During the matricide scene in Night of the Living Dead (which, like the shower scene in Psycho , seems almost endless to our shocked eyes the first time we see it), the little girl's arm strikes a hanging lightbulb, and the cellar becomes a nightmare dreamscape of shifting, swinging shadows-revealing, concealing, revealing again. During the attack of the birds in the attic, it is the big flashlight Ms. Hedren carries which provides this strobe effect (also mentioned in connection with Looking for Mr. Goodbar and used again-more irritatingly and pointlessly-during Marlon Brando's incoherent monologue near the end of Apocalypse Now ) and also provides the scene with a pulse, a beat-at first the flashlight beam moves rapidly as Ms. Hedren uses the light to ward off the birds . . . but as she is gradually sapped of strength and lapses first into shock and then into unconsciousness, the light moves more and more slowly, sinking to the floor. Until there is only dark . . . and in that dark, the tenebrous, whirring flutter of many wings.
I'll not belabor the point by analyzing the "darkness quotient" in all these films, but will close this aspect of the discussion by pointing out that even in those few movies that achieve that feeling of "sunlit horror," there are often feary moments in the dark-Genevieve Bujold's climb up the service ladder and over the operating room in Coma takes place in the dark, as does Ed's (Jon Voight) climb up the bluff near the end of Deliverance . . . not to mention digging up the grave containing the jackal bones in The Omen , and Luana Anders's creepy discovery of the underwater "memorial" to the long-dead little sister in Francis Coppola's first feature film (made for AIP), Dementia-13 .
Still, before leaving the subject entirely, here's a further sampling: Night Must Fall, Night of the Lepus, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, The Black Pit of Dr. M., The Black Sleep, Black Sunday, The Black Room, Black Sabbath, Dark Eyes of London, The Dark, Dead of Night, Night of Terror, Night of the Demon, Nightwing, Night of the Eagle . . . Well, you get it. If there had been no such thing as darkness, the makers of horror movies would have needed to invent it.
10
I have held out mention of one of the films from the quiz, partially because it's the antithesis of many of those we've already discussed-it depends for its horror not upon darkness but upon light-and also because it leads naturally into a brief discussion of something else that the mythic, or "fairy-tale" horror movie will do to us if it can. We all understand about the "gross-out," which is fairly easy to achieve,* but it is only in the horror movies that the gross-out-that most childish of emotional impulses-sometimes achieves the level of art. Now, I can hear some of you say that there is nothing artistic about grossing somebody out-all you really have to do is chew your food and then hang your open mouth in your table-mate's face- but what about the works of Goya? Or Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and soup cans, for that matter?
Even the very worst horror movies sometimes achieve a moment or two of success on this level. Dennis Etchison, a fine writer in the genre, reminisced fondly with me on the phone one day not too long ago about a brief sequence in The Giant Spider Invasion where a lady drinks her morning hi-potency vitamin cocktail, all unknowing that a rather plump spider fell into the blender just before she turned it on. Yum yum. In the eminently forgettable film Squirm , there is that one unforgettable moment (for all two hundred of us who saw the picture) when the lady taking a shower looks up to see why the water stopped coming and sees a showerhead clogged with dangling nightcrawlers. In Dario Argento's Suspiria , a bunch of schoolgirls are subjected to a rain of maggots . . . while sitting at the dinner table, no less. All of it has nothing to do with the film's plot, but it is vaguely interesting, in a repulsive sort of way. In Maniac , directed by former soft-core filmmaker William Lustig, there is the incredible moment when the homicidal ding-dung (Joe Spinell) carefully scalps one of his victims; the camera does not even leer at this-it merely stares at it with a kind of dead, contemplative eye that makes the scene well-nigh impossible to watch.
*I can remember, as a kid, one of my fellow kids asking me to imagine sliding down a long, polished bannister which suddenly and without warning turns into a razorblade. Man, I was days getting over that.
As noted previously, good horror movies often operate most powerfully on this "wanna-look-at-my-chewed-up-food?" level-a primitive, childish level. I would call it the "YUCH factor" . . . sometimes also known as the "Oh my God, was that gross! " factor. This is the point at which most good liberal film critics and most good reactionary film critics part company on the subject of the horror film (see, for instance, the difference between Lynn Minton's review of Dawn of the Dead in McCall 's-she left after two reels or so-and the cover story in the Arts section of The Boston Phoenix on the same film). Like punk rock music, the horror movie capable of delivering the good gross-out wallop finds its art in childish acts of anarchy-the moment in The Omen where the photographer is decapitated by a falling pane of glass is art of the most peculiar sort, and one cannot blame critics who find it easier to respond to Jane Fonda as a wholly unbelievable screen incarnation of Lillian Hellman in Julia than to stuff like this.
But the gross-out is art, and it is important that we have an understanding of this. Blood can fly everywhere and the audience will remain largely unimpressed. If, on the other hand, the audience has come to like and understand-or even just to appreciate-the characters they are watching as real people, if some artistic link has been formed there, blood can fly everywhere and the audience cannot remain unimpressed. I can't remember, for instance, anyone who walked out of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde or Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch who didn't look as if he or she had been hit on the head with a very large board. Yet people walk out of other Peckinpah films-Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Cross of Iron - yawning. That vital linkage just never happens.
That's all fine, and there is little argument about the virtues of Bonnie and Clyde as art, but let us return momentarily to the pureed arachnid in The Giant Spider Invasion . This doesn't qualify as art in respect to that idea of linkage between audience and character at all. Believe me, we don't care very much about the lady who drinks the spider (or anyone else in this movie, for that matter), but all the same there is that moment of frisson , that one moment when the groping fingers of the filmmaker find a chink in our defenses, shoot through it, and squeeze down on one of those psychic pressure points. We identify with the woman who is unknowingly drinking the spider on a level that has nothing to do with her character; we identify with her solely as a human being in a situation which has suddenly turned rotten-in other words, the gross-out serves as the means of a last-ditch sort of identification when the more conventional and noble means of characterization have failed. When she drinks the drink, we shudderand reaffirm our own humanity. **
Having said all that, let's turn to X-The Man with the X-Ray Eyes , one of the most interesting and offbeat little horror movies ever made, and one that ends with one of the most shuddery gross-out scenes ever filmed.
This 1963 movie was produced and directed by Roger Corman, who at that time was in the process of metamorphosing from the dull caterpillar who had produced such meatloaf movies as Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Little Shop of Horror (not even notable for what may have been Jack Nicholson's screen debut) and into the butterfly who was responsible for such interesting and rather beautiful horror films as The Masque of the Red Death and The Terror .
The Man with the X-Ray Eyes marks the point where this strange two-step creature came out of its cocoon, I think. The screenplay was written by Ray Russell, the author of Sardonicus and a number of other novelsamong them the rather overripe Incubus and the much more successful Princess Pamela .
In The Man with the X-Ray Eyes , Ray Milland plays a scientist who develops eyedrops which enable him to see through walls, clothing, playing-cards, you name it; a kind of super-Murine, if you will. But once the process begins, there is no slowing it down. Milland's eyes begin to undergo a physical change, first becoming thickly bloodshot and then taking on a queer yellow cast. It is at this point that we begin to feel rather nervous-perhaps we sense the gross-out coming, and in a very real sense it's already arrived. Our eyes are one of those vulnerable chinks in the armor, one of those places where we can be had. Imagine, for instance, jamming your thumb into someone's wide-open eye, feeling the squish, seeing it sorta squirt out at you. Nasty, right? Immoral to even consider such a thing. But surely you remember that time-honored Halloween party game Dead Man, where peeled grapes are passed from hand to hand to hand in the dark, to the solemn intonation of "These are the dead man's eyes"? Ulp, right? Yuck, right? Or as my kids say, Guh-ROSS!
*Now, don't get me wrong or misinterpret what I'm saying. Kids can be mean and unlovely, and when you see them at their worst, they can make you think black thoughts about the future of the human race. But meanness and cruelty, although related, are not the same thing at all. A cruel action is a studied action; it requires a bit of thought. Meanness, on the other hand, is unpremeditated and unthinking. The results may be similar for the person-usually another child-who gets the butt end, but it seems to me that in a moral society, intent or lack of it is pretty important.
**This might lead to the accusation that my definition of the horror movie as art is much too wide-that I just let in everything. That is not true at all-movies like Massacre at Central High and Bloody Mutilators work on no level. And if my ideas concerning the boundaries of art seem rather lenient, that's too bad. I'm no snob. and if you are, that's your problem. In my business, if you lose your taste for good baloney, it's time you got into some other line of work.