiction. Although it describes very little in the way we usually think of description, it says a great dealwe all know what Stevenson means, and he knew we would, because he knew, apparently, that all of us are old hands at watching for the mutant He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarcely know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary looking man, and yet I can really name nothing out of the way . . . . And it's not for want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment. It was Rudyard Kipling, years later and in another tale, who named what was bothering Enfield about Mr. Hyde. Wolfsbane and potions aside (and Stevenson himself dismissed the device of the smoking potion as "so much huggermugger"), it is very simple somewhere upon Mr. Hyde, Enfield sensed what Kipling called the Mark of the Beast. 8 Utterson has information of his own with which Enfield's tale neatly dovetails (God, the construction of Stevenson's novel is beautiful; it ticks smoothly away like a wellmade watch). He has custody of Jekyll's will and knows that Jekyll's heir is Edward Hyde. He also knows that the door Enfield has pointed out stands at the back of Jekyll's townhouse. A bit of a swerve off the main road here. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published a good three decades before the ideas of Sigmund Freud would begin to surface, but in the first two sections of Stevenson's novella the author gives us a startlingly apt metaphor for Freud's idea of the conscious and subconscious mindsor, to be more specific, the contrast between superego and id. Here is one large block of buildings. On Jekyll's side, the side presented to the public eye, it seems a lovely, graceful building, inhabited by one of London's most respected physicians. On the other sidebut still a part of the same buildingwe find rubbish and squalor, people abroad on questionable errands at three in the morning, and that "blistered and distained door" set in "a blind forehead of discoloured wall." On Jekyll's side, all things are in order and life goes its steady Apollonian round. On the other side, Dionysus prances unfettered. Enter Jekyll here, exit Hyde there. Even if you're an antiFreudian and won't grant Stevenson's insight into the human psyche, you'll perhaps grant that the building serves as a nice symbol for the duality of human nature. Well, back to business. The next witness of any real importance in the case is a maid who witnesses the murder which turns Hyde into a fugitive from the scaffold. It's the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, and as Stevenson sketches it for us we hear echoes of every nasty murder to hit the tabloids in our time Richard Speck and the student nurses, Juan Corona, even the unfortunate Dr. Herman Tarnower. Here is the beast caught in the act of pulling down its weak and unsuspecting prey, acting not with cunning and intelligence but only with stupid, nihilistic violence. Can anything be worse? Yes, apparently one thing his face is not so terribly different from the face you and I see in the bathroom mirror each morning. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on . . . like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bonds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with apelike fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted. All that's really lacking here to make the tabloid picture complete is a scrawl of LITTLE PIGGIES or HELTER SKELTER on a nearby wall, written in the victim's blood. Stevenson further informs us that "The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter . . . ." Stevenson, here and in other places, describes Hyde as "apelike." He suggests that Hyde, like Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, is a step backward along the evolutionary scale, something vicious in the human makeup that has not yet been bred out . . . and isn't that what really frightens us in the myth of the Werewolf? This is inside evil with a vengeance, and it is no wonder that clergymen of Stevenson's day hailed his story. They apparently knew a parable when they read one, and saw Hyde's vicious caning of Sir Danvers Carew as the old Adam coming out full blast. Stevenson suggests that the Werewolf's face is our face, and it takes some of the humor out of Lou Costello's famous comeback to Lon Chaney, Jr. in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Chaney, playing the persecuted skinchanging Larry Talbot, mourns to Costello "You don't understand. When the moon rises, I'll turn into a wolf." Costello replies "Yeah . . . you and about five million other guys." At any rate, Carew's murder leads the police to Hyde's Soho flat. The bird has flown the coop, but the Scotland Yard inspector in charge of the investigation is sure they'll get him, because Hyde has burned his checkbook. "Why, money's life to the man. We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the handbills." But Hyde, of course, has another identity he can turn to. Jekyll, at last frightened back to reason, determines never to use the potion again. Then he discovers to his horror that the change has begun to occur spontaneously. He has created Hyde to escape the strictures of propriety, but has discovered that evil has its own strictures; in the end he has become Hyde's prisoner. The clergy hailed Jekyll and Hyde because they believed the book showed the grim results of allowing man's "baser nature" more than the shortest possible tether; modern readers are more apt to sympathize with Jekyll as a man looking for an escape routeif only for short periodsfrom the straitjacket of Victorian prudery and morality. Either way, when Utterson and Jekyll's butler, Poole, break into Jekyll's laboratory, Jekyll is dead . . . and it is the body of Hyde which they find. The worst horror of all has occurred; the man has died thinking like Jekyll and looking like Hyde, the secret sin (or the Mark of the Beast, if you prefer) which he hoped to conceal (or to Hyde, if you prefer) stamped indelibly on his face. He concludes his confession with the words, "Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Dr. Jekyll to an end." It's easytoo easyto get caught up in the story of Jekyll and his ferocious alter ego as a religious parable told in pennydreadful terms. It's a moral tale, sure, but it seems to me that it's also a close study of hypocrisyits causes, its dangers, its damages to the spirit. Jekyll is the hypocrite who falls into the pit of secret sin; Utterson, the book's real hero, is Jekyll's exact opposite. Because this seems important, not only to Stevenson's book but to the whole idea of the Werewolf, let me take a minute of your time to quote from the book again. Here's how he introduces Utterson to us on page one of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty, and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. . . . He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theater, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. I must admit that, after reading Stevenson's description of Utterson, I found myself curious as to just how he was lovable! About the Ramones, an amusing punkrock band that surfaced some four years ago, Linda Ronstadt is on record as saying, "That music's so tight it's hemorrhoidal." You could say the same thing for Utterson, who fulfills the function of court stenographer in the book and still manages to come off as the story's most engaging character. He's a Victorian prig of the first water, of course, and one would fear for a son or daughter brought up by the old man, but Stevenson's point is that there is as little of the hypocrite in him as there is in any man living. ("We may sin in thought, word, or deed," the old Methodist credo goes, and I suppose that by thinking of fine vintages while he knocks off his ginandwater, we could say that Utterson is a hypocrite in thought . . . but here we're entering a fuzzy gray area where the concept of free will seems harder to grasp; "The mind is a monkey," Robert Stone's protagonist muses in Dog Soldiers, and he is so right.) The difference between Utterson and Jekyll is that Jekyll would only drink gin to mortify a taste for vintages in public. In the privacy of his own library he's the sort of man who might well drink an entire bottle of good port (and probably congratulate himself on not having to share it, or any of his fine Jamaican cigars, either). Perhaps he would not want to be caught dead attending a risqu play in the West End, but he is more than happy to go as Hyde. Jekyll does not want to mortify any of his tastes. He only wants to gratify them in secret. 9 All of that is very interesting, you may be saying, but the fact is there hasn't been a good Werewolf movie in ten or fifteen years (a couple of pretty dismal madeforTV movies, such as Moon of the Wolf, but they hardly count); and although there have been a good number of JekyllandHyde movies,  I don't believe there has been a fullfledged remake (or ripoff ) of Stevenson's story since AmericanInternational's Daughter of Dr. Jekyll in the late fifties, and that was a sad comedown for one of the original Mad Doctors, a figure that most horror buffs view with a great deal of affection. Three great actors took the dual role John Barrymore (1920), Fredric March (1932), and Spencer Tracey (1941). March won an Academy Award for the role, earning him the distinction of being the only actor ever to win the award for Best Actor as a result of his efforts in a horror movie. But remember that what we're talking about here, at its most basic level, is the old conflict between id and superego, the free will to do evil or to deny it . . . or in Stevenson's own terms, the conflict between mortification and gratification. This old struggle is the cornerstone of Christianity, but if you want to put it in mythic terms, the twinning of Jekyll and Hyde suggests another duality the aforementioned split between the Apollonian (the creature of intellect, morality, and nobility, "always treading the upward path") and the Dionysian (god of partying and physical gratification; the getdownandboogie side of human nature). If you try to take it any further than the mythic, you come damn close to splitting the body and mind altogether . . . which is exactly the impression Jekyll wants to give his friends that he is a creature of pure mind, with no human tastes or needs at all. It's hard to picture the guy sitting on the fakes with a newspaper. If we look at the Jekyll and Hyde story as a pagan conflict between man's Apollonian potential and his Dionysian desires, we see that the Werewolf myth does indeed run through a great many modern horror novels and movies. Perhaps the best example of all is Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, although in all deference to the master, the idea was there for the taking in Robert Bloch's novel. Bloch, in fact, had been honing this particular vision of human nature in a number of previous books, including The Scarf (which begins with those wonderful, eerie lines "Fetish? You name it. All I know is that I've always had to have it with me . . ." ) and The Deadbeat. These books are not, at least technically, horror novels; there is nary a monster or supernatural occurrence on view. They are labeled "suspense novels." But if we look at them with that ApollonianDionysian conflict in mind, we see that they are very much horror novels; each of them deals with the Dionysian psychopath locked up behind the Apollonian facade of normality . . . but slowly, dreadfully emerging. In short, Bloch has written a number of Werewolf novels in which he has dispensed with the huggermugger of the potion or the wolfsbane. What happened with Bloch when lie ceased writing his Lovecraftian stories of the supernatural (and he never has, completely; see the recent Strange Eons) was not that he ceased being a horror writer; lie simply shifted his perspective from the outside (beyond the stars, under the sea, on the Plains of Leng, or in the deserted belfry of a Providence, Rhode Island, church) to the inside . . . to the place where the Werewolf is. It may be that someday these three novels, The Scarf, The Deadbeat, and Psycho, will be anthologized as a kind of unified triptych, as were James M. Cam's The Postman Alway Ring Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Piercefor in their own way, the novels that Robert Bloch wrote in the 1950s had every bit as much influence on the course of American fiction as did the Cain "heelwithaheart" novels of the 1930s. And although the method of attack is radically different in each case, both the novels of Cain and Bloch are great crime novels; the novels of both adopt a naturalistic view of American life; the novels of both explore the idea of protagonist as antihero; and the novels of both point up the central Apollonian Dionysian conflict and thus become Werewolf novels. Psycho, the best known of the three, deals with Norman Batesand as played by Anthony Perkins in the Hitchcock film, Norman is about as tightassed and hemorrhoidal as they come. To the observing world (or that small part of it that would care to observe the proprietor of a gonetoseed backwater motel), Norman is as normal as they come. Charles Whitman, the Apollonian Eagle Scout who went on a Dionysian rampage from the top of the Texas Tower, comes immediately to mind; Norman seems like such a nice fellow. Certainly Janet Leigh sees no reason to fear him in the closing moments of her life. But Norman is the Werewolf. Only instead of growing hair, his change is effected by donning his dead mother's panties, slip, and dressand hacking up the guests instead of biting them. As Dr. Jekyll keeps secret rooms in Soho and has his own "Mr. Hyde door" at home, so we discover that Norman has his own secret place where his two personae meet in this case it is a loophole behind a picture, which he uses to watch the ladies undress. Psycho is effective because it brings the Werewolf myth home. It is not outside evil, predestination; the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. We know that Norman is only outwardly the Werewolf when he's wearing Mom's duds and speaking in Mom's voice; but we have the uneasy suspicion that inside he's the Werewolf all the time. Psycho spawned a score of imitators, most of them immediately recognizable by their titles, which suggested more than a few toys in the attic Straitjacket (Joan Crawford does the axwielding honors in this gritty if somewhat overplotted film, made from a Bloch script), Dementia13 (Francis Coppola's first feature film), Nightmare (a Hammer picture), Repulsion. These are only a few of the children of Hitchcock's film, which was adapted for the screen by Joseph Stefano. Stefano went on to pilot television's Outer Limits, which we will get to eventually. 10 It would be ridiculous for me to suggest that all modern horror fiction, both in print and on celluloid, can be boiled down to these three archetypes. It would simplify things enormously, but it would be a false simplification, even with the Tarot card of the Ghost thrown in for good measure. It doesn't end with the Thing, the Vampire, and the Werewolf; there are other bogeys out there in the shadows as well. But these three account for a large bloc of modern horror fiction. We can see the blurry shape of the Thing Without a Name in Howard Hawks's The Thing (it turns outrather disappointingly, I always thoughtto be big Jim Arness tricked out as a vegetable from space) ; the Werewolf raises its shaggy head as Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage and as Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; and we can see the shadow of the Vampire in such diverse films as Them! and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead . . . although in these latter two, the symbolic act of blooddrinking has been replaced by the act of cannibalism itself as the dead chomp into the flesh of their living victims. Romero's Martin is a classy and visually sensuous rendering of the Vampire myth, and one of the few examples of the myth consciously examined in film, as Romero contrasts the romantic assumptions so vital to the myth (as in the John Badham version of Dracula) with the grisly reality of actually drinking blood as it spurts from the veins of the vampire's chosen victim. It is also undeniable that filmmakers seem to return again and again to these three great monsters, and I think that in large part it's because they really are archetypes; which is to say, clay that can be easily molded in the hands of clever children, which is exactly what so many of the filmmakers who work in the genre seem to be. Before leaving these three novels behind, and any kind of indepth analysis of nineteenthcentury supernatural fiction with them (and if you'd like to pursue the subject further, may I recommend H. P. Lovecraft's long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature? It is available in a cheap but handsome and durable Dover paperback edition.), it might be wise to backtrack to the beginning and simply offer a tip of the hat to them for the virtues they possess as novels. There always has been a tendency to see the popular stories of yesterday as social documents, moral tracts, history lessons, or the precursors of more interesting fictions which follow (as Polidori's The Vampyre foreran Dracula, or Lewis's The Monk, which in a way sets the stage for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein)as anything, in fact, but novels standing on their own feet, each with its own tale to tell. When teachers and students turn to the discussion of novels such as Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula upon their own termsthat is, as sustained works of craft and imaginationthe discussion is often all too short. Teachers are more apt to focus on shortcomings, and students more apt to linger on such amusing antiquities as Dr. Seward's phonograph diary, Quincey P. Morris's hideously overdone drawl, or the monster's lucky grabbag of philosophic literature. It's true that none of these books approaches the great novels of the same period, and I will not argue that they do; you need only compare two books of roughly the same periodDracula and Jude the Obscure, let's sayto make the point pretty conclusively. But no novel survives solely on the strength of an ideanor on its diction or execution, as so many writers and critics of modern literature seem sincerely to believe . . . these salesmen and saleswomen of beautiful cars with no motors. While Dracula is no Jude, Stoker's novel of the Count continues to reverberate in the mind long after the more ghoulish and clamorous Varney the Vampyre has grown silent; the same is true of Mary Shelley's handling of the Thing Without a Name and Robert Louis Stevenson's handling of the Werewolf myth. What the wouldbe writer of "serious" fiction (who would relegate plot and story to a place at the end of a long line headed by diction and that smooth flow of language which most college writing instructors mistakenly equate with style) seems to forget is that novels are engines, just as cars are engines; a RollsRoyce without an engine might as well be the world's most luxurious begonia pot, and a novel in which there is no story becomes nothing but a curiosity, a little mental game. Novels are engines, and whatever we might say about these three, their creators stoked them with enough invention to run each fast and hot and clean. Oddly enough, only Stevenson was able to stoke the engine successfully more than once. His adventure novels continue to be read, but Stoker's later books, such as The jewel of Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm, are largely unheardof and unread except by the most rabid fantasy fans. Mary Shelley's later gothics have similarly fallen into almost total obscurity. In all fairness it must be added that Bram Stoker wrote some absolutely champion short stories"The Squaw" and "The Judge's House" may be the best known. Those who enjoy macabre short fiction could not do better than his collection Dracula's Guest, which is stupidly out of print but remains available in the stacks of most public libraries. Each of the three novels we've been discussing is remarkable in some way, not just as a horror tale or as a suspense yarn, but as an example of a much wider genre that of the novel itself. When Mary Shelley can leave off belaboring the philosophical implications of Victor Frankenstein's work, she gives us several powerful scenes of desolation and grim horrormost notably, perhaps, in the silent polar wastes as this mutual dance of revenge draws to its close. Of the three, Bram Stoker is perhaps the most energetic. His book may seem overlong to modern readers, and to modern critics who have decided that one should not be expected to devote any more time to a work of popular fiction than one might devote to a madeforTV movie (the belief seeming to be that the two are interchangeable), but during its course we are rewardedif that's the right wordwith scenes and images worthy of Dore Renfield spreading his sugar with all the unflagging patience of the damned; the staking of Lucy; the beheading of the weird sisters by Van Helsing; the Count's final end, which comes in a hail of gunfire and a scary race against darkness. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a masterpiece of concisionthe verdict of Henry James, not myself. In that indispensable little handbook by Wilfred Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, the thirteenth rule for good composition reads simply "Omit needless words." Along with Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Douglas Fairbairn's Shoot, Stevenson's economysized horror story could serve as a textbook example for young writers on how Strunk's Rule 13the three most important words in all of the textbooks ever written on the technique of compositionis best applied. Characterizations are quick but precise; Stevenson's people are sketched but never caricatured. Mood is implied rather than belabored. The narrative is as chopped and lowered as a kid's hot rod. We'll leave where we picked this up, with the wonder and terror these three great monsters continue to create in the minds of readers. The most overlooked facet of each may be that each succeeds in overleaping reality and entering a world of total fantasy. But we are not left behind in this leap; we are brought along and allowed to view these archetypes of Werewolf, Vampire, and Thing not as figures of myth but as figures of near realitywhich is to say, we are brought along for the ride of our lives. And this, at least, surpasses "good." Man . . . that's great. CHAPTER IV An Annoying Autobiographical Pause EARLY ON, I mentioned that trying to deal successfully with the phenomenon of terror and horror as a mediacultural event during the last thirty years would be impossible without a slice of autobiography. It seems to me that the time to make good on that threat has now arrived. What a drag. But you're stuck with it, if only because I cannot divorce myself from a field in which I am mortally involved. Readers who find themselves inclining toward some genre on a regular basiswestern, privateeye stories, drawingroom mysteries, science fiction, or flatout adventure yarnsseem rarely to feel the same desire to psychoanalyze their favorite writers' interests (and their own) as do the readers of horror fiction. Secretly or otherwise, there is the feeling that the taste for horror fiction is an abnormal one. I wrote a fairly long essay at the beginning of a book of mine ( Night Shift), trying to analyze some of the reasons why people read horror fiction and why I write it. I don't have any interest in reheating that hash here; if you're interested in pursuing that subject, I recommend the introduction to you; all my relatives loved it. The question here is a more esoteric one Why do people have such an interest in my interestand in their own? I believe that, more than anything else, it's because we all have a postulate buried deep in our minds that an interest in horror is unhealthy and aberrant. So when people say, "Why do you write that stuff?" they are really inviting me to lie down on the couch and explain about the time I was locked in the cellar for three weeks, or my toilet training, or possibly some abnormal sibling rivalry. Nobody wants to know if Arthur Hailey or Harold Robbins took an unusually long time learning to use the potty, because writing about banks and airports and How I Made My First Million are subjects which seem perfectly normal. There is something totally American in wanting to know how things work (which goes a long way toward explaining the phenomenal success of the Penthouse Forum, I think; what all those letters are really discussing is the rocketry of intercourse, the possible trajectories of oral sex and the howto of various exotic positionsall as American as apple pie; Forum is simply a sexual plumbing manual for the enthusiastic doityourselfer), but something unsettlingly alien about a taste for monsters, haunted houses, and the Thing that Crawled Out of the Crypt at Midnight. Questioners automatically turn into reasonable facsimiles of that amusing comicstrip psychiatrist Victor De Groot, ignoring the fact that making things up for moneywhich is what any writer of fiction doesis a pretty bizarre way to earn a living. In March of 1979, I was invited to be one of three speakers on a panel discussing horror at an event known as the Ides of Mohonk (a onceyearly gathering of mystery writers and fans sponsored by Murder Ink, a nifty mysteryanddetection bookshop in Manhattan). During the course of the panel discussion I told a story that my mother had told me about myselfthe event occurred when I was barely four, so perhaps I can be excused for remembering her story of it but not the actual event. According to Mom, I had gone off to play at a neighbor's housea house that was near a railroad line. About an hour after I left I came back (she said), as white as a ghost. I would not speak for the rest of that day; I would not tell her why I'd not waited to be picked up or phoned that I wanted to come home; I would not tell her why my chum's mom hadn't walked me back but had allowed me to come alone. It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks (years later, my mother told me they had picked up the pieces in a wicker basket).