Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson

All but approximately eighteen minutes of John Carpenter's Halloween are set after nightfall. The major scare scenes in Psycho all take place after dark. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the final horrible sequence (my wife ran for the women's room, believing she was going to toss her cookies), where Tom Berenger stabs Diane Keaton to death, is shot in her dark apartment, with only a flickering strobe-light for illumination. In Alien, that constant motif of the dark barely needs mentioning. "In space, no one can hear you scream," the ad copy read; it also could have said, "In space, it is always one minute after midnight." Dawn never comes in that Lovecraftian gulf between the stars. Hill House is always spooky, but it saves its really big effects-the face in the wall, the bulging doors, the booming noises, the thing that held Eleanor's hand (she thought it was Theo, but-gulp!-it wasn't)-for well past sunset. It was another Everest House editor, Bill Thompson (who has been my editor for about a thousand years; perhaps in a previous life I was his editor and now he's having his revenge), who reminded me of The Night of the Hunter-and mea culpa that I should have needed reminding-and told me that one of the scenes of horror which has remained with him over the years was the sight of Shelley Winters's hair floating in the water after the homicidal preacher has disposed of her in the river ...»