Danse Macabre (27 page)

People understood this and could live with it (fifties science books extolled the wonderful world the Friendly Atom would produce, a world refueled by nice safe nuclear reactors, and grammar school kids got free comic books produced by the power companies), but they suspected and feared the hairy, simian face on the other side of the coin as well: they feared that the atom might be, for a number of reasons both technological and political, essentially uncontrollable. These feelings of deep unease came out in movies such as
The Beginning of
the End, Them!, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man
(where radiation combined with a pesticide causes a very personal horror for one man, Scott Carey),
The H-Men
, and
Four-D
Man. The entire cycle reaches its supreme pinnacle of absurdity in
Night of the Lepus
, where the world is menaced by sixty-foot bunnies.*

The concerns of the techno-horror films of the sixties and seventies change with the concerns of the people who lived through those times; the big bug movies give way to pictures such as
The Forbin Project

*And a host of others, many of them Japanese imports, all linked by either long-term radiation or nuclear blast as first cause:
Godzilla, Gorgo, Rodan, Mothra,
and
Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster
. The idea was even played for laughs once before Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove,
in an odd little fifties picture called
The Atomic Kid,
starring Mickey Rooney.

(The Software that Conquered the World) and 2001, which both offer us the possibility of the computer as God, or the even nastier idea (ludicrously executed, I'll readily admit) of the computer as satyr, which is laboriously produced in
Demon Seed
and
Saturn 3
. In the sixties, horror proceeds from a vision of technology as an octopus-perhaps sentientburying us alive in red tape and information-retrieval systems which are terrible when they work (
The Forbin
Project
) and even more terrible when they don't: In
The Andromeda Strain
, for instance, a small scrap of paper gets caught in the striker of a teletype machine, keeps the bell from ringing, and thereby (in a fashion Rube Goldberg certainly would have approved of ) nearly causes the end of the world.

Finally there are the seventies, culminating in Frankenheimer's notvery-good but certainly well-meant film
Prophecy
, which is so strikingly similar to those fifties big bug movies (only the first cause has changed), and
The China Syndrome
, a horror movie which synthesizes all three of these major technological fears: fears of radiation, fears for the ecology, fears of the machinery gone out of control, run wild.

Before leaving this all too brief look at pictures which depend on some mass unease over matters technological to provide the equivalent of The Hook (pictures which appeal to the Luddite hiding inside all of us), we should mention some of the films dealing with space travel which fall into this category . . . but we'll exclude such xenophobic pictures as
Earth vs. the
Flying Saucers
and
The Mysterians
from our view. Pictures which focus on the possible Dionysian side of space exploration (such as
The Andromeda Strain
and
Night of the Living
Dead
, where satellites bring back dangerous but nonsentient organisms from the void) ought to be differentiated from those purely xenophobic movies dealing with invasion from outer space-films where the human race is viewed in an essentially passive role, attacked by the equivalent of muggers from the stars. In pictures of this type, technology is often seen as the savior (as it is in
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
, where Hugh Marlowe uses his sonic gun to interrupt the saucers' electromagnetic drive, or in
The Thing
, where Tobey and his men use electricity to barbecue the interstellar vegetable)—Apollonian science vanquishing the Dionysian bad guys from Planet X.

Although both
The Andromeda Strain
and
Night of the Living Dead
present space travel itself as an active danger, perhaps the best example of that idea combined with the brilliant mind dangerously hypnotized by the siren song of technology comes in
The Creeping
Unknown
, a film that predates both of the former. In that film, the first of the critically acclaimed Quatermass series, the viewer is originally presented with one of the creepiest locked-room mysteries ever posited: three scientist-astronauts are sent into space, but only one returns . . . and he is catatonic. Telemetry and the presence of all three spacesuits seem to prove that the two missing spacemen never left the ship. So where did they go?

What happened, apparently, is that they picked up an interstellar hitchhiker, a plot device we see again in
It.! The Terror from Beyond Space
and, of course, in
Alien
. This hitchhiker has consumed the survivor's two mates, leaving only a mass of sludgy gray stuff behind . . . and, of course, the hitchhiker (a kind of space spore) is now busily at work in the body of the survivor, Victor Carune, who is played with skull-like, spooky believability by Richard Wordsworth. Poor Carune ends up degenerating into a spongy, many-tentacled horror which is finally spotted clinging to a scaffolding in Westminster Abbey and dispatched (just in the nick of time; it is about to sporulate and create billions of these things) by a big jolt of electricity which sets it on fire.

All of this is fairly standard monster-movie fare. What elevates
The Creeping Unknown
to levels undreamed of in the philosophies of the creators of
The Horror of Party Beach
is Val Guest's somber, atmospheric direction, and the character of Quatermass himself, played by Brian Donlevy (other actors have since played Quatermass in other films, softening the interpretation a bit). Quatermass is a scientist who may or may not be mad, depending on your own views of technology. Certainly if he is nuts, there is enough Apollonian method in his madness to make him every bit as scary (and every bit as dangerous) as that blob of tentacle-waving goo that was once Victor Carune. "I'm a scientist, not a fortune-teller," Quatermass grunts contemptuously at a timid doctor who asks him what he thinks might happen next; when a fellow scientist tells him that if he tries to open the hatch of the crashed rocket he will roast the space travelers inside, Quatermass storms at him: "Don't tell me what I can and can't do!"

His attitude toward Carune himself is the cold-blooded attitude which a biologist might adopt toward a hamster or a Rhesus monkey. "He's coming along fine," Quatermass says of the catatonic Carune, who is sitting in something which vaguely resembles a dentist's chair and staring out at the world with eyes as black and dead as cinders coughed up from hell. "He knows we're trying to help him."

Yet in the end it is Quatermass triumphant—if only through blind luck. After the monster is destroyed, Quatermass brushes rudely by a police officer who is trying to tell him in a halting way that he prayed they would be successful. "One world at a time is enough for me," the policeman says; Quatermass ignores him.

At the door, his young assistant finds his way to him. "I only just heard, sir," he says. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Yes, Morris," Quatermass replies. "I'm going to need some help."

"Help, sir?"

"Going to start again," Quatermass amplifies—it is the film's last line of dialogue. It fades to a scene of yet another rocket blasting off into outer space.

Guest seems ambivalent about his ending and about the character of Quatermass, and it's that ambivalence which gives this early Hammer film its resonance and real power. Quatermass seems somehow closer to those very real Oak Ridge scientists of the postwar period than he does to the gibbering Mad Labs scientists of the thirties; he is no Dr. Cyclops in a white lab coat, chuckling evilly as he stares through his bottle-thick glasses at his creations.
Au contraire
, he is not only fairly good-looking and fearsomely intelligent, he is charismatic and impossible to turn from his purpose. If you are an optimist, you can see the coda of
The
Creeping Unknown
as a testament to the glorious stubbornness of the human spirit, its determination to advance the store of knowledge at any cost. If, on the other hand, you are a pessimist, then Quatermass becomes the ultimate symbol of mankind's built-in limiting factor, and the high priest of the techno-horror film. The return of his first manned space probe has almost resulted in the end of the human race; Quatermass's response to this niggling little reversal is to launch another as quickly as he can. Foot-dragging politicians are apparently no match for the man's charisma, and as we see that rocket going up at the end of the picture, we're left with a question:
What will
this
one bring back?

Even such a much-loved American institution as the motor vehicle has not entirely escaped the troubled dreams of Hollywood; a few years before being run out of his mortgaged house in Amityville, James Brolin had to face the terrors of
The Car
(1977) , a customized something-or-other that looked like a squatty airport limo from one of hell's used -car lots. The movie degenerates into a ho-hum piece of hackwork before the end of the second reel (the sort of movie where you can safely go out for a popcorn refill at certain intervals because you know the car isn't going to strike again for ten minutes or so), but there is a marvelous opening sequence where the car chases two bicyclists through Utah's Zion State Park, its horn blatting arrhythmically as it gains on them and finally runs them down. There's something working in that opening sequence, something that calls up a deep, almost primitive un-ease about the cars we zip ourselves up in, thereby becoming anonymous . . . and perhaps homicidal. A better film is the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Richard Matheson's short story
Duel
, a film which originally appeared as part of ABC's
Movie of the Week
series and went on to become something of a cult film. In this film, a psychotic trucker in a big ten-wheeler pursues Dennis Weaver over what seems to be at least a million miles of California highways. We never actually see the trucker (although we do see a beefy arm cocked out of the cab window once, and at another point we see a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots on the far side of the truck), and ultimately it is the truck itself, with its huge wheels, its dirty windshield like an idiot's stare, and its somehow hungry bumpers, which becomes the monster-and when Weaver is finally able to lead it to an embankment and lure it over the edge, the noise of its "death" becomes a series of chilling Jurassic roars . . . the sound, we think, a tyrannosaurus rex would make going slowly down into a tar pit. And Weaver's response is that of any self-respecting caveman: he screams, shrieks, cuts capers, literally dances for joy.
Duel
is a gripping, almost painfully suspenseful rocket ride of a movie; perhaps not Spielberg's best work—that must almost certainly wait for the eighties and nineties—but surely one of the half -dozen best movies ever made for TV.

We could uncover other interesting tales of automotive horror, but they would be stories and novels, mostly; such turkeys as
Death Race 2000
and
Mad Max
hardly count. Modern Hollywood has apparently decided that, as the day of the privately owned gasoline vehicle enters its late afternoon, the automobile in most cases must be reserved for funny car chases (as in
Foul Play
and the cheerfully mind-croggling
Grand Theft Auto
) or a kind of sappy reverence (
The Driver
). The interested reader might enjoy an anthology (now available in paperback) edited by Bill Pronzini and titled
Car Sinister
. Fritz Leiber's contribution alone, a funny/sinister tale of Car Future titled "X Marks the Pedwalk," is worth the price of admission. 

7

Social horror films.

We've already discussed a few films with social implications—pimples and the heartbreak of psoriasis in the fifties, not to mention Michael Landon drooling shaving cream all over his high school jacket. But there have been other films which tackle more serious social subjects. In some cases (
Rollerball, Wild in the Streets
), these films feature a logical or satirical extrapolation of current social trends and thus become science fiction. We'll restrict these, if you don't mind, on the grounds that they constitute another dance—a bit different from this dark cotillion we're currently engaged in.

There have been a few films which have tried to walk the borderline between horror and social satire; one of those which seems to me to tread this borderline most successfully is
The
Stepford Wives
. The film is based on the novel by Ira Levin, and Levin has actually been able to pull this difficult trick off twice, the other case being that of
Rosemary's Baby
, which we'll talk about in some depth when we finally arrive at our discussion of the horror novel. For now we'll stick to
The Stepford Wives
, which has some witty things to say about Women's Liberation, and some disquieting things to say about the American male's response to it. I spent some time trying to decide if the film, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss, really belonged in this book. It is as satiric as the best of Kubrick's work (although a good deal less elegant), and I defy an audience not to laugh when Ross and Prentiss step into the home of a neighbor (he's the local druggist, and a Walter Mitty type if ever there was one) and hear his wife moaning upstairs: "Oh, Frank, you're the greatest . . . Frank, you're the best . . . you're the champ . . .*

The original Levin story avoided the label "horror novel" (something like the label "pariah dog" in the more exalted circles of literary criticism) because most critics saw it as Levin's sly poke at the Women's Movement. But the scarier implications of Levin's jape are not directed at women at all; they are aimed unerringly at those men who consider it only their due to leave for the golf course on Saturday morning after breakfast has been served them and to reappear (loaded, more likely than not) in time for their dinner to be served them. I'm including it here—as social horror rather than social satire—because the film, after some uneasy backing and filling where it seems unsure of just what it
does
want to be—becomes just that: a social horror story.