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4 "roo BAD WE CAN'T STAY, BABY!": THE HORROR AT AMITYVILLE 1. By the 1970s, the self-consciously literary tradition Shirley Jackson found in the genteel ghost story of the nineteenth century had begun to diverge from the more visceral efforts of writers like William Peter Blatty, Ira Levin, and Stephen King-writers who, not insignificantly, would soon begin to identify themselves as genre writers, horror writers, in a way that would have been alien to most of their predecessors. Even Peter Straub, the most self-consciously literary stylist of the new generation , presented a vision of the supernatural more flatly prosaic and physical than anything Henry James ever dared to dream; in Ghost Story, his single most famous novel, Straub actually weaves a retelling of The Tum of the Screw into the text, undermining its famous ambiguity with graphic depictions of the violence enveloping the town of Milburn, New York. At the same time, the horrific elements Jackson drew from Poe and Hawthorne-the notions of the sentient house and the threatened family, the focus on contemporary and American themes-gained ascendance in a number of new haunted house tales, among them Jay Anson's 1977 bestseller, The Amityville Horror, a purportedly true account of a New York haunting. As we will see, aside from its presentation as non-fiction, there is nothing particularly remarkable about either the novel or the film that followed in 1979. The prose is workman-like, the characterization barely adequate, the plot simultaneously illogical and utterly predictable. The qualities which make Amityville significant-even central-to our purposes have very little to do with art. Indeed, its lack of artistry is key, for nowhere else can we find a more transparent and detailed example of the haunted house formula which gained maturity in the 1970s and which continues to influence horror writers of the present. More important , the book's phenomenal success raises important questions about the nature and function of genre, about the haunted house tale and its continued popularity: Why do paint-by-number books such as The Amityville Horror sometimes touch a raw nerve with mass audiences? And just how familiar are those audiences with the conventions of the haunted house formula? 47 48 American Nightmares To begin answering these questions, I propose we tum not to some specter-haunted ruin at the edge of town, but to a locale altogether different , a scene as opposed to the traditional haunted house as any I can imagine. Here we will find not only a measure of the haunted house tale's familiarity, but a glimmering of the subversive truths hidden at its heart. 2. The year is 1983, the setting Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., a concert hall packed with mostly young, mostly white Americans of middle-class affluence. The young man on stage-a handsome black man in clinging red leather-is Eddie Murphy, and Eddie Murphy, near the peak of his popularity as a comedian and actor, is wrapping up a seventy -minute performance of stand-up comedy that will soon see theatrical release as Delirious. This is what he has to say: I was watching Poltergeist last month. I got a question: why don't white people leave the house when there's a ghost in the house? Ya'll stay in the house too fuckin long; just get the fuck out of the house. Very simple: there's a ghost in the house, get the fuck out. And not only did they stay in the motherfuckin house in Poltergeist. they invited more white people over. Sit around going, "Our daughter, Carol Anne, is in the television set." I would have been gone. If I had a daughter, I would have been down the priest's saying, "Look, man, I went home and my fuckin daughter 's in the t.v. set and shit so I just fuckin left. Umm, you can have all that shit. I ain't goin back to the motherfucker, you know, I just came down so if she ain't in school, you don't think I killed the bitch or nothin like that. But she is inside the t.v. set. You can have all that shit. Fuck it." "But, Mr. Burkett, didn't you try to save your daughter?" "Yeah, I'm a man and shit. I tried to save her. I turned the channel, the shit didn't work. I got the fuck out." Whew! The kid was only...

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