Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [107]
Some of these movies surely responded to or reflected anxieties about Vietnam or Watergate, but their timing was important for other reasons as well. Made between the end of the Production Code and the dawn of the special-effects revolution of the 1980s, these movies, which benefited from a weak studio system and a growing independent scene, opened during a transitional period when technology and budgets were limited enough that most of the creative energy was not concentrated on the technical challenges. While they were not as driven by one visionary director as most journalistic accounts would have it, the growing power of the auteur did give more room for artists to bring something fresh to old formulas.
Directors worked hard on the Monster Problem. In an evolution from the rigid debate that Vincent Price lost on The Mike Douglas Show, they made sure that their movies were not either real or fantasy. They melded the two, or used one to improve the other. The New Horror was defiantly modern, rejecting costume drama and fusty conventions, but it was also not limited to being merely topical. The best horror movies are like fairy tales, tapping into something more universal than fear of racism or shark attacks. The central challenge of the modern genre is this: How do you scare adults so much that you make them feel like kids again?
The way that Roman Polanski and Dan O’Bannon and John Carpenter and Brian De Palma did this was to try and summon the “inexplicable delight” of the fear sickness. Their embrace of ambiguity of motivation and morality, the resistance of neat resolutions and happy endings, and the blurring of lines between dream and reality are what unifies them. These directors always maintain an element of the unknown. That’s also why straddling the line between art and trash works so effectively, because these are movies that refuse to be put neatly into familiar categories.
Rosemary seems to be living in both a fantasy and real life. The zombies are halfway between dead and alive. Michael Myers and Giger’s alien seem to defy easy definitions. Carrie is a revenge fantasy that sneaks some guilt into its thrills. The killers in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are also victims. These are movies that want to confuse you, in part because getting lost focuses the attention on the terror of uncertainty.
That’s something we can all relate to, because we were all children. As you get older, it becomes harder to access that shock of being lost, that feeling of helplessness that is as attractive as it is upsetting. But it’s not impossible. These deeply disorienting horror movies are proof, and while they will never be quite as scary as they are the first time you see them, they can still give you the shivers decades after they were made. They endure, like great art does.
THE STRANGE thing about the New Horror is that it started declining just as most critics and reporters thought it was taking off. Its death, perhaps appropriately, looked like its birth. In the eighties, there were more scary movies, with bigger budgets and larger audiences than ever before. Hollywood executives were throwing money at horror, and it produced a flood of unnecessary sequels, bland PG-13 shockers, formula slasher movies, and also some very good movies. Yet none of the popular hits of the eighties matched the intensity of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the cultural impact of The Exorcist, or the artistry of Alien and Halloween.
The common explanation for this is that the genre went mainstream, and imitation replaced invention as the central motivating factor. “They just wanted me to make Halloween again. The same movie,” John Carpenter says. “They want me to do the same movie again. No. There’s no more story. Sorry. It’s over. It was over when I finished with the first one. There’s nothing left to say. Michael goes away and he comes