We examined it for maggots No maggots "Maybe there's maggots inside it," Charlie said hopefully (Charlie was one of the fellows who referred to the William Castle film as McBare , and on rainy days he was apt to call me up and ask me if I wanted to come down the street to his house and read "comet bwoots").

*From Kids: Day in and Day Out , edited by Elisabeth Scharlatt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979) ; this particular story related by Walter Jerrold.

We examined the dead cat for maggots, turning it from one side to the other-using a stick, of course; no telling what germs you might get from a dead cat. There were no maggots that we could see.

"Maybe there's maggots in its brain ," Charlie's brother Nicky said, his eyes glowing. "Maybe there's maggots inside it, eating up its braiiiin .” "That's impossible," I said. "Your brains are, like, airtight. Nothin' can get inside there.” They absorbed this.

We stood around the dead cat in a circle.

Then Nicky said suddenly: "If we drop a brick on its heinie, will it shit?” This question of postmortem biology was absorbed and discussed. It was finally agreed that the test should be made. A brick was found. There was a discussion of who should get to bombs-away the brick on the dead cat. The problem was solved in time-honored fashion: we put our feet in. The rites of eenie-meenie-miney-moe were invoked. Foot after foot left the circle until only Nicky's was left.

The brick was dropped.

The dead cat did not shit.

Deduction number two: After you're dead, you won't shit if someone drops a brick on your ass.

Soon after, a baseball game started up, and the dead cat was left.

As the days passed, an ongoing investigation of the cat continued, and it is always the dead cat in the gutter out in front of Burrets' Building Materials that I think of when I read Richard Wilbur's fine poem "The Groundhog." The maggots put in their appearance a couple of days later, and we watched their fever-boil with horrified, revolted interest. "They're eatin 'his eyes,” Tommy Erbter from up the street pointed out hoarsely. "Look at that, you guys, they're even eatin' his eyes .” Eventually the maggots moved out, leaving the dead cat looking considerably thinner, its fur now faded to a dull, uninteresting color, sparse and knotted. We came less frequently. The cat's decay had entered a less gaudy stage. Still, it was my habit to check the cat on my mile's walk to school each morning; it was just another stop on the way, part of the morning's ritual- like running a stick over the picket fence in front of the empty house or skipping a couple of stones across the pond in the park.

In late September the tag-end of a hurricane hit Stratford. There was a minor flood, and when the waters went down a couple of days later, the dead cat was gone-it had been washed away. I remember it well now, and I suppose I will all my life, as my first intimate experience with death. That cat may be gone from the charts, but not from my heart.

Sophisticated movies demand sophisticated reactions from their audiences-that is, they demand that we react to them as adults. Horror movies are not sophisticated, and because they are not, they allow us to regain our childish perspective on death-perhaps not such a bad thing. I'll not descend to the romantic oversimplification that suggests we see things more clearly as children, but I will suggest that children see more intensely. The greens of lawns are, to the child's eye, the color of lost emeralds in H. Rider Haggard's conception of King Solomon's Mines, the blue of the winter sky is as sharp as an icepick, the white of new snow is a dream-blast of energy. And black . . . is blacker. Much blacker indeed.

Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber's leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety . . . for a little while, anyway.

The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat (or the shape under the sheet, to use a metaphor from the introduction to my short story collection) . . . but not as an adult would look at it. Never mind the philosophical implications of death or the religious possibilities inherent in the idea of survival; the horror film suggests we just have a good close look at the physical artifact of death. Let us be children masquerading as pathologists. We will, perhaps, link hands like children in a circle, and sing the song we all know in our hearts: time is short, no one is really okay, life is quick and dead is dead.

Omega, the horror film sings in those children's voices. Here is the end. Yet the ultimate subtext that underlies all good horror films is, But not yet. Not this time . Because in the final sense, the horror movie is the celebration of those who feel they can examine death because it does not yet live in their own hearts.