...idea...expressed by William F. Nolan at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door, Nolan said. ...The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as he/she (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a
hundred feet tall." ...And if what happens to be behind it is a bug, not ten but a hundred feet tall, the audience heaves a sigh of relief (or utters a scream of relief) and thinks, "A bug a hundred feet tall is pretty horrible but I can deal with a hundred-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a
thousand feet tall." The thing is -- and a pretty good thing for the human race, too, with such neato-keano things to deal with as Dachu, Hiroshima, the Children's Crusade, mass starvation in Cambodia, and what hppened in Jonestown, Guyana--the human consciousness can deal with almost anything...which leaves the writer or director of the horror tale with a problem which is the psychological equivalent of inventing a faster-than-light space drive in the face of E=MC2.