Mark Frost (Troy Donahue) receives a fatal bedroom visit from the Queen of Evil.
going to happen next. I threw questions to the audience instead of clues, keeping them off- balance. In building the terror, I was making the questions bigger and bigger. The problem with that is that you can push your audience until it doesn’t care anymore.
Another existential question posed by the film is, “Who are these terrorists?**Edmund seems convinced that they are the charac­ ters from his work-in-progress, yet Serge finds a historical basis for each of them, and a radio broadcast mentions the escape of three inmates from a mental asylum. I’m surprised you caught it—the whole in­
mate thing—because few people do. In the script, as I remember, we made a big point out of that. They were escaped inmates, or maybe, I don’t know, reincarnations. What I think we were try­ ing to do was this: as sometimes happens in our dreams, reality (via the radio message) comes in and is real, is concrete—yet you know, as you listen to it, that it isn’t real. It makes no differ­ ence where they come from. It makes no differ­ ence if they’re dog catchers or refugees from Watergate. Reality can’t help you in that
42
situation. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD played it up beautifully with all that television stuff, ex­ plaining that the zombies were radioactive corpses coming out of their graves. Great expla­ nation, but so what? Toa certain degree, in this film, we mock all the
genres that exist. The scene with Edmund and Serge is crucial to this theory. In so many horror films, I’ve always loved the expository scene where the scientist would explain the vampire to the dummies who were being victimized. In any such film, there is always an explanation. Serge goes on about how they’re reincarnations of Kali, Louis the Cruel, the Jackal. It is a bit of a put-on. When Hervé says he’s a babbling old man, there’s an element of truth—but the radio message is also a babble. It may be true or false. But what’s the point? In the framework in which Edmund is existing, it’s totally irrelevant.
^Vnof/ier possibility is that the creatures have emanated from the tense atmosphere underlying the Blackstone family. The hus­ band is withdrawn, morbid and wracked by nightmares. His wife is cold and distant. Look at the friends they have. And in the
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