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.

*But the credit for this particular scene belongs to neither Forbes nor Levin, but with the film's screenwriter, William Goldman, who is a very funny fellow. If you doubt, see his wonderful send-up of fantasy and fairy tales, The Princess Bride . I can think of no other satire, with the possible exception of Alice in Wonderland , which is so clearly an expression of love and humor and good temper.

Katharine Ross and her husband (played by Peter Masterson) move from New York City to Stepford, a Connecticut suburb, because they feel it will be better for the children, and themselves as well. Stepford is a perfect little village where kids wait good-humoredly for the school bus, where you can see two or three fellows washing their cars on any given day, where (you feel) the yearly United Fund quota is not only met but exceeded.

Yet there's a strangeness in Stepford. A lot of the wives seem a little . . . well, spacey.

Pretty, always attired in flowing dresses that are almost gowns (a place where the movie slips, I think; as a labeling device, it's pretty crude. These women might as well be wearing stickers pasted to their foreheads which read I AM ONE OF THE WEIRD STEPFORD WIVES), they all drive station wagons, discuss housework with an inordinate degree of enthusiasm, and seem to spend any spare time at the supermarket.

One of the Stepford wives (one of the weird ones) cracks her head in a minor parking lot fender-bender; later we see her at a lawn party, repeating over and over again: "I simply must get that recipe . . . I simply must get that recipe . . . I simply must . . ." The secret of Stepford comes clear immediately. Freud, in a tone which sounds suspiciously like despair, asked: "Woman . . . what does she want?" Forbes and company ask the opposite question, and come up with a stinging answer. Men, the film says, do not want women; they want robots with sex organs.

There are several funny scenes in the movie (besides the aforementioned "Frank, you're the champ" sequence); my own favorite comes when, at a women's "bitch session" Ross and Prentiss have arranged, the weird Stepford wives begin discussing cleaning products and laundry soaps with a slow and yet earnest intensity; everyone seems to have walked right out of one of those commercials male Madison Avenue execs sometimes refer to as "Two C's in a K"-meaning two cunts in a kitchen.

But the movie waltzes slowly out of this brightly lit room of social satire and into a darker chamber by far. We feel the ring closing, first around Paula Prentiss, then around Katharine Ross. There is an uncomfortable passage when the artist who apparently creates the features for the robots sits sketching Ross, his eyes looking up from the sketch pad at her and then back down again; there is the smirking expression on the face of Tina Louise's husband as the bulldozer rips up the surface of her tennis court in preparation for the pool he always wanted; there is Ross discovering her husband sitting alone in the living room of their new house, a drink in his hand, weeping. She is deeply concerned, but we know that his shallow tears mean only that he has sold her out for a dummy with micro-chips in her head. Very soon she will lose all her interest in photography.