was aptly suited in the wake of the youth upheavals of the late 1960s and early '70s. 1975's The Stepford Wives, King says, "has some witty things to say about Women's Liberation ... and the American male's response to it". In The Amityville Horror, King sees "economic unease" and maintains that the film's 1979 release during an extended economic slump "could not have come along at a more opportune moment". He also calls The China Syndrome, released the same year and usually categorized as a disaster-suspense film, a horror movie that "synthesizes technological fears ... fears of the machinery gone out of control, run wild". In the following chapter, "The Horror Movie as Junk Food" King begins by making the statement: "I am no apologist for bad filmmaking, but once you've spent twenty years or so going to horror movies, searching for diamonds in the dreck of the B-pics ... you begin to seek the patterns and appreciate them when you find them, you begin to get a taste for really shitty movies." He makes the point that his agent Kirby McCauley had selected the obscure 1977 film Rituals as his favorite, while King himself chose 1979's Tourist Trap as one that "wields an eerie spooky power. Wax figures begin to move and come to life in a ruined, out-of-the-way tourist resort." He continues with reviews of such films as Prophecy (1979), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), The Horror of Party Beach (1964), and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), among others; concluding: "Bad films may sometimes be amusing, sometimes even successful, but their only real usefulness is to form that basis of comparison: to define positive values in terms of their own negative charm. They show us what to look for because it is missing in themselves." King then turns his most weighty criticism toward television, borrowing Harlan Ellison's description of television as "the glass teat", and subtitling the chapter, "This Monster Is Brought to You by Gainesburgers". He reviews horror anthology programs such as Thriller, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Dark Shadows, and Night Gallery, ultimately concluding that television is severely limited in its ability to illustrate horror because it is enslaved to the demands of network Standards and Practices censorship and the appeasement of advertising executives that provide the financial means necessary for television to continue its free access. In the "Horror Fiction"