Far from the noble and rather sad good looks of Michael Rennie as Klaatu, the space people in Earth vs. On that Saturday afternoon in Connecticut some six years later, the folks in the flying saucers looked and acted a good deal less friendly. No death ray here just a simple interstellar cure for cancer. It turns out, of course, that the gadget was a gift for the President. Klaatu begins fooling with some sort of gadget-it looked kind of like a Weed-Eater, as I recall-and a trigger-happy soldier-boy promptly shoots him in the arm. It is a moment of memorable tension, a moment that is sweet in retrospect-the sort of moment that makes people like me simple movie fans for life. Klaatu strides down the gangway and pauses there at the foot, the focus of every horrified eye and the muzzles of several hundred Army guns. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, an alien named Klaatu (Michael Rennie in a bright white intergalactic leisure suit) lands on The Mall in Washington, D.C., in a flying saucer (which, when under power, glows like one of those plastic Jesuses they used to give out at Vacation Bible School for memorizing Bible verses). the Flying Saucers, starring Hugh Marlowe, who at the time was perhaps best known for his role as Patricia Neal’s jilted and rabidly xenophobic boyfriend in The Day the Earth Stood Still-a slightly older and altogether more rational science fiction movie. The Saturday matinee on that day when the real terror began was Earth vs. The movie that day was and is one of my all-time favorites, and the fact that it-rather than a Randolph Scott western or a John Wayne war movie-was playing was also only fitting. And, as was only fitting, I was in a movie theater: the Stratford Theater in downtown Stratford, Connecticut. Excerptįor me, the terror-the real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and boogeys which might have been living in my own mind-began on an afternoon in October of 1957. With the insight and good humor his fans appreciated in On Writing, Danse Macabre is an enjoyably entertaining tour through Stephen King’s beloved world of horror. Here, in ten brilliantly written chapters, King delivers one colorful observation after another about the great stories, books, and films that comprise the horror genre-from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Exorcist, The Twilight Zone, and Earth vs. In 1981, years before he sat down to tackle On Writing, Stephen King decided to address the topic of what makes horror horrifying and what makes terror terrifying. Before he gave us the “one of a kind classic” ( The Wall Street Journal) memoir On Writing, Stephen King wrote a nonfiction masterpiece in Danse Macabre, “one of the best books on American popular culture” ( Philadelphia Inquirer).įrom the author of dozens of #1 New York Times bestsellers and the creator of many unforgettable movies comes a vivid, intelligent, and nostalgic journey through three decades of horror as experienced through the eyes of the most popular writer in the genre.
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