Danse Macabre

At the door, his young assistant finds his way to him. "I only just heard, sir," he says. "Is there anything I can do?” "Yes, Morris," Quatermass replies. "I'm going to need some help.” "Help, sir?” "Going to start again," Quatermass amplifies-it is the film's last line of dialogue. It fades to a scene of yet another rocket blasting off into outer space.

Guest seems ambivalent about his ending and about the character of Quatermass, and it's that ambivalence which gives this early Hammer film its resonance and real power.

Quatermass seems somehow closer to those very real Oak Ridge scientists of the postwar period than he does to the gibbering Mad Labs scientists of the thirties; he is no Dr. Cyclops in a white lab coat, chuckling evilly as he stares through his bottle-thick glasses at his creations.

Au contraire , he is not only fairly good-looking and fearsomely intelligent, he is charismatic and impossible to turn from his purpose. If you are an optimist, you can see the coda of The Creeping Unknown as a testament to the glorious stubbor

Even such a much-loved American institution as the motor vehicle has not entirely escaped the troubled dreams of Hollywood; a few years before being run out of his mortgaged house in Amityville, James Brolin had to face the terrors of The Car (1977) , a customized something-or-other that looked like a squatty airport limo from one of hell's used -car lots. The movie degenerates into a ho-hum piece of hackwork before the end of the second reel (the sort of movie where you can safely go out for a popcorn refill at certain intervals because you know the car isn't going to strike again for ten minutes or so), but there is a marvelous opening sequence where the car chases two bicyclists through Utah's Zion State Park, its horn blatting arrhythmically as it gains on them and finally runs them down. There's something working in that opening sequence, something that calls up a deep, almost primitive un-ease about the cars we zip ourselves up in, thereby becoming anonymous . . . and perhaps homicidal.

A better film is the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Richard Matheson's short story Duel , a film which originally appeared as part of ABC's Movie of the Week series and went on to become something of a cult film. In this film, a psychotic trucker in a big ten-wheeler pursues De

We could uncover other interesting tales of automotive horror, but they would be stories and novels, mostly; such turkeys as Death Race 2000 and Mad Max hardly count. Modern Hollywood has apparently decided that, as the day of the privately owned gasoline vehicle enters its late afternoon, the automobile in most cases must be reserved for fu

7

Social horror films.

We've already discussed a few films with social implications-pimples and the heartbreak of psoriasis in the fifties, not to mention Michael Landon drooling shaving cream all over his high school jacket. But there have been other films which tackle more serious social subjects. In some cases (Rollerball, Wild in the Streets ), these films feature a logical or satirical extrapolation of current social trends and thus become science fiction. We'll restrict these, if you don't mind, on the grounds that they constitute another dance-a bit different from this dark cotillion we're currently engaged in.

There have been a few films which have tried to walk the borderline between horror and social satire; one of those which seems to me to tread this borderline most successfully is The Stepford Wives . The film is based on the novel by Ira Levin, and Levin has actually been able to pull this difficult trick off twice, the other case being that of Rosemary's Baby , which we'll talk about in some depth when we finally arrive at our discussion of the horror novel. For now we'll stick to The Stepford Wives , which has some witty things to say about Women's Liberation, and some disquieting things to say about the American male's response to it.

I spent some time trying to decide if the film, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss, really belonged in this book. It is as satiric as the best of Kubrick's work (although a good deal less elegant), and I defy an audience not to laugh when Ross and Prentiss step into the home of a neighbor (he's the local druggist, and a Walter Mitty type if ever there was one) and hear his wife moaning upstairs: "Oh, Frank, you're the greatest . . . Frank, you're the best . . . you're the champ . . .*

The original Levin story avoided the label "horror novel" (something like the label "pariah dog" in the more exalted circles of literary criticism) because most critics saw it as Levin's sly poke at the Women's Movement. But the scarier implications of Levin's jape are not directed at women at all; they are aimed unerringly at those men who consider it only their due to leave for the golf course on Saturday morning after breakfast has been served them and to reappear (loaded, more likely than not) in time for their di

I'm including it here-as social horror rather than social satire-because the film, after some uneasy backing and filling where it seems unsure of just what it does want to be-becomes just that: a social horror story.

*But the credit for this particular scene belongs to neither Forbes nor Levin, but with the film's screenwriter, William Goldman, who is a very fu

Katharine Ross and her husband (played by Peter Masterson) move from New York City to Stepford, a Co

Yet there's a strangeness in Stepford. A lot of the wives seem a little . . . well, spacey.

Pretty, always attired in flowing dresses that are almost gowns (a place where the movie slips, I think; as a labeling device, it's pretty crude. These women might as well be wearing stickers pasted to their foreheads which read I AM ONE OF THE WEIRD STEPFORD WIVES), they all drive station wagons, discuss housework with an inordinate degree of enthusiasm, and seem to spend any spare time at the supermarket.

One of the Stepford wives (one of the weird ones) cracks her head in a minor parking lot fender-bender; later we see her at a lawn party, repeating over and over again: "I simply must get that recipe . . . I simply must get that recipe . . . I simply must . . ." The secret of Stepford comes clear immediately. Freud, in a tone which sounds suspiciously like despair, asked: "Woman . . . what does she want?" Forbes and company ask the opposite question, and come up with a stinging answer. Men, the film says, do not want women; they want robots with sex organs.

There are several fu

But the movie waltzes slowly out of this brightly lit room of social satire and into a darker chamber by far. We feel the ring closing, first around Paula Prentiss, then around Katharine Ross. There is an uncomfortable passage when the artist who apparently creates the features for the robots sits sketching Ross, his eyes looking up from the sketch pad at her and then back down again; there is the smirking expression on the face of Tina Louise's husband as the bulldozer rips up the surface of her te