Danse Macabre by Stephen King Page B

screaming Cleopatra, was simply too much. Even some of MGM's tame exhibitors flatly refused to show it, and Carlos Clarens reports in his Illustrated History of the Horror Pima (Capricorn Books: 1968) that at its one preview in San Diego "a woman ran screaming up the aisle." The film was exhibited—after a fashion—in a version so radically cut that one film critic complained that he had no idea what he was watching. Clarens further reports that the film was banned for thirty years in the U.K., the country that has brought us, among other things, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, the Snivelling Shits, and the charming custom of "Paki-bashing." Freaks is now sometimes exhibited on PTV stations and may at this writing have finally become available on videocassettes. But to this day it remains a source of heated discussion, comment, and conjecture among horror fans—and although many have heard of it, surprisingly few have actually seen it.

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    Leaving freaks entirely out of it for the moment, what else do we consider horrible enough to label with what surely must be the world's oldest perjorative? Well, there were all those bizarre Dick Tracy villains, perhaps best epitomized by Flyface, and there was the archenemy of Don Window, The Scorpion, whose face was so horrible that he had to keep it constantly covered (although he would sometimes unveil it to minions who had failed him in some way—said minions would immediately drop dead of heart attacks, literally scared to death). So far as I know, the horrible secret of The Scorpion's physiognomy was never uncovered ( pardon the pun, heh-heh ) , but the intrepid Commander Winslow did once succeed in unmasking The Scorpion's daughter, who had the slack, dead face of a corpse. This information was delivered to the breathless reader in italics— the slack, dead face of a corpse! —for added emphasis.
    Perhaps the "new generation" of comic monsters is best epitomized by those created by Stan Lee's Marvel Comics, where for every superhero such as Spiderman or Captain America, there seem to be a dozen freakish aberrations: Dr. Octopus (known to children all over the comicreading world as Doc Ock), whose arms have been replaced by what appear to be a waving forest of homicidal vacuum-cleaner attachments; The Sandman, who is a sort of walking sand dune; The Vulture; Stegron; The Lizard; and most ominous of all, Dr. Doom, who has been so badly maimed in his Twisted Pursuit of Forbidden Science that he is now a great, clanking cyborg who wears a green cape, peers through eyeholes like the archers' slits in a medieval castle, and who appears to be literally sweating rivets. Superheroes with elements of monstrosity in their makeup seem less enduring. My own favorite, Plastic Man (always accompanied by his wonderfully screwball sidekick, Woozy Winks), just never made it. Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four is a Plastic Man lookalike, and his cohort Ben Grimm ( aka The Thing) looks like a hardened lava flow, but they are among the few exceptions to the rule.
    So far, we've talked about carny freaks and the caricatures we sometimes find in the funnies, but let's come a trifle closer to home. You might ask yourself what you consider monstrous or horrible in daily life—you're exempted from this if you're a doctor or a nurse; these people see all the aberrations they can handle, and much the same can be said for policemen and bartenders. But as for the rest of us?
    Take fat. How fat does a person have to be before he or she passes over the line and into a perversion of the human form severe enough to be called monstrosity? Surely it is not the woman who shops Lane Bryant or the fellow who buys his suits in that section of the menswear store reserved for the "husky build"—or is it? Has the obese person reached the point of monstrosity when he or she can no longer go to the movies or to a concert because his/her buttocks will no longer fit between the fixed armrests of a single seat?
    You will