In the Brooding Wild

Nixon, whose name is engraved on a plaque placed on the airless surface of the moon. Perhaps the supreme realization of this return to childhood comes in David Cronenberg's marvelous horror film The Brood, where a disturbed woman is literally producing "children of rage" who go out and murder the members of her family, one by one. About halfway through the film, her father sits dispiritedly on the bed in an upstairs room, drinking and mourning his wife, who has been the first to feel the wrath of the brood. We cut to the bed itself . . . and clawed hands suddenly reach out from beneath it and dig into the carpeting near the doomed father's shoes. And so Cronenberg pushes us down the slide; we are four again, and all of our worst surmises about what might be lurking under the bed have turned out to be true. The irony of all this is that children are better able to deal with fantasy and terror on its own terms than their elders are. You'll note I've italicized the phrase "on its own terms." An adult is able to deal with the cataclysmic terror of something like The Texa Chainsaw Massacre because he or she understands that it is all make-believe, and that when the take is done the dead people will simply get up and wash off the stage blood ...»