Danse Macabre

In fact, almost every physical and mental human aberration has been at some point in history, or is now, considered monstrous-a complete list would include widows' peaks ( once considered a reliable sign that a man was a sorcerer), moles on the female body ( supposed to be witches' teats), and extreme schizophrenia, which on occasion has caused the afflicted to be canonized by one church or another.

Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us. We love and need the concept of monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings . . . and let me further suggest that it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply.

The late John Wyndham, perhaps the best writer of science fiction that England has ever produced, summarized the idea in his novel The Chrysalids (published as Rebirth in America). It is a story that considers the ideas of mutation and deviation more brilliantly than any other novel written in English since World War II, I think. A series of plaques in the home of the novel's young protagonist offer stern counsel: ONLY THE IMAGE OF GOD IS MAN; KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD; IN PURITY OUR SALVATION; BLESSED IS THE NORM; and most telling of all: WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT! After all, when we discuss monstrosity, we are expressing our faith and belief in the norm and watching for the mutant. The writer of horror fiction is neither more nor less than an agent of the status quo.

5

Having said all that, let's now return to the American-International pictures of the 1950s. In a little while we'll tally about the allegorical qualities of these films (you there in the back row, stop laughing or leave the room), but for now let's stick to the idea of monstrosity . . . and if we touch allegory at all, we'll touch it only lightly, by suggesting some of the things films were not.

Although they came along at the same time rock and roll broke the race barrier, and although they appealed to the same fledgling hoppers, it's interesting to notice the sort of things that are altogether absent . . . at least in terms of "real" monstrosity.

We've noted already that the AIP pictures, and those of the other independent film companies that began to imitate AIP, gave the movie industry a much-needed shot in the arm during the ho-hum fifties. They gave millions of young viewers something they couldn't get at home on TV, and it nave them a place where they could go and make out in relative comfort. And it was the "indies," as Variety calls them, that gave a whole generation of war babies an insatiable Jones for the movies, and perhaps prepared the way for the success of such disparate movies as Easy Rider, Jaws, Rocky, The Godfather , and The Exorcist .

But where are the monsters?

Oh, we've got fake ones by the score: saucer-men, giant leeches, werewolves, mole people ( in a Universal picture), and dozens more. But what AIP didn't show as they tested these interesting new waters was anything that smacked of real horror . . . at least as those war babies understood the term emotionally . That is an important qualification, and I hope you'll come to agree with me that it warrants its italics.

These were-we were-children who knew about the psychic distress that came with The Bomb, but who had never known any real physical want or deprivation. None of the kids who went to these movies were starving or dying of internal parasites. A few had lost fathers or uncles in the war. Not many.

And in the movies themselves, there were no fat kids; no kids with warts or tics; no kids with pimples; no kids picking their noses and then wiping it on the sun visors of their hot rods; no kids with sexual problems; no kids with any visible physical deformity (not even such a minor one as vision that had been corrected by glasses-all the kids in the AIP horror and beach pictures had 20/20 vision).

There might be an endearingly wacky teenager on view-of the sort often played by Nick Adams-a kid who was a bit shorter or did daring, kooky things such as wearing his hat backwards like a baseball catcher (and who had a name like Weirdo or Scooter or Crazy), but that was as far as it ever went.

The setting for most of these films was small-town America, the scene the audience could best identify with . . . but all of these Our Towns looked eerily as if a eugenics squad had gone by the day before production actually began, removing everyone with a lisp, birthmark, limp, or potbelly-everyone, in short, who did not look like Frankie Avalon, A

Although both rock and roll and the new youth movies ( everything from I Was a Teenage Werewolf to Rebel Without a Cause ) burst upon an older generation, just begi

But as there turned out to be fewer Communists and fifth columnists than was at first suspected, the Shadow of the Dread JD also proved to be rather overrated. In the last analysis, the war babies wanted what their parents wanted. They wanted driver's licences; jobs in the cities and homes in the suburbs; wives and husbands; insurance; underarm protection; kids; time payments which they would meet; clean streets; clear consciences. They wanted to be good. Years and miles between Senior Glee Club and the SLA; years and miles between Our Town and the Mekong Delta; and the only known fuzz-tone guitar track in existence was a technical mistake on a Marty Robbins country and western record. They adhered happily to school dress codes. Long sideburns were laughed at in most quarters, and a guy wearing stacked heels or bikini briefs would have been hounded unmercifully as a faggot. Eddie Cochran could sing about "those crazy pink pegged slacks" and kids would buy the records . . , but not the pants themselves. For the war babies, the norm was blessed.

They wanted to be good. They watched for the mutant.

Only one aberration per picture was allowed in the early youthcult horror films of the fifties, one mutation. It was the parents who would never believe. It was the kids-who wanted to be good-who stood watch (most often from those lonely bluffs which overlook Our Town from the ends of lovers' lanes); it was the kids who stamped the mutant out, once more making the world safe for country club dances and Hamilton Beach blenders.

Horrors in the fifties, for the war babies, were mostly-except maybe for the psychic strain of waiting for The Bomb to fall-mundane horrors. And perhaps a conception of real horror is impossible for people whose bellies are full. The horrors the war babies felt were scale-model horrors, and in that light the movies that really caused AIP to take off, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein , become mildly interesting.

In Werewolf , Michael Landon plays an attractive but moody high school student with a quick temper. He's basically a good kid, but he's involved in one fight after another ( like David Ba

Seeing Landon as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development-like back to the Alley Oop stage-Bissell uses hypnosis to regress Landon totally, in effect deliberately making the problem worse instead of trying to cure it. This plot twist seems cribbed from the then-current and fabulously successful Search for Bridey Murphy , the story (purportedly factual but later declared a hoax) of a woman who, under hypnosis, revealed memories of a previous life.

Bissell's experiments succeed beyond his wildest dreams-or worst nightmares-and Landon becomes a ravening werewolf. For a 1957 high school or junior high school kid watching the transformation for the first time, this was baaad shit. Landon becomes the fascinating embodiment of everything you're not supposed to do if you want to be good . . . if you want to get along in school, join the National Honor Society, get your letter, and be accepted by a good college where you can join a frat and drink beer like your old man did. Landon grows hair all over his face, produces long fangs, and begins to drool a substance that looks suspiciously like Burma-Shave. He peeks at a girl doing exercises on the balance beam all by herself in the gymnasium, and one imagines him smelling like a randy polecat who just rolled in a nice fresh pile of coyote shit. No button-down Ivy League shirt with the fruit loop on the back here; here's a fellow who doesn't give a fart in a high wind for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. He has gone absolutely, not apeshit, but wolfshit.