In the Richard Egan film Gog (directed by Herbert L. Strock), the equipment of an entire space-research station seems to go mad. A solar mirror twirls erratically, pursuing the heroine with what amounts to a lethal heat ray; a centrifuge designed to test would-be astronauts for their responses to heavy g-loads speeds up until the two test subjects are literally accelerated to death; and at the conclusion, the two BEM-like robots, Gog and Magog, go totally out of control, snapping their Waldo-like pincers and making weird Geiger-counter-like sounds as they roll forward on various errands of destruction ("I can control him," the cold-fish scientist says confidently only moments before Magog crushes his neck with one of those pincers).
"We grow them big out here," the old Indian in Prophecy says complacently to Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire as a tadpole as big as a salmon jumps out of a lake in northern Maine and flops around on the shore. Indeed they do; Foxworth also sees a salmon as big as a porpoise, and by the conclusion of the film, one is grateful that whales are not fresh-water mammals.
All the foregoing are examples of the horror film with a technological subtext . . . sometimes referred to as the "nature run amok" sort of horror picture (not that there's much natural about Gog and Magog, with their tractor treads and their forests of radio aerials). In all of them, it is mankind and mankind's technology which must bear the blame; "You brought it on yourselves," they all say; a fitting epitaph for the mass grave of mankind, I think, when the big balloon finally goes up and the ICBMs start to fly.
In Them! it is nuclear testing at White Sands that has produced the giant ants; the Cold War has spawned dat ole binary debbil Colossus; ditto the machines that have gone nuts in Gog; and it's mercury in the water, a side-effect of a paper-making process, that has produced the giant tadpoles and the mutant monstrosities in the John Frankenheimer film Prophecy.
It is here, in the techno-horror film, that we really strike the mother lode. No more panning for the occasional nugget, as in the case of the economic horror film or the political horror film; pard, we could dig the gold right out of the ground with our bare hands here, if we wanted to. Here is a corner of the old horror-film corral where even such an abysmal little wet fart of a picture as The Horror of Party Beach will yield a technological aspect upon analysis--you see, all those beach blanket boppers in their bikinis and ball-huggers are being menaced by monsters that were created when drums of radioactive waste leaked. But not to worry; although a few girls get carved up, all comes right in the end in time for one last wiener roast before school starts again.
Once more, these things happen only rarely because directors, writers, and producers want them to happen; they happen on their own. The producers of The Horror of Party Beach, for example, were two Connecticut drive-in owners who saw a chance to turn a quick buck in the low-budget horror-movie game (the reasoning seeming to be that if Nicholson and Arkoff of AIP could make X amount of dollars churning out B-pictures, then they might be able to make X2 amount of dollars by turning out Z-pictures). The fact that they created a film which foresaw a problem that would become very real ten years down the road was only an accident . . . but an accident, like Three Mile Island, that perhaps had to happen, sooner or later. I find it quite amusing that this grainy, low-budget rock 'n' roll horror picture arrived at ground zero with its Geiger counters clicking long before The China Syndrome was even a twinkle in anyone's eye.
By now it must be obvious that all of these circles intersect, that sooner or later we always arrive back at the same terminus--the terminus which gives upon the land of the mass American nightmare. These are nightmares for profit, granted, but nightmares is nightmares, and in the last analysis it is the profit motive that becomes unimportant and the nightmare itself which remains of interest.
The producers of The Horror of Party Beach never sat down, I'm sure (just as I'm sure the producers of The China Syndrome did), and said to each other: "Look--we're going to warn the people of America about the dangers of nuclear reactors, and we will sugar-coat the pill of this vital message with an entertaining story line." No, the line of discussion would have been more apt to go like this: Because our target audience is young, we'll feature young people, and because our target audience is interested in sex, we'll site it on a sun-and-surf-type beach, which allows us to show all the flesh the censors will allow. And because our target audience likes grue, we'll give them these gross monsters. It must have looked like boffo box-office stuff: a hybrid of AIP's most consistently lucrative genre pictures--the monster movie and the beach-party movie.
But because any horror film (with the possible exception of the German expressionist films of the teens and twenties) has got to at least pay lip service to credibility, there had to be some reason for these monsters to suddenly come out of the ocean and start doing all these antisocial things (one of the film's highlights--maybe lowlights would be better--comes when the creatures invade a slumber party and kill ten or twenty nubile young things . . . talk about party-poopers!). What the producers decided upon was nuclear waste, leaking from those dumped canisters. I'm sure it was one of the least important points in their preproduction discussions, and for that very reason it becomes very important to our discussions here.
The reason for the monsters most likely came about in a kind of free-association process, the sort of test psychiatrists use to discover points of anxiety in their patients. And although The Horror of Party Beach has long since been consigned to oblivion, that image of the canisters marked with radiation symbols sinking slowly to the bottom of the ocean lingers in the memory. What in Christ's name are we really doing with all that nuclear sludge? the mind enquires uneasily--the burn-off, the dreck, the used plutonium slugs, and the worn-out parts that are as hot as a nickel-plated revolver and apt to stay that way for the next six hundred years or so? Does anybody know what in Christ's name we're doing with those things?
Any thoughtful consideration of techno-horror films--those films whose subtexts suggest that we have been betrayed by our own machines and processes of mass production--reveals very quickly another face in that dark Tarot hand we dealt out earlier: this time it's the face of the Werewolf. In talking about the Werewolf in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde I used the terms Apollonian (to suggest reason and the power of the mind) and Dionysian (to suggest emotion, sensuality, and chaotic action). Most films which express technological fears have a similar dual nature. Grasshoppers, Beginning of the End suggests, are Apollonian creatures, going about their business of hopping, eating, spitting tobacco juice, and making little grasshoppers. But following an infusion of nuclear wolfsbane, they grow to the size of Cadillacs, become Dionysian and disruptive, and attack Chicago. It is their very Dionysian tendencies--in this case, their sex drive--that spells the end for them. Peter Graves (as the Brave Young Scientist) rigs up a mating-call tape that is broadcast through loudspeakers from a number of boats circling on Lake Michigan, and the grasshoppers all rush to their deaths, believing themselves to be on their way to a really good fuck. A bit of a cautionary tale, you understand. I bet D. F. Jones loved it.
Even Night of the Living Dead has a techno-horror aspect, a fact that may be overlooked as the zombies move in on the lonely Pennsylvania farmhouse where the "good guys" are holed up. There is nothing really supernatural about all those dead folks getting up and walking; it happened because a space probe to Venus picked up some weird corpse-reviving radiation on its way back home. One suspects that chunks of such a satellite would be eagerly sought-after artifacts in Palm Springs and Fort Lauderdale.
The barometer effect of the subtexts of techno-horror films can be seen by comparing films of this type from the fifties, sixties, and seventies. In the fifties, the terror of the Bomb and of fallout was a real and terrifying thing, and it left a scar on those children who wanted to be good just as the depression of the thirties left a scar on their elders. A newer generation--now still teenagers, with no memory of either the Cuban missile crisis or of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, raised on th
e milk of detente--may find it hard to comprehend the terror of these things, but they will undoubtedly have a chance to discover it in the years of tightening belts and heightening tensions which lie ahead . . . and the movies will be there to give their vague fears concrete focusing points in the horror movies yet to come.
It may be that nothing in the world is so hard to comprehend as a terror whose time has come and gone--which may be why parents can scold their children for their fear of the bogeyman, when as children themselves they had to cope with exactly the same fears (and the same sympathetic but uncomprehending parents). That may be why one generation's nightmare becomes the next generation's sociology, and even those who have walked through the fire have trouble remembering exactly what those burning coals felt like.
I can remember, for instance, that in 1968, when I was twenty-one, the issue of long hair was an extremely nasty, extremely explosive one. That seems as hard to believe now as the idea of people killing each other over whether the sun went around the earth or the earth went around the sun, but that happened, too.
I was thrown out of a bar called the Stardust in Brewer, Maine, by a construction worker back in that happy year of 1968. The guy had muscles on his muscles and told me I could come back and finish my beer "after you get a haircut, you faggot fairy." There were the standard catcalls thrown from passing cars (usually old cars with fins and cancer of the rocker panels): Are you a boy or are you a girl? Do you give head, honey? When was the last time you had a bath? And so on, as Father Kurt so rightly says.
I can remember such things in an intellectual, even analytical way, as I can remember having a dressing that had actually grown into the tissue yanked from the site of a cyst-removal operation that occurred when I was twelve. I screamed from the pain and then fainted dead away. I can remember the pulling sensation as the gauze tore free of the new, healthy tissue (the dressing removal was performed by a nurse's aide who apparently had no idea what she was doing), I can remember the scream, and I can remember the faint. What I can't remember is the pain itself. It's the same with the hair thing, and in a larger sense, all the other pains associated with coming of age in the decade of napalm and the Nehru jacket. I've purposely avoided writing a novel with a 1960s' time setting because all of that seems, like the pulling of that surgical dressing, very distant to me now--almost as if it had happened to another person. But those things did happen; the hate, paranoia, and fear on both sides were all too real. If we doubt it, we only need review that quintessential sixties counterculture horror film, Easy Rider, where Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper end up being blown away by a couple of rednecks in a pickup truck as Roger McGuinn sings Bob Dylan's "It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" on the soundtrack.
Similarly, it is difficult to remember in any gut way the fears that came with those boom years of atomic technology twenty-five years ago. The technology itself was strictly Apollonian; as Apollonian as nice-guy Larry Talbot, who "said his prayers at night." The atom was not split by a gibbering Colin Clive or Boris Karloff in some Eastern European Mad Lab; it was not done by alchemy and moonlight in the center of a rune-struck circle; it was done by a lot of little guys at Oak Ridge and White Sands who wore tweed jackets and smoked Luckies, guys who worried about dandruff and psoriasis and whether or not they could afford a new car and how to get rid of the goddam crabgrass on the lawn. Splitting the atom, producing fission, opening that door on a new world that the old scientist speaks of at the end of Them!--these things were accomplished on a business-as-usual basis.
People understood this and could live with it (fifties science books extolled the wonderful world the Friendly Atom would produce, a world refueled by nice safe nuclear reactors, and grammar school kids got free comic books produced by the power companies), but they suspected and feared the hairy, simian face on the other side of the coin as well: they feared that the atom might be, for a number of reasons both technological and political, essentially uncontrollable. These feelings of deep unease came out in movies such as The Beginning of the End, Them!, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man (where radiation combined with a pesticide causes a very personal horror for one man, Scott Carey), The H-Man, and Four-D Man. The entire cycle reaches its supreme pinnacle of absurdity in Night of the Lepus, where the world is menaced by sixty-foot bunnies.5
The concerns of the techno-horror films of the sixties and seventies change with the concerns of the people who lived through those times; the big bug movies give way to pictures such as The Forbin Project (The Software that Conquered the World) and 2001, which both offer us the possibility of the computer as God, or the even nastier idea (ludicrously executed, I'll readily admit) of the computer as satyr, which is laboriously produced in Demon Seed and Saturn 3. In the sixties, horror proceeds from a vision of technology as an octopus--perhaps sentient--burying us alive in red tape and information-retrieval systems which are terrible when they work (The Forbin Project) and even more terrible when they don't: In The Andromeda Strain, for instance, a small scrap of paper gets caught in the striker of a teletype machine, keeps the bell from ringing, and thereby (in a fashion Rube Goldberg certainly would have approved of) nearly causes the end of the world.
Finally there are the seventies, culminating in Frankenheimer's not-very-good but certainly well-meant film Prophecy, which is so strikingly similar to those fifties big bug movies (only the first cause has changed), and The China Syndrome, a horror movie which synthesizes all three of these major technological fears: fears of radiation, fears for the ecology, fears of the machinery gone out of control, run wild.
Before leaving this all too brief look at pictures which depend on some mass unease over matters technological to provide the equivalent of The Hook (pictures which appeal to the Luddite hiding inside all of us), we should mention some of the films dealing with space travel which fall into this category . . . but we'll exclude such xenophobic pictures as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The Mysterians from our view. Pictures which focus on the possible Dionysian side of space exploration (such as The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead, where satellites bring back dangerous but non-sentient organisms from the void) ought to be differentiated from those purely xenophobic movies dealing with invasion from outer space--films where the human race is viewed in an essentially passive role, attacked by the equivalent of muggers from the stars. In pictures of this type, technology is often seen as the savior (as it is in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, where Hugh Marlowe uses his sonic gun to interrupt the saucers' electromagnetic drive, or in The Thing, where Tobey and his men use electricity to barbecue the interstellar vegetable)--Apollonian science vanquishing the Dionysian bad guys from Planet X.
Although both The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead present space travel itself as an active danger, perhaps the best example of that idea combined with the brilliant mind dangerously hypnotized by the siren song of technology comes in The Creeping Unknown, a film that predates both of the former. In that film, the first of the critically acclaimed Quatermass series, the viewer is originally presented with one of the creepiest locked-room mysteries ever posited: three scientist-astronauts are sent into space, but only one returns . . . and he is catatonic. Telemetry and the presence of all three spacesuits seem to prove that the two missing spacemen never left the ship. So where did they go?
What happened, apparently, is that they picked up an interstellar hitchhiker, a plot device we see again in It! The Terror from Beyond Space and, of course, in Alien. This hitchhiker has consumed the survivor's two mates, leaving only a mass of sludgy gray stuff behind . . . and, of course, the hitchhiker (a kind of space spore) is now busily at work in the body of the survivor, Victor Carune, who is played with skull-like, spooky believability by Richard Wordsworth. Poor Carune ends up degenerating into a spongy, many-tentacled horror which is finally spotted clinging to a scaffolding in Westminster Abbey and dispatched (just in the nick of time; it is about to sporulate and create billions of these things) by a big jolt o
f electricity which sets it on fire.
All of this is fairly standard monster-movie fare. What elevates The Creeping Unknown to levels undreamed of in the philosophies of the creators of The Horror of Party Beach is Val Guest's somber, atmospheric direction, and the character of Quatermass himself, played by Brian Donlevy (other actors have since played Quatermass in other films, softening the interpretation a bit). Quatermass is a scientist who may or may not be mad, depending on your own views of technology. Certainly if he is nuts, there is enough Apollonian method in his madness to make him every bit as scary (and every bit as dangerous) as that blob of tentacle-waving goo that was once Victor Carune. "I'm a scientist, not a fortune-teller," Quatermass grunts contemptuously at a timid doctor who asks him what he thinks might happen next; when a fellow scientist tells him that if he tries to open the hatch of the crashed rocket he will roast the space travelers inside, Quatermass storms at him: "Don't tell me what I can and can't do!"
His attitude toward Canine himself is the cold-blooded attitude which a biologist might adopt toward a hamster or a Rhesus monkey. "He's coming along fine," Quatermass says of the catatonic Carune, who is sitting in something which vaguely resembles a dentist's chair and staring out at the world with eyes as black and dead as cinders coughed up from hell. "He knows we're trying to help him."
Yet in the end it is Quatermass triumphant--if only through blind luck. After the monster is destroyed, Quatermass brushes rudely by a police officer who is trying to tell him in a halting way that he prayed they would be successful. "One world at a time is enough for me," the policeman says; Quatermass ignores him.
At the door, his young assistant finds his way to him. "I only just heard, sir," he says. "Is there anything I can do?"