In the book business, Stephen King, a down-to-earth, mid-30s former schoolteacher who talks with a pronounced New England twang and loves rock 'n' roll, is the nearest thing they've got to a superstar. He's written nine books and has had nine best-sellers, his novels becoming filmscripts seemingly overnight: Carrie,

Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo (the last four are still at the screenplay stage). He made his acting debut this year in Creepshow, a flick he created with Night Of The Living Dead director George Romero. By next spring, his new novel will be available with, he promises, "rock 'n' roll as its dominant force." And like all of Stephen King's work, that book will inevitably do two things—scare a lot of people and sell a lot of copies.

Stephen King enjoys his work like a malevolent Peter Pan who won't grow up, heh-heh-heh. His friend and fellow scaremonger Peter Straub (Ghost Story, Shadowland) pokes fun at him because Straub likes cool jazz and King is unapologetic about punching the car buttons to pull in AC/DC at top volume. King writes tense tales that toss Americana upside down, transforming a loving father into a maniac (played in suitably over-the-top fashion by Jack Nicholson in The Shining) or evolving the family pooch into a rabid, disgusting mess (Cujo ain't Lassie). And you can bet there's rock 'n' roll chronicling the destruction, as King has seen fit to quote the Ramones, Bruce Springsteen, Blue Oyster Cult and many others in his work.

"This new book is about kids and cars—that whole ethic. It was written, in first draft anyway, before I ever had a Springsteen album, and apparently Springsteen is interested in the same scene. And for me it all fixates on a lot of the old rock 'n' roll, Nervous Norvus 'Transfusion' and stuff like that. The last section of this novel is called 'Teenage Death Songs' and it has to do with the whole thing of 'you don't come back from Deadman's Curve!" King quavers in a flu-encrusted voice. "There's one for your tape recorder!"

King's own three kids are still too young to cause him the kind of teenage tsuris he wrote about in Carrie (who'll ever forget Sissy Spaeek getting pelted with tampons in the girl's shower room?). But King remembers his own escapist Philadelphia youth—"I wore great big thick glasses and had buck teeth"—and taught high school before his growing success allowed him the freedom to write full-time.

"I was a weird kid but I hid it. I think most horror fans are pretty weird kids. I also think most teenagers feel pretty indestructible, and if you're 17 or 18, you feel strong, you feel full of sap, you feel you can beat just about anything, so you can get scared for recreational purposes.

"The other side of that is a lot of 'em really are unsure of things and the horror stuff seems to describe, in symbolic terms, what they feel insecure about. In Danse Macabre (his nonfiction history/analysis of media horror) I suggested that a lot of it has to do with pimple fear.

When you see things like The Norwegian Rat That Ate Chicago, you say 'man, that thing's really fucked up.. .next to that, I look great!' And it's true, like in I Was A Teenaged Frankenstein, that guy is so messed up his mother wouldn't know him." King obviously hasn't lost his gusto for gross Overkill, relishing An American Werewolf In London by chuckling about "that guy who just kept getting deader and deader."

What scares Stephen King? Not much, when you consider that by the time he was 10 he could rivet his friends' attention simply by reading one of his own tales out loud. "There have only been two or three times in my entire life where read something that really scared me, so I'm a little bit surprised when I get a letter from one of my readers who was apparently really scared. Lord Of The Flies—at the end, they're chasing the last of the boys not to succumb to the madness.

1984, cause you knew they were gonna get poor old Winston Smith and I was very frightened for him. That's another one," King agrees, when I mention my own nemesis, the post-nuclear masterpiece of doom, On The Beach. Of course King's got his own catastrophic epic in The Stand, which, in one of those delicious coincidences of timing will probably hit the screen in 1984.

And while King is no drum-beater for what he calls the "deadening violence of excessively gory films," he has a specific understanding of and empathy for why we tirelessly attend the booga-booga brigade of nightmare inducers.

"I think we've got an inner basic need to experience for fun all the emotions we experience for real. I think that a lot of people, women mostly, will read love novels to find out how you're supposed to feel and act when you're in love. And I think that people will read a horror novel to try to work their way around those fears and get a better understanding of them. That's one of the things that art is for, to experience things that aren't real, and yet at the same time to have that cathartic experience."

Stephen King is scariest when he glides along the boundary that separates imagination from actuality, dreams from waking steps. I hope he never turns his attention to the New York subway system.

Swell Book Neat Pictures

CULT MOVIES Danny Peary (Delacorte)

Ihe title conjures up images ot conclaves of disaffected suburban youths joined by up-and-coming drag queens for post-closet rituals of amateur glam and alienation affirmation, i.e., The Rocky Horror Picture Show ('75), or perhaps solitary seekers supped full of auteurist literature, staying up `til 4:34 a.m. to finally catch Detour ('46), a poverty row number with four characters', six minimal sets and a plot that would depress an Osmond, but, some believe, a genuine work of art by a genuine artist (Edgar G. Ulmer). Actually Danny Peary, who has written this enormously informative and entertaining book, begins with a definition of "cult movie" that's much more generous than usual—not only is it a film that inspires a small coterie of people to see something that the general public and mainstream critics have either ignored or rejected, a film that is too weird, or incoherent, or demanding, or low budget,, or repulsive* or all of the above and more to reach a large audience but has been adopted by a small one who responds to it despite, or often because of, its aberrant qualities... Peary's definition includes any film that has a worshipful following, adherents who view it repeatedly, memorize its more cogent dialogue, proselytize non-believers, and generally bug you if you haven't seen it. So along with Bedtime For Bonzo ('51) and Behind The Green Door ('72) (brought together in this book by alphabetical fate, a picture of Ronald Reagan admonishing the title chimp facing a nude poster of Marilyn Chambers, two extremes of morality, two examples of how little a film performance can have to do with acting in the traditional sense—three if you count the monkey) Peary considers The Maltese Falcon ('41), All About Eve ('50), Casablanca ('42), Citizen Kane ('41), and The Wizard OfOz ('39), whose cult membership must exceed 100 million...no matter, as long as the 100 million view it obsessively, it qualifies.

The book has an ingenious format. Peary has chosen 100 films that fit his criteria (while acknowledging that the number was dictated by space limitations and that it could easily have been 200) given the cast and credits and a longish synopsis for each one (except Eraserhead ['78], which can not be synopsized) and then written a three or four page wellillustrated essay on each film.

Altho the book has some reference value, and the pictures are neat, it really succeeds because of the essays. Peary strikes a nice balance between opinion and fact, between anecdotal material and restrained analysis—though he has an auteurist orientation (the auteur theory, in a nutshell, says that the director is the guiding aesthetic sensibility of a film, the author or auteur—obviously this isn't meant to apply to every hack who's ever helmed a movie, but the theory has afforded many previously underrated talents serious consideration) he isn't hardcore, apparently aware that film is often a collaborative effort and that symbols, parallels, metaphors and meanings to be derived are not necessarily put in a film by a single omniscient artist. Many of the films here (Kiss Me Deadly ['55], Gun Crazy ['49], Tall T ['57], etc.) have been endowed with (cultish at least) respectability by auteurists who were mining their directors' careers for overlooked gems and in order to better understand how the cults for flicks such as these—unpretentious genre pieces—came about it helps to be familiar not only with the director's oeuvre (sounds dirty, doesn't it?) but the inappropriate literary-based mainstream critical standards that such career investigations were a reaction against. Of course, the danger now is in having the pendulum swing too far the other way and have innocent films overendowed, imbued with meanings descending from the analyst's zeal, rather than the director's vision. Peary pretty much avoids that trap. Besides, anybody who can find something new to day about Plan 9 is worth reading (Penary sees it as a subversive work, containing what was for the repressive '50s a bold anti-nuclear statement— unfortunately, the film was so howlingly inept that the statement sort of got lost...).

At the end of the book Peary lists a hundred more films'he could have covered and hopefully a sequel is in the works. Meanwhile, watch for High Risk ('81), ostensibly a run-of-the-mill action caper meller with a second-rate cast —James Brolin stars!—but actually a first-rate funny intelligent action caper meller with a fine performance and a rousing rock 'n' roll ending. See it soon. Let's get this cult rollin'...

Richard C. Walls

DRIVE-IN SATURDAY

...Hand Me The Pliers

by Edouard Dauphin

Poltergeist, the Stephen Spielberg picture to see this summer if you couldn't get in to see £. T., is described in its production notes as "a tale of terror that could happen to you." Sure, just the other day, The Dauph was sitting around the house when a five-yearold girl got sucked into the television set, furniture flew non-stop around the room, a shrieking dwarf-woman was brought in to exorcise the place, the child's mother crawled through the wall into the next life, as about.50 dead people rose from the grave, making a soggy mess of the swimming pool out back. 1 knew I shouldn't have taken this apartment over Bookie's.

The folks in Poltergeist live in a suburban development lined with tract houses built so close together the automatic TV channel changer in one living room interferes with the choice of boob tube fare in the living room next door. This provides one of the early "gags" of the film, since the hero's household wants to watch football and keeps getting o}d movies instead. Pretty side-splitting, huh? Wonder if they get Masterpiece Theatre when they're trying for Here's Boomer.

Here's the American family according to Spielberg. Dad (Graig T. Nelson) sells fraudulent real estate, wears boxer shorts and reads a biography of Ronald Reagan before retiring. Mom (Jobeth Williams) is a pot-smoking birdbrain and the two oldest children wreak more havoc at the breakfast table than Wendy O. Williams turned loose in a deltware factory. It's hard to blame little tyke Heather O'Rourke for wanting to escape into a Magna vox—even Mister Rogers' Neighborhood has to be preferable to Speilbergburg. Village Of The Dumb.

Plucking the urchin from the netherworld before she can be devoured by reruns of Gentle Ben occupies the rest of the movie. A parapsychologist and a scientist are called in but things only get worse. Enter Zelda Rubinstein (wonder what her name was before she changed it) as Tangina, a runfy supernaturalist who looks like Paul Williams in a brunette wig on blotter acid. She instructs the family in how to dive into the Twilight Zone and get back before you reach the Outer Limits. Zelda's bio notes that she is the voice of Atrocia Frankenstone on TV's Flintstone Comedy Show, which, in The Dauphin's book, easily makes her the most distinguished artiste in Poltergeist.

Tangina succeeds and Mama Dumb retrieves her squealing whelp from the afterlife which, to judge from this movie, seems packed with a repulsive substance resembling half-frozen raspberry Jello. (Better bring along a spoon when you die.) Oh, almost forgot—there are some poltergeists on hand—hokey transparencies that reminded Edouard of the high-stepping Rockettes. Even less visible is the hand of Tobe Hooper, director of record who once gave us the classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Rumor has it Spielberg really helmed the flick so give him the blame.

Interesting domestic note: the Jobeth Williams character continues her daily chores even after little Heather has been hoovered into the 21" solid state. Yep, a scene shows Mom coming, down the hallway to pause outside the closed door of her wee daughter's bedroom—now off-limits to everyone since the poltergeists have put the furniture on the ceiling. Mom shakes her head—it sure would be nice to have the kid back again but first, well, there's the laundry. And off she goes, a pile of neatly folded family wash in her arms. The vengeful dead may have her baby but Mom knows the real enemy: "Oh, those dirty rings!"

Skip Poltergeist and do your own laundry.

☆ ☆ ☆

Time was when Cameron Crowe was a teenaged cub reporter hanging around the CREEM editorial office, getting under the feet of the grizzled veterans, offering to change The Dauphin's typewriter ribbon or run down to the 7-11 for a six-pack of Stroh's, forever asking everyone if we thought Peter Frampton really body-waved his hair.

Time also was when each summer brought a bevy of mindless youth movies—but this year we've pretty much had to make do with Fast Times At Ridgemont High, written by that same Cameron Crowe and based on his novel. Better than some of the Gidget films but below the mark set by Rock 'n' Roll High School, Fast Times is cheerfully stupid, sexy in a Clearasil way and over faster than an Eighth Avenue romance.

Three actors stay with you: Sean Penn as a drugged-out goon who orders pizza delivered to the classroom; Jennifer Jason Leigh as a terminally cute mall waitress; and old pro Ray Walston, hilarious as a teacher who knows no one really wants to learn.

The writing is crisp and accurate. Good job, Cameron, and next time you're in Birmingham, I'd like a McRib Sandwich, a Mars bar and a quart of Wild Turkey. Thanks, kid.