Much of the sex in horror fiction is deeply involved in power tripping; it's sex based upon relationships where one partner is largely under the control of the other; sex which almost inevitably leads to some bad end. I refer you, for instance, to Alien, where the two women crew members are presented in perfectly nonsexist terms until the climax, where Sigourney Weaver must battle the terrible interstellar hitchhiker that has even managed to board her tiny space lifeboat. During this final battle, Ms. Weaver is dressed in bikini panties and a thin T-shirt, every inch the woman, and at this point interchangeable with any of Dracula's victims in the Hammer cycle of films in the sixties. The point seems to be, "The girl was okay until she got undressed." *

*I thought there was another extremely sexist interlude in Alien, one that disappoints on a plot level no matter how you feel about women's ability as compared to men's. The Sigourney Weaver character, who is presented as toughminded and heroic up to this point, causes the destruction of the mothership Nostromo (and perhaps helps to cause the deaths of the two other remaining crew members) by going after the ship's cat. Enabling the males in the audience, of course, to relax, roll their eyes at each other, and say either aloud or telepathically, "Isn't that just like a woman?" It is a plot twist which depends upon a sexist idea for its believability, and we might well answer the question asked above by asking in turn, "Isn't that just like a male chauvinist pig of a Hollywood scriptwriter?” This gratuitous little twist doesn't spoil the movie, but it's still sort of a bummer.

The business of creating horror is much the same as the business of paralyzing an opponent with the martial arts-it is the business of finding vulnerable points and then applying pressure there. The most obvious psychological pressure point is the fact of our own mortality.

Certainly it is the most universal. But in a society that sets such a great store by physical beauty (in a society, that is, where a few pimples become the cause of psychic agony) and sexual potency, a deep-seated uneasiness and ambivalence about sex becomes another natural pressure point, one that the writer of the horror story or film gropes for instinctively. In the bare-chested sword-and-sorcery epics of Robert E. Howard, for instance, the female "heavies" are presented as monsters of sexual depravity, indulging in exhibitionism and sadism. As previously pointed out, one of the most tried-and-true movie poster concepts of all time shows the monster-whether it be a BEM (bug-eyed monster) from This Island Earth or the mummy for Hammer's 1959 remake of the Universal film-striding through the darkness or the smoking ruins of some city with the body of an unconscious lovely in its arms. Beauty and the beast. You are in my power. Heh-heh-heh. It's that primal rape scene again. And the primal, perverse rapist is the Vampire, stealing not only sexual favors but life itself. And best of all, perhaps, in the eyes of those millions of teenaged boys who have watched the Vampire take wing and then flutter down inside the bedroom of some sleeping young lady, is the fact that the Vampire doesn't even have to get it up to do it. What better news to those on the threshold of the sexual sphere, most of whom have been taught (as certainly they have been, not in the least by the movies themselves) that successful sexual relationships are based upon man's domination and woman's submission? The joker in this deck is that most fourteen-year-old boys who have only recently discovered their own sexual potential feel capable of dominating only the centerfold in Playboy with total success. Sex makes young adolescent boys feel many things, but one of them, quite frankly, is scared. The horror film in general and the Vampire film in particular confirms the feeling. Yes, it says; sex is scary; sex is dangerous. And I can prove it to you right here and now. Siddown, kid. Grab your popcorn. I want to tell you a story . . . .

7

Enough of sexual portents, at least for the time being. Let's flip up the third card in this uneasy Tarot hand. Forget Michael Landon and AIP for the time being. Gaze, if you dare, on the face of the real Werewolf. His name, gentle reader, is Edward Hyde.

Robert Louis Stevenson conceived Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a shocker, pure and simple, a potboiler and, hopefully, a money machine. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the first draft and rewrote it, injecting a little moral uplift to please his spouse. Of the three books under discussion here, Jekyll and Hyde is the shortest (it runs about seventy pages in close type) and undoubtedly the most stylish. If Bram Stoker serves us great whacks of horror in Dracula, leaving us, after Harker's confrontation with Dracula in Transylvania, the staking of Lucy Westenra, the death of Renfield and the branding of Mina, feeling as if we have been hit square in the chops by a two-by-four, then Stevenson's brief and cautionary tale is like the quick, mortal stab of an icepick.

Like a police-court trial (to which the critic G. K. Chesterton compared it), we get the narrative through a series of different voices, and it is through the testimony of those involved that Dr. Jekyll's unhappy tale unfolds.

It begins as Jekyll's lawyer, Mr. Utterson, and a distant cousin, one Richard Enfield, stroll through London one morning. As they pass "a certain sinister block of building" with "a blind forehead of discoloured wall" and a door which is "blistered and distained," Enfield is moved to tell Utterson a story about that particular door. He was on the scene one early morning, he says, when he observed two people approaching the corner from opposite directions-a man and a little girl. They collide. The girl is knocked flat and the man-Edward Hyde-simply goes on walking, trampling the screaming child underfoot. A crowd gathers (what all of these people are doing abroad at three A.M. of a cold winter's morning is never explained; perhaps they were all discussing what Robinson Crusoe used for pockets when he swam out to the foundering ship), and Enfield collars Mr. Hyde. Hyde is a man of so loathsome a countenance that Enfield is actually obliged to protect him from the mob, which seems on the verge of tearing him apart: "We were keeping the women off as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies," Enfield tells Utterson. Moreover, the doctor who was summoned "turn[ed] sick and white with desire to kill him." Once again we see the horror writer as an agent of the norm; the crowd that has gathered is watching faithfully for the mutant, and in the loathsome Mr. Hyde they seem to have found the genuine article-although Stevenson is quick to tell us, through Enfield, that outwardly there appears to be nothing much wrong with Hyde. Although he's no John Travolta, he's certainly no Michael Landon sporting a pelt above his high school jacket, either.

Hyde, Enfield admits to Utterson, "carried it off like Satan." When Enfield demands compensation in the name of the little girl, Hyde disappears through the door under discussion and returns a short time later with a hundred pounds, ten in gold and a check for the balance.

Although Enfield won't tell, we find out in due course that the signature on the check was that of Henry Jekyll.

Enfield closes his account with one of the most telling descriptions of the Werewolf in all of horror fiction. Although it describes very little in the way we usually think of description, it says a great deal-we all know what Stevenson means, and he knew we would, because he knew, apparently, that all of us are old hands at watching for the mutant: He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarcely know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary looking man, and yet I can really name nothing out of the way . . . . And it's not for want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.

It was Rudyard Kipling, years later and in another tale, who named what was bothering Enfield about Mr. Hyde. Wolfsbane and potions aside (and Stevenson himself dismissed the device of the smoking potion as "so much hugger-mugger"), it is very simple: somewhere upon Mr. Hyde, Enfield sensed what Kipling called the Mark of the Beast.

8

Utterson has information of his own with which Enfield's tale neatly dovetails (God, the construction of Stevenson's novel is beautiful; it ticks smoothly away like a well-made watch).

He has custody of Jekyll's will and knows that Jekyll's heir is Edward Hyde. He also knows that the door Enfield has pointed out stands at the back of Jekyll's townhouse.

A bit of a swerve off the main road here . Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published a good three decades before the ideas of Sigmund Freud would begin to surface, but in the first two sections of Stevenson's novella the author gives us a startlingly apt metaphor for Freud's idea of the conscious and subconscious minds-or, to be more specific, the contrast between superego and id. Here is one large block of buildings. On Jekyll's side, the side presented to the public eye, it seems a lovely, graceful building, inhabited by one of London's most respected physicians. On the other side-but still a part of the same building-we find rubbish and squalor, people abroad on questionable errands at three in the morning, and that "blistered and distained door" set in "a blind forehead of discoloured wall." On Jekyll's side, all things are in order and life goes its steady Apollonian round. On the other side, Dionysus prances unfettered. Enter Jekyll here, exit Hyde there. Even if you're an anti-Freudian and won't grant Stevenson's insight into the human psyche, you'll perhaps grant that the building serves as a nice symbol for the duality of human nature.

Well, back to business. The next witness of any real importance in the case is a maid who witnesses the murder which turns Hyde into a fugitive from the scaffold. It's the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, and as Stevenson sketches it for us we hear echoes of every nasty murder to hit the tabloids in our time: Richard Speck and the student nurses, Juan Corona, even the unfortunate Dr. Herman Tarnower. Here is the beast caught in the act of pulling down its weak and unsuspecting prey, acting not with cunning and intelligence but only with stupid, nihilistic violence. Can anything be worse? Yes, apparently one thing: his face is not so terribly different from the face you and I see in the bathroom mirror each morning.