Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [10]
Strolling onstage, Wertham looked frail and formal when attempting to make casual conversation, paying Price a few mild compliments. But he appeared to grow in stature after going on the attack. “He has done incalculable harm to American children,” he said of Price in a thick accent that made him seem like a villain from a World War II comedy. He described how the worst horror movies are shown in cities that have been wracked by violence and riots, casually implying a connection. “Horror shows teach cruelty,” he said soberly, “that it’s fun to kill and choke a girl.”
Price chuckled, uneasily. He clearly didn’t expect the severity of this ambush. This doctor took horror films very seriously; and Price, to engage him, would have to get serious himself, which is exactly what he didn’t want to do. Price was more ambivalent about the genre than he let on. Tired of playing the same old monsters, he had grown increasingly unhappy with the quality of his films, stuck in a contract that kept him appearing in cameos in teen films that he felt were beneath him. Price would have liked to do other kinds of movies and plays, but the audience wants what it wants. So he would remain Mr. Horror. Instead of firing back, Price collapsed. “I don’t condone them,” he said, “but as a matter of fact, in most of them I don’t play the meanie.”
After presenting the horror movie as harmless fun full of silly capes and goofy costumes, Price contradicted the image and made a pitiful concession, absurd on its face. Of course he played meanies. In front of all his fans, Price confessed his sins to the genre’s worst enemy. It was evidence of the irrelevance of the horror movie in 1967. Even Vincent Price couldn’t defend horror! After regrouping, Price did offer one defense that focused on what would become the central divide of the modern horror film. The real horror, he said, is not the fantasy at the movies, but the real world of violence and war. The studio audience applauded.
In other words, how can you get worked up about vampires and werewolves when kids are dying in Vietnam? Price added there was more murder in Medea than in any horror movie. Wertham returned fire immediately. “Fantasy and reality are not separate,” he countered. “One spills from one to the other.” The serene confidence of the authoritative doctor stunned Price into an awkward silence and inadvertently made one of the arguments for the New Horror. Price made pure fantasy—or at least it was a kind of fantasy where the line between the real and the unreal was clear. Audiences knew that what they were watching was fake, obviously, so showing them terrifying violence would do no harm. But what if they didn’t know? Or more to the point, what if they could be fooled, ever so briefly, into suspending their disbelief?
ROMAN POLANSKI knew this deception was the key to Rosemary’s Baby. He had been strongly influenced by R. L. Gregory’s Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, which argues that our ideas about reality are based on perceptions shaped by memory, that we see what’s in front of us much less than we think we do. Polanski made the movie strictly from Rosemary’s perspective and maintained that it must be always possible for all the supernatural elements she starts to believe in to be a series of coincidences. His goal was