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By Root 690 0

of the most fertile decade in the history of the genre, these movies were, in some ways, just a continuation of one of those long conversations at USC. You could see the origins of both movies in Dark Star. Their differences rested on top of shared assumptions. Each film told a spare story of a relentless killer that projected an enveloping sense of evil. They were inspired by the same lineage: the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft, the shape-shifting monster of The Thing from Another World, and the stylized indirectness of absurdist theater. They dispensed with old forms of representation—thinning out character and plot, which Stephen King called “a means to an end”—in favor of something more vague. They moved the genre away from the realism that was in vogue at the beginning of the seventies and back to its natural home: the fantastical. But they treated this subject matter with a seriousness that movies had generally avoided. These landmark films shared a confident vision that pushed the monster movies of their childhood toward something that looked like high art.

The central question that most directors of the era struggled with was not how to build the greatest monster, but how to avoid showing the monster at all. Polanski and Castle argued about it. The dilemma manifested itself in debates about motivation in movies like Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist, where the New Horror perspective argued for increased ambiguity. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre showed us the monsters, but from the point of view of a very confused onlooker. When the monster does appear in these movies, it is relentless, powerful, and barely motivated, if at all.

The New Horror was darker than earlier movies. The gloomy ending became common. The settings of these New Horror movies were familiar: the beach, the hospital, the bedroom, the prom, the highway, right next door. But the ordinary turns into something ambiguous, confusing, and repulsive. Middle-class suburbia is the home of unexplainable evil. The most civilized minds contain barbarism. Even though the cynicism of the counterculture and anger at the Vietnam War played a role in shaping the sensibility, anyone can find a subtext if they look hard enough. The central message of the New Horror is that there is no message. The world does not make sense. Evil exists, and there is nothing you can do about it.

As it happens, the movies sometimes did not make sense either. They were put together quickly and often did not have the money to reshoot. Even the big-budget movies such as Alien had glaring errors, like when the monster emerges from John Hurt’s belly, why does it run away, as opposed to every other instance in the movie when it attacks? Similarly, Michael Myers seems to violate the laws of physics. But these details don’t make you question these movies in the same way that your suspension of disbelief can be destroyed in other films. In part, that’s because when you are scared, you are willing to ignore almost everything else. While grasping the arms of your chair in fright, logic isn’t your first concern. But since horror movies tap into hidden anxieties, average audience members read them the same way that psychiatrists do dreams. The inexplicable sits next to the explicable in your nightmares. Questioning the logic may be beside the point.

There was perhaps no more striking illustration of the artistic triumph of the New Horror genre than at the end of the decade, when Stanley Kubrick announced that he was going to make what he called “the ultimate horror film.” When Carpenter and O’Bannon were at USC, such a boast would have appeared to be setting sights pitifully low. Critics did not call A Clockwork Orange a horror movie, even though it was one of the most violent and disturbing movies ever made. Since then, Hollywood had realized that horror sells.

Based on the novel by Stephen King, The Shining told the story of a writer going mad and chasing his family around with an ax. John Calley, the executive who worked on The Exorcist for Warner Brothers, sent the manuscript of the