Danse Macabre Quotes
"For a moment—just for a moment—the paradoxical trick has worked. We have taken horror in hand and used it to destroy itself, a trick akin to pulling one’s self up by one’s own bootstraps."
"If there is any truth or worth to the danse macabre, it is simply that novels, movies, TV and radio programs—even the comic books—dealing with horror always do their work on two levels."
"The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of—as both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out."
"The genre we’re talking about, whether it be in terms of books, film, or TV, is really all one: make-believe horrors."
"We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones."
"What do you see when you turn out the light? the Beatles asked; their answer: I can’t tell you, but I know that it’s mine."
"Horror, terror, fear, panic: these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone."
It is paradoxical that feelings and emotions we associate with the "mob instinct" should do this, but crowds are lonely places to be, we’re told.
"The melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration."
"The writer of horror fiction is neither more nor less than an agent of the status quo."
"They stand at the foundation of a huge skyscraper of books and films—those twentieth-century gothics which have become known as 'the modern horror story.'"
"Like an almost perfect Tarot hand representing our lusher concepts of evil, they can be neatly laid out: the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name."
"All of these books have certain things in common, and all of them deal with the very basis of the horror story: secrets best left untold and things best left unsaid."
"It’s a matter of roots. It may not do you any good to know that your grandfather liked to sit on the stoop of his building with his sleeves rolled up and smoke a pipe after supper, but it may help to know that he emigrated from Poland in 1888."
"One of the things that makes art a force to be reckoned with even by those who don’t care for it is the regularity with which myth swallows truth."
"The inevitable result, of course, is the creation of a monster with more parts than a J. C. Whitney automotive catalogue."
"Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?"
"If it does nothing else, it may give you a new perspective on your own morning subway ride."
"I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death."
"His character, though engaging, is just not strong enough to take that weight."
"You remember my answer? Oh, such a scholarly prophecy! Mighty-sounding theories about cessation of earth rotation . . . entropy . . . but now, this is reality, Louis! The end has come for humanity! Not in the red of atomic fusion . . . not in the glory of interstellar combustion . . . not in the peace of white, cold silence . . . but with that! That creeping, grasping flesh below us. It is a joke, eh, Louis? The joke of the cosmos! The end of mankind . . . because of a chicken heart."
I took the books out of the attic with me. My aunt, who was a grammar school teacher and the soul of practicality down to her shoes, disapproved of them strenuously, but I held onto them. That day and the next, I visited the Plains of Leng for the first time; made my first acquaintance with that quaint pre-OPEC Arab, Abdul Alhazred (author of The Necronomicon, which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been offered to members of the Book-of-the-Month Club or the Literary Guild, although a copy was reputed to have been kept for years under lock and key in the Special Collections vault at Miskatonic University); visited the towns of Dunwich and Arkham, Massachusetts; and was, most of all, transported by the bleak and creeping terror of "The Colour Out of Space."
"The first movie I can remember seeing as a kid was Creature from the Black Lagoon."
Children deftly manipulate the logistics of Santa Claus’s entry on Christmas Eve (he can get down small chimneys by making himself small, and if there’s no chimney there’s the letter slot, and if there’s no letter slot there’s always the crack under the door), the Easter Bunny, God (big guy, sorta old, white beard, throne), Jesus ("How do you think he turned the water into wine?" I asked my son Joe when he—Joe, not Jesus—was five; Joe’s idea was that he had something "kinda like magic Kool-Aid, you get what I mean?"), the devil (big guy, red skin, horse feet, tail with an arrow on the end of it, Snidely Whiplash moustache), Ronald McDonald, the Burger King, the Keebler Elves, Dorothy and Toto, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a thousand more.
"Books and movies are all very well, and we’ll come back to them before long, but before we do I’d like to talk a little about radio in the mid-fifties."
The Amityville Horror allows people to touch the unknown in a simple, uncomplicated way; it is as effective in this way as other "fads" have been before it, beginning, let us say, with the hypnosis/reincarnation vogue that followed The Search for Bridey Murphy and encompassing the flying-saucer flaps of the fities, sixties, and seventies; Raymond Moody’s Life After Life; and a lively interest in such wild talents as telepathy, precognition, and the various colorful pronouncements of Castaneda’s Don Juan.
"It's heartening to learn that Saul Bass, the imaginative graphics artist who designed the opening titles for Hitchcock’s three greatest thrillers, has himself now taken to directing suspense movies."
"If you’re a genuine horror fan, you develop the same sort of sophistication that a follower of the ballet develops; you get a feeling for the depth and texture of the genre."
"Your ear develops with your eye, and the sound of quality always comes through to the keen ear."
"There is fine Waterford crystal, which rings delicately when struck, no matter how thick and chunky it may look; and then there are Flintstone jelly glasses."
"But as Roen points out, a person who loves the genre’s genuine Waterford (and there isn’t enough of it... but then, there never is enough of the good stuff in any field, is there?) finds a great deal happening in Phase IV."
"The ear detects that true ringing sound... and the heart responds."
The opposite also applies. The ear which is constantly attuned to the "fine" sound—the decorous strains of chamber music, for instance—may hear nothing but horrid cacophony when exposed to bluegrass fiddle... but bluegrass music is mighty fine all the same.
"The point is that the fan of movies in general and horror movies in particular may find it easy—too easy—to overlook the crude charms of a film like The Amityville Horror after he or she has experienced films such as Repulsion, The Haunting, Fahrenheit 451, or Phase IV."
"For now, let it suffice to say that the fan loses his taste for junk food at his or her own peril, and when I hear by way of the grapevine that New York film audiences are laughing at a horror movie, I rush out to see it."
"In most cases I am disappointed, but every now and then I hear me some mighty good bluegrass fiddle, eat me some pretty good fried chicken, and get so excited that I mix me some metaphors, as I’ve done here."
"The horror film as political polemic, then."
"The best films of this political type seem to come from that period—although we may be coming full circle again."
"Movies are the dreams of the mass culture... and if horror movies are the nightmares of the mass culture, then many of these fifties horrors express America’s coming-to-terms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation over political differences."
We ought to eliminate the horror movies of that period that sprang from technological unease and also those "nuclear showdown" movies.
"These movies are not political in the sense that Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is political."
"The political horror films of the period we’re discussing here begin, I think, with The Thing."
"It starred Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, and James Arness as the blood-drinking human carrot from Planet X."
"A polar encampment of soldiers and scientists discovers a strong magnetic field emanating from an area where there has been a recent meteor fall."
"An expedition is dispatched to the spot, and it discovers a flying saucer buried in the ice."
The Thing is a small movie done on a low budget and as obviously done "on-set" as Lewton’s The Cat People.
"In space, no one can hear you scream; it also could have said, 'In space, it is always one minute after midnight.'"
"A lot of light had the power to vanquish imagined evils and fears, but sometimes a little light only made them worse."
"During the attack of the birds in the attic, it is the big flashlight Ms. Hedren carries which provides this strobe effect."
"Still, before leaving the subject entirely, here’s a further sampling: Night Must Fall, Night of the Lepus, Dracula, Prince of Darkness."
"If there had been no such thing as darkness, the makers of horror movies would have needed to invent it."
"The gross-out—that most childish of emotional impulses—sometimes achieves the level of art."
"Blood can fly everywhere and the audience will remain largely unimpressed. But if the audience has come to like and understand the characters, blood can fly everywhere and the audience cannot remain unimpressed."
"We identify with her solely as a human being in a situation which has suddenly turned rotten."
"The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat."
"Horror movies do not love death, they love life. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller joys of our own lives."
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
"Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more."
"The heart of the Southern gothic beats strongly."
"In a world where the very furniture of your life, the basic bones of your existence, turn terrible and strange, perhaps the only thing we’re going to have to fall back on is whatever innate decency we can find deep within ourselves."
"The resident of Fox Run Chase who meets a ghoulie out by the hot tub is going to be frozen dead in his or her Nikes on the tennis courts the next day if he or she persists in gabbling about it."
"A house askew is one of the not-rightest things in the world, and is terrible out of all proportion to its actual visitant."
"It is an extension of ourselves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear. My shelter. My earth. My second skin. Mine."
"The house next door, which turns people’s own deepest weaknesses against them."
"What distinguishes it—what 'brings it up'—is Straub’s mirroring effect."
"First, a microcosm serves as the arena where universal forces collide."
"The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternative might be."
"The real problem with the house next door, we see, is that it changes people into the very things they most abhor."
"Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic... weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality."
"It recounts their adventures there, and culminates with a scary, mystifying climax."
"Eleanor is a woman who has been profoundly stunted by her upbringing and her family life."
"Her narcissism is perhaps most strikingly established by a fantasy she indulges in while still on the way to Hill House."
"Eleanor immediately turns this into herself: 'Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course.'"
"Eleanor’s final realization that she has been used by a monstrous organism—that she has, in fact, been manipulated on the subconscious level into believing that she has been pulling the strings."
"For Eleanor Vance, that would be business as usual."
"What powers the rockets is Popular Mechanics stuff. The province of the writer is what powers the people."
"Libraries are the real birthing places of the universe for me."
"I love the book best of all the things I have ever written."
"The easiest difference to point out is that Dreiser is called a realist while Bradbury is known as a fantasist."
"It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen?"
"The wails of a lifetime were garnered in [that train-whistle] from other nights in other slumbering years."
"The carnival is chaos, it is the taboo land made magically portable, traveling from place to place and even from time to time with its freight of freaks and its glamorous attractions."
"The essence of evil, Bradbury suggests, is its need to compromise and corrupt that delicate passage from innocence to experience that all children must make."
"Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us."
"The entire novel was written in the cellar of the rented house on Long Island. I did a shrewd thing in that. I didn’t alter the cellar at all."
The carnival "attraction" which has accomplished this malign trick is one that both Narcissus and Eleanor Vance could relate to.
One of these involves an undertaker who performs hideous but curiously moral atrocities upon his "clients".
"The symbolism of the times of birth is large, crude, and apparent; so is the symbolism of the lightning rod salesman, who arrives as a harbinger of bad times."
"Written in a semipoetic style that seems to suit such concerns perfectly, Bradbury examines these childhood concerns and comes to the conclusion that only children are equipped to deal with childhood’s myths and terrors and exhalations."
"They are in terror, but it is the unique ability of these myth-children to enjoy their terror."
"Even writing this, I am touched again to remember with what a burst of joy and agony I found that my Dad was there, forever, forever for me anyway, locked on paper, kept in print, and beautiful to behold."
"But, above all, I did a loving thing without knowing it. I wrote a paean to my father."
"I just let my subconscious throw up when it feels like it."
"He can switch hats, in the blink of an eye, from that of the child to that of the adult."
"In terms of the new American gothic, we can see that the mirror maze is the catch-trap, the place where too much self-examination and morbid introspection persuades Miss Foley to step over the line into abnormality."
"If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence... Scott Carey ran into his new world, searching."
"I think a novel gathers its own impetus. I have to creep up on it unawares."
I wouldn’t restrict the label "pulp" simply to genre works of horror, fantasy, science fiction, detective, and western.
"But I wouldn’t have written ‘Born of Man and Woman’ a few years later either because it is so illogical. What difference does it make really?"
"The Cordwainer Bird name is a good example of Ellison’s restless wit and his anger at work he feels to be substandard dreck."