Status Updates From Danza macabra

"...posters in New York suggested, that the Ayatollah Khomeini is a puppet of—yeah, you guessed it—David Rockefeller."

King's recollection of a visit from the Black Panthers is so much more interesting than everything else in this book.

This is the kind of thing King should have reserved for his diary, it's insulting to the reader to be so casual and aimless: "Oh dear God, we're off on another tangent"

King's fixations are admittedly entertaining. His grudge against hypothetical readers who turn to the back of the book to see the ending is almost as funny as his obviously sincere suggestion of publishing a book without the last 30 pages, which would be mailed to the reader only if they could accurately summarize everything that lead up to those pages.

Whoah! Talk about dated. He savages Wes Craven just 4 years before horror fans are treated to Nightmare.

I've never been able to articulate why the Romero movies always frustrated me, despite the fact that they're among the handful of decent zombie movies in existence. King's example about the old woman eating a bug makes me think my issue with them is that the point of those movies is usually to be gross or disturbing. World War Z is a lot more fun.

Wish he'd elaborate on why he thinks Kubrick's Shining is "maddening, perverse and disappointing."

It's crazy that King expects his readers to pay for reprinted reviews of bad movies that he then comments on, in addition to a quiz that takes up a couple of pages. This is Chizmar-level commoditization.

For 55 pages, he's been writing about "William Friedkin's Prophecy" and "tadpoles as big as salmon" but there are 20 or 30 pages between these references. He can't stay on topic for more than a sentence, which serves his purpose because the arguments he's making are mostly facile, very subjective or just one-sided. Wanting to be scared is counterintuitive, but serves a purpose, we get it.

The (apocryphal) ending of the movie about the x-ray eyes sounds pretty cool, but this list of movie moments is so tedious, even for someone who loves this stuff. The story about Bing Crosby's son is legitimately disturbing--King should have leaned more on that stuff.

The Tingler gimmick sounds very cool. And it sets the reader at ease to hear the author admit that the plot written out sounds "pretty fucking stupid" but "it helps if you're eleven years old."

Here's the "annoying autobiographical pause." Three paragraphs of self-indulgent Carrie compliments climaxing in this ultimate statement of literary self-gratification, where he calls his own (first) book "a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden." Give me a break, Mr. King.

Seriously, FOCUS. How are we a third of the way into this book, the author having used the phrase "social merit" three times already, and now we're beginning a chapter with the subheading "social horror"?

King really lets his writing get wild here. He's tossing out thousand-character sentences left and right and they don't say much.

You've made a mistake when your book is obsolete three years after publication. What a different book this would have been in light of John Carpenter's The Thing and an impending collaboration between King and Carpenter on Christine. At the time he published this book, he apparently had not yet finished (or had not published) Pet Sematary. Hopefully, he at least touches on Halloween.

"As horror goes, Amityville is pretty pedestrian. So's beer, but you can get drunk on it." This sentence is emblematic of King's whole attitude in this book. Paragraphs are anything but tightly written, the argument is directionless and individual points are arguable.

Asking why children don't tour mortuaries as often as police departments is a stupid way of illustrating the point that death is taboo, and completely redundant for every reader who isn't a sociopath.

The Exorcist is a social issue movie about the societal fears of hoodlums and vulgar children? News to me. Is this like King's response to the literati of the day? He doesn't even introduce the ideas, it's like he just expects the readers to have been subjected to that line of argument already. I'd be very interested to hear him make the case, but he doesn't.

King's "annoying autobiographical pause" (chapter IV) really seems to be an ADD detour. It's not annoying, but it continues in the thread of the previous chapters discussing horror in radio, comics and eventually, movies. The dousing rod story was great, but how it connects to the academic "why do people like horror" section is beyond me. Should have started with chapter 5, segued to forms of media, then the thesis.