Danse Macabre Read online

  We see three boys (one of them the film's nominal hero, played by William Katt) trying on tuxedos for the Prom in a kind of Gas House Kids routine that includes Donald Duck talk and speeded-up action. We see the girls who have humiliated Carrie in the shower room by throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her doing penance on the exercise field to tootling, lumbering music which is reminiscent of "Baby Elephant Walk." And yet beyond all these sophomoric and mildly amusing high school cut-ups, we sense a vacuous, almost unfocused hate, the almost unplanned revenge upon a girl who is trying to rise above her station. Much of De Palma's film is surprisingly jolly, but we sense his jocoseness is dangerous; behind it lurks the aw-shucks grin becoming a frozen rictus, and the girls laboring over their calisthenics were the same girls shouting, "Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up!" at Carrie not long before. Most of all, there is that bucket of pig's blood poised on the beam above the place where Carrie and Tommy (Katt) will eventually be crowned . . . only waiting its time.

  De Palma is sly, and extremely adept at handling his mostly female cast. In writing the novel, I found myself slogging grimly toward the conclusion, trying to do the best job I could with what I knew about women (which was not a great deal). The strain shows in the finished book. It's a fast and entertaining read, I think, and (for me at least) quite gripping. But there's a certain heaviness there that a really good popular novel should not have, a feeling of Sturm und Drang that I could not get rid of no matter how hard I tried. The book seems clear enough and truthful enough in terms of the characters and their actions, but it lacks the style of De Palma's film.

  The book attempts to look at the ant farm of high school society dead on; De Palma's examination of this High School Confidential world is more oblique . . . and more cutting. The film came along at a time when movie critics were bewailing the fact that there were no movies being made with good, meaty roles for women in them . . . but none of these critics seem to have noticed that in its film incarnation, Carrie belongs almost entirely to the ladies. Billy Nolan, a major--and frightening--character in the book, has been reduced to a semisupporting role in the movie. Tommy, the boy who takes Carrie to the Prom, is presented in the novel as a boy who is honestly trying to do something manly--in his own way he is trying to opt out of the caste system. In the film he becomes little more than his girlfriend's cat's-paw, her tool of atonement for her part in the shower room scene where Carrie is pelted with sanitary napkins.

  "I don't go around with anyone I don't want to," Tommy said patiently. "I'm asking because I want to ask you." Ultimately, he knew this to be the truth.

  In the film, however, when Carrie asks Tommy why he is favoring her with an invitation to the Prom, he offers her a dizzy sun 'n' surf grin and says, "Because you liked my poem." Which, by the way, his girlfriend wrote.

  The novel views high school in a fairly common way: as that pit of man-and woman-eaters already mentioned. De Palma's social stance is more original; he sees this suburban white kids' high school as a kind of matriarchy. No matter where you look, there are girls behind the scenes, pulling invisible wires, rigging elections, using their boyfriends as stalking horses. Against such a backdrop, Carrie becomes doubly pitiful, because she is unable to do any of these things--she can only wait to be saved or damned by the actions of others. Her only power is her telekinetic ability, and both book and movie eventually arrive at the same point: Carrie uses her "wild talent" to pull down the whole rotten society. And one reason for the success of the story in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie's revenge is something that any student who ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of. In Carrie's destruction of the gym (and her destructive walk back home in the book, a sequence left out of the movie because of tight budgeting) we see a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden.

  8

  Once upon a time there dwelt on the outskirts of a large forest a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children; the boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had always had little enough to live on, and once, when there was a great famine in the land, he couldn't even provide them with daily bread. One night, as he was tossing about in his bed, full of cares and worry, he sighed and said to his wife: "What's to become of us? How are we to support our poor children, now that we have nothing more for ourselves?" "I'll tell you what, husband," answered the woman, "early tomorrow morning we'll take the children into the thickest part of the wood; there we shall light a fire for them and give them each a piece of bread; then we'll go on to our work and leave them alone. They won't be able to find their way home and we shall thus be rid of them . . ."7

  Previous to now, we have been discussing horror movies with subtexts which try to link real (if sometimes free-floating) anxieties to the nightmare fears of the horror film. But now, with this invocation from "Hansel and Gretel," that most cautionary of nursery tales, let us put out even this dim light of rationality and discuss a few of those films whose effects go considerably deeper, past the rational and into those fears which seem universal.

  Here is where we cross into the taboo lands for sure, and it's best that I be frank with you up front. I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better--and maybe not all that much better, after all. We've all known people who talk to themselves; people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching; people who have some hysterical fear--of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground to play their part in the great Thanksgiving table of life: what once ate must eventually be eaten.

  When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.

  Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete three-sixty or ploughs through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special province of the young; by the time one turns forty or fifty, one's appetite for double-twists of 360deg loops may be considerably depleted.

  As pointed out, we also go to reestablish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that, no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.

  And we go to have fun.

  Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn't it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced--sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur's version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version of the public lynching.

  It is true that the mythic, "fairy-tale" horror film intends to take away the shades of gray (which is one reason why When a Stranger Calls doesn't work; the psycho, well and honestly played by Tony Beckley, is a poor shmuck beset by the miseries of his own psychoses; our unwilling sympathy for him dilutes the film's success as surely as water dilutes Scotch); it urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and pure whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein at all.

  If we are all insane, then all insanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (except neither of those two amateur-night sur
geons were ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you're under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business . . . although it's doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.

  The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (I exclude saints, past and present, but then, most or all saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then he has to be let loose to scream and roll around on the grass. . . . By God, I do believe I'm talking Werewolf again. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we recognize that it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional "muscles" are accepted--even exalted--in civilized society; they are, of course, the emotions which tend to maintain the status quo of civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness--these are all the emotions which we applaud, emotions which have been immortalized in the bad couplets of Hallmark Cards and in the verses (I don't dare call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy.

  When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, "Isn't he the sweetest little thing?" Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow. But if we deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister's fingers in the door, sanctions follow--angry remonstrance from parents, aunts, and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking.

  But anticivilization emotions don't go away, and they demand periodic exercise. We have such "sick" jokes as, "What's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?" (You can't unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork . . . a joke, by the way, which I heard originally from a ten-year-old.) Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out of us even as we recoil, a possibility which confirms the thesis: if we share a Brotherhood of Man, then we also share an Insanity of Man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity, but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.

  My agent, Kirby McCauley, likes to relate a scene from Andy Warhol's film Bad--and he relates it in the fond tones of the confirmed horror-movie buff. A mother throws her baby from the window of a skyscraper; we cut away to the crowd below and hear a loud splat. Another mother leads her son through the crowd and up to the mess (which is obviously a watermelon with seeds removed), points to it, and says, to the effect, "That's what will happen to you if you're bad!" It's a sick joke, like the one about the truckload of dead babies--or the one about the babes in the woods, which we call "Hansel and Gretel."

  The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized . . . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For these reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them--Dawn of the Dead, for instance--as lifting a trapdoor in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.

  Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed.

  9

  And now this word from the poet Kenneth Patchen. It comes from his small, clever book But Even So: Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?

  This is the mood which the best films of mythic "fairy-tale horror" summon up in us, and it also suggests that, below the level of simple aggression and simple morbidity, there is a final level where the horror movie does its most powerful work. And that is well for us, because without more, the human imagination would be a poor, degraded thing, in need of no more in the way of horror than such things as Last House on the Left and Friday the 13th. The horror movie is planning to harm us, all right, and that is exactly why it is lurking here in the very darkest part of the forest. At this most basic level, the horror film isn't fooling around: it wants to get you. Once it has reduced you to a level of childlike expectation and point of view, it will begin playing one or more of a very few simple harmonic melodies--the greatest limitation (and therefore the greatest challenge) of the horror form is its very strictness. The things that really scare people on a gut level can be reduced like fractions to an irreducible handful. And when that has finally happened, analyses such as those I've given in the foregoing pages become impossible . . . and even if analysis were possible, it would be irrelevant. One can point out effect, and that must be the end of the matter. To try and go any further is as useless as trying to divide a prime number by two and come out even. But effect may be enough; there are films, like Browning's Freaks, that have the power to reduce us to jelly, to make us mutter (or whimper) to ourselves, "Please let it stop"; they are those films which hold their spell over us in spite of all we can do, even including the recitation of that most magic spell-breaking incantation: "It's only a movie." And they can all be invoked with that wonderful fairy-tale door-opener, "Once upon a time."

  So, before we proceed any further, here's a little quiz for you. Get a scrap of paper and something to write with and jot down your answers. Twenty questions; give yourself five points per question. And if you score below 70, you need to go back and do some postgraduate work in the real fright films . . . the ones that scare us just because they scare us.

  Ready? Okay. Name these films: 1. Once upon a time, the husband of the world's champion blind lady had to go away for awhile (to slay a dragon, or something of that sort) and a wicked man named Harry Roat, who came from Scarsdale, came by to see her while her husband was gone.

  2. Once upon a time, three babysitters went out on Halloween night, and only one of them was still alive come All Saints Day.

  3. Once upon a time a lady who stole some money spent a not-so-enchanted evening at an out-of-the-way motel. Everything seemed pretty much okay until the motel owner's mother came by; mother did something very naughty.

  4. Once upon a time some bad people tampered with the oxygen line in one operating room of a major hospital and a lot of people went to sleep for a long, long time--just like Snow White. Only these people never woke up.

  5. Once upon a time there was a sad girl who picked up men in bars, because when the men came home with her, she didn't feel so sad. Except one night she picked up a man who was wearing a mask. Underneath the mask he was the bogeyman.

  6. Once upon a time some brave explorers landed on another planet to see if someone needed help. Nobody did, but by the time they got going again, they discovered that they had picked up the bogeyman.

  7. Once upon a time a sad lady named Eleanor went on an adventure in an enchanted castle. In the enchanted castle, Lady Eleanor was not so sad, because she found some new friends. Except that the friends left, and she stayed . . . forever.

  8. Once upon a time a young man tried to bring a magic potion from another country to his own aboard a magic flying carpet. But he was caught before he could get on his magic carpet, and the bad people took away his magic potion and locked him in an evil dungeon.

  9. Once upon a time there was a little girl who looked sweet, but she was really very wicked. She locked the janitor up in his room and set his highly flammable bed of wood-chips and excelsior on fire because he was mean to her.

  10. Once upon a time there were two little children, very much like Hansel and Gretel, in fact, and when their father died, their mommy married a wicked man who pretended to be very good. This wicked man had LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand and HATE tattooed on
the fingers of the other.

  11. Once upon a time there was an American lady living in London whose sanity was under some question. She thought she saw a murder in the old boarded-up house next door.

  12. Once upon a time a lady and her brother went to put flowers on their mother's grave and the brother, who liked to play mean tricks, scared her by saying, "They're coming to get you, Barbara." Except that it turned out they really were coming to get her . . . but they got him, first.

  13. Once upon a time all the birds in the world got mad at the people and started to kill the people because the birds were under an evil spell.

  14. Once upon a time a crazyman with an ax started to chop up his family, one by one, in an old Irish house. When he chopped off the groundskeeper's head, it rolled right down into the family pool--wasn't that funny?

  15. Once upon a time two sisters grew old together in an enchanted castle in the Kingdom of Hollywood. Once one of them had been famous in the Kingdom of Hollywood, but that was long, long ago. The other one was stuck in a wheelchair. And do you know what happened? The sister who could walk served her paralyzed sister a dead rat for dinner! Wasn't that funny?

  16. Once upon a time there was a cemetery caretaker who discovered that if he put black pins into the vacant plots on his cemetery map, the people who owned those plots would die. But when he took out the black pins and put in white pins, do you know what happened? The movie turned into a big pile of shit! Wasn't that funny?

  17. Once upon a time a bad man stole the little princess and buried her alive . . . or at least, he said he did.

  18. Once upon a time there was a man who invented some magic eyedrops, and he could use them to see through people's cards in Las Vegas and make lots of money. He could also see through girls' clothes at cocktail parties, which was maybe not such a nice thing to do, but wait a minute. This man kept seeing more . . . and more . . . and more . . .