danse macabre, by stephen king

Some of us love stories that leave us listening fearfully for shuffling footsteps in the dark, or movies that make us spray our popcorn about the room when the bogeyman leaps from the shadows, on reflection, we may wonder just what it is about scary stories that causes such fearful reactions. Those who scoff at the horror genre, who flinch at any mention of anything bad happening in a story and whose entertainment choices revolve around TV shows like American Idol, may wonder what all the excitement over the horror genre is about. The balm for both these groups is Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, an homage, exploration, and critical analysis of the horror genre during the period 1950-1980, a period that experienced the cultivation and development of the scary story form through radio, TV, movie, and book formats.

Lest the very idea of a thirty-year overview of the horror genre conjure up fears of a stale, academic, and tedious exposition, rest assured that this tour through the spooky and macabre is conducted by the perfect guide–King is an award-winning author of more than 49 horror novels and short stories with many movie and TV adaptations. In Danse Macabre he approaches his task as someone who loves and lives the genre, not as the critic, who dissects and pontificates as an outsider. This book is an insider’s tour delivered in King’s pouncey-bouncy writing style, a conversational one that both entertains and educates.

There are three main contributions in this book. First, there is the dutiful comb-through of the horror highlights of the radio, TV, movie, and book formats. But though it is interesting to hear about mid-1950s radio broadcasts, such as Suspense or Orson Wells’s War of the Worlds, I suspect that most people today, in an era of streaming Internet movies, may have difficulty relating to (horror) radio broadcasts. Nevertheless, the inclusion of radio makes the overview of the horror genre complete, and it reinforces the fact that telling a scary story is not limited by technological channels—an entire world was frightened by Orson Wells intoning over just a radio microphone.

In discussing horror movies and TV shows, rather than heavy analysis King focuses simply on which pieces speak most to our fears, whether they be universal, political, social, or cultural, along with mentioning those films and shows which are just plain entertaining to watch. Again, the tone is light and informational. While we learn how the movie The Amityville Horror can be seen as playing on our economic fears, we also gain insights into how this movie, though it was not critically acclaimed, nevertheless struck a resonant chord with the viewing audience. There are pages to this discussion, touching on many tangents and related movies, such as The Exorcist, Fahrenheit 451, and Them!, but King also sums up his point succinctly with this nugget: “As horror goes, Amityville is pretty pedestrian. So’s beer, but you can get drunk on it.” Time and again in Danse Macabre King similarly illuminates as well as he entertains.

For novels, King discusses ten books that represent the best of the horror genre as both literature and entertainment, such as Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. As with his discussion of radio, movie, and TV shows, King careens through the entire literary corpus with tangents, anecdotes, and behind-the-scenes commentary, such as entertaining stories about what happened when Harlan Ellison, an author with some notoriety, was invited to work on the script for the first Star Trek movie.

Beyond just overviewing the horror genre, King more interestingly takes a step back and looks at the elements of the horror story—what scares us and why. He proposes three iconic monsters for the horror genre, and details especially the horror stories those monsters are known for: the thing, (in Frankenstein), the vampire (in Dracula), and the werewolf (in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide). He also shows three levels of emotion horror stories can target within us: terror, horror, and revulsion. The finest and most primal emotional level reached by a scary story is terror, and we are terrified when stories allow our own minds to fill in the details about the baddies around the corner. So in stories that evoke terror–judged to be the most effective at being scary–we are actually not allowed to see the monster behind the closed door. A slightly more coarse emotion, but still scary enough, is that of horror. Here, the door is opened and we see the monster, lurching. If a story can’t achieve the effect of terror or horror, then it can at least cause revulsion—you see the monster, slurping the victim’s entrails like pasta in a wine-dark marinara sauce.

The third and perhaps most important contribution of Danse Macabre is that this book is an homage to the horror genre. King shows us why horror matters and why people who like horror stories aren’t psychopaths. On the contrary, horror can help us understand our deepest fears by showing us a side of life that we don’t often experience directly, lifting the lid of the casket, so to speak. By looking inside, we can learn the truth about ourselves.

Horror stories have the power to transport us back to when we were young and the world was ominous and life was to be relished, and King generously shares his encyclopedic knowledge and enthusiasm for the genre in Danse Macabre. The book makes us want to be scared, to want to go investigate that strange sound, and King cheerfully leads the way for us down into the dark and dank catacomb. With his insights and recommendations we can crawl as far into the tunnels as we dare in seeking the creepy, guided by Stephen King in the role of our inner child.

Available on Amazon: Danse Macabre, by Stephen King