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ballroom. But we'll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark. May I have the pleasure?

CHAPTER II
    Tales of the Hook

    T HE FIRST ISSUE of Forrest Ackerman's gruesomely jovial magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland that I ever bought contained a long, almost scholarly article by Robert Bloch on the difference between science fiction films and horror films. It was an interesting piece of work, and while I do not recall all of it after eighteen years, I do remember Bloch saying that the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby collaboration on The Thing (based on John W. Campbell's classic science fiction novella "Who Goes There?") was science fiction to the core in spite of its scary elements, and that the later film Them! , about giant ants spawned in the New Mexico desert (as the result of A-bomb tests, naturally), was a pure horror film in spite of its science fiction trappings.
    This dividing line between fantasy and science fiction (for properly speaking, fantasy is what it is; the horror genre is only a subset of the larger genre) is a subject that comes up at some point at almost every fantasy or science fiction convention held (and for those of you unaware of the subculture, there are literally hundreds each year). If I had a nickel for every letter printed on the fantasy/sf dichotomy in the columns of the amateur magazines and the prozines of both fields, I could buy the island of Bermuda.
    It's a trap, this matter of definition, and I can't think of a more boring academic subject. Like endless discussions of breath units in modern poetry or the possible intrusiveness of some punctuation in the short story, it is really a discussion of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and not really interesting unless those involved in the discussion are drunk or graduate students—two states of roughly similar incompetence. I'll content myself with stating the obvious inarguables: both are works of the imagination, and both try to create worlds which do not exist, cannot exist, or do not exist yet. There is a difference, of course, but you can draw your own borderline, if you want—and if you try, you may find that it's a very squiggly border indeed. Alien , for instance, is a horror movie even though it is more firmly grounded in scientific projection than Star Wars. Star Wars is a science fiction film, although we must recognize the fact that it's sf of the E. E. "Doc" Smith/Murray Leinster whack-and-slash school: an outer space western just overflowing with PIONEER SPIRIT. Somewhere in between these two, in a buffer zone that has been little used by the movies, are works that seem to combine science fiction and fantasy in a nonthreatening way— Close Encounters of the Third Kind , for instance.
    With such a number of divisions (and any dedicated science fiction or fantasy fan could offer a dozen more, ranging from Utopian Fiction, Negative Utopian Fiction, Sword and Sorcery, Heroic Fantasy, Future History, and on into the sunset), you can see why I don't want to open this particular door any wider than I have to.
    Let me, instead of defining, offer a couple of examples, and then we'll move along—and what better example than Donovan's Brain?
    Horror fiction doesn't necessarily have to be nonscientific. Curt Siodmak's novel Donovan's Brain moves from a scientific basis to outright horror (as did Alien ). It was adapted twice for the screen, and both versions enjoyed fair popular success. Both the novel and the films focus on a scientist who, if not quite mad, is certainly operating at the far borders of rationality. Thus we can place him in a direct line of descent from the original Mad Labs proprietor, Victor Frankenstein.* This scientist has been experimenting with a technique designed to keep the brain alive after the body has died—specifically, in a tank filled with an electrically charged saline solution.
    *And on back to Faust? Daedalus? Prometheus? Pandora? A genealogy leading straight back