Danse Macabre

Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Le

9

And now this word from the poet Ke

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 pla

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 boogeyman.

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 boogeyman.

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 some magic dust 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 white powder 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 fu

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 di

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 fu

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 . . . 19. Once upon a time there was a lady who was saddled with Satan's child, and he knocked her over a gallery railing with his trike. What a mean thing to do! But lucky mommy! Because she died soon after, she didn't have to do the sequel!

20. Once upon a time some friends went on a canoe trip down a magic river, and some bad men saw that they were having fun and decided to fix them for it. That was because the bad men didn't want those other fellows, who came from the city, to have a good time in their woods.

Okay, did you write down all of your answers? If you find you have four or more blanks-not even an educated guess to plug in there-you have been spending far too much time seeing "quality" films like Julia, Manhattan , and Breaking Away . And while you've been watching Woody Allen give his imitation of an ingrown hair (a liberal ingrown hair, of course), you missed some of the scariest films ever made. For the record, the answers are:

1.Wait Until Dark2.Halloween 3. Psycho 4.Coma 5. Looking for Mr. Goodbar 6. Alien 7. The Haunting 8. Midnight Express 9. The Bad Seed 10. The Night of the Hunter 11. Night Watch 12. Night of the Living Dead 13. The Birds 14. Dementia-13 15. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?16. I Bury the Living 17. Macabre * 18. X-the Man with the X-Ray Eyes 19. The Omen 20. Deliverance

The first thing we can note about this list of films is that, of the twenty (which I would call the basic coursework in films of gut-level horror in the period we're discussing here), fully fourteen have nothing supernatural going on in them . . . fifteen if you count Alien , which is at least nominally science fiction (I do count it as a supernatural tale, however; I think of it as Lovecraft in outer space, mankind finally going to the Elder Gods rather than they coming to us). So we might be able to say, paradox or not, that movies of fairy-tale horror demand a heavy dose of reality to get them rolling. Such reality frees the imagination of excess baggage and makes the weight of unbelief easier to lift. The audience is propelled into the movie by the feeling that, under the right set of circumstances, this could happen.

The second thing we could note is that a quarter of them bear a reference either to "night" or "the dark" in their titles. The dark, it goes almost without saying, provides the basis for our most primordial fears. As spiritual as we may believe our natures to be, our physiology is similar to that of all the rest of the mammals that creep, crawl, trot, or walk; we must make do with the same five senses. There are many mammals whose eyesight is keen, but we are not among them. There are mammals-dogs, for instance-which have even lousier eyesight than we do, but their lack of brainpower has forced them to develop other senses to a kee

*This William Castle feature-his first, but unfortunately not his last-was perhaps the bigest "gotta-see" picture of my grammar school days. Its title was pronounced by my friends in Stratford, Co

"Gotta-see" or not, very few of our parents would let us go because of the grisly ad campaign. I, however, exercised the inventiveness of the true aficionado and got to see it by telling my mother I was going to Davy Crockett , a Disney film which I felt I could summarize safely because I had most of the bubble-gum cards.

So-called psychics like to prate of a "sixth sense," a vague term which sometimes means telepathy, sometimes precognition, sometimes God knows what, but if we have a sixth sense, it is probably just (some just!) the kee