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The Last Waltz - Horror and Morality, Horror and Magic

'Yes, but how do you justify earning a living by feeding off people's worst fears?'

The police have been summoned by a neighbor who has heard a commotion of some kind. What they find is a bloodbath - and something worse. The young man admits, quite calmly, that he has murdered his grandmother with a pipe, and then cut her throat.

I needed her blood,' the young man tells the police calmly. I'm a vampire.

Without her blood, I would have died. '

In his room the police find magazine articles about vampires, vampire comic books, stories, novels.

We'd been having a pretty nice lunch, this reporter from the Washington Post and I, something I was grateful for. I'd just started a twelve-city tour for my novel The Dead Zone the day before in New York with a kick-offparty thrown by the Viking Press at Tavern on the Green, a huge, rococo eating and drinking establishment on the edge of Central Park. I had tried to take it easy at the party, but I still managed to put away about eight beers there, and another six or so at a smaller, more relaxed party with some friends from Maine later on. Nevertheless I was up the next morning at quarter of five to make the six o'clock Eastern shuttle to Washington so I could, in turn, make a seven o'clock TV appearance to plug my novel. Welcome to touring, friends and neighbors. I made the shuttle handily, telling invisible beads as it ??ook off in a pouring rainstorm (sitting next to an overweight businessman who read the Wall Street Journal through the entire flight and ate Turns one after another, deliberately and reflectively, as if enjoying them) and made A.M. Washington with at least ten minutes to spare. The television lights intensified the mild hangover I'd gotten up with, and I was grateful for what had been a fairly laid-back lunch with the Post reporter, whose questions had been interesting and relatively unthreatening. Then this spitball about feeding off people's fears comes out of nowhere. The reporter, a young, lanky guy, was looking at me over his sandwich, eyes bright.

It's 1960, and a lonely Ohio youth has left the movie theater where he has just seen Psycho for the fifth time. This young man goes home and stabs his grandmother to death. The pathologist would later count overforty separate stab wounds. Why? the police asked. Voices, the young man replies. Voices told me to do it. 'Look,' I said, putting my own sandwich down. 'You take any big-city psychiatrist. He's got a marvelous home in the suburbs, a hundred thousand dollars' worth of house at the very least. He drives a Mercedes-Benz, either tobacco-brown or silver-gray. His wife has got a Country Squire wagon. His kids go to private schools during the academic year and to good summer camps in New England or in the northwest every summer. Sonny has got Harvard if he can make the grades - money is certainly no problem - and his daughter can go to some reet and compleet girls' school where the sorority motto is "We don't conjugate, we decline." And how is he making the money that produces all of these wonders? He is listening to women weep over their frigidity, he is listening to men with suicidal impulses, he is dealing with paranoia both high and low, he's maybe striking on the occasional true schizophrenia. He's dealing with people who most of all are scared shitless that their lives have somehow gotten out of control and that things are falling apart . . . and if that isn't earning a living by feeding off people's fears, I don't know what is.' I picked up my sandwich again and bit into it, convinced that if I hadn't hit the spitter he had thrown me, I'd at least managed to foul it back and stay alive at the plate. When I looked up from my Reuben, the little half-smile on the reporter's face was gone. 1,' he said softly, 'happen to be in analysis.' January of 1980. The woman and her mother arc having a worried conference over the woman's three-month-old baby. The baby won't stop crying. It always cries. They agree on the source ofthe problem: the baby has been possessed by a demon, like that little girl in The Exorcist. They pour gasoline on the baby as it lies crying in its crib and then light the child onfre to drive the demon out. Tht baby lingers in a burn ward for three days. Then it dies.

The reporter's article was clean and fair for all of that; he was unkind about my physical appearance and I suppose he had some cause - I was in the slobbiest shape I've been in for ten years during that late summer of 1979 - but other than that, I felt I got a pretty square shake. But even in the piece he wrote, you can feel the place where his path and mine diverged; there is that quiet snap which is the sound of ideas suddenly going off in two completely different directions.

'You get the impression that King likes this sort of sparring,' he wrote. Boston, iQTJ. A woman is killed by a young man who uses a number of kitchen implements to effect the murder. Police speculate that he might have gotten the idea from a movie - Brian De Palma 's Carrie,from the novel by Stephen King. In theftlm version, Carrie kills her mother by causing ail sorts of kitchen implements -including a corkscrew and a potato-peeler - to fly across the room and literally nail the woman to the wait.

Prime-time television survived the call by pressure groups to end the excessive, graphic depletion of violence on the tube for over ten years and House and Senate subcommittees almost without number which were convened to discuss the subject. Private eyes went on shooting bad guys and getting clopped over the head after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King; you could order up a dose of carnage at the twist of the channel selector on any night of the week, including Sundays. The undeclared war in Vietnam was heating up quite nicely, thank you; body counts were spiralling into the stratosphere. Child psychologists testified that after watching two hours of violent prime-time TV, groups of children in the test group showed a marked increase in play aggressiveness - beating the toy truck against the floor rather than rolling it back and forth, for instance.

Los Angeles, ig6g. Janis Joplin, who will later die of a drug overdose, is belting out 'Ball and Chain '. Jim Mornson, who will die of a heart attack in a bathtub, is chanting 'Kill, kill, kill, kill' at the end of a song titled 'The End' - Francis Ford Coppola will use the song ten years later to fade in the prologue of Apocalypse Now. Newsweek publishes a picture of a shyly-smiling U.S. soldier holding up a severed human ear. And in a Los Angeles suburb, a young boy puts out his brother's eyes with his fingers. He was, he explained, only trying to imitate the old Three Stooges two-jingercd boinnng! When they do it on TV, the weeping child explains, no one gets hurt.

Television's make-believe violence rolled on nevertheless, through the sixties, past Charles Whitman up on the Texas Tower ('There was a rumor/about a tumor,' Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys sang gleefully, 'nestled in the base of his braiyyyyn . . .'), and what finally killed it and ushered in the Sitcom Seventies was a seemingly unimportant event when compared to the deaths of a President, a Senator, a great civil rights leader. Television execs were finally forced to rethink their position because a young girl ran out of gas in Roxbury. She had a gas can in her trunk, unfortunately. She got it filled at a gas station, and while walking back to her beached car, she was set upon by a gang of black youths who took her gas can away from her, doused her with the gas, and then - like the woman and her mother trying to drive the demon out of the baby - lit her on fire. Days later she died. The youths were caught, and someone finally asked them the sixty-four-dollar question: Where did you get such a horrible idea?

From TV, came the response. From The ABC Movie of the Week. Near the end of the sixties, Ed McBain (in reality novelist Evan Hunter) wrote one of the finest 8^th Precinct novels of the policeman's lot. It was called Fu^, and dealt in part with a gang of teenagers who went around dousing winos with gasoline and lighting them up. The film version, which is described by Steven Scheuer in his invaluable tubeside companion Movies on TV as & 'scatterbrained comedy', starred Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch. The biggest yocks in the movie come when several cops on stakeout dress up as nuns and then chase after a suspect, holding their habits up to reveal big, clunky workshoes. Pretty funny, right, gang? A real gut-buster.

McBain's novel isn't a gut-buster. It's grim and almost beautiful. Certainly he has never come any closer to defining exactly what the policeman's lot may be than near the end of the novel when Steve Carella, masquerading as a wino, is lit on fire himself. The producers of the movie apparently saw something between M*A*S*H and Naked City in this, and the misbegotten result is in most respects as forgettable as a Tracy Stallard fastball . ... except that one of Stallard's fastballs went out of Fenway Park to become Roger Maris's record-breaking sixty-first home run. And Fu% a poorly executed comedy-drama, effectively ended TV violence.

The message? You are responsible. And network TV accepted the message.

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'How do you justify the violence of the shower scene in Psycho?' A critic once asked Sir Alfred Hitchcock.

'How do you justify the opening scene in Hiroshima, Mon Amour?' Hitchcock is reputed to have replied. In that opening scene, which was certainly scandalous by American standards in 1959, we see Emmanuele Riva and Eliji Okada in a naked embrace.

'The opening scene was necessary to the integrity of the film,' the critic answered. 'So was the shower scene in Psycho,' Hitchcock said.

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What sort of burden does the writer - particularly the writer of horror fiction

- have to bear in all of this? Certainly there has never been a writer in the field (with the possible exception of Shirley Jackson) who has not been regarded with more than a degree of critical caution. The morality of horror fiction has been called into question for a hundred years. One of the blood-spattered forerunners of Dratula, Varney the Vampyre, was referred to as a 'penny dreadful'. Later on, inflation turned the penny dreadfuls into dime dreadfuls. In the 19305 there were cries that pulps such as Weird Tales and Spicy Stories (which regularly served up lip-smacking S & M covers on which lovely ladies were tied down, always in their 'small clothes', and menaced by some beastly - but identifiably male -creature of the night) were ruining the morals of the youth of America. Similarly in the fifties, the comics industry choked offsuch outlaw growths as E.C.'s Tales from the Crypt and instituted a Comics Code when it became clear that Congress intended to clean their house for them if they would not clean it for themselves. There would be no more tales of dismemberment, corpses come back from the dead, and premature burials - or at least not for the next ten years. The return was signalled by the unpretentious birth of Creepy, a Warren Group magazine which was a complete throwback to the salad days of Bill Gaines's E.G. horror comics. Uncle Creepy, and his buddy Cousin Eerie, who came along two years or so later, were really interchangeable with the Old Witch and the Crypt-Keeper. Even some of the old artists were back -Joe Orlando, who made his debut as an E.G. artist, was also represented in the premiere issue of Creepy, if memory serves.

I would suggest that there has always been a great tendency, particularly when it comes to such popular forms as movies, television, and mainstream fiction, to kill the messenger for the message. I do not now and never have doubted that the youths who burned the lady in Roxbury got the idea from the telecast of Fuzz one Sunday night on ABC; if it had not been shown, stupidity and lack of imagination might well have reduced them to murdering her in some more mundane way. The same holds true with many of the other cases mentioned here.

The danse macabre is a waltz with death. This is a truth we cannot afford to shy away from. Like the rides in the amusement park which mimic violent death, the tale of horror is a chance to examine what's going on behind doors which we usually keep double-locked. Yet the human imagination is not content with locked doors. Somewhere there is another dancing partner, the imagination whispers in the night - a partner in a rotting ball gown, a partner with empty eyesockets, green mold growing on her elbow-length gloves, maggots squirming in the thin remains of her hair. To hold such a creature in our arms? Who, you ask me, would be so mad? Well . . . ?

'You will not want to open this door,' Bluebeard tells his wife in that most horrible of all horror stories, 'because your husband has forbidden it.' But this, of course, only makes her all the more curious . . . and at last, her curiosity is satisfied.

'You may go anywhere you wish in the castle,' Count Dracula tells Jonathan Harker, 'except where the doors arc locked, where of course you will not wish to go.' But Harker goes soon enough.

And so do we all. Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or window willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not. . . and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever. Baltimore, 1980. The woman is reading a book and waiting for her bus to arrive. The demobbed soldier who approaches her is a Vietnam vet, a sometime dope addict. He has a history of mental problems which seem to date from his period of service. The woman has noticed him on the bus before, sometimes weaving, sometimes staggering, sometimes calling loudly and wildly to people who are ml there. 'That's right. Captain!' she has heard him say. 'That's right, that's right!'

He attacks the woman as she waits for her bus; later, the police will theorize he was after drug money. No matter. He will bejust as dead, no matter what he was after. The neighborhood is a tough one. The woman has a knife secreted upon her person. In the struggle, she uses it. When the bus comes, the black ex-soldier lits dying in the gutter.

What were you reading? a reporter asks her later; she shows him The Stand, by Stephen King.