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And some come to visit. Glenn Close, who plays Alex, was recently approached by a mid-40s woman with her husband in tow: "She had enjoyed Fatal Attraction, and was taking him to see it 'so he'll never cheat on me.' And he goes, 'Huh-huh' -- this nervous little laugh." Sidney Ganis, Paramount's marketing boss, observes, "There is a fever out there. It is more than a movie. It's part movie, part real life." Adrian Lyne, the film's director, is amazed by its reach: "The movie is almost like a living thing that feeds off the public and takes on new shape." In other words, Fatal Attraction is a monster hit.
But who is the monster? Alex Forrest, creature of the id. And who are the heroes? An American family, right or wrong, weak or strong, Dan or Beth. And how does a film with no surefire stars, no space-age special effects, no ringing affirmation of the human spirit, no discernible pretensions toward art, no unanimous blessing from the critics -- and not a single teenager among its cast of characters -- luck into the national bloodstream? By tapping the current mood of sexual malaise with a cautionary -- indeed, reactionary -- tale about an errant husband, a faithful wife and a career woman unlucky in love. And by skewing a Hitchcockian domestic thriller into a rousing horror show. Fatal Attraction starts as Vertigo and ends as Psycho. For all its flaws, the picture deftly scares and excites people with fun-house-mirror reflections of themselves. As Director John Carpenter (Halloween) notes, "The strongest human emotion is fear. It's the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman." Or woman.
One instant indicator of a pop phenomenon is the parodies and rip-offs it inspires. Fatal Attraction's success has already been validated by a skit on Saturday Night Live. Last week NBC aired a TV-movie thriller with the sounds- like title Dangerous Affection (originally Hit and Run); for Nov. 30, the network has scheduled a mystery called Fatal Confession (originally Father Dowling). And the title of Larry Cohen's detective movie Love You to Death was changed before release to Deadly Illusion. Perhaps, even at this moment, some literate mogul is optioning the Don Quixote epilogue, in which a man, sure of his wife's fidelity, persuades his best friend to woo her, and the result is hot sex and violent death. Hollywood could even keep Cervantes' title for the tale: Fatal Curiosity.
Like any phenomenal film, Fatal Attraction transforms a theater full of strangers into a community: confidant to Dan, cheerleader to Beth, lynch mob for Alex. And they leave the movie with golden word of mouth. "I saw a lot of couples looking at each other sideways as they walked out," says Jim Stegall, 35, a Miami ad salesman. "The meaning of that look was obvious: Don't even think about having an affair." Director Lyne says, "I've had men ring me up and say, 'Thanks a million, buddy, you've ruined it for us.' " A Manhattan psychoanalyst told Co-Producer Lansing, "I know the picture is a hit, because out of my seven patients, five have brought up the movie."