Men Without Hats...Who Really Danse
Macabre
A Review of Stephen King's Non-fiction Book on the "Entire
Horror Phenomenon"
by Andy Morton
King, Stephen, Danse Macabre. Everest House, 1981. 391 p.
When King's Danse Macabre was suggested for review this particular writer gave a slight internal groan. Everyone who has read anything in horror is bound to have grazed upon King's ideas, either through his books, movies, or on television. And while he does have merit, he is not the mainstay of my reading habits, so this review was initially approached with a short, small sense of dread.
To put it bluntly, all of Stephen King's previous forays into fiction had for this reader all the magic of a formulaic standard spaced triplicate pattern for mainstream mayhem. I expected King to ponderously cover the usual canon of horror, the movies everyone had seen and the books everyone had read a thousand times. After all, successful horror is usually mainstream horror; they are one and the same, right?
Well...NO...
Not always, anyway.
In Danse Macabre, King discusses many books and movies that were, well, not exactly on Main Street USA's radar, nor on my own for that fact. These fictional fritters were successful to some degree, but they were not mainstream. I mean, I can't imagine the button-up preppie types (or nice retired people, my parent's age) standing in line for tickets to see a midnight double feature of Night of the Living Dead followed by Dawn of the Dead. This reminds me: Horror has always been sort of sneered at for being less than art, or rather for being the junk food of literature and film. Even pizza and coke have some sort of nutritional value; if nothing else, they fill the void. Unfortunately, there has been way too much horror that has barely filled fans' hungry voids (for instance, Plan 9 from Outer Space which Mr. King places at the top of his worst ever movie list).
Now pay attention children. This is important. Per King:
The first rule of horror is "you gotta scare the audience."
The second rule of horror is you gotta scare the audience.
So, when you are considering something junky like Plan 9 (or a pepperoni pizza with extra cheese), it's hard to imagine being horrified. Some low-paid actor in a gorilla suit who wears a diving helmet with floppily attached antennae, and who hides out in some Hollywood cave, playing with an old war surplus short-wave radio that blows Lawrence Welk-like bubbles, is just not the same as the boogie man. The only effect Ed Wood gets with Plan 9 is audience members groaning in unison, "Woooooooo....I AM SO SCARED !!!!!
According to King's book, all modern horror stories seem to stem from three main pieces of supernatural literature (each in its own right being scary for its particular audience). These three novels are Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which, by the way, was penned in only 3 days, but, his wife was so horrified by the work that Stevenson promptly threw it in the fire, only to write it again in only 3 more frantic days). Stephen King relates his appreciation for the aforementioned,
Each of the three novels "is remarkable in some way, not just as a horror tale or as a suspense yarn, but as an example of a much wider genre: that of the novel itself."
In these three cornerstone pieces of horror we find the 3 archetypes of monster: the Werewolf, the Vampire, and the Bad Thing. Any one of these terrifying "things" can be found in fictional horror. They may be slightly altered, as for example, the Bad Thing may have been slightly twisted and become a Bad Place, such as in the Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Hill House, or The House Next Door. But whatever forms evil may take in our preferred flavor of horror, we must not forget the whole idea is to find something that scares us back into our primitive caves. Whether that thing that frightens us is evil from within, such as in The Bad Seed, or supernatural evil from without, like in Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space, the idea is to make us scared enough not to snicker.
In Danse Macabre, King discusses influential (and I might add, scary) texts as being the10 books that in his opinion, represented "everything in the genre that is fine: the horror story as both literature and entertainment." Others among these books is Ghost Story by Peter Straub, which King describes as "probably the best of the supernatural novels to be published in the wake of the three that kicked off a new horror 'wave' in the Seventies." These three are identified as Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other.
King also gets into the theory of the genre. The terms "gothic" and "horror" are intermixed when speaking of horror as a genre, despite the fact that they have some distinct differences. King stirs them up like a good Crown and 7. For most, gothic represents repressed sexuality, and horror is the fear that stalks us on the earth. But in this book, King states that "the New American Gothic" created in the last 40* years or so, uses the "bad place" to symbolize not sexual interests and fear of sex, but interest in the self and fear of the self." He states,
There is something frighteningly lush and fertile in the southern imagination, and this seems particularly so when it turns into the gothic channel.
To King, we have turned our fears inward, or so it seems. It is the hidden evil inside that scares us now. We've defeated the evil red threat, won the space race, and appear to be leading at the development for curing the diseases that threaten our health and welfare. What's left to beat but ourselves?
So, I liked many of King's ideas and found some of his theories to be fascinating after all. And I liked reading this book. Danse Macabre, although tedious in places, gave me the over all feeling that King was sitting right there in front of me--spinning his yarn like a good English professor, intertwining his staggered speech with witticisms straight out of his Maine or "nor'easter" upbringing ("Shit and anchovy pizza" is a Stephen King descriptive that will live with this writer for a very long time). Even his notes are worth reading. In fact, it would do the reader a great disservice if he/she were to thoughtlessly skim or outright ignore King's many footnotes and annotations. This is where great sources were gleaned, some of the funniest stories were related, and King's mischievous, sly humor really shone through.
Finally, I found myself enjoying the fact that King does not leave many stones unturned. Hebrew for "haunted" is " tsaraas," which means "leprous". I guess that sums up the overall perception that most have for the horror genre, and like most lepers, you usually miss the good pieces if you're not careful. This is something that Mr. King appears not to have done in Danse Macabre.
Which leads this reviewer to comment: keep on dansing, man.
*This book was originally written in 1981; dates have been adjusted.