MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF YOUNG WOMEN IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF DOMINICAN WOMEN'S PERCEPTIONS OF BEAUTY AND BLACKNESS

Miss DeVore's lined, sunken face; the young man staggering blindly down the stairs of the decaying bayou mansion with a hatchet buried in his head ("Pigeons from Hell"); the fellow who sees the faces of his fellow men and women turned into hideous monstrosities when he puts on a special pair of glasses ("The Cheaters," from another Bloch story)-these may not have constituted fine art, but in Thriller's run, we find those qualities above all others by fans of the genre: a literate story coupled with the genuine desire to frighten the viewer into spasms. Years after Thriller, a production company associated with NBC-the network upon which Thriller was telecast-optioned three stories from my 1978 collection, Night Shift, and invited me to do the screenplay. One of these stories was a piece called "Strawberry Spring," about a psychopathic Jack-the-Ripper-type killer who is roaming a fogbound college campus. About a month after turning the script in, I got a call from an NBC munchkin at Standards and Practices (read: The Department of Censorship). *And some say it was the single most frightening story ever done on TV ...»