Danse Macabre by Stephen King

the monster suit of an underwater creature ( as in The Attack o f the Giant Leeches ). Arkoff himself recalls that they rarely began with a completed script or even a coherent screen treatment; often money was committed to projects on the basis of a title that sounded commercial, such as Terror from the Year 5000 or The Brain Eaters , something that would make an eye-catching poster.
    Whatever the elements were, they worked.

    3
    Well, let all that go for the moment. Let's talk monsters.
    Exactly what is a monster?
    Begin by assuming that the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by its very nature; that it is symbolic. Assume that it is talking to us, like a patient on a psychoanalyst's couch, about one thing while it means another. I am not saying that horror is consciously allegorical or symbolic; that is to suggest an artfulness that few writers of horror fiction or directors of horror films aspire to. There has recently been a retrospective of AIP movies in New York (1979), and the idea of a retrospective suggests art, but at most they are trash art. The pictures have great nostalgia value, but those searching for culture may look elsewhere. To suggest that Roger Corman was unconsciously creating art while on a twelve-day shooting schedule and a budget of $80,000 is to suggest the absurd. The element of allegory is there only because it is built-in, a given, impossible to escape. Horror appeals to us because it says, in a symbolic way, things we would be afraid to say right out straight, with the bark still on; it offers us a chance to exercise (that's right; not exorcise but exercise ) emotions which society demands we keep closely in hand. The horror film is an invitation to indulge in deviant, antisocial behavior by proxy—to commit gratuitous acts of violence, indulge our puerile dreams of power, to give in to our most craven fears. Perhaps more than anything else, the horror story or horror movie says it's okay to join the mob, to become the total tribal being, to destroy the outsider. It has never been done better or more literally than in Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery," where the entire concept of the outsider is symbolic, created by nothing more than a black circle colored on a slip of paper. But there is no symbolism in the rain of stones which ends the story; the victim's own child pitches in as the mother dies, screaming "It's not fair! It's not fair!" Nor is it an accident that the horror story ends so often with an O. Henry twist that leads straight down a mine shaft. When we turn to the creepy movie or the crawly book, we are not wearing our "Everything works out for the best" hats. We're waiting to be told what we so often suspect—that everything is turning to shit. In most cases the horror story provides ample proof that such is indeed the case, and I don't believe, when Katharine Ross falls prey to the Stepford Men's Association at the conclusion of The Stepford Wives or when the heroic black man is shot dead by the numbnuts sheriff's posse at the end of Night of the Living Dead , that anyone is really surprised. It is, as they say, a part of the game.
    And monstrosity? What about that part of the game? What sort of handle can we get on that? If we don't define, can we at least exemplify? Here is a fairly explosive package, my friends. What about the freaks in the circus? The carny aberrations observed by the light of naked hundred-watt bulbs? What about Cheng and Eng, the famous Siamese twins? A majority of people considered them monstrous in their day, and an even greater number no doubt considered the fact that each had his own married life even more monstrous. America's most mordant—and sometimes funniest—cartoonist, a fellow named Rodrigues, has rung the changes on the Siamese-twin theme in his Aesop Brothers strip in the National Lampoon , where we have our noses rubbed in almost every possible bizarre exingency of life among the mortally attached: the sex lives